My Life in Pieces (55 page)

By now, it was clear that my honeymoon with the critics, such as it was,
was over. I had been remarkably lucky, over the years; had, as Ronald
Bergan’s editor might have said, got away with it. But now there was a
distinct feeling of ‘Oh no, not him again’ in the response to my work.

And in truth, I was fairly fed up with myself as an artist, insofar as I felt
entitled to call myself that at all. I had sworn in public – in print, indeed,
in the pages of
Being an Actor –
that I would never become a jobbing
actor; now I had become a sort of jobbing director, although, ironically
enough, my latest, biggest flop had been a conviction project
par excellence
, born out of love of that film in particular, and of French acting in
general, whose essence I had tried to bring to an English stage. I felt the
need to stop, to think, to rediscover, to reconnect. Whenever I directed in
America, I would tell the actors, before they went out in front of the pub
lic during previews, to remember why it was that they had wanted to be
actors in the first place. Now I needed to give myself the same note. I
found that I was just doing things in order to be doing them. Not even,
really, to make money, just in order to be perpetually busy.

Then I went to America to direct Cavalli’s
La Calisto
in Glimmerglass, in
James Fenimore Cooper country, in the bear-inhabited forests of upstate
New York, and something about being in that wild, pioneer landscape and
working on one of the earliest of all operas, on a subject taken from the
dawn of Western civilisation, changed my whole pulse as a director. To
my slack-jawed astonishment, Jane Glover, conducting, orchestrated the
music as she went along with her group of baroque instrumentalists,
inventing it in the instant. I sat and listened, I encouraged the singers to
listen – to each other, to the instrumentalists, to themselves – to allow the
piece to breathe with its own inherent vibrations as naturally as the rhap
sodic Orphic strummings of the theorbists in the pit. The production was
simplicity itself, inspired, visually, by the paintings of Piero di Cosimo,
which have a unique quality, seeming to be not generic evocations of the
ancient world, as in so many Renaissance canvases, but an actual record
of it, as if Piero had not imagined that world, but visited it. His fauns are
not frolicsome or riotous as in Titian: they are rutty, iddy creatures, rough
and hairy; you can almost smell them. Even the animals that emerge from
the forest in
The Forest Fire
, Piero’s great canvas in the Ashmolean, are
weirdly miscegenated, still evolving, some with human faces, others with
ancillary limbs. In
La Calisto
, Endymion’s lovelorn addresses to his divine
mistress seemed to speak of a purer, simpler world.

Immersion in this world was stirring something in me, a dissatisfaction
with my life in art, to put it rather grandly. In fact, my feeling was that art
was precisely what I was not making. While I was staying in Cooperstown,
where Glimmerglass is located, I was writing an introduction to Snowdon’s
collection of photographs,
Snowdon on Stage
– it’s easy, he had said, you
just have to write everything that’s happened since Suez – and this, too,
forced me, in considering the evolution of the British theatre over the
previous forty years, to question what sort of a contribution I thought I
was making. I was painfully conscious of the erratic nature of my career
as an actor: two Shakespeares, no Ibsen, no Chekhov, no Pinter, no Beckett.
What kind of a path was I pursuing? Certainly not that of the classical
actor I had set out to be. Hoping somehow to catch up, I leaped at Bill
Alexander’s invitation to go to the Birmingham Rep and play Face in
The Alchemist
, a play I had enjoyed seeing in the past. Once in rehearsals,
however, I found that I loathed doing it. It was not a happy production, but
the problem went beyond that. I found Jonson’s world view so
unrelentingly misanthropic, so contemptuous of the foibles of his fellow
human beings, that I had a sort of physical reaction against playing the
character. I had no real idea what I was doing, apart from hurling out a
lot of wilfully obscure language at a baffled audience and desperately
trying to whip up some sort of comic energy. I felt as if I was idiotically
prancing behind a huge glass pane, in front of an audience which was
viewing me with resentful incomprehension. I feared that I was losing my
pleasure in acting altogether, and resolved to step back from the theatre.
In fact,
The Alchemist
had been my first play for five years; I hoped it
would be at least another five before I did one again.

At that point, in 1997, the producer Brian Brolly asked me to revive
Micheál mac Liammóir's one-man play
The Importance of Being Oscar
in the West End. I refused immediately, not just because of my vow to
keep out of the theatre but because I felt that the play was inextricably
bound up with his unique personality. I wrote this piece about him and it
for the
Sunday Telegraph
in 1997
.

To a remarkable degree, my adolescence was dominated by Oscar Wilde: I only ever spoke of him as ‘Oscar'. This was the man I wanted to be, generous, eloquent, intellectually brilliant, provocative, fun, and, of course, gay, though I kept rather quiet about that bit; this was, after all, 1963.

When I was about fifteen I borrowed a couple of LPs from the record library, their sleeves exotically printed in gold and black, the title printed in curling Beardsleyesque letters:
The Importance of Being Oscar
. The title was irresistible, of course, to a thorough-going Wildean, the presentation exotic and promisingly decadent; even the actor/author's name was fascinatingly foreign, not to say unpronounceable: Micheál mac Liammóir. What I heard did not disappoint on any of these counts. It was an astonishingly ripe and evocative odyssey through Wilde's life, spoken with a kind of immediacy, an intimacy, almost, that took one directly to the heart of the life and the work. The acting style was one I had never encountered before: its rhetorical sweep alternated, in a brilliant exercise in contrasted rhythms, with sudden throwaway quips that had the
air of improvisation about them. The actor was playful and magisterial, conversational and ritualistic, high priest and cheeky altar server all at once. The Irish accent was like none other I had heard, too, neither upper-class cut glass, nor Dublin demotic, certainly not stage-Irish and yet not life-Irish either, but it was a supremely musical and utterly compelling, and I came to know its cadences as one learns a piece of music.

Time passed; I went to work at Olivier's Old Vic, in the box office, where I fell in love with actors and acting, and determined to make the theatre my life. I decided to go to university to find out whether I had any talent; there was not the slightest pretence that I would be doing any academic work. I had intended to go to Trinity College in Dublin – Wilde's Alma Mater, of course – but the British Government had just ceased to offer grants to go there so instead I went to Queen's University in Belfast, thinking, in my boyish innocence, that it would be much the same thing. It wasn't, but it was rather wonderful nonetheless, and the day I arrived I enrolled in the Drama Society, and proceeded to immerse myself in its work. Our year built towards the competition, in March, of the Irish University Drama Association, and presently it was announced that the adjudicator for that year would be Micheál mac Liammóir. I walked into the office of
Gown
, the student paper, and proposed that I interview the great man in Dublin, and found myself, furnished with a tape recorder the size of a large suitcase, on the train a week later.

What I found there, I described to the readers of the paper. I continued:

I went back to Belfast a changed man; I had been vouchsafed a glimpse of a whole other way of being, like something out of my reading, out of my dreams. Olivier's National Theatre, my
beau idéal
up to that point, seemed terribly dour after this; I knew then the real meaning of a phrase of Cocteau's that had stuck in my mind, ‘red-and-gold sickness' – of a theatre of poetry and magic and a sort of opulence of spirit.

When Micheál came for the Festival I ferried him around Belfast, from play to play; I took down his verdicts on the performances, including my own as Trigorin in
The Seagull
(‘not a born actor, I fear; a born writer perhaps'); above all, I dressed him for the two performances he gave of
The Importance of Being Oscar
, and saw for the first time something of
the pity and terror of an actor's life, as well as its glory: minutes before the supremely self-assured performances, he was a shuddering wreck, invoking the Mother of God, Her Husband, Her Son, and all the Saints, to protect him through his ordeal. Once on, though, he was an absolute master.

When he left Belfast, he handed me a sweetly inscribed copy of
The
Importance of Being Oscar
, and was gone – gone, in fact, out of my life for ever, in the flesh, at any rate. As a presence he has remained with me ever since, not as a model, for he was truly
sui generis
, but as a token of a sort of richness, a ripeness, even, that is quite absent from our new, improved stages. I wrote to him when I was about to graduate from drama school saying you won't remember me but… and he replied saying you're quite right, I don't, but what a very charming photograph. I auditioned for Hilton Edwards, but didn't get in, and that, you might have thought, would be that. But then I wrote a book a few years ago in which I described my encounter with Micheál in Belfast, and an ex-member of his company, Pat Maclarnon, wrote to me and said that I'd got him dead right, and as a reward he would be leaving me in his will Micheál's very first theatre design. Then, a few years later, I went to Dublin to make a radio documentary about mac Liammóir, and sought out Pat in his reclusive retirement, and after many clankings and bangings and sliding of bolts, the door opened and a man appeared, red of face and heavily bespectacled, struggling along on two sticks – this was the man, mind, who had played Dorian Gray to Micheál's Lord Henry Wotton – and said he wondered when I'd come, he had something for me, and he reached into a drawer and pulled out a gold ring, an exquisite thing, with a Celtic motif signifying love unto death, and he told me that it was Micheál's, that Micheál had designed it and Hilton had had it made up, and then he said, ‘It's yours, it belongs to you.' And it fitted, and I have worn it ever since.

Nonetheless, and if that isn't An Omen I don't know what is, I resisted suggestions that I should revive
The Importance of Being Oscar
: how could I banish Micheál's lush cadences from my ear? Finally, grudgingly, I agreed to read the script, and found to my amazement that it was perfectly possible to play it very differently indeed from Micheál, and very rewarding. I understood for the first time the brilliance of Micheál as writer, which his brilliance as an actor had been masking, and I was able to make the piece my own. So although there is a certain charming
symmetry to the notion that once I was his dresser, and now I'm wearing his mantle, in fact the show, like Wilde himself, seems a very different thing now. It remains one of the greatest stories ever told, and it has been an extraordinary experience telling it.

Even though I had made the show my own, Micheál was ever-present.
Meeting him had had an understandably large impact on me at the time,
but now, thirty years later, he was if anything more vivid in my mind. He
carried so much with him, so much history: in terms of theatre alone, the
fact that he had played Oliver Twist to Beerbohm Tree's Fagin, that he
had been at the legendary pre-war London performances of the Ballets
Russes, that he had seen and met Sarah Bernhardt, gave him a link to a
mythic theatrical past. His vocal technique itself belonged to the Victorian
theatre: even in his lifetime, Tree was thought to be a throwback, and he
had been Micheál's first teacher. But he was connected to history in other
ways, too: he had known Yeats and Lady Gregory intimately and been
passionately involved in Irish Nationalism. He was the author, too, of the
oldest Irish-language play still regularly performed. He had more or less
invented Orson Welles; he certainly discovered him. The theatre he crea
ted with Hilton Edwards in Dublin was a blazing torch of avant-gardism,
acclaimed across the whole of the theatrical world. To talk to him was to
be plugged into a vanished world of art, wit and gossip at the very highe
st level, as well as to be vouchsafed glimpses of a sort of a mysticism
which he liked to say was Celtic, but which was rather more occult than
that. His power over an audience was positively uncanny, magical and
mysterious, spellbinding in an almost literal sense. The revelation in the
late 1990s that he wasn't Irish at all, that his accent, his name and his
supposed Cork childhood were all inventions, only compelled further admir
ation. What a supreme act of creative imagination to realise who you are
in your essence and to reinvent yourself accordingly! Sitting in my dressi
ng room one afternoon after the show, I discovered yet another dimension
of this extraordinary man: a beautiful young woman with tumbling yellow
tresses knocked on the door and announced herself as Valerie Rossmore,
daughter of Brian Tobin, who had been, I knew, Micheál's manager and
his lover. Her father having no gift for fatherhood, Micheál had adopted
her, and she was brought up by him and Hilton at Harcourt Terrace – two
flamboyantly gay men raising a thirteen-year-old girl in the middle of
Sixties Dublin, one of the most puritanically Catholic cities in the world. 
She and I immediately became fast friends, and so he continues to be a
living presence in my life.

Doing
The Importance of Being Oscar
proved to be my salvation as an
actor. The play is a highly sophisticated and brilliantly effective piece of
storytelling, and the contact with the audience was powerfully direct and
eventually quite profound. They seemed mesmerised by the story I was
telling, entranced by the spellbinding cadences of both Wilde and mac
Liammóir. And, for the first time in what seemed like a very long while,
like my singers in
La Calisto
, I was able to listen: to listen to what I was
saying, listen to the audience, listen to the complex feelings that were
passing through me. I could take the pulse of show. The form of the piece
was deeply satisfying: this attempt to evoke a man and his work not by
impersonating him but by summoning him out of the ether. In
The Importance of Being Oscar
the narrative formed a framework for sections of
great virtuosity in which I would play several characters speaking to each
other, or evoke the Victorian theatre (in the brilliant five-minute digest of
Dorian Gray
), or dazzle with a very flashy speech from
Salome
in the
original French, always returning to the man, Oscar Wilde. With
Importance
, I had found myself again as an actor. It was nothing to do with a
rejection of acting with other people, nothing to do with not wanting to
do plays any more: it was a reassertion of the sheer pleasure of storyt
elling, a return of my delight in the power of language to evoke worlds,
a renewal of the pact between me and the audience, a joyous rediscovery
of the exhilaration of creating character.

The end of the brief run of
The Importance of Being Oscar
was perfectly
timed to coincide with the anniversary of Wilde's release from Reading
Gaol. The day after we closed, I went down to Reading and performed the
whole of the
Ballad
outside of the gaol, which is now – how Wilde would
have wept! – a remand centre for young offenders. A few friends came
down and passers-by gathered round and we drank some champagne and
ate smoked-salmon sandwiches and it was all very touching. Not the least
touching thing was to discover that all the inmates of the remand centre
were issued with copies of the poem on arrival.

After
The Importance of Being Oscar
, I started urgently thinking of
another writer whose life and work would be suitable for the mac
Liammóir treatment. The qualification was obviously that the life and the
work had to be of equal fascination. I at once thought of Balzac, but
rejected him – reluctantly: the particular sweep and fervour of French
 
romanticism remains something I long to bring to life on a British stage,
but it seemed perverse to do a writer in translation – and then turned,
inevitably, as it now seems, to Dickens. Dickens had been my literary hero
ever since at the age of twelve a copy of
The Pickwick Papers
had been
put in my hands as I lay in bed trying not to itch the scabs that chicken pox
had left all over my body. Once I started reading, I was never tempted to
itch again. Later, I played Bob Cratchit and Scrooge, as I have recounted,
in rep, and Micawber on television. More recently, again on television, I
had recreated, for two consecutive Christmases, a number of Dickens's
public readings. This was my first direct connection with the man himself.
These public readings are central to an understanding of his personality
and indeed his life. I reviewed Malcolm Andrews's
Dickens as a Reader
in
the
Guardian
in 2006
.

Alongside the huge and ever-expanding tide of Shakespeare studies there is a more modest but equally interesting wave of Dickens studies lapping gently along. From a biographical point of view, the difference between these Titans is, of course, that we know so little about Shakespeare whereas – with certain crucial lacunae – we know almost everything about Dickens. Unlike the shadowy playwright from Stratford, Dickens lived his adult life in a lurid glare of publicity, much of it self-generated; he was a tireless speech-maker; his collected correspondence runs to twelve large volumes and his reading tours brought him into direct contact with his public both in America and Britain in a way that no author had ever achieved before (nor has any since).