My Life in Pieces (37 page)

I hope the foregoing absolves me of apostasy, as if the Pope were suddenly to start selling contraceptives. I have, in any case, directed before, in tandem with my friend and co-optimist, Snoo Wilson, at the Bush Theatre, and very enjoyable it was. But different. One so quickly forgets what it felt like to be on the other side, in much the same way that to drivers the world is plagued with pesky pedestrians who deliberately try to prevent one from simply getting from A to B, to the benefit of all, until they leave their cars at home and become themselves pedestrians, at which point the world becomes a nightmarish place swarming with four-wheeled macho brutes hell-bent on killing every human thing in sight in their crazed desire to get from one unimportant place to another. Why don’t the actors know their lines? I find myself asking. Why are they systematically misinflecting every phrase? How can they allow themselves to stand THERE, where they can’t be seen? Above all, why can’t they remember their own inspired inventions from yesterday?

The thing one forgets is just the sheer bloody difficulty of acting, the paraplegia which overcomes the actor as he strives to recompose his psychic structure. As a director you gaze on the proceedings with a mixture of pity and helplessness until you begin to consider what help you can
offer. Simple things, first. Good humour, energy, unfailing interest. Then a kind of osmosis can start to occur, whereby you feel what the actor is going towards, and can either put in words for him what it is he’s beginning to do, or even suggest a shape that might lead to a sensation that might release something. You develop a sense of the kinetic energy that the stage can liberate. If the actor moves two inches to his left, he becomes vibrantly present; two inches to his right, he disappears. So, by suggestion, you can offer the actor short cuts to his destination.

But the greatest task of the director is in the articulation of the style. One of the most remarkable directors I ever worked with was Jean Jourdheuil, who created
Melancholy Jacques
, a piece about Rousseau I did a year ago. Only after the production had opened and he’d gone back to France did I realise that he’d never given me a note, as such, never suggested I do this or that. He had simply defined the intention of the production over and over again, in a hundred various ways: what the play was, how it worked, what we were hoping to release in the audience. The moment I grasped those things all problems simply became problems of execution. In the same way, on this play,
The Passport
, I’m trying to express to the actors the organic principle of the piece, and to some extent the organic principle of the characters, but in such a way that those principles, and not my impositions, dictate everything that they do: so that their work is their own, and so that my work, the actual staging of the piece, can constantly be challenged by reference to this objective thing, the principle of the production.

Once that has been established, we can behave how we like, I can leap up and show them what I mean, give them line readings – do everything you’re supposed not to, because they can shout me down when I transgress the production’s principle. And oh the joy, the joy unconfined, when that organic connection is made, and the acting starts to flow, a live and dangerous substance. When that happens, it’s both moving and wild, the anarchy of creation itself, when the actors burst the integument of their own personalities and become the conduit of great forces.

The most cherished compliment I received at the time of
Loving Reno
, Snoo Wilson’s play, was from the author and co-director. He said, ‘I didn’t know you could ask so much of actors.’

There is no limit.

The late Peter Bayliss
, who played the customs officer in
The Passport
,
was one of the grand eccentrics of the British theatre. Stories about him
were lovingly circulated by his fellow actors. Cameron Mackintosh wanted
him to play Doolittle in a revival of
My Fair Lady
. Peter had no agent, and
suggested to Cameron that they might meet and have the discussion at the
Soda Fountain at Fortnum and Mason’s. He said that he went there often,
and that he would as usual be bringing his dog. When he arrived, he had
no dog, but when he ordered, he asked for a bowl of water for the dog.
The waitress asked where the dog was; Cameron told her just to bring the
water, which she did. Cameron opened negotiations. ‘£1,000 a week,’ he
said. ‘Sounds very good to me,’ said Peter, ‘but I’ll have to ask the dog.’
Which he did. ‘I’m afraid the dog says no,’ he said after a while. By the
time they left, he’d got Cameron up to £5,000. When he and I met to talk
about
The Passport
, he told me how much he admired
Being an Actor
, his
favourite book of all time, he said. I asked him how he liked to work. ‘Oh,
I like to be directed,’ he said: Tyrone Guthrie, that genius of blocking, was
his idol. So when we started rehearsing, I explained my interpretation and
gave him detailed moves. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘You’re taking
my performance away from me.’ I apologised and said that I was only too
willing to incorporate any suggestions he might have. What would he like
to do? ‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘you’re the director.’ Somehow we escaped from
this vicious circle and got on with doing the play, but not before he told
me that he was going straight from the theatre to Waterstone’s, where he
would move all the copies of
Being an Actor
from the non-fiction to the
fiction shelves. ‘You’re terrible, you are,’ he said. ‘Who do you think you
are? Max Reinhardt?’ He tortured Anna Korwin with similar mad mind
games, but every day he developed more and more exactly in the quite
extreme direction I was keen to explore. We opened, and his extraordinary
performance was rightly acclaimed: huge, dense, very Russian, very dis
turbing, everything I had hoped for. Eventually Pierre Bourgeade, the
author, came to see this mad production of his little play. He adored it, he
said, the design, the lighting, the production, everything. As for Bayliss, he
was astounded by his performance – ‘
bouleversant
’ – and begged to be
allowed to meet this great actor, this genius. I took him to the dressing
room, which I found to be locked. I knocked, calling out Peter’s name. ‘M.
Bourgeade
LOVED the show, Peter. He wants to congratulate you.’ Even
tually from deep within, Peter said that he didn’t want to meet the author.
He wanted to go home. I cajoled, I begged, I shouted, with no effect. ‘At
least let Anna out, Peter.’ She had translated the play, as well as having
given a very good performance herself. At last, as if we were under siege
in Beirut, the key was turned in the lock and the door opened long enough
for Anna to be ejected, then the door was locked again. He never did meet
Bourgeade. After supper I was walking home, and bumped into him. ‘I
wouldn’t have known what to say,’ he said, amiably. He kept working
almost to the day he died; in his will he left instructions that his ashes
were to be flushed down the lavatory.

Peter was the second replacement in the role in
The Passport
. The first
actor was Vladek Sheybal, who had been wonderful in Wajda’s early
films. He was, in his own Polish way, a match for Bayliss in the eccentric
ity stakes. He put in an urgent call to me while I was in the dress rehearsal
of a play that I was acting in just before starting on
The Passport
. I rushed
to the phone: ‘Yes, Vladek?’ ‘Simon, you know our play? I’ve been think
ing about it. Don’t you think it’s rather
thin
?’ ‘In some ways, Vladek, but
I believe that by doing it the way I’ve proposed to you it won’t seem so.’
‘Hm. I still think it will seem thin. Do you know Chekhov’s play,
The Three Sisters
?’ ‘I do, Vladek.’ ‘You know the big scene between Masha and Ver
shinin?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Don’t you think we could just slip it into our play?’ ‘Don’t
you think someone might notice?’ ‘Oh, we change the names, of course.
Do you like my idea?’ ‘Vladek, I have no time to discuss it, but no, I don’t
think it would work and I don’t think it’s necessary.’ ‘Ugh!’ It was as if I
had stabbed him. ‘Very well, I see you’re going to be difficult. I think we
should terminate our relationship now. Goodnight.’ The second actor was
my friend Vernon Dobtcheff who discovered at the end of the first read-
through that for tax reasons he had to leave the country that very evening.
And so we got Peter.

The play whose dress rehearsal Vladek had interrupted was Manuel
Puig’s
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, which remains almost my favourite
experience in the theatre. This masterpiece is a two-hander: my fellow
actor was Mark Rylance, fresh from his definitive Peter Pan at the
Barbican. We played at the Bush Theatre – my last appearance there, in
fact. This piece was written in 1997 to celebrate the theatre’s twenty-
fifth anniversary.

My debut at the Bush was in a transfer from the old Soho Poly of Snoo Wilson’s
The Soul of the White Ant
, expanded to full length with the addition of a lurid scene by the roadside during which I was required to
quaff a cocktail in which a variety of salads and a small umbrella floated in a liquid looking and indeed tasting very much like calamine lotion; it was called a Pink Flamingo (or ‘Punk Flamungo’ as my character, the knobble-knee’d Jo’burg journalist Pieter de Groot, would have said). The play was full of the rough magic for which the author is so justly famous, and it was my introduction both to the Fringe – of which I was flatteringly held eventually to become, for a while, the King – and to the Bush, which became my spiritual home, theatrically speaking, for some years. At that time, the theatre was at the be ginning of the long journey from high-spirited chaos to ruthless efficiency and matchless production values at which it has now arrived. Though the journey was right and inevitable, there was a certain charm to the chaos, to the informality, of those early days, and it was still then possible for me to wander into the office with a play in my hand and ask to be allowed to do it and a month later we would be on.

The first time I did that was with Richard Quick’s one-man show called
Juvenalia
, in which the right-wing Roman satirist was supposed to have slipped through the time warp to harangue the audience for some seventy-five minutes in a DJ, in verse, under a revolving glitter ball on a stage made up to resemble a seaside cinema. Strange to relate, the show worked, both artistically and commercially. As part of the deal, I had agreed – my arm hardly needed to be twisted – to play Princess Anne in David Edgar’s parody of
Equus
(
Hippos
, it was called) as part of
Blood
Sports
, a collection of four short plays on politico-sportive themes. This also worked. One that didn’t work was my Charles Bukowski show,
Ejac
ulations
. It would have been wonderful, I have always believed – the original politically incorrect man, Bukowski wrote like an angel, a sort of hobo Jeffrey Bernard. We had tried valiantly to get hold of the author for permission, but on the first day of rehearsal the director Rob Walker walked in with a telegram in his hand which simply read: ‘Absolutely not. Bukowski.’ We never found out why. This was perplexing, and also vexing, but only mildly. We just moved quickly along to the next thing.

Matters were beginning to get rather more serious by 1982. Simon Stokes, Jenny Topper and Nicky Pallot now formed a directorial triumvirate, and were slowly transforming the place into what it has since become. Everything at the Bush was still done on a shoestring, but it was a shoestring of infinitely expandable dimensions. For
Loving Reno
, Grant Hicks designed an ambitious set which was simultaneously an airport lounge,
an amphitheatre and the inside of a cranium. It was hugely complicated and strange, fashioned out of materials begged, borrowed but very rarely bought. It was installed to an impressively high level of finish – as it had to be; sets at the Bush were inevitably submitted to very close scrutiny, with the audience only inches away from the stage. There was no question, in those days, of any limitation on the hours that the actors or the theatre staff would work; as a production came close to opening, all outside life, any attempt at regular meals or sleep, was abandoned, and an increasingly hag-ridden team, sustained largely by roll-ups and pints from the pub below, would doggedly ensure that the latest vision was realised in that tiny little black room above the pub.

The pub itself really was, in those days, a pub, run by stout Irish Tommy and his incomputably large family. He and indeed all of them were robustly indifferent to what was actually going on in the room above, though perfectly friendly and delightful to all of us who worked there. The local clientele of the pub, equally oblivious of the dubious goings-on upstairs, were less tolerant of the influx of poncey theatre buffs and puffs coming between them and the next pint at around eight o’clock. The lavatories were properly pungent and awash with misdirected urine; no concessions to West End standards there. Of course it was vexing for the theatre lot to be artificially yoked to this counter-culture, but it was also healthy, in its way. A certain roughness in the experience prevented it from drifting away from life altogether. Backstage, conditions were on the primitive side of rough. The dressing rooms were on the other side of the auditorium from the stage; a small cupboard, modestly divided into male and female with a curtain held up by gaffer tape. During
The Soul of the
White Ant
, Clive Merrison had first to cover himself with soil, then to wash himself spotless, in this cupboard, with all the rest of us dancing around him. No matter how large or small your part, you had to sit there from beginning to end of the show – although it was possible to get round to the other entrance, the one by the door, by going down the back stairs and running, in costume and make-up, down the Goldhawk Road and back through the pub, forcing one’s way through the mystified regulars, by now on their fourth or fifth round of the evening. Nightly I made my entrance as Princess Anne by this route, with ponytail and jodhpurs, to much rubbing of eyes.