My Life in Pieces (29 page)

He genuinely dislikes fame. It has rendered him incapable of passing unnoticed in a pub or a restaurant. Not long ago he could go to the half-dozen – pubs in his neighbourhood, visiting each one in a different persona, using a different voice – Scots in one, Welsh in another – telling a different story about himself. Not any more. Like it or not, he is very famous indeed, both from the astonishing succession of brilliant stage performances he has given since that
Galileo
and from his television performances – above all
The Singing Detective
, where, bedridden, his aching, flaking presence dominated the series that kept the nation, from palace to pub, glued to its sets.

He is more astonished by all this than anyone. Not that his career has been difficult: while training as an engineer, he spent every spare moment in amateur dramatics until, on an impulse, he answered an advertisement for the famous Dublin Gate Theatre run by the great Irish actor Micheál
mac Liammóir – the man who had given Orson Welles his start. Gambon played a season with them before coming back to London, where he worked as a stage manager on Spike Milligan’s surreal comedy
The Bed-
Sitting Room.
Then, only a year after becoming an actor – and despite having audaciously auditioned in front of Olivier with a speech from
Richard III
– he became a founding member of Olivier’s National Theatre Company. His fellow spear carriers included Derek Jacobi, Michael York and Anthony Hopkins. He progressed slowly through the ranks, acting in all the productions in that golden period of the English theatre, until, knowing that he must cut his teeth on a great role, he found himself in Birmingham playing Othello. It was then that some of his extraordinary qualities began to make people sit up: his massive stamina, a huge and apparently indestructible voice, and sudden and exquisite lyrical delicacy.

But he didn’t return to the classics for some time, becoming instead the supreme interpreter of Alan Ayckbourn’s bourgeois tragicomedies. He is not built quite the way classical actors are supposed to be. Though not short – 5’11” – his body lacks regularity. His great box of a chest – ‘as deep as it is wide’, in his own words – sits on top of legs whose shortness is belied by long tapering feet. His hands, too, are immense, with extremely long, delicate fingers. The contrasts thus afforded – massive weight and elegant, almost dainty precision – are perfectly embodied in a face that is big and open, but whose eyes and mouth are constantly expressing myriad intermediate emotions. The whole impact is of a humorous and subtle warrior, a giant who chooses to tease. A word from his mouth confirms the impression. Strong enough to ride Lear’s storm twice a day on matinee days, or to take Galileo through his four-hour decline eight times a week in the most vocally hazardous auditorium in the country, his voice can have the same consistency as Ralph Richardson’s: a kind of
mille-feuille
lightness that is almost literally delicious. And when this big man makes love, his voice is strangely affecting. At the end of the first production of Pinter’s
Betrayal
, Gambon gave the final declaration of love a lyrical urgency, an almost Puccini-like golden melodiousness that hasn’t been heard in the English theatre for many years. It wasn’t until
Galileo
, in which he was an unexpectedly cast by the great actor-trainer John Dexter, that the range of the tragic was opened up to him. The danger, the anger, and the big shout that dwell deep inside him, fuelled his performances, which have redefined those heroes for the Eighties.

He has no imitators. Like Katharine Hepburn, what he does works only because it is he who is doing it. His rhythms, his inflections are so unusual that they would be thought mannered were it not that they come, not from a desire to impress, but from inner certainty. He was born in Dublin, and an occasional Irish vowel sound will seep into his speech, but he owes no more to his Celtic background than to anything else. He claims to hate the Irish – ‘low, crafty, grasping people’ – but as he says it, there’s something sly at the corner of his eyes that makes you wonder whether you or perhaps the whole idea of national differences are being sent up. It’s impossible to pin down why he should have endowed Eddie Carbone, in his triumphant revival of
A View from the Bridge
, with a kind of balletic grace, but somehow it made the final tragedy doubly affecting. He just felt it that way.

He seems, too, to owe nothing to any other actors. Laurence Olivier is the subject of some of his best stories, but if Gambon acquired the trumpets in his voice from Olivier, the orchestration is so different that you’d never notice. He speaks with awe of Brando and De Niro, but what he has taken from them is summed up in his dictum that ‘You’ve got to be brave, haven’t you?’

And brave, above all, is what he is – whether in the cockpit of the plane he flies in his spare time (‘I like the power, the authority’) or on the
stage. I caught his Uncle Vanya in the last week of its run. I was startled by something he did in the third-act confrontation. At the height of his tirade against Serebriakov, he fell to the floor, apparently in the throes of a heart attack. Pumping his arm, he dragged himself to his feet and retired to the corner of the stage. I rushed back to see him and asked why? And how? ‘I did it for the first time tonight,’ he said. ‘The scene needed it.’ Chekhov doesn’t ask for it, I don’t know how one would ever think of it, but it was perfectly right, and at the same time was the single most audacious piece of theatrical invention I’ve ever seen.

He is the great original of our theatre.

Michael’s naughtiness is well-known. It is of the same order as Paul
Scofield’s, the playfulness of someone who is so in command of what he
is doing, that he is able to maintain his performance with perfect intensity
while at the same time attempting to amuse his fellow players. In
Galileo,
I played the Little Monk, a fiendish part, in that it’s fully ninety minutes
into the play before the character comes on, and then for only two
unspeaking minutes, to reappear shortly after with a huge ten-minute aria
of a speech. Dexter had told me that when I spoke, it must be as if I hadn’t
spoken for five years, a wonderful note which I could never convincingly
fulfil; in fact, I always had a sense of failure in the part. It’s a very exposed
speech, containing the only persuasive counter-argument to Galileo’s, and
it needed tremendous focus. Galileo simply listens. As I started the speech
on the first preview, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of
Gambon’s famously long fingers slowly, over the whole course of the
speech, unfurl itself until it was, by the end of it, erect, in an unmistakably
obscene gesture. On the first night I gave him, as a present, a large
matchbox, in which I had concealed a plastic hand, bought in a joke shop,
filled with water and the fingers strapped down all except for one, which,
as he opened the matchbox, emerged and stood erect. He always mentions
this whenever we meet.

Gambon apart, one of the abiding memories I have of
Galileo
is of that
fine actor Andrew Cruickshank – in his time one of the great Ibsen
actors, as well as Claudius to Olivier’s Hamlet at the Old Vic, and later
a national figure on television as Dr Cameron in
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
–
playing the small role of one of the grandees of the Church in the open
ing scenes of the play. Then, instead of going home, as he had every right
to do (if you’re finished in the first half you don’t have to stay for the
curtain call), he retired to his dressing room with a bottle of Glen
morangie and his favourite Kierkegaard text. Four and a half hours later,
at the end of the play, he would emerge, to take his bow, but somehow –
all that Kierkegaard, no doubt – he never quite got to the stage in time,
meeting us all in the corridor on our way back to our dressing rooms, and
not minding at all, just happy to be part of the company and in a the
atre, working.

I also acted in Ayckbourn’s
Sisterly Feelings
, again with Gambon, and
Stephen Moore, Penelope Wilton, Anna Carteret, Greg Hicks, Michael
Bryant, and Cruickshank: a real ensemble play, which also took full
advantage of the Olivier stage, including a genuinely alarming moment in
which I cycled down a steep grass hill at full pelt, generally knocking Anna
Carteret into the front row. The possibilities for collective hysteria were
all too many, and rather too frequently indulged. The staff director, that
genial and deeply serious man Kenneth Mackintosh (Olivier’s understudy
as Othello at the Old Vic and a fine actor in his own right), was livid: ‘Sir
Laurence would never have allowed it!’ he would furiously tell us. And he
was right. Something about the clockwork perfection of Ayckbourn’s comic
mechanism, with its perfectly plotted and infallible laughs, seemed to
create a mood of anarchy among us, and all it would need was for Andrew
to be facing the wrong way when the lights came up at the beginning of
the play (easily done: it is very hard to get on in a blackout on the Olivier
stage), and we were all on the brink of hysterical laughter. I like to believe
that the audience never noticed. Michael Bryant was the worst offender,
because his facial mask never cracked. In the picnic scene he would pour
a glass of orange juice for me and say, perfectly audibly, I felt, though
there was never any audience reaction, ‘Hand that to the pervert.’ This
was the same Michael Bryant who, during rehearsals for
As You Like It,
when Sara Kestelman was getting into her stride, would hold up a large
piece of paper with the words ‘Too Jewish’ on it. When it was my turn,
the piece of paper would say, ‘Too camp.’ And when I performed all one
hundred and fifty-four of Shakespeare’s Sonnets one afternoon at the
Olivier Theatre, there was Bryant in the wings, in his underpants, for some
reason, with a placard saying ‘1/2’. No doubt he was right.

For many years, the Sonnets became my main connection to Shakespeare.
That extraordinary event at the Olivier was a one-off, never to be
repeated by anyone in his or her right mind. But they remain not only one
of the most remarkable collections of poems ever published, but also one
of the greatest accounts in the language, perhaps in any language, of
amour fou
. I have performed them across the world in various combina
tions, always essentially based on the highly controversial sequence by Dr
John Padel (father of Ruth); I have recorded them, twice; I have broad
cast them for the BBC, twice (one in the 1609 printed sequence, the other
in Padel’s); and in 2008 I did a shortened version – a mere eighty-four of
them – in an event called
There Reigns Love
, commissioned by the Shake
speare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. The more I perform them, the less
important it seems to me whether they tell us anything about Shakespeare
himself, and the more remarkable they seem to me in their account of the
psychopathology of love. Audiences in Stratford were astounded by their
intensity of feeling, so powerful that in certain poems – towards the end
of the cycle, in Padel’s sequence – the verse, as in many of the later plays,
threatens to break down completely. I performed them entirely from mem
ory, this time – at the Olivier I had a book in front of me – and this also
had a transforming effect on my performance: as I said of
As You Like It,
in a sense, very little acting is required. The verse tells you everything, does
it all for you.

I wrote a piece for the
Guardian
on the occasion of the BBC broadcast of
the Padel version.

Michael Kustow, then Associate Director of the National Theatre, telephoned me one day, nearly fifteen years ago, to ask if I’d be interested in performing a new version of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It was one, he said, which not only revealed an extraordinary, complex background story which seemed to account for some of the mysterious, half-submerged allusions in the verse, but – more importantly – made more sense of the poems as poems than any previous reordering. My head reeled, not just from excitement (these were sensational claims) but from ignorance. I scarcely knew more than half a dozen sonnets, and to be truthful, no more than the first lines, which seemed somehow to make up a sort of ghostly sonnet on their own:

They sat there, those one hundred and fifty-four poems, in their own separate volume, seeming to have little to do with the man who wrote the plays that are for me and every English actor the unavoidable mine down which we all must go sooner or later if we are to come to terms with our language, our craft and ourselves. But we know so very little about that man. Kustow’s call offered the chance of dispelling some of that ignorance – maybe of meeting the man Shakespeare face to face.

I set to reading all one hundred and fifty-four poems as printed in the poet’s lifetime, and emerged with some confusion, a confusion I shared with virtually everyone who has read the Sonnets through. To whom are they addressed? To two people at least. What is the betrayal spoken of in a number of them? Whence this overwhelming sense of rejection? What is the marriage so ardently desired?

It’s impossible not to feel that somewhere behind these, for the most part unconnected, poems is some experience, a hidden story involving the
young man to whom the majority of them are addressed, the woman to whom a smaller number belong, and the poet himself.