My Life in Pieces (54 page)

A final note on
Four Weddings and a Funeral
: the film had an almost
impossibly ideal cast, some of the older members of which – Kenneth
Griffith, Robert Lang, Rosalie Crutchley, Corin Redgrave – have since left
us, as has one of the poster boys and girls, one of the core team, Char
lotte Coleman. Her death in 2001 was responsible for my only experience
of being doorstepped: the tabloid press smelt a scandal. I refused to speak
to any of them, but wrote this piece for the
Guardian.

I suppose Charlotte Coleman will be always remembered now as Scarlett, Hugh Grant’s unexpectedly punk flatmate in
Four Weddings and a
Funeral
, but for a generation of children presently growing into young adulthood she was Marmalade Atkins and for another whole section of the viewing public, she was Jess in the television adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
. That was quite a range, although all these parts and almost everything else she ever played shared a wholly unforced quirkiness which was the essential her. I had known her for some years before we worked together in
Four Weddings and a
Funeral
, when she was still a very young woman, and she always cut a striking figure – sartorially, to be sure, as a clothes horse for the teenage chic of the moment, her nostrils sometimes be-ringed, her hair radically transformed every time you met her – but it was the intensity of her personality that caught you, wild with laughter one moment, plunged into deep melancholy the next, her huge sleepless eyes opening up deepest chasms of feeling. She was worryingly thin, but her energy was immense.
She spoke brilliantly and wittily of herself, begging one to shut her up – ‘I know I’m emotionally incontinent’ – but always conscious of absurdity, in herself or in others. She struck me as a Sally Bowles
de nos jours
, outrageous and vulnerable and impossible not to watch. I believed that she was going to be one of the great comic talents of our time, with the special gift of creating her own outlandish rhythms, which made everything she ever said as an actress seem new and original and hilarious. The loss is terrible, for her family and for all of us. Thank God there is so much that is wonderful to remember her by.

The only jobs I got out of
Four Weddings and a Funeral
were to be the
voice of the Ancient Green Grasshopper in
James and the Giant Peach
, and
to play the villain in Jim Carrey’s
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
, which
shot in Charleston, Carolina, in 1996, and was not, to put it mildly, a joy
ous experience. But the long hours of waiting in a sweltering caravan were
not wasted: I sat there in my jodhpurs (villains always wear jodhpurs in
these sort of films), translating the screenplay of
Les Enfants du Paradis
and adapting it into a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for whom
I was going to direct it. I wrote the following for the
Daily Telegraph
just
before the opening night.

Last spring, Adrian Noble asked me to direct
Widowers’ Houses
for the RSC. It is a splendid play in its way, acerbic, trenchant, relevant, but Shaw has never excited me, neither as actor or director, so when I met Noble to talk about it, I brought a list of twenty-seven possible alternative options with me. After reciting them, I casually added, hardly expecting to be taken seriously, that what I really wanted to do was to put
Les
Enfants du Paradis
on stage. The effect was electrifying. Noble jumped up, eyes blazing. ‘My favourite film!’ he cried, as so many people would over the coming months. He’d seen it at the Academy Cinema when he first came to London as a kid, going back again and again and again. We trotted down Memory Lane: the old movie house on Oxford Street, the Peter Strausfeld woodcut posters, the polyglot babble of the foyer, the all-pervading smell of coffee too long on the hob. Then favourite moments from the film and favourite actors – ‘Arletty! Barrault! Brasseur!’ – the names alone enough to evoke a vanished world of expression, one of the greatest films ever made which is at the same time one of the supreme
celebrations of the theatre. ‘Do you think it’s possible?’ Adrian asked and I said truthfully that I hadn’t the slightest idea but that I’d find out.

What he didn’t ask was why I would want to do it on stage, with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He didn’t need to; it was obvious to both of us. It was an opportunity for actors and audience to encounter the French romantic tradition, with the human heart, eloquent, impassioned, at its centre. This form of writing calls for a very particular kind of acting, the head and the heart in perfect balance, in which the individual emotional experience is transformed, made mythic by force of personality, expressed in language both eloquent and concrete. Acting of this sort has not been seen on the English stage for many years, for the simple reason that the plays that call for it do not exist, or do not translate well. French nineteenth-century theatre has hitherto resisted at tempts to find a satisfactory English form; the nearest experience of it English audiences have had was in Alan Badel’s extraordinary performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of Dumas’ play
Kean
, in which that astonishing and much-missed actor played the central role with a (rather un-English, in fact some what un-Kean-like) burnished articulateness, a smouldering eloquence, phrasing in huge paragraphs, exuding a sexuality of intellect, that was a perfect transmutation into English terms of a fundamentally French phenomenon. He did it again on television, in an adaptation of
The Count of Monte
Cristo
, no doubt long since wiped, in which his Edmond Dantès, too, was full of the uniquely precise passion he so consummately distilled.

It was self-evident to me and, I guess, to Adrian Noble, that it would be a marvellous thing for a company like the RSC to explore this language of acting. It would be the sort of technical, imaginative and emotional challenge which is the lifeblood of ensembles.
Les Enfants du Paradis
is the work of a poet – the great popular poet Jacques Prévert, France’s unofficial laureate for over thirty years. Though the film is not in verse (which immediately makes it more susceptible to translation) it is nonetheless of quite exceptional elegance and eloquence and fullness. The film’s exploration of the devastating power of love, so particular to the characters and yet so unerring in its ability to embody the universal romantic experience, is one of the most comprehensive expressions in existence of that fascination with romantic love which is undergoing something of a shy revival at the present moment, in films like
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, and plays such as Jonathan Harvey’s
Beautiful Thing
and David Hare’s
Skylight
. The question was – would it work in the theatre?

I had no qualms whatever about transferring a text from one medium to another – the traffic from stage to screen dates from the earliest days of the cinema; why should it all be one way? In deed, it had struck me forcibly while directing my film
The Ballad of the Sad Café
that there were several ways of conveying exactly the same script to the screen, mine being just one, even though I had actively collaborated with the screenwriter. Why shouldn’t Prévert’s wonderful material have a second innings? And why should the original interpreters have copyright on the material they first performed? After all, I wasn’t pulping the film. It would always be there, and if people were terrified of a new performance or interpretation tampering with their memories, I suppose I’d just have to say, well don’t come. If they did, though, they might have a whole new and complementary experience of the masterpiece, rather like – but only
rather
like – seeing Shakespeare’s
Othello
and Verdi’s
Otello
side by side. My only consideration was whether the material would work on stage.

I had a hunch that it would: certainly the plot, the spine of the action, is exceptionally well-wrought, with a symmetry and an ingenuity that rivals
Twelfth Night
(to name a somewhat comparable treatment of romantic experience). While love is unquestionably the theme – scarcely a scene or a character in the entire three-and-a-half-hour span is not concerned in some way with it – the context is that of the theatre. The action takes place largely in or around theatres of various kinds, offering extremely promising opportunities for staging – not to mention splendid value for money: three mime shows, a chunk of melodrama spoofed and a three-minute
Othello
. But all of this would be of no interest if the text itself were not dramatically conceived. I had not seen the film for fifteen years when I made my suggestion; to find out whether it was I went, not to the film, but straight to the screenplay.

Close scrutiny of the text revealed that, in a way unusual in film, every single speech both advanced the action and disclosed more about the characters. The director Marcel Carné – who was of course closely involved in creating the screenplay – was a strictly classical director; camera work per se was of no interest to him. He created the physical world of the piece in studios in the South of France and Paris, and then trained his cameras on it, in almost documentary style, always concentrating on the human figure; a vast amount of the film consists of single shots, two-shots and three-shots. Even tracking is used with great
restraint. Putting
Citizen Kane
on stage would be absurd, or an exercise in visual theatre on the grandest scale. It lives entirely in its visual style. The essential test of a play, however, is whether or not it lives in its language, and this,
Les Enfants du Paradis
most decidedly and triumphantly does. Not only in its dazzling eloquence, but in its exhilarating commitment to the principle of action, which has nothing to do with action shots in a movie, and everything to do with the momentum of the characters and their needs.

The text we play is virtually intact. The action needed only a small amount of relocating to avoid restless cutting from scene to scene. There are nonetheless some fifty scenes in the play (not quite as many as
Antony
and Cleopatra
, I reassured a gobsmacked RSC) and my brief to the designer, Robin Don, was simple: no scene-change must take longer than twenty seconds. He solved this monstrous demand with perfect sangfroid, and his solution was such as to make it quite impossible, even if one had been tempted, to reproduce on stage the physical life of the film; every scene had to be rethought in theatrical terms alone. In some ways, though, the approach to the play has been not unlike approaching a film: the costume requirement has been enormous – some three hundred and fifty costumes specially designed by Christopher Woods; musically too, it is an enormous undertaking. John White, avant-gardist of the class of ’65, a musician of vast sympathies and irrepressible originality, has composed over two-and-a-quarter hours of new music, and is still at it. Steve Wasson, mime and teacher, last
assistant
of the great Étienne Decroux, has, to brilliant effect, taught the actors the essentials of a discipline that normally takes years to absorb, and created entirely new versions of the mime shows. At every level, the piece is an epic – a huge panorama on the subject of love created at a murky period of French history (1944) to affirm the essentially human values that had been compromised during an occupation out of which few French people had come unscathed.

My greatest anxiety once I’d translated the thing was how the young actors to whom I gave the script would respond. Casting actors more or less the age of the characters in the first half of the play – mid-twenties – rather than the forty-year-olds in the film (Arletty – ‘
une jeune fille
’ – was actually forty-six), I had no idea what they would feel about this material, with its entirely direct acceptance of the premises of romantic love. The work is the antithesis of
cool
; the inverted commas which enclose a great deal of modern acting are of no use here. I shouldn’t have
worried. Every actor who received the script – many of them had never seen the film – walked into the casting office eyes glowing, scarcely being able to believe their luck at having material like this in their hands. Such work calls for acting of a particular commitment and freedom, which it immortally received from its first interpreters. Watching the RSC actors, all twenty-six of them, flower with it (and they were after all the starting point for the whole project) has been uniquely moving and exhilarating, the most remarkable experience of my working life in the theatre.

That article was one of the worst misjudgements of my professional life.
My opening sentences about Adrian Noble jumping to his feet were quoted
and requoted in review after review as an example of my pretentiousness
and idiocy. Adrian and I became a kind of self-congratulatory mafia
scheming to make fools of the public. The press were anyway quite
determined to loathe the show: I knew this in advance because a perfectly
harmless, scholarly fellow called Ronald Bergan, whom I knew slightly,
and who had been deputed by the
Guardian
to interview me, sat down,
switched on his tape recorder and launched into some very spiky,
confrontational questions. ‘Hold on, hold on, Ronald,’ I said, ‘what’s got
into you?’ He switched the tape recorder off, and smiled sheepishly.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘only they told me: “Don’t let him get away with it”.’
Well, I didn’t. They made sure of that.

Not only were the reviews bad, all attacking my temerity at tampering
with a masterpiece, there were shock-horror state-of-the-RSC stories
about how expensive it had been, how many actors had been specially
hired for the production, and how I had disappeared after the (tri
umphant, as it happens, with curtain call after curtain call) first night. I
had
disappeared, but only because, thanks to the vagaries of repertory
planning, there were no performances of the show for a week afterwards.
I had the pleasure of reading the reviews the following morning at the
airport as I departed for the cross-country American book-signing tour of
the first volume of my biography of Orson Welles,
The Road to Xanadu
,
which was being serialised in the
New York Times
, had been joyfully
received up and down the country, and propelled me on to every chat
show in the land. There I was, being interviewed by the great Studs Terkel
in Chicago, and Charlie Wilson in New York, and every hour, on the hour,
it seemed, they were faxing me yet more bad reviews for
Les Enfants
. It
was an oddly schizophrenic experience. I toyed with not going back to
England. Ever. On my return to the Barbican, the stage management all
greeted me warmly, none of the actors tried to punch me, and there were
dozens of letters from the public to say how much they’d enjoyed it. As
some sort of salve, the French critics who had seen the show wrote of it
with high enthusiasm, only regretting that I’d been too respectful to the
original. One shouldn’t whine about failure, and as often as not it’s
deserved, in some measure (vide
My Fair Lady
). But this time, I think the
show was better than it was said to be: too long, certainly, because we
had had unending technical problems with the revolve, and been obliged
to cancel a number of previews, which meant we could never work on the
play on the set, and the cutting which I’d always known was needed had
not been possible. After we opened, I slashed about twenty minutes, and
of course it was better. In fact, the last night was like the first night:
awash with tears and cheers, people saying that it was the best thing
they’d ever seen and so on. Whatever else it was or wasn’t, it was differ
ent: a different acting vocabulary, a different temperature, a different
story.