My Life in Pieces (25 page)

At the time of the almost unanimous critical drubbing for my production of
Les Enfants du Paradis
for the RSC, I determined to write an essay called
Anatomy of a Flop
, describing the love, energy, imagination and hard work that had gone into the making of the show, and attempting to answer the critics’ question, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of how such a – to them – palpable catastrophe had ever been allowed to happen. With the publication of Arnold Wesker’s wonderful new book, which describes the 1977 Broadway production of his play
Shylock
, my essay is redundant. There has never been such a complete account of how frighteningly touch-and-go is the business of bringing a play, particularly a new one, to the stage, even in the hands of a master director.

Wesker describes
Shylock
’s genesis: how his violent reaction as a Jewish man against Laurence Olivier’s interpretation of the most famous Jew in dramatic literature resolved him to write a work of his own in which he would try to understand the actions of Shakespeare’s character, and offer an alternative image of him as intelligent, compassionate and deeply moral. Despite the encouragement of friends, producers failed to show any interest; Peter Hall turned it down for the National Theatre. At that point John Dexter, director of Wesker’s greatest successes but somewhat distant since their falling-out over
The Old Ones
, read it and immediately set up a New York production backed by the Shuberts, with Zero Mostel in the leading role.

The play opened in Washington. After the first preview Mostel fell ill; within days he was dead. The understudy took over, the production resumed and eventually opened on Broadway. Despite wild excitement from the preview audiences, the New York critics, especially the
Times
, were unenthusiastic, and the play closed at the end of the week. All this Wesker recorded, minute by minute, in his journal, and it is this, with a few letters and pages of notes appended, which comprises the present volume. It is his
Anatomy of a Flop.

It is also a great deal more than that. First, it is a book about work in the theatre. Wesker is a deeply, even desperately serious man who believes passionately in the importance of his job and of the theatre itself, and every page of the book celebrates that belief. He describes the endeavour of a large group of people to create a theatrical event of power and substance in language that might be used to describe a love affair, or an illness, both of which it closely resembles. In the ‘making of’ genre, it is a masterpiece, the best of its kind, a detailed study of group dynamics, of
collective enterprise and of the nature of leadership. More than that, it is a poignant and sometimes distressing account of a friendship gone wrong. Finally, it offers a full-length portrait of one of the most terrible and wonderful individuals ever to devote himself to the stage, the director John Dexter.

Wesker has lately become a prophet without honour in his own profession, that most unhappy figure, the unfashionable dramatist. For what is an unperformed playwright? The plays accumulate in his drawer, unseen, or seen briefly and obscurely. Once, though, Wesker was the man of the moment, who put the world of working people and indeed their work itself, on stage. Unlike his contemporary, John Osborne, who expressed their rage, and his own, in torrentially rhetorical language, Wesker addressed the aspirations and frustrations of the post-Second World War generation in detailed and concrete terms in a number of strong, sober pieces posited on robust socialist humanist principles.

He had the supreme good luck to find an interpreter who was able to offer his work what it needed: a fanatical commitment to realism, and an uncommon gift for choreographing complex action for maximum theatrical impact. John Dexter, a sometime actor seeking to establish himself as a director, seized on the plays that came to be known collectively as the Wesker trilogy, and staged them first in Coventry, then later at the Royal Court Theatre, with the young Joan Plowright as Beatie Bryant creating an unforgettably radiant image of aspiring, intelligent youth. More plays followed in quick succession:
Chips with Everything
and
The
Kitchen
, both directed by Dexter, both highly successful. Then things started to go wrong.

Wesker was now being superseded by a new wave of radical writers, more pessimistic, more overtly revolutionary and more experimental theatrically. The era of the well-made left-wing play, it appeared, was over. After two egregious disasters (
The Journalists
, at the RSC, which was withdrawn when the actors refused to perform it, and
The Friends
, sabotaged from within by the leading actor), he was beginning to feel out on a limb. It was then that he wrote
Shylock
. Re-enter John Dexter.

Nobody who worked with Dexter, who died, pointlessly young, in 1990, is likely to forget him. He brought to the stage some of the most memorable productions since the war: apart from Wesker’s plays, and Peter Shaffer’s, he was responsible for the musical
Half a Sixpence
, Olivier’s
Othello
at the National Theatre, a glittering
Misanthrope
,
M. Butterfly
,
and innumerable triumphs on the operatic stage at the Met and elsewhere. His heyday was at Olivier’s National, where he helped form a uniquely flexible acting company, mentally and physically brilliant. He was funny, exciting, and a master of his craft, but he could also be savage, castratingly rude, and as capable of draining the life out of a piece as releasing it.

Dexter had been afflicted with polio in his youth, been tarred and feathered by the women in the factory where he worked in Derby, endured bullying during his War Service and terrible hostility when he went to prison (for the alleged abuse of a minor, who was in fact blackmailing him). All these experiences convinced him of the need to assert himself decisively over both people and materials. He had to believe in himself as an absolute master; when belief faltered, he would attack those who seemed to threaten his success. Most often they would be actors whom he felt were not up to the job that he had unthinkingly given them because they were pretty or nice, or because he was in the giving vein that day; when they fell out of favour, he would attack them again and again in excruciatingly personal terms, generally to little positive effect.

This was not directing: it was spite. He would turn on authors, too, accusing them of not understanding their own plays, of being lazy or of not being able to write. A famous sally of his, understandably not quoted by the author in the present volume, was hurled at him during rehearsals of
The Kitchen
: ‘Shut up, Wesker, or I’ll direct the scene the way you wrote it!’ He came to believe that he alone was responsible for his great successes. He was also quite capable of being kind, illuminating, witty and even humble. He worked staggeringly hard – fuelled by booze, sex, drugs – willing himself to great heights of scholarship (becoming far more learned than the university-educated colleagues whom he so despised); he could be the best fun, too, but you never knew which mood would prevail, or why. Eventually he alienated almost all of his friends; the exchange of letters between Wesker and Dexter at the end of the production of
Shylock
in which he formally suspends their friendship, is particularly painful to read.

Artistically, his judgement of plays and actors became increasingly erratic, and the productions themselves seemed oddly punitive, austere and cold, as if he now wanted to dominate and bully the audience, too, to get them to shut up and listen properly and stop fidgeting. There were no concessions; all the old sensuality and sweep were gone.

Despite all this, I and many other people loved him deeply – a love he roughly brushed aside – and mourn him to this day. He is here in Wesker’s pages in all his complexity, angel and demon, tyrant and inspiration; the book alerts us, too, to the existence of a big play with big themes that cries out for a proper production at one of our great subsidised theatres. Meanwhile, read Wesker’s book. It is a totally authentic and powerfully moving account of how plays are made – or broken.

This was the man I was about to work with. I knew enough of his repu
tation to tremble; but in the event he was only kind to me.

Olivier, of course, was the great absentee from the National – his personal
touch, his leadership from the front, on stage, at the head of his gallant
band, his eye on every single detail of the organisation, all absent. The
current director Peter Hall, whom I had yet to meet, could scarcely dupli
cate that. But who could? Not even Olivier, as it happens, not even at his
height. The place was simply too big. This was not to say that wonderful
work couldn’t be done – it was being done, and it would be done, again
and again. But the missing element was the one which Oliver had brought
to the enterprise: gallantry – an odd word, perhaps, for a gang of thesps,
but one which, for me, characterises the theatrical enterprise at its best: a
spirit of struggling against the odds, with mingled courage and insou
ciance, in a great and noble cause. And it is hard to feel that camaraderie
across a whole army. Loyalty is to battalion, to regiment.

There were, of course, great actors in the company, and they created a
living link with the older tradition that Olivier had so vividly represented:
Peggy Ashcroft (once Juliet to Olivier’s Mercutio and Romeo, in alternation
with John Gielgud) had been the great beating heart of Peter Hall’s first
RSC seasons; Ralph Richardson had run the Old Vic company in tandem
with Olivier, until Tyrone Guthrie manoeuvred them out of the job. Sir
Ralph was by now an extraordinary presence, like a more or less
benevolent dinosaur, stealthily padding through the theatre, his eyes madly
blazing. I wrote this brief profile to accompany a splendid photograph of
him by Roddy McDowall (who was a great photographer as well as a good
actor and an incomparable friend) in his 1989 book
Double Exposure.

‘Cup of coffee, Sir Ralph?’ asked one of the younger actors in the National Theatre canteen during a break in rehearsals. There was an electric silence as the great man, head gently shaking, eyes gleaming strangely, contemplated the question. ‘I’d rather have,’ he said, ‘a cup of hemlock.’ This last word was pronounced Hem Lock, which somehow made it all the more real and terrible. And, of course, funny. He was always an alarming presence, on stage and off, never merely avuncular or dotty, as he might so easily have appeared. Anarchy and potential violence never lay far behind the drolleries. In the trial scene of
The Merchant of Venice
, his Shylock suddenly produced, with a frightening flash of steel, a huge knife from his belt, and moved with superhuman speed across the stage, missing Antonio’s proffered breast by the merest millimetre. Only the prompt intervention of his Portia stood between the actor playing Antonio and certain death. Her intervention produced an audible gasp of relief from the audience. Had she missed her cue, Sir Ralph, I have no doubt, would have been a homicide.

In addition to this physical danger he had an earthly spirituality, a quality a million miles removed from that of his friend, John Gielgud. That much mimicked voice, a sort of drunken gargle, could speak of life and death with startling actuality. Though it was not his last, his performance of John Gabriel Borkman remains in memory as a glorious leave-taking. Like many of his performances it was disorientatingly original. He seemed to play the second act in a sort of trance. The third act was piercingly urgent, and his last act among the greatest things I have ever seen on a stage. At the moment when Borkman stands high above the city, gazing down on the industrial world below, Richardson, who somehow conveyed in his performance a sense of the great height of the mountain and the terrible teeming world at his feet, emitted a mysterious sound: three hoots. ‘Hoo hoo hoo.’ Shortly after, Borkman dies. The sound was heart-stopping, unforgettable. I ran home to find Ibsen’s stage direction. Nothing.

A couple of years later I asked Peter Hall, who had directed the play, how it had come about, how the actor had discovered the exact sound of a soul leaving the body. ‘He just did it,’ said Hall, ‘and we all knew that it was right. No one ever mentioned it.’

When he had arrived at the National Theatre, Richardson insisted that there should be a ceremony of some sort to mark the first performance of a new show. Accordingly, he set off a rocket for the very first night, and
thereafter, on every first night, rockets cleaved the sky above Waterloo Bridge. These are his memorials: dazzling, dangerous fireworks and those strange other-worldly hoots.

Inevitably, the fireworks were suspended after a couple of years owing to
Health and Safety considerations: not considerations that the whisky-
swigging, motorbike-riding Sir Ralph ever took into account (the leather
jacket he wore on his bike carried the legend
Hall’s Angels
)
.
His old chum
and sparring partner John Gielgud played a season at the Olivier, too, giv
ing his Julius Caesar and Sir Politick-Would-Be in Peter Hall’s production
of
Volpone
. He and Richardson did not, alas, appear together at the new
National, which was a shame after their knock-down brilliant turns in
No Man’s Land
and
Home
; what wonderful Broker’s Men they would have
made in a panto, or perhaps Ugly Sisters. I wrote this piece about the sales
of their respective effects for the
Daily Telegraph.

By curious chance, the collections of two of the last century’s greatest actors have come up for sale at more or less the same time. They were utterly different both as men and as actors, but in later years they became fast friends and – in plays by David Storey and Harold Pinter – members of one of the greatest double acts the British theatre has ever known. Their performances, together and separately, left indelible impressions on all who saw them, but off the stage, their private personalities were every bit as memorable. At Monday’s Private View of the Gielgud Collection, the great and the good of the acting profession turned up in large numbers, more, one felt, to immerse themselves again in the great man’s aura than specifically to buy his effects, which, beyond the superb theatrical memorabilia, and an enormous number of gifts from friends and admirers, consist largely of domestic items – elegant furniture, carpets, china statues, paintings of varying quality (a superb Nicholson, a Lely and a fine Dufy, alongside others with specifically theatrical significance) – that attest to the conventionally tasteful taste of Gielgud’s partner of some thirty years, Martin Hensler, with whom he had lived in comfortable splendour in Wotton Underwood near Aylesbury. All of the items have charm; but a sixteenth-century Buddha head and two ravishing alabaster busts of the Emperor Hadrian’s boyfriend Antinöos are striking, and somehow unexpected. Their London house, in Cowley Street, had been
given up some years before: ‘Nobody gives parties any more,’ Gielgud proclaimed, not altogether accurately, in the mid-Seventies when they made the move. What he meant was that nobody gave parties that he wanted to go to any more. ‘So nice to see you,’ he once told Gyles Brandreth, ‘because all my real friends are dead.’