Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (12 page)

But what is poetry anyway? It’s not beautiful sound, though sometimes it is, but compression of meaning. A Shakespeare speech is so packed with meaning any paraphrase should be two or three times longer than the original speech. Bertram Joseph, armed with his knowledge of how Shakespearean actors acted, showed us how to deal with the many figures of speech, always seeing them in actor’s terms. How do I recognize a figure, why do I need it, and most importantly, how do I speak it so that all its elements are clear?

Meanwhile Brian Way was showing us another path to truthful acting in his improvisation class. Improvisation for Brian was not theatre sports and the like, nor was it telling funny stories; it was completely actor centred. Sometimes the entire class would participate in the improvisation, but when only part of the class was working, the observers were not allowed to react or draw attention to themselves as an audience. However funny the scene might be, the observers were not allowed to laugh. The actors were aiming to find the truth and life of the imagined situation; they were not to try to create story. They were to be free of obligations to the audience, allowing themselves to live spontaneously in the imagined situation. They were also free of judgement. While Brian would sometimes ask a group to discuss how the scene felt, he himself would never pass judgement, never say this was good or that was bad. In fact for weeks he wouldn’t say anything at all, other than what was necessary to begin the next improvisations. And then one day he would do a Brian Way — he would talk about the work, about acting, and about life, and he was brilliant.

Meantime, I was settling into my new flat, making new friends, finding my way around London on the underground — no taxis on this budget — and going to the theatre. At the end of my year in London I had 130 programs, mostly from plays, but concerts, ballets, and operas as well.

Casting a shadow over this exciting new world was Sylvia’s pregnancy. We had discussed her coming to England to have the baby and put it up for adoption. Someone had given me the name of a doctor who might be sympathetic to our situation and he suggested I come to his surgery and we could discuss. His surgery? My notion of surgery was an operation in a highly restricted area of a hospital. What an odd place to have a discussion. However, it turned out that in Britain a surgery was when a doctor saw patients in his office. Doctors didn’t schedule appointments as they do in Canada; patients simply came to the office during the surgery hours and waited their turn. And so after a considerable wait I finally had a conversation with the doctor who did indeed say that possibly the baby could be born in London and put up for adoption. A sidebar of our discussion centred on national health or medicare as we would now call it. He was the first doctor I had ever heard support the idea of a national health service. Medicare was still in the future in Canada, and my uncle who was a doctor was adamantly opposed to it, as were most doctors in the country. How refreshing to hear a doctor say how much he liked the system as he could prescribe whatever treatment was necessary and know that his patient could receive it.

I was torn. Of course I was concerned for Sylvia and her situation, but on the other hand a whole new life was opening up for me. No one cared that I had been divorced; no one cared about my checkered past; it was truly a “brave new world.” How would I introduce a pregnant girlfriend into this world? Remember, the stigma attached to unwed pregnancy was far greater than now. And to complicate matters further I was becoming involved with someone else. Sometimes I think my first name should have been ‘Wriggle’ instead of ‘William.’ I was in a situation I needed to wriggle out of it so wriggle I did. I didn’t tell Sylvia not to come, but I managed to invite her in such a lukewarm way that she decided not to come. A blot on my character to be sure, but by no means the last.

Sylvia did survive, of course. When her family found out that she was pregnant, they did not moralize with her, as we had both feared, but were supportive and helpful. She gave the baby up for adoption with the help of her brother in the United States. She and I remained friendly, if guarded, and I visited her when I returned to Canada at Easter and again months later, but as a relationship it was no longer ‘operative,’ to use the political term. No, the operative relationship was now Carolyn Jones, a Canadian in her first year of the regular program at LAMDA.

Carolyn and I had become an item, and often as not she would spend the night at my flat rather than her room in South Kensington. No reflection on Carolyn, but I think my desire for my own bed goes back to those months of sharing a single bed with Carolyn. I still remember the sheer joy of being able to spread out in the bed on those mornings when she was up before me. Ever since, sleeping with someone has always seemed an overrated activity. Not sex, mind, I never thought that was overrated.

We went to parties of which there seemed to be many. Not only were sexual relations between staff and students not frowned upon, they were public. It was not uncommon for a faculty member at a party to be seen on the dance floor in a full French kiss with a student. We didn’t think this odd at the time. What I did find odd was the gay men who might also be seen in a full French kiss. Some of them, like Bill Gaskill, were the new hot directors and writers of the British theatre. The English didn’t seem to find this odd, just hick Canadians like me. Homosexuals in Canada were still fingering the doorknob on the inside of the closet; here they had kicked it open. It was the beginning of the Sixties.

The rehearsal class was the core of the training in most theatre schools at the time; classes in voice, movement, improvisation, and other technical areas would be in the morning, and the afternoon would be given to the rehearsal of a play or portion of a play. Dedicated to the classics as our program was, we rehearsed three Shakespeares, one Chekhov, one Restoration Comedy, and a verse play by Christopher Fry.

Our second rehearsal class was
Much Ado About Nothing
directed by Hugh Cruttwell, who would later go on to be principal of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). I was cast as Balthazar who has to sing. When I protested that I couldn’t sing, couldn’t carry a tune, both Kristin and the singing teacher, John Dalby, insisted that I could. I just had to get out of my own way and let my natural instincts function. I wasn’t tone deaf they insisted, it is just that for lack of confidence. I tried to think my way on to a note instead of allowing the vocal response to happen naturally. Of course, they were right in their analysis. There was nothing wrong with my ear, but ever since my difficulty with ‘that tenor part’ in
Ten Nights in a Barroom
I had avoided singing almost as much as dancing. And yet I had sung in the school choir before my voice broke. In any event Dalby worked with me very patiently until, my goodness, I could actually sing on key. Or at least I could when alone in a classroom with just the singing teacher and when standing right beside the piano. I even managed fairly well at our final rehearsal before we moved into the theatre to present the play to the other students.

Only the other students in the school were invited, but of course they were the most terrifying audience of all. Any group of strangers would be far less intimidating. When we came to my song I could barely hear the piano; it was actually at the back of the theatre so the audience could hear it better than I. Well, I may have come within an octave of the right notes, but I doubt I was much closer. And soon what little sound the piano was making was drowned by the laughter of the students. Finally the song finished to an embarrassing round of applause. Don Pedro compliments Balthazar to which he replies modestly, “And an ill singer, my lord.” At that point the audience fell off their chairs. To this day I avoid singing at all costs, even the national anthem.

Another rehearsal class was Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
directed by the acclaimed actress Catherine Lacey. Once the piece was blocked, she said very little to us, but listened to every moment with penetrating intensity. While the character of Vershinin suited me well with his passion for philosophizing, his bad marriage, and his love for an unattainable woman, I suspect I was somewhat mannered and a bit stiff if I were to go back and see the work now. Still, we were pleased with the emotional life we were able to create and taken aback when Norman’s end of show criticism began with “Why did you wear your hearts on your sleeve?” I’ve seen several student productions of
The
Three
Sisters
since and seen a lot of hearts on a lot of sleeves. It would be another few years before I had a better idea of how Chekhov should be played.

Following
The
Three Sisters
we finally got to work with Michael Warre. Another misfit, Michael was a superb teaching director. He had been a rising star at the Old Vic, but had been shunted aside. “Be careful of alcohol,” he said, “or you could end up teaching at a drama school.” However he got to LAMDA, we were lucky to get him. He directed us in an obscure Restoration comedy by Thomas Otway called
A Soldier’s Fortune
. I played the ninety-year-old Sir Davey Dunce who has locked up his young wife so no other men can get to her, a common theme in Restoration comedy. Well, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I put on my old man’s voice and staggered about the stage for about two weeks when Michael told me to throw it all away. Just do what the character does and forget about how he looks and sounds. ‘You have to be kidding,’ I thought. After all, the character was nearly seventy years older than I. But to my amazement I found that when I did all the things the character did, locking up and protecting his young wife, I became old. I didn’t have to act old. If you do what an old person does you will be old — a lesson that has stayed with me to this day.

Meanwhile I would sit in class and watch Michael MacOwan rehearse Shakespeare scenes. One day he was on form. Each time a scene was presented he found the exact thing to fix it — to bring the scene truly to life. At one point he noticed my watching and, knowing that I was a director, came over and explained to me that I should not do with professional actors what he was doing here with students. Students want to learn new ways of working, whereas professional actors have developed a way of working over the years and challenging their methods can be threatening. I nodded wisely, but was not to remain so wise when I got to the Chesterfield Rep the next year.

A short, nervous man, smoking feverishly as we all did, Michael’s eyes were not windows to his soul, they were wide open doors. His talent was also his curse. He couldn’t hide his emotions; the best he could do was soften them with drink. But when he was, in his term, “on form,” his emotional clarity was inspiring. And while I had met his wife and gone to his home once, I don’t think his wife ever came to the school. I remember his regretting one time that he was not paying her enough attention. I don’t recall whether this was around the time that he felt he needed to explain that he was not in love with a woman we had been discussing, he “was in love with someone else.” By the way he phrased it, I assumed he was not referring to his wife.

Michael introduced us to John Vivyan, a writer whose work on Shakespeare seems to have faded to black. How does this happen? How can work of such insight and scope be discarded by the artistic and academic communities? Vivyan’s central thesis was that Shakespeare has a consistent ethic that runs through all his plays; he even showed how the structure of Shakespeare’s argument or story developed through the five acts turning the play to tragedy or comedy. My, what would Robert McKee or Linda Seger say about that, these screenplay experts on dramatic story who insist that all drama is three acts, even Shakespeare? But to oversimplify Vivyan’s argument, each play was either a comedy, when the protagonist would eventually do something positive, a tragedy when they would do something negative, or a mercy play where the protagonist who had done something negative would redeem himself and be forgiven —
The Winter’s Tale
, for instance. The tragic action generally involves resorting to violence in the pursuit of the protagonist’s goal. Macbeth kills Duncan; Brutus kills Caesar. Most of the plays, leaving aside the histories, follow one of these patterns. The interesting apparent exception is
Hamlet
. We are often told
Hamlet
is a play about a man who can’t make up his mind. Olivier himself makes this point. If so, then Vivyan’s thesis is in difficulty. In no other play is indecision given such moral force. Sure, Henry VI and Richard II are challenged by indecision, but these are not thought of as tragic flaws. But I guess the argument is that when put in a position where action is required, it is tragic if you cannot take action, if you are Chamberlain instead of Churchill. But there is another way to look at
Hamlet,
and that is that the tragedy is that he does — finally — make up his mind. He does kill Claudius and like all other Shakespeare tragedies he comes to a bad end for so doing. Looked at in this way,
Hamlet
is a play about what a character does before he commits the tragic act;
Macbeth
is mainly about what happens after the tragic act, while
Julius Caesar
, placing the act in the middle, shows the arc from each side.

We ended the year doing Christopher Fry’s
The Firstborn
. We were thrilled when the famous author himself came to talk to us. We had been puzzled by many things in the play. Surely he would have the answers. Well, no, actually. Every time we asked him something he would say something like ‘maybe,’ or ‘perhaps,’ or ‘it could be.’ Clearly the characters had risen unbidden in his imagination and he was as innocent of their motives as we were.

In retrospect many things are remarkable about this seminal year in my artistic life. I was exposed to an amazing array of talent, both inside the school and out. Some principles have stayed with me for decades: the natural voice, the search for reality and spontaneity, the use of verse in the service of the actor, the playing of actions as a means to develop character, and likely others buried deep in my subconscious. But when one looks back on those schools now, particularly after spending some time years later auditing programs in New York, there seems to be one curious omission. We were never taught how to act. There were no classes in acting. A North American scene study class is structured in such a way as to demonstrate principles and methods of acting on a regular basis. A scene is presented to the class and analyzed by the instructor. Students might even take notes. We did nothing of the kind at LAMDA. All we did was act and if we ran into difficulty we were coached; we were helped to work through our unique needs and problems. We were not taught general principles of acting. If our character was not required for a particular rehearsal, we worked on our own; we didn’t sit and watch other students being coached. Yes, voice and movement teachers would come into rehearsal from time to time to assist in the application of their work to the playing of character, but still there were no lessons as such. The work was largely individual. Which system is better? Well, looked at in one way, can you imagine a hockey camp where two players take a turn on the ice while the other players sit and watch, after which the coach gives a lecture on the merits of the two players on the ice? Some of the difference between LAMDA and, say, the HB Studio in New York was pedagogical, but some was likely financial. The American schools had to find a way to interest larger classes in shorter time spans.