My Life in Pieces (31 page)

I had always had a very pleasant relationship with Peter, often visiting
him in his office for little chats, in the course of which he had spoken with
extraordinary candour about his work and his life. Once, he had asked me
to play Montano in
Othello
. ‘Who?’ I had said. ‘Indeed,’ he had replied.
‘And when your friends come to see the play, they will say, “Why did you
take the part?” And the only answer you will be able to give them will be,
“Because Peter Hall asked me to do it”.’ I asked for an hour or so to think
about it, then phoned and said no. ‘Ah well,’ sighed the great pragmatist,
‘I had to try, didn’t I?’ I was sure our little chat about Parolles would be
just the same. I booked an appointment with Peter, breezed in and told
him that I’d been offered the job and that I’d like to go, please.

What happened next took me aback. A large tear rolled down his cheek.
‘My dear friend,’ he said. ‘We must have failed you very badly. I thought
you were happy here?’ ‘Yes, very happy, but –’ I spluttered. ‘No, you have
to go. Of course you do. But – may I give you some advice? – not till you’ve
done a play-carrying part in the Olivier. Then you can go. Then you
must
go. But not before. How ironic, though, that you should come to see me at
this very moment.’ ‘In what way?’ ‘I was talking to Tom Stoppard just
before you came in. I’ve just put the phone down, in fact. I was asking him
to adapt a play by Nestroy for you – you know who Nestroy is?’ ‘Yes, yes,
he wrote
Einen Jux will er sich machen
. Thornton Wilder based
The Matchmaker
on it, didn’t he?’ ‘Of course, I knew I could rely on you to
know this wonderful writer. Well, I have just asked Tom to do a version
of the play for you. To be done in the Olivier, with you finally carrying a
play in this auditorium you have so made your own. In – let me see –’ he
consulted his calendar – ‘yes, in six months’ time.’ ‘Peter,’ I said, barely
able to speak from excitement, ‘this changes everything.’ ‘Does that mean
you’ll stay?’ he said with a charming smile, sunshine breaking through
clouds. ‘Of course, of course. Of COURSE.’ I skipped out, and a week or
so later we signed the extension of my contract. Shortly after that, I had
a very nice card from Stoppard saying that he’d seen
As You Like It
, and
much enjoyed it, and I wrote back to him and said how much I was look
ing forward to the Nestroy. A week after that, I bumped into him at the
Evening Standard Awards, and he said, ‘Who’s Nestroy?’

Which, of course, is why Peter Hall is such a genius at running theatres.
The Nestroy adaptation turned up a year later as
On the Razzle
, with
Felicity Kendal in my part (don’t ask). I carried on with
Sisterly Feelings
and
Galileo
and, of course,
Amadeus
. And then, finally, I left, to play Ver
laine in Hampton’s
Total Eclipse
at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, a
play neither critics nor audiences seem to like very much, but which actors,
directors and writers adore, and so it proved on this occasion. After that,
I played the epically brilliant part of Lord Are in the world premiere of
Edward Bond’s
Restoration
at the Royal Court. And then I did J. P. Don
leavy’s own adaptation of his novel,
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in St Martin’s Lane. This was my first
play in the West End since
The Plumber’s Progress
in 1975 with Harry
Secombe, and it felt like a triumphant return. Until the reviews appeared,
that is. Business was not good (though there are people who think my
Beefy was the apogee of my achievements as an actor, and who am I to
quarrel with them?). So, inspired by a very elegant article Ian McKellen
had written for the
Evening Standard
, I suggested to the press office, as a
way of whipping up business, that the paper might like a piece from me.
Unexpectedly, they agreed. It was my very first piece for a newspaper. I
had a rare old time writing it and took it with high spirits to my new friend
Peggy Ramsay, the famous play agent. She read it, tut-tutting the while.
Soon she came to a phrase in which I said that Donleavy was ‘a bit of a
Ming vase’. ‘Have you ever SEEN a Ming vase?’ she asked. ‘They’re very
heavy
. Is that what you meant?’ I submitted a soberer, more considered
version to her, and the
Standard
printed it without changing a word. I felt
immensely proud, though now I look at it, it seems oddly naïve. I give it
as it appeared on the page, headlines and all
.

HOW
B
EEFY
AN
D
BALTHAZA
R B
U
R
ST
ON TO T
HE
B
OA
R
DS

Actor Simon Callow reveals the enterprising story of how J. P. Donleavy’s
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
came to be launched in the West
End.

The whole thing started one day in January when Patrick Ryecart – whom I’d never met – phoned me to say that he’d bought the rights of
The
Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
by J. P. Donleavy and would I like to play Beefy?

A friend of his, also an actor, was going to direct, and he’d said, independently, that I should play it.

I laughed, because five years previously John Dexter had asked me to play the same part, in a production which fell though. I’d never read the play – only the novel; but I thought that if the role was anything like as funny and outrageous as the character in the book, I wanted to play it more than any part I’d ever clapped eyes on.

So I said yes, of course. It turned out that Patrick had been cast as Balthazar in a later production which had fallen through too. Like me, he’d gone crazy for the character and the book. It’s a lovely funny sad thing, as riotous, as bawdy, as ebullient as
The Ginger Man
but with a deep tender thread of melancholy running through it.

Pat had been deeply disappointed by the collapse of the production and when he heard that the rights had reverted to the author, he determined to get hold of them himself. Nothing was going to stop him playing that part. So he wrote to Donleavy.

Donleavy doesn’t have an agent. If you want to do one of his plays, you have to get hold of him – which is easier said than done, because he lives in isolation on his farm in Mullingar, in the west of Ireland. The first letter was met with silence. Others followed over the next six months, all unanswered.

Pat nearly gave up hope. Then one morning, out of the blue – he was in his bath – the phone rang and he heard for the first time the halting but exact Anglo-American tones of the writer, suggesting tea at Fortnum’s – not the first place one would expect to meet the creator of
The Ginger
Man
, or the only begetter of Beefy (who would surely be more at home in some murky dive off Piccadilly about perhaps to start his third bottle of Glenlivet). But in fact, your man is a different creature altogether; delicate, courtly, fragile. Fortnum’s was just the place.

Donleavy was enchanted by Patrick and agreed to sell the rights to him. It was an incredible coup. Patrick had bought the rights to a world premiere by one of the top-selling authors in the world. He was that unheard-of thing; an actor who owns a play.

But the idea of setting something up from scratch was daunting. Isn’t that an awful lot of money? I asked. Peanuts, Pat said, it’s a marvellous play, they’ll be falling over each other to put it on.

Developments were astonishing. He’d tried several West End managers, who were rather cool. Coolness wouldn’t do. It had to be passion and love. So he went to someone who’d never put on a play before, Naim Atallah, head of Quartet Books and Financial Director of Asprey’s.

Atallah read the play, fell in love with it – and put up £100,000. Pat then went to Capital Radio, who own the Duke of York’s Theatre. John Whitney and his board all turned out to be Donleavy buffs and welcomed the play with open arms. Now having the backing and the theatre, he went to an old friend, the producer Howard Panter, and asked him to manage the show. All systems go.

Then a big black cloud came into view. The director was obliged to pull out. Suddenly we were without the key person in the whole operation.
For the first time, I saw Pat daunted. There was no point in just getting the play on. It had to be done with love and imagination. And time was running out. We couldn’t keep putting the Duke of York’s off, and Pat and I couldn’t keep ourselves available indefinitely. It was ridiculous. We had everything but this one detail – the most important of all. Then, that week,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
opened at Stratford to rave reviews for its director, Ron Daniels. They spoke of its magic, beauty and earthy laughter. Exactly what we needed.

We’d assumed that Ron wouldn’t be available because of his heavy RSC schedule, but we checked nonetheless. He was. He came down overnight, having read the play and the novel, and loving both. Everything he said about the project delighted us. We signed him up and packed him off to Donleavy. Together they produced a version of the play which was quite different to the one we’d had all these months: richer, funnier, bolder – truer to the novel.

Ron had ten days to do everything: to work on the script, to cast the play, to work with the designer. When we started rehearsing, we had half a cast and half a script. The designers were working round the clock. The whole cast only got together to read the play a week after rehearsals started. Bits of script arrived daily, completely new scenes were put in, new characters introduced. It was a crazy time. Buoyed along by Daniels’s good humour and sureness of touch, it was also creative in a way that rehearsals often aren’t.

When Pat first said to me would I like to play Beefy, I said, if anyone else plays him, I’ll picket the theatre. And I would.

Patrick was and is an uncommonly optimistic fellow. He was convinced
that something would turn up and that the play would become an
overnight success. He shared this view with Naim Atallah, who devised a
dozen schemes to lure into the theatre what he thought was the play’s core
audience: yuppies. Nothing worked. But Patrick’s conviction never
wavered. He was sustained by his belief that one day Prince Andrew –
the Duke of York – would come to the Duke of York’s, and that somehow,
magically, this would reverse our fortunes. It is true that the people who
did come – by no means only yuppies – fell in love with the characters and
were swept away by the language, which has a real champagne quality,
and often came back for second and third helpings, but there were never
enough of them. From time to time, Donleavy – Mike to us, by now –
would come to see the show, dryly noting the divergences from the text (‘I
recognised a phrase or two from time to time and seemed to remember
having written something like it once upon a time’). One night, on Patrick’s
insistence, the three of us went to a dubious club in Mayfair, where we
were greeted at the door by mammiferous lovelies, naked from the waist
up; downstairs, even more lightly clad maidens were romping around on
all fours, pursued by middle-aged gents in their shorts. Patrick called for
madder music and for stronger wine, I nervously sipped my Campari and
soda, and Donleavy surveyed the scene, which could have come from any
one of his novels, with fastidious interest, as he sipped cocoa, Patrick roar
ing his encouragement at the romping couples at our feet. This excursion
cheered him up no end, and kept him going through another month of
empty houses.

Eventually, Patrick’s dream came true. Naim invited Billy Connolly to see
the show, and Billy expressed an interest in taking over from me, which
he did. I did not picket the theatre. Every penny that the management had
lost during the ten months of my playing the role was recovered during
Billy’s eight weeks’ tenure.

Among the very charming cast of the show my special friend was Sylvia
Coleridge. When she died in 1986, the
Evening Standard
allowed me to
write a memoir of her:

When people talk about the richness of English acting, they probably mean the brilliant young men and women, the wonderful character actors, the aged knights. But there is another layer of actors and actresses who are quite as glorious, those actors of marked individuality who never play a leading part, but who illuminate what they do with unique truth and distinction. One of these, Sylvia Coleridge, has just died. I am proud to have been her friend for the last few years of her life, and proud to have acted with her.

We met when we worked together in
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar
B
. It was a typical Sylvia Coleridge role: nothing, or next to nothing, on the page; but she made something so remarkable of it, that were she not as generous in her acting as she was in her self, one might have found
oneself seriously upstaged by it. She played a dowager in Harrods, overhearing the scandalous conversation of Beefy and Balthazar. She expressed her outrage by a roll (well, several rolls, actually) of those uniquely expressive eyes and much pantomime with a copy of
The Times
. In due course, Balthazar leaves the stage, and I, as Beefy, saunter over, in my navvy’s boots, to her chair, where, in a few well-chosen phrases, I melt her into sunshine smiles. The smiles were something rather extraordinary. She had the great actress’s gift of releasing radiance in increasing bursts of delight; her voice, a somewhat unpredictable instrument, was likewise able to strike a word with a shout of pleasure or a quite unexpected growl.