My Life in Pieces (33 page)

Another Country
changed Rupert’s life; he and it were the toast of the
town.
Balthazar
, which had its passionate devotees, had no such impact on
my life or my career. It was utterly at odds with the temper of the times,
both bawdy and beatific as the title suggests, as well as being anarchic
and nostalgic, in a way that I fully see could be thought to be reactionary
– an exaltation of aristocracy and wealth. It was nakedly sexist, full of
buxom tarts and lurid fantasies. From a dramatic point of view, the play
was unquestionably imperfect, but the characters and the language were
rich and joyous in a way that few characters and little language was in
the early 1980s, and the deep and heartfelt vein of melancholy in the
writing moved me greatly.

But I could hardly wait to go. For me
Balthazar
was the end of something.
I had finally managed, after nine years of pretty well continuous acting,
to exhaust my addiction to it. I simply had to stop. When I left the play in
the summer of 1982, I felt liberated, not just from the eight shows a week
– though I was beginning to go ever so slightly but quite seriously
demented as we played night after night to a hundred or so desperately
self-conscious individuals huddled in the stalls – but from my driven need
to create another part, strut my stuff again, earn approval. There was, I
knew, a life elsewhere. It seemed symbolic and right that to find it I should
brush the dust of England off my feet, which I accordingly did.

It was to America I went, with a small group of actors from the National
Theatre, to be part of the initial season of the British American Theatre
Institute (which lived with its rather silly acronym for a couple of years
before becoming the British American Drama Academy, which still lives
and thrives). We went to Santa Fe, still then an altogether uncommon
place, not yet part of the extended mall which the American South West
has now become. The light, the bald mountains, the mystical associations
as well as the somewhat sinister proximity of Los Alamos, site of the first
nuclear tests, took one as far away from the West End and the South Bank
and the whole working world of the theatre as humanly possible. For the
first time in my life I taught and directed, both of which activities forced
me to stand outside of myself and think about what I had been up to for
the last nine years. Greer Garson lived there, and all our work was done in
the theatre named after her. (I had occasion while I was there to write to
Gore
Vidal, but got no reply; when I saw him later in London he apolo
gised, saying that he couldn’t bring himself to write to the Mrs Miniver
Theatre.) After I had been in Santa Fe for a week or so, I had a letter from
Peggy Ramsay telling me that Nick Hern had commissioned me to write a
book. I shook when I got the letter, and I admit that I wept a little, too,
then ran round telling everybody to whom the information would mean
anything at all, as well as a baffled few to whom it meant nothing. This,
far more than anything that had happened to me in my acting career, was
genuinely beyond my most unbridled fantasies. Hern was head of theatre
books at Methuen, one of the best drama publishers in the country at the
time. I celebrated by going up in a balloon at dawn in Albuquerque and
hung in the air, at that eerie and soundless moment when they switch off
the engine and two currents of air hold you suspended over the world, and
reflected that life could hardly get any better.

When you come down from the balloon ride, you end up in the town dog
dump (DUMP DEAD DOGS HERE, a sign says). They then baptise you in
champagne, a symbolism I greatly liked. For a while it seemed that I
might stay in Santa Fe and form a company based on some of my very
talented students. A millionaire was found to pay for it, but his enthusiasm
drifted, our season ended, and no more was ever said about it. Back in
Britain, I set to work on the first series of a deliciously original television
sitcom,
Chance in a Million
, in which I appeared with Brenda Blethyn.
Then I wrote the book, in a frenzy, in three separate weeks, one in France,
one in Switzerland and one in Brighton, and gave it to Nick Hern, who
encouraged me to cut the first three pages (imperishable prose about my
family) so that it opened with the words, ‘When I was eighteen I wrote a
letter to Laurence Olivier’, and then printed the book pretty well
unchanged. When
Being an Actor
appeared, it caused a small scandal by
opposing, in its last pages, the stranglehold of directors over the theatre.
I knew that I was taking a risk when I wrote the book, first by making no
secret of my homosexuality, and secondly by challenging what I called
the ‘directocracy’. No one even blinked at my coming out, but my polemic
against directocracy caused a bit of a sensation. Michael Billington, in
the
Guardian
, thought the supposed attack on directors was ‘tragically
misguided’; but the following day, in the same newspaper, Ian McKellen
rode up like a knight in shining armour, to defend me and the book. The
actor Dinsdale Lansden wrote a review in
Plays and Players
which feared
for my future; and I got hundreds, literally hundreds, of letters from actors
who felt that I had, as I hoped I would, spoken for them. The idea of
actors reclaiming some autonomy was in the air; very soon afterwards,
Kenneth Branagh started up a company of his own, as did Mark Rylance.
As it happens, my purpose had never been to denounce directors. It was
to remind actors that they were not just pawns in the hands of the grand
masters of the theatre, but artists in their own right, whose contribution
– imaginatively, emotionally, intellectually – was essential to the process.
They were the ones, after all, who made the word flesh, up there on the
stage, or in front of the camera: their bodies, their hearts, their brains,
their creative energies were the heart and soul of the enterprise. My war
cry was not about doing down directors: it was to encourage actors to
raise their own game, be ambitious for their art, and not allow anyone
tell them to shut up, as many directors, in those dark days, quite literally
did.

Publication of the book had many unforeseen outcomes. One day, I came
home late at night to find a letter on my mat whose envelope was written
in a highly distinctive semi-italic hand. It was from Sir Alec Guinness. I
reviewed Garry O’Connor’s biography of him,
The Unknown Alec Guinness
, in 2002, in the
Guardian.

Knowing Alec Guinness – I have to stop right there. I didn’t know Alec Guinness. We had a sustained and very rewarding acquaintance which was curiously complex and in some ways surprisingly intimate, but I would never dream of claiming that I knew him. Garry O’Connor’s new account of his life implies that no one ever did, least of all his biographer, now making his second attempt to wrestle the old shape-shifter to the ground. The title of the book is exact – Guinness is and remains unknown; any suggestion that this book reveals him for what he was is misleading. But O’Connor’s biographical inquiry is nonetheless deeply rewarding and entertaining for all that.

My own encounter with Guinness is a fairly typical one, but it shows some of what O’Connor has been up against. Like everyone else, I had been enchanted and astonished by his film performances, from
Great
Expectations
and
Oliver Twist
on to the Ealing comedies and
The Bridge
on the River Kwai
and
Tunes of Glory
, awed by his transformations and conscious of a curious intensity, an interior quality irradiating his work. From the late Sixties, I saw his work in the theatre – Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in
The Cocktail Party
, an Ivy Compton-Burnett curiosity called
A
House and its Heritage
, and two plays by Alan Bennett – and here I was surprised, a little baffled, by his impact. A militant fan of Laurence Olivier, I was initially disappointed by the absence of visceral energy in Guinness’s work; having recently discovered John Gielgud for myself, missed that great actor’s mercurial thought processes. But I soon succumbed. The measured gravity, the detachment, the faint air of whimsicality should all have produced a muted impression, but they were, on the contrary, curiously compelling. The physical transformations in every case were complete, but not conspicuous: they did not draw attention to themselves, which had seemed to me to be the whole fun of
the thing when Olivier did it – Guinness seemed to change alchemically, his metal altered in the crucible of his imagination rather than painted from a make-up box.

Vocally, too, there was an evenness of production, a careful turning of phrases, an ability to let thoughts hang in the air, which compelled in a very different way both from the great Romantic orchestral effects of Olivier – the trumpets, the violins, the cymbal crashes with which he coloured his voice – and the Mozartian babbling brook of Gielgud. There was nothing to excite the ear, but one found oneself listening very deeply. And then, most surprising of all, he would take you to some very strange place, a zone of the soul rather than any emotional or sensual or even mental place, and on these occasions the temperature in the auditorium would change palpably. In Bennett’s
The Old Country
, a civilised meditation on loyalty and national identity, Guinness as a Philby-like defector to Moscow purred his way intelligently and interestingly, if a little soporifically, through the play, assessing the unexpected and unsought offer of a pardon and repatriation. Finally understanding that he had no choice, that he was being used as a bargaining coin in a diplomatic manoeuvre and that he must go home, he was left alone for a moment on stage, opened a drawer, took out a gun, looked at it, put it back in the drawer and left the stage. That’s all. But the moment the gun was produced, something impossible to explain happened. The theatre was suddenly engulfed with dark energy, as if the wings of the Angel of Death had passed over us all. It became for a moment hard to breathe; one’s stomach muscles tightened; the heart beat uncomfortably rapidly. Then Guinness put the gun back and left the stage, and everything went back to normal. (I know that this was not merely an overexcited extrapolation of my own because a couple of years later, when I first met that least mystical of men, John Dexter, we talked of Guinness and I mentioned
The
Old Country
and before I said another word Dexter said ‘I know what you’re going to say: the moment with the gun. Terrifying.’)

This sort of juju happened in
Habeas Corpus
, too, in Dr Arthur Wick-steed’s final dance, a moment created entirely by the actor, against the express wishes, O’Connor tells us, of the author. It was a kind of Dance of Death, an odd deconstructed death-haunted music-hall shuffle which rounded off Bennett’s brilliant play on a note of almost Expressionist ghoulishness that took the evening to a different level of theatrical poetry. Here was a formidable operator, attempting things that no other actor I
had seen seemed capable of, or interested in; and yet he seemed outside the mainstream, unlike his friend Ralph Richardson, who also seemed to function on a somewhat mystical plane but who was more recognisably actorly. Beneath his demure exterior, Guinness seemed to be involved in the black arts; there was something priestly about his procedure, as if he were practising a ritual which would result in a moment of contact with strange powers. This was even true in the Compton-Burnett, where the affable character he played seemed to carry with him, behind the seraphic smiles and jaunty Edwardian manners, a curious and in some ways an inappropriate force. By now, of course, he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, though nothing that George Lucas’s special-effects division could conjure up came within a mile of what the actor could manage by his own efforts on a stage.

In the summer of 1984 I received a card from Guinness (how had he got my address?). He had, he said, read the just-published
Being an Actor
, and he wanted to thank me for writing it, because it had made him feel that it might after all be worth carrying on as an actor. This card did not, he said, require a reply. It got one, of course, and from then on until his death sixteen years later, we were in fairly regular correspondence, and I doubt whether a month went by during all that time when I didn’t get some communication or other in the unmistakable hand, each line shorter than the one before, like a surrealist poem, culminating in the final
Alec
(he unknighted himself for me at our very first meeting). My letters to him were on writing paper which was all the colours of the rainbow, which he seemed to find charming. Soon he came to see plays that I was in or which I had directed, and we had a number of meals, always at the Connaught (‘when I have a little money,’ he would say), generally in his room, though there was one alarming occasion when we dined in the Grill with Victor Bannerjee (Aziz in Lean’s
A Passage to
India
) and his wife. Mrs Bannerjee was full of nervous energy and obviously determined not to be daunted by the wood-panelled hush of the famous restaurant, or by the gravity of her host, and talked her way loudly through the menu, advising on what would be wise to avoid because of the season. ‘I think you’ll find,’ said Alec, mildly, ‘that all the food at the Connaught is edible,’ but the atmosphere this remark created was anything but mild. Again, the Force was with us, and a locked, unbreakable silence of many minutes ensued until Bannerjee managed to find some item of small talk that got us going again, though the meal never fully recovered.

Generally, though, supper was in his room. He alerted me to the delicious fact that the room-service waiter, a Spaniard, had never been able ‘properly to pronounce one’s name’ and that when he was entertaining guests, they would be surprised to hear the waiter ask ‘Eberytin to your sassisfaction, Sir Alice?’ At the first meal I had with Alec, the waiter obligingly asked this question, and as he did, Guinness caught my eye with a look of the deepest and most complicit hilarity. His smile was something extraordinary, a zygomatic manoeuvre of such perfect control that he was able to increase it continuously over minutes until he became all smile, a perfect mask of sublime amusement, in which his other features seemed to disappear. He was able to talk through this immense grin, which suggested that he had remarkable control of the muscles in his mouth. Control is the word that is unavoidable in speaking of Alec Guinness.

These dorm bean-feasts at the Connaught were substantial, many-coursed affairs, and the amount of alcohol consumed was prodigious, starting with cocktails, proceeding to wine, several bottles of it, red and white, continuing with Armagnac, then resuming with more wine, and finally, at about three in the morning, he would pad over to the fridge to produce a bottle of beer for the road. Throughout, Alec would puff away at cigarettes and talk in his measured way about his life. He did so with unexpected freedom, revealing deep hatreds (of Laurence Olivier, for example, or his mother) and profound loves – of poetry, mostly. He never spoke to me directly of any of the celebrated crushes to which he was prey, though occasionally he would write to ask if I knew how to get in touch with
X
or
Y
whom he had just seen in a play; these were invariably the tough, straight guys to whom (it was common knowledge) he was always drawn. I never knew whether he got in touch with any of them; he never referred to them again.