My Life in Pieces (28 page)

Paul Scofield was the last of the theatrical Titans, a late flowering of that astonishing generation which included Olivier, Gielgud, Ashcroft, Evans, Redgrave and Richardson, and his death on Wednesday leaves the stage immeasurably impoverished. I say the stage, because, despite his Oscar
for
A Man for All Seasons
and much distinguished work in other films and on television, he was above all a creature of the theatre, and no one who saw him treading the boards will ever forget it. He was such an uncommon physical phenomenon: tall and powerful, a fine figure of a man, but complex, even physically. Every inch of him seemed to be expressing contradictory things. His face was sensationally handsome – as a youth he would have been called beautiful – but there too there were contradictions: the soft sensuousness of his mouth denied by the sharp precision of his nose, his eyes often veiled, his brow imperious, his eyebrows endlessly mobile. His skin was astonishingly smooth and soft.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of his physical gifts, though, was his voice, an instrument like none other – an organ with limitless stops, from the mightiest of bass rumbles, through light tenorial lyricism, to falsetto pipings; he seemed to be able to sound several notes at once, creating chords which resonated to the most remarkable effect, stirring strange emotions. He would swoop effortlessly up and down the register, but always for expressive purpose, never for mere virtuosity. Given this exotic physical endowment, it is surprising that he was able to transform himself so completely. His Uncle Vanya and his King Lear within a few years of each other scarcely seemed to come from the same planet; and could it be the same actor playing the gloriously shabby, bedraggled Wilhelm Voigt in
The Captain of Köpenick
who would appear a few seasons later in the role of Oberon, all made of air and silver? Equally he had access to a kind of deeply human nobility best exemplified in his Thomas More. These transformations were of great virtuosity, but they never drew attention to themselves. He was unusual among English actors in that, however exuberant his assumptions might sometimes be, he was not an extrovert. Whatever he did had a profound charge of interiority within it. His performances owed nothing to any influence but were entirely original, many-layered and complex. With him, the inner workings of the character were made flesh. In the early 1970s I was an usher at the Old Vic and saw his Wilhelm Voigt night after night. I found myself deeply nourished by the performance. It was like gazing at a great painting and finding more and more in it: endless detail, sudden vistas of great depth, marvels of technique producing immense emotion.

In the light of all this, it may be imagined that I approached the prospect of acting with him with a kind of bliss mingled with dread. The play was
Amadeus
; he of course was playing the machinating Salieri, I was to be
Mozart. I was thirty, in the grip of almost uncontrollable energy which I scarcely knew what to do with, on stage or off. He was fifty-seven, two years younger than I am today, but giving a good impression of the Ancient of Days, with his magnificent silver head of hair and noble mien; the only bohemian element – the only clue that he might be an actor rather than a king, say, or a Nobel prize-winner – was his penchant for pastel-coloured shirts. In person, he was sweet, courteous, without any side whatever. He laughed easily, but it was evident that he was very shy, socially. He wore country clothes and smoked his pipe whenever he could. Once the formalities were over, we swiftly got on with rehearsing the play. He said very little, and was evidently wrestling with a very long part which was being constantly rewritten. I, on the other hand, seemed to be suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, busily offering suggestions on every subject, including his performance. Scofield eyed me warily from behind his high-backed chair. In other words our relationship was pretty well that of the characters in the play, with the difference that I was playing a genius, while he actually was one.

I noted that his approach was to seem to sketch the performance in quite lightly, and then suddenly plunge in deeper, like an aqua-diver. He would emerge from these sudden immersions with another important new note in the character, which would then be incorporated into the role. However it was that Paul contacted his inner life, it had nothing to do with the Method or any conscious seriousness of purpose. He simply sent the character for a swim in his own secret streams, the deeply hidden pools of emotion and fantasy deep within which I suspect even he knew nothing about. As the older Salieri, he had invented an extraordinary old geezer, wheezing and leering, a doddery comic fuss-budget, who then disappeared in the twinkling of an eye when the young Salieri stepped forward and the action of the play commenced. I was rather shocked by how much he seemed to be enjoying playing old Salieri – there was almost a quality of music hall about it. Acting with him in the rehearsal room was inspiring and paralysing in equal measure. I was desperately nervous and overcompensated by being too emphatic, shrieking and giggling over his lines. He bore it with great patience.

What he could not endure was the constant rewriting. One day, Peter Hall, who was directing, told me that he and Peter Shaffer had realised that there were a couple of lines necessary in a certain sequence in one of his scenes with me, and that they were going to give them to Paul.

During a break, the four of us gathered round the piano in the middle of the rehearsal room while the other actors sat around, chatting, having tea and so on, well out of earshot of our little group. Hall said, ‘Paul, Peter has a small rewrite which –’ He never finished the sentence. Scofield said in a voice that was barely audible but of unimaginable intensity, ‘I’m not. Learning. Another. Line.’ Suddenly the whole room fell silent and the temperature turned to ice. Hall immediately said he was sure it wasn’t really necessary, Shaffer started gibbering and I offered to say all the new lines myself. End of discussion. The veil of courtesy had been pulled away for a minute and one saw the massive power that lay behind the affable exterior. It was this power that underpinned every performance he gave. On another occasion, I was as usual solving the play’s problems, as I saw it, and said, ‘It just needs a line here,’ and Paul roared, ‘Not from me, baby!’ And then he turned to me and added, ‘You monster!’, the word hurled at me like a thunderbolt. I felt duly pulverised, was actually shaking physically, but had the good sense after a suitable interval to go over to him as he fumed behind his high-backed chair and say, ‘I’ve just got a few rewrites for tomorrow, Paul,’ and he laughed and explained his anxieties and we started to know each other properly from that moment.

When we left the rehearsal room and got into the theatre, I felt him stretching and prowling like a panther in the jungle, sniffing the space out. He seemed, even during technical rehearsals, to be expanding. He started getting taller. When the audience arrived at the first preview, he seemed like a giant. I was physically shocked by the intensity of the public’s response to him. They ached for him, they wanted to consume him entirely, every delicious morsel. I had no experience of this sort of thing and foolishly tried to tug him back into the relationship we had had in the rehearsal room. He would not tolerate it. He and the audience were making love and woe betide anyone who came between them. When I finally got the hang of it and attempted a little gentle lovemaking with them myself, he changed completely. He was more than happy to encourage a
ménage à trois
. From then on, for the remainder of the two years during which we did the play, there was a deep twinkle in his eyes, as we played the great game together in close communion with the audience. He plumbed the depths and soared to the heights of Salieri’s tormented soul, but behind it all, somewhere, was that twinkle.

We got on wonderfully well without ever really spending any time together. Our relationship was unspoken, until one night on the stairs on
the way back from the stage, he suddenly told me that he would never play Salieri with anyone but me. I swore the same to him. We remained faithful to our vows. I would see him from time to time, we wrote to each other, we did the play on the radio. He had no small talk, but then he had no big talk either. He did not live the usual semi-public life of an actor. When he wasn’t acting, he retreated to the home where he lived in perfect domestic equilibrium with his beloved wife Joy. He didn’t much like to leave the country, except to go to the Isle of Mull where, as everywhere else, he read and thought and nurtured his inner life. After a triumphant
John Gabriel Borkman
at the National Theatre, he seemed to have quietly retired. And then, about eight years ago, I asked him to take part in a gala I was directing at the Palace Theatre one Sunday night, and he duly stepped forward at the end of the evening, slightly frail, a little smaller than he had been, but still in majestic command of his great vocal instrument and his adoring audience. It was Prospero’s farewell, and he filled that large auditorium with his unique music:

I and everyone in the cast and all the stage managers and the stagehands surrendered to his spell. Perfect silence fell. And now that great voice is silent. It is hard to imagine another such voice being heard in our lifetime.

After
Amadeus
, John Dexter, still breathing fire and spitting venom, was
back at the National with one of the greatest triumphs of his career,
which further confirmed his absolute mastery of the Olivier auditorium.
But
Galileo
was a triumph for everyone, not least Michael Gambon, who
suddenly emerged, as people sometimes do, overnight, as a major classi
cal actor. I had known him since 1969, when I was in the box office of the
Mermaid Theatre, and he was the shy, sexy, funny boyfriend of the Pro
duction Manager’s secretary, Lyn Haill. He dressed oddly: in a safari
jacket, with a silk scarf tied round his neck, and his huge long feet encased
in suede shoes. We used to pass the time of day together: he laughed so
charmingly and naughtily and told the tallest stories. I was a rather self-
conscious twenty-year-old who thought he knew everything and who
knew nothing, but Michael talked to me as if I was the person he most
enjoyed talking to in the whole world. When he became famous, he
refused to give interviews. American
Vogue
was desperate to do a piece on
him: they contacted me and offered me a lot of money to write it, so I
phoned Mike and told him that I’d give him half. He agreed. A month
later, I found that he’d cashed the cheque in favour of his son.

He is known throughout the English theatre as, simply, ‘Gambon’. Sir Ralph Richardson referred to him as ‘The Great Gambon’ – as if he were a circus act, Michael Gambon believes. The appellation declares both high esteem and familiarity. Within his own profession, he is the most loved actor of his generation. Love is not easily earned in a world as competitive and critical as that of the theatre, but he has it and has had it for as long as I can remember.

His public acclaim was clinched on a night in 1980 when his performance in the title role in Brecht’s
Galileo
brought the audience – including several critics – to its feet. This is still rare enough in the English theatre to have warranted a mention on the front page of
The Times
. The reviews repeated the standing ovation verbally. More than one of them contained the phrase ‘a star is born’, though they might more accurately have said ‘recognised’, since they had been acclaiming him, quietly, for a good ten years.

At the curtain call that first night, Gambon himself seemed distant, uninvolved. He clung to his fellow actors (I was one of them), until, inevitably, he had to take a solo call. He shuffled forward, nodded a slight acknowledgement, smiled his characteristic awkward grin, then shuffled back to the security of the line-up. We all trailed off back to our dressing rooms, which at the National Theatre give onto an inner well. Gambon appeared at the window of his dressing room. Suddenly every dressing-room
window was open, and we all hung out of them and clapped and cheered him. He wept, not surprisingly.

In twenty years in the theatre, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was not, to repeat, very English. More than a great tribute to his performance, it was an expression of love for the man. And it was private. Actors sometimes applaud each other in public to show what good chaps they are, but this was different. Here, there was no audience.

On the face of it, both the love and the admiration are a little surprising. Gambon is a shy man, not a great socialite. He has charm and is a supreme raconteur, but he takes no pains to dominate a conversation, to dazzle. He reveals little of himself, and when he does, he is so startling (‘the thing about me is I hate a lot of people’) that one hesitates to investigate any further. He once told me that he needed advice on a very sensitive subject: would I come round his place for supper to talk it over? I arrived only to find half a dozen other people there. The subject, whatever it might have been, was never mentioned.

Despite the veils drawn over his most private self, there are many, probably countless, people who consider themselves Gambon’s friend. He is most at ease with his fellow actors, and however large or central his role in a play, he always remains part of the group. He refuses to play at being a star, never makes public announcements, and hardly ever attends the award ceremonies at which he is so regularly honoured. Asked if he would ever like to run a company, his ‘no’ is instant and unnegotiable.