My Life in Pieces (69 page)

Even in his models, Dickens is unexpected. In some unfathomable way, I
feel deeply connected to him; in 2012, the year of his bicentenary, I’ll be
playing the character in all of Dickens that I love most: Mr Pickwick. To
embody that bonhomie, that profound optimism, that eternally springing
hope that Dickens placed at the centre of his first novel, trying to convince
himself against all the evidence of his early experience that the world is
essentially benevolent, fills me with joy. As the Inimitable puts it, inim
itably: ‘And in the midst of all this, stood Mr Pickwick. Let us leave our
old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we
 
seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here.
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the con
trast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than
for the light; we, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to
take our last parting look at our visionary companions, when the brief
sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.’

One of the most pleasing things that has ever happened to me is the
superb translation into French of my first book by Gisèle Joly, a French
actress who learned English in order to perform the task, and who fur
nished the new edition with a comprehensive glossary of all the people
mentioned in the book, which thus stands as a sort of monument to all my
colleagues and partners in crime over the thirty-five years of my life in
the theatre.

Two years ago, some actors from the Comédie Française read out passages
from the translation at the Maison de Molière itself, to a large audience of
actors, who responded with recognition and hilarity. That the book I wrote
twenty-five years ago could reach this entirely new audience, and that
that audience felt that what I had written was both true and funny, was
deeply satisfying. I end the present book with these words I wrote for the
French edition.

When I wrote
Being an Actor
, my first book, hoping to paint a truthful portrait of life in the theatre I used autobiographical form, because I believed that only by giving a precise account of my own journey through the theatre, blow by blow, could I convey anything worth telling about my life as an actor and the lives of my fellow actors. This was a gamble. Not all actors’ lives have been like mine, and when I remarked at the beginning of the book that I hoped actors would say, ‘
That’s
what being an actor is like,’ I knew that there was a very good chance that they might say, ‘Oh no it isn’t.’ As it happens, to my infinite gratification, it seems that despite my really rather brief experience then of the theatre and acting – I wrote the book when I had been professionally employed for only nine years – I had told a truth that many of my fellow thespians in the British theatre were able to recognise. I never expected that it could speak to actors from other countries and other traditions. Again, I was most
happily surprised. A successful American edition followed quite soon after the book’s appearance in Britain, and then, astoundingly, the first half of the book was translated into Russian; a few years ago an intrepid translator even rendered it into Slovenian (
Biti Igralec
). Again, the results were warmly received. Actors in these different countries seemed to feel that I had hit the nail on the head in two main areas: the experience of actually performing, and the things that lead one to become an actor. And I have begun to feel that, despite the wildly dissimilar structures and even aspirations of different theatrical cultures, there are some universal elements that we can all recognise.

I am especially delighted that this book is finally being translated into French. My grandmother was French – her father, an English teacher in Lyon, was said, according to family myth, to have taught Sarah Bernhardt the part of Hamlet – and I have always been profoundly engaged by French culture. French is the only foreign language I speak and I love the music of it, its shapes, its constraints, its passionate precision, its analytical aptitude, its innate intelligence. I have translated four plays from the French (Cocteau’s
La Machine Infernale
, my stage version of Prévert’s
Les
Enfants du Paradis
, Milan Kundera’s
Jacques et Son Maître
– a play originally written in French, not Czech – and
La Crampe des Écrivains
, a little squib by the composer Camille Saint-Saëns), and my hope has been to try to convey something of their essential Frenchness – even in the Kundera, which is after all inspired by Diderot. There are certain attributes of French acting, too, that I have longed to see on the British stage, above all what might be called the sexiness of the intellect, that capacity possessed by some actors – Pierre Brasseur, for example – to surrender no part of their brains when playing lovers (or actors). In my youth, I was lucky enough to see many great French actors of different kinds on stage – Marie Bell, Madeleine Renaud, Edwige Feuillère, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques Charon, Robert Hirsch – and, different as they were, all of them were characterised by this keenness of wit, this penetrating power of thought. The great companies I was able to see, like the Compagnie Barrault-Renaud, Planchon’s TNP, Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil and the Comédie Française at various times over the last forty years, were also wonderfully nimble and dashing in their use of language. Nowadays I am more likely to see French actors on film, and they are among my favourite. (I have even acted in a French film, in French:
Le Passager
Clandestin
, one of Simenon’s
outre-mer
stories.) My training was deeply
influenced by Michel Saint-Denis (one of the founder members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as it happens, and Patron of my drama school) and through him by his master, Copeau. Many of the best and most provocative books about acting, too, have been French, characteristically emphasising the philosophical and the exploratory: from Diderot’s
Paradoxe
to Coquelin’s
L’Art et le Comédien
(the introduction to the English edition by Sir Henry Irving, no less), the autobiography of the divine Sarah, books of reflection by the great trinity of Antoine, Copeau and Jouvet, Barrault’s several volumes and Vilar’s single masterpiece, to say nothing of the visionary manifestos of the fiery angel, Artaud, and Saint-Denis’ seminal work,
Theatre: the Rediscovery of Style
, echoes from which will be found in the preceding pages. In fact, it is impossible to think of the theatre without thinking about the contribution of the French.

I offer my book to the French public, and perhaps especially to the French profession, with all due modesty. It offers no system, whether analytical or prescriptive: it is a book of observation, mostly, I confess, self-observation. It came from an almost anthropological fascination with the world I found myself in, and with the particular and unique experiences I underwent while in it. It is predicated on a conviction that acting and the theatre are central to the human situation and illuminate a great deal more than themselves. Finally, it is, despite occasional outbursts of melancholy and even rage, an optimistic book, and an idealistic one. The theatre has the power of transforming lives, sometimes on a simple level, sometimes profoundly. It has the capacity to restore us to ourselves, to waken the part of ourselves that has gone to sleep, to throw off life’s oppressions. This is a noble calling. One of the most touching expressions of this is to be found in Guitry’s charming play
Deburau
. The great mime is pining for love of Marguérite Gautier, to the extent that a doctor is summoned: he seems to be dying. A medical examination reveals nothing untoward, so the doctor, who has not been told the name of his patient, says ‘I prescribe a visit to the theatre. Why don’t you go and see Deburau? He can banish the deepest depression.’ (Deburau of course leaps out of bed and rushes down to the theatre to resume his career, but it is too late: he is booed, and hands his name over to his son, who triumphs. The scene in which the old man instructs his son in what might be called the etiquette of acting will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who loves this profession.)

A crucial element in what led me to write
Being an Actor
in the first place was to remind actors that they were not the slaves of either directors or authors or of The System, but autonomous creative artists who had control over their destinies, and who had grave responsibilities towards their audiences. I believe that they should occupy a central part in determining the functioning of the organisations to which they belong. For various historical reasons, in England, the phrase actor-manager has become a term of derision. But in the land of Jouvet, of Antoine, of Planchon, the idea expressed in the manifesto at the end of
Being an Actor
, which caused such a scandal on its first publication, that actors might resume control of their art, will scarcely provoke anything other than an unsurprised nod.

I am almost embarrassed to have written so much about acting, the theatre
and film: this book contains only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands
of words that have poured out of me over the past thirty years. If I
sometimes seem combative, it is largely because there is, as I say elsewhere
more than once, no broad debate about these matters, no sense of differing
passionate views. The consensus prevails. As I did when I wrote
Being an Actor
, I feel that more, so much more, can be asked of actors and of
acting. Occasionally an actor emerges who is in himself so original, whose
choices are so unexpected that, like Charles Laughton eighty years ago, he
shakes up the whole concept of what an actor can do. In the present time,
Mark Rylance is such an actor. But what would be thrilling to me would
be if whole companies were inspired by their own particular vision of
acting. In
Being an Actor
I made a comparison with orchestras: why could
acting companies not be self-governing, as orchestras were, hiring their
own directors just as the musicians hired their conductors? But there is a
more melancholy orchestral comparison to be made now: with every
passing year, orchestral standards get higher and higher, but it becomes
harder and harder to distinguish these orchestras from each other, except
in terms of corporate excellence. This multinationalism has affected
singers too: it is so very much harder now to recognise a singer by
individual timbre. Similarly actors, especially in the theatre, seem all to be
singing from the same hymn sheet. Once, the National Theatre and the
Royal Shakespeare Company stood for very different things: now their
work – of undisputed excellence – is essentially indistinguishable. Once,
the Royal Court pioneered a style of acting that served a new generation 
of authors, but also served us to make us see the classical theatre afresh,
as, in radically difficult form, did Joan Littlewood. Now it, too, has adopted
the lingua franca of acting.

My plea is only the old Maoist prescription: let a hundred flowers blos
som. After the preceding four hundred pages, it is pointless to deny that I
am a romantic about the theatre, which has been the centre of my cre
ative life for forty years. My view is a rather Chestertonian one, dreaming
of guilds of actors, each fiercely loyal to each other and passionately con
vinced of the rightness of their own approach, engaging the public with
their different wares. Most people, probably most actors and directors and
audiences, are just grateful for good work, and good work is undoubtedly
being done. But one could say about performances exactly what Orson
Welles used to say about movies: ‘what’s the point of making a film unless
you make a great one?’

While we were playing
Waiting for Godot
, it fell to me to arrange the
memorial service for Paul Scofield, who had died a year before. As I have
said, his death hit me hard, not because of our personal relationship, but
because of what he represented. What I had said in the
Guardian
about
the end of an epoch was cause for great reflection. By the time of the
memorial service, I was sixty, and in some ways felt myself to be part of
a vanishing world.

The service took place in St Margaret’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey
before a congregation packed with his colleagues stretching back over sixty
years. I believe we did him honour. The choir sang Vaughan Williams;
Eileen Atkins, who acted with him in his last public performance, spoke
the end of the last of Eliot’s
Four Quartets
:

Ian McKellen spoke the Lesson (from St John: ‘In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’). Scofield’s 
widow Joy Parker read Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’: ‘He was one who had an eye
for such mysteries’; his son Martin read his father’s favourite speech from
Shakespeare, Henry VI’s lament:

Seamus Heaney read Beowulf’s funeral – ‘They extolled his heroic nature
and exploits and gave thanks for his greatness’ – from his own transla
tion of the great poem, and at the very end, before we filed out, Paul’s
matchless voice, Prospero renouncing his art, echoed round the chapel:

I gave the Address. I suppose it sums up a great deal of what I’ve been
saying in this book.

Greatness – and from almost the very beginning, there was no question that Paul Scofield, for whose life and work we are giving thanks today, was touched with greatness – takes many forms. In the middle years of the twentieth century, there was in the British theatre an unprecedented outcrop of great actors: the roll call is astounding: Thorndike, Evans, Richardson, Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Wolfit, Redgrave, Guinness, all born within a few years of each other, each radically different from the other. The theatre revolved around these great figures: this was the golden age, not of directing or writing, but of acting. The actors were themselves managers and directors; the theatre was in their hands. Their fame made them public figures, ‘The glass of fashion, and the mould of form / The observ’d of all observers.’

After the war, everything changed, not immediately, of course, but inexorably. And in the theatre, this meant that in the attempt to build the theatre anew, producers, directors and writers now increasingly became the central figures in the theatre. The great actors were still in their prime, and had great work still to do, but they were less and less leaders, more and more part of the team. Into this brave new world, the young Paul Scofield emerged. He was, in many ways, an actor for the new times. He was without managerial ambition, he had no desire to direct, he was utterly uninterested in the social position that fame conferred. What interested him was acting, and only acting. Discovering at an early age, as so many actors before him have done, that his scholastic gifts were meagre – a discovery that may have been an uncomfortable one, given that his father was the headmaster of the school he attended – he fell with inexpressible relief on acting, for which his gift was instantly apparent. Scofield was not in the least a boastful man, and not given to hyperbole, so we may believe him when he says that his thirteen-year-old Juliet was ‘a sensation’. Other sensations of a similar kind followed, and as soon as he possibly could, he left school to train at various modest establishments purporting to inculcate the dramatic arts, where he learned, he said, not so much technique as an understanding of his instrument.

From a physical point of view, the young actor had quite exceptional advantages: he was tall and commanding, his face – uncommonly
handsome, but in a highly individual way, mingling sensuality with severity, the eyes capable of great warmth and great coldness – was powerfully expressive. As for his voice, it was simply phenomenal, with more stops than any organ, from piping treble to full-throated diapason. Over the next sixty years, the critical thesaurus would be ransacked to describe its astonishing variety of registers: the sometimes grating, sometimes caressing, often sumptuous, sounds he seemed effortlessly to produce. But they were not just sounds: he had an intense relationship with language: he spoke of letting words loose in the echo chamber of his mind, where they would resonate with untold possibilities of meaning.

There is a danger in such a prodigious endowment for a young actor, the temptation of mere virtuosity, or indeed of laziness, a reliance on mere physical impact. But the defining thing about the young Scofield was that he was never tempted by easy effectiveness. He seems always to have had an innate maturity, knowing that if he was to do his work as an actor he must painstakingly learn to understand and master his physical instrument, however superb; above all he must nurture the source of his work: his imagination, his inner life. Though charming, courteous and full of naughty fun by nature, he instinctively knew that the social life on which most actors thrive would be the enemy of his work. His delight in that work was so complete, his fulfilment by it so absolute, that to abandon the social round for its sake was nothing to him, especially after he found his life’s companion in the actress Joy Parker. They married and had two children, and Scofield wrapped his family round him like a strong fortress, enabling him to engage ever more deeply with his inner world.

At an impressionable age, he had received a number of jolts to his system which had opened his eyes to the possibilities of the art to which he was devoting himself. He saw Sybil Thorndike playing Medea on a tour of mining villages, an experience which he described as shattering and life-changing. Later he joined her company. Turned down for military service, as a very young man he worked constantly in touring companies, learning, learning, learning, often from distinguished older actors and directors who, like him, had not been called up, acquiring as Christopher Fry said of him at that age, ‘a quiet mastery of his skills’. Luckily for him, though properly appreciated, he was allowed to serve his apprenticeship unmolested by the overheated attentions of the press. After the war, he went to work for that great manager, Sir Barry Jackson, at the Birmingham Rep, where he met the twenty-two-year-old Peter Brook, and a great
artistic partnership started. Brook, Scofield said, taught him above all that he must learn to think, to connect with the thoughts of the character and ultimately with those of the author: how to lay what he called the groundwork of the character, the parameters of a role. His plan was to push these parameters as far as he possibly could, to create the richest, most complex and lifelike character feasible. He had success after success in an extraordinary range of parts, each one etched with a precise brilliance which seemed to release the very souls of the characters: the fantastical
hidalgo
Don Armado, followed by an earthy, dangerous Mercutio, and a tender and scholarly Horatio.

At the age of twenty-six he played a Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon that for many people was the most perfect of post-war performances of the role. With Brook he proceeded to exquisite romantic comedy in
Ring
Round the Moon
, a second
Hamlet
, which was the first British production to play in Moscow since the Revolution, and the role of the whisky priest in
The Power and the Glory
, a performance which Laurence Olivier, not reckless with praise of other actors, described as the most perfect he had ever seen. He played a sleazy agent in the musical
Espresso
Bongo
, Lord Harry Monchesney in
The Family Reunion
, and a number of well-wrought West End plays which he transformed with his power to astonish. His reputation grew and grew, steadily but greatly; after his remarkable performance in
A Man for All Seasons
transferred to Broadway he was increasingly spoken of as the greatest actor in the English-speaking world.

The more the acclaim, the further he withdrew from the social world, immersing himself ever deeper in his private life. He was a countryman by temperament; his horse, his resolutely untameable dog Diggory, his garden, his reading, his wife, his children: these absorbed him deeply and renewed him. His connection with nature was profound; he listened to its pulses, and through them, to his own, enriching in every way he knew the fertility of his inner soil. On horseback, or striding across the Downs for hours on end alone or with his hounds: it is an unexpected image for an actor. But Scofield was nothing if not his own man.