My Life in Pieces (68 page)

Although I stand by everything I wrote about the play then, the experi
ence of actually doing it proved, as always, completely unpredictable – an
unimaginably
difficult journey into the heart of this richest and most dis
turbing of plays. Playing Pozzo ranks as one of the most perfectly
satisfying experiences of my career and one of the most intense rehearsal
periods – to say nothing of the piquancy, for me, of the fact that I had
sold tickets for each of my fellow actors; first, Ronnie Pickup at the
National, then Ian McKellen at the Mermaid Theatre and finally Patrick
Stewart at the Aldwych; I had known Sean Mathias since he was mere
lad. I turned sixty, Ian seventy, during the production; Ronnie and Patrick
were both about sixty-nine. We must have had the highest average age,
per capita, of any West End cast, and for once were the approximate ages
of the characters, which made a profound difference to the event.
Rehearsals were incredibly hard for all of us, but I have never known a
rehearsal room in which the actors’ egos were less prominent. We got on
with it, like war-scarred veterans. The reward was extraordinary, first on
the tour, then in the West End, where people queued for the front-row
seats, which were held back, from three in the morning. Sometimes they
were so tired when they got to their seats that they fell asleep. But they
were the only ones sleeping. I wrote this programme note for the 2010
revival of the production in which Pozzo was played by Matthew Kelly
and Vladimir by Roger Rees. I called it
On the Road with Vladimir and Estragon
.

I have known
Waiting for Godot
quite well since I was sixteen; I have seen productions of it all over the world, in several languages. A few years ago, when Peter Hall’s production of
Waiting for Godot
came to London, I was asked by the
Guardian
newspaper to write a piece about it, and in preparation for the piece, I reread the play and browsed through a biography or two and some critical studies. So you might have thought that I was pretty well prepared when Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Ronnie Pickup, Sean Mathias and I assembled to rehearse the play.

In fact, as we read it, I realised that I had never understood the play at all. Not in the sense of failing to grasp it intellectually: contrary to its reputation, it is fairly transparent from that point of view. Nor was the form of the play so very difficult. Partly under its influence, plays have become far more exploratory both in terms of language and of technique. No, what I had absolutely failed to realise until I sat down and read it with my fellow actors was the scope of the action: the scale of the journeys made by each of the characters and the epic, even heroic energy that was involved in doing it. I’d written in the
Guardian
that ‘like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.’ Yes, indeed, perfectly true, Professor, but actually doing it, staking out that path, working through all the stages along it, following every twist and turn, ending up in the extraordinary place to which Beckett takes the characters, was quite another matter. After the first read-through, I turned to one of the producers, Arnold Crook, and said ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to do this.’ Again, it wasn’t that the character was hard to recognise or that his emotions were obscure: it was a question of how one would rise to them, how one would make them real and overwhelming – of whether I could, as the old actors used to say, ‘come near it’.

I have never been more terrified of any play. I am aware that this sounds like luvvie-speak, but it is terrifying to contemplate one’s own inability to do justice to a part. And Beckett, like the Greek tragic dramatists, offers no carefully graded development, no psychological entrée into the emotions depicted: you simply have to open yourself up to them and let them course through you; you have to become their conduit. And the way to do this, we quickly discovered, is by absolutely mastering the text and then letting it do its work. This is how it is with musicians; and Beckett is as much a composer as he is a dramatist. In the first weeks, we talked
through every line, every phrase of the play. But it was when we stood up and began to find the play’s music that it started to seize our souls. And this meant listening with extraordinary intensity, to ourselves and to each other. Increasingly, we were reminded of Beckett’s famous reply to an actor who had asked him, ‘What does this line mean?’ ‘What does it say?’ he had answered. Not ‘What is it about?’ – ‘What does it say?’ And the more we attended to what the characters actually said, the more astonishing the play became. Again and again Sean would say: ‘I think there’s more to that speech. Keep digging in.’

Once we hit the road, we were hugely relieved to discover that the audiences that came to the play in their coachloads were quite undaunted by
Godot
’s fearsome reputation. They were immediately intrigued by these two dropouts: they knew exactly what they were saying, their anxieties and their meagre hopes; they enjoyed their jokes and their domestic frustrations; and then they were horribly disturbed by the sudden eruption on to the stage of a blustering man brandishing a whip, with another, silent man at the end of a rope. The audience, as audiences always do, taught us the story. The play has been haunted by a remark by one of the play’s first admirers: ‘In
Waiting for Godot
, nothing happens, twice.’ But the audience’s response told us that, on the contrary, in
Waiting for Godot
, Pozzo and Lucky happen, twice, and each of their appearances has a shattering effect on the other two characters. On the road, the response to the play was astonishing. I believe it is true to say that we never consciously tried to make the play funny, but the more we played what the lines said, the louder and louder the laughter rang round all those great regional theatres, and the deeper and deeper the awe with which the terrible truths Beckett exposes was received. He once said: ‘I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them.’ Nor did we. But the audience got it, loud and clear.

It was not until the third week of the tour of
Godot
that I began to feel
wholly on top of the physical demands of Pozzo: the props, the rope, the
coat, the eating. These had to be absolutely precise. Until they were, there
could be no movement forward. Once they were, and the text was deeply
rooted in my brain, it became possible to try to discover what was really
there. Following Beckett’s advice, I simply looked at what the characters
said. Pozzo’s account of himself is astonishing – he speaks of having 
slaves, of taking Lucky to the market to sell him; especially surprisingly, he
speaks of Lucky having taught him all he knows, of having been his tutor
(‘knook’). He hints at some terrible catastrophe that reduced Lucky to the
subhuman creature that he is. Ronnie Pickup and I began to build a deep,
complex, murky relationship. It was as if Pozzo and Lucky were a married
couple: the second married couple in the play, because Didi and Gogo are
similarly spliced. But the more we played the play, the more clearly it
seemed to me that what happens in the play is that Everyman and his twin
brother pool their anxieties, and then human history erupts on stage: a man
enslaved by another man. This is the essence of Empire. I reread
Heart of Darkness
: Pozzo seems to share, as well as Kurtz’s crazed colonial sav
agery, his sense of primal horror. Idi Amin came into my mind, a tyrant
who, like Pozzo, desperately needed an audience, wanted to bask in
approval; a man who had waded through blood. Pozzo’s manic-depressive
descents into abject melancholy had to be real, almost life-threatening. And
yet, from somewhere he always finds the impulse to continue. ‘On, on!’ is
his great cry. I listened to music of epic breadth: as I walked around the
streets I sang – to the alarm of passers-by – the great brass chorale of the
last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the top of my voice, to
expand my instrument; and then I remembered the terrible third movement
of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, which seemed to me precisely to
describe Lucky and Pozzo’s journey across the blasted landscape, the
strings’ savagely ticking ostinato pierced by shrieks of pain from the wood
wind. Every time I ever did the show, I listened to this music, had it running
in my head as I stepped on stage. When Pozzo comes back in the second
act, blind and broken, both physically and vocally, I wanted to show his
frailty, certainly, but behind that his indomitability. I replaced his stento
rian basso profundo with the querulous but penetrating and determined
voice of my old friend Frith Banbury, who had just died at the age of
ninety-six. ‘What do you do when you fall over far from help?’ asks
Vladimir. ‘We wait until we can get up,’ says Pozzo, impatiently, ‘and then
we go on. On!’ Beckett demands a huge impersonality, truly epic acting.
Despite my dread and uncertainty, I felt licensed to go down this path by
Beckett’s own choice of actor for the part: when asked by Roger Blin who
in an ideal world he would like for the roles, he said, ‘For Vladimir, Buster
Keaton, for Gogo, Chaplin, and for Pozzo – Charles Laughton.’

I felt that I had really done something with Pozzo, that it was, as Laughton
would say, ‘a creation’. I like to think that Michael Chekhov might have
 
approved of it; it sits with half a dozen other performances – Arturo Ui,
Mozart, Molina, Falstaff, Verlaine, Lord Foppington – by which I would
ask to be judged at the theatrical pearly gates.

While the revival of
Godot
was playing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket,
I was acting at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in
Dr Marigold and Mr Chops
, two monologues by Dickens. He performed them as public
readings, in his habitual tails at the lectern, but spoken in the first person,
in character and in costume, they amount to monodramas. At last I had
found the Dickens plays he had neglected to write, so much more satis
factory, as Michael Billington pointed out in the
Guardian
, than
‘cut-and-paste jobs adapted from the novels’. Written in the last decade
of his life, at the very height of his powers, they have the full span of
Dickens at his most extended.
Dr Marigold
, in particular, in its tumultuous
narrative flow, swooping in and out of sentiment and comedy with
breathtaking speed, exemplifying the technique he called ‘streaky bacon’,
affected audiences in Hammersmith as much as it had affected the Vic
torians, who loved it second only to
A Christmas Carol
. I wrote a piece for
the programme about one of Dickens’s great inspirations: I called it
He do the police in different voices
(the original title of
The Waste Land
, as it
happens).

As a young man, Dickens’s appetite for theatre-going was insatiable. He claimed that for a three-year period during his young manhood, he went to the theatre every single night. His taste was catholic, embracing variety, melodrama, Shakespeare and sentimental comedy. But his favourite by far was Charles Mathews, an extraordinarily original performer who pioneered a form of theatre he called
monodramatics
– one-man pieces in which he played a dozen or more characters. The first of these pieces he called
At Home
; all his subsequent plays were known generically as At Homes. They were in two halves, in the first of which Mathews appeared as himself, narrating a journey, in which he described and increasingly became the characters he encountered. The second half – a straightforward farce made unusual by the fact that he played all the characters – was dubbed by Mathews (ever the enthusiastic neologist), a
monopoly
logue
. They were no mere show-off pieces. Leigh Hunt observed that ‘for the richness and variety of his humour,’ they were ‘as good as half a dozen plays distilled’.

As the characters in the monopolylogue came and went they changed costume, taking the performance to a high pitch of virtuosity, for which he must have combined the transvestite skills of Arturo Brachetti with the ear of Mike Yarwood. In
Youthful Days
, a big hit of the 1830s, he played, in rapid succession, a servant, a dandy, a French organist, a knight (Sir Shiveraine Scrivener), Monsieur Zephyr, a stout Welshman (ap Llewellyn-ap Lloyd), a skinny snooker player (Mark Moomin), and, finally, Moomin’s wife Amelrose. It could so easily have been a generalised blur of stereotypes, but the quality his contemporaries above all admired in Mathews was his verisimilitude. He departed entirely from the set types of comedy, thereby, according to E. B. Watson, introducing ‘what later would have been called “character acting”’. He toured America, where he is credited with introducing demotic language into local playwriting: a piece he wrote specially for the tour,
The African-Ameri
can
, in which he performed, in blackface and in dialect, a version of ‘Possum Up a Gum Tree’, had a surprisingly liberating effect on contemporary American drama. He died at fifty-nine, in 1835.

This is the extraordinary performer Dickens so admired; indeed, he had memorised a chunk of one of the monopolylogues to perform at the audition for the Covent Garden Theatre he had so fatefully to cancel because of the flu. But Mathews’s influence stayed with him, and was recognised as such; indeed, when
The Pickwick Papers
appeared, he was roundly accused of plagiarising the character of Jingle from Mathews (by then dead), which is as may be. But his art is felt throughout Dickens’s novels in the constant sense of vocal virtuosity, of projected performance. Like Sloppy in
Our Mutual Friend
, and like Mathews before him, Dickens – the author as actor – did the police in different voices.