Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (17 page)

Barrie comes alongside us smiling gently. Points to another man who
is wearing a crash helmet. He has fallen over so often his face is cut and
bruised like a boxer's - his hands are twisted in such a way that he cannot
break his falls.

Barrie says we're welcome to come back whenever we like. There's a
Richard III lookalike whom he feels we should see but who isn't here
today. We thank him and leave.

Drive back quite dazed.

Charlotte comes round to the house before this evening's visit to the
disabled games group.

'Was yesterday of any use?' she asks.

`Oh yes. But I don't think Richard is a spastic.'

'No.'

'The condition is too convulsive.'

She explains in detail about hunchbacks. Often the condition doesn't
arise until adolescence (and most commonly among girls). There are two
types: scoliosis, and kyphosis.

I instantly decide on the latter. It's what I've been drawing. The bottled
spider, the bull. And it's different from Olivier.

`Anyway,' says Charlotte, `tonight there'll be a much wider range. Every
kind of disability, the mentally ill, the blind, everything.'

`Right,' I say, and down a stiff vodka tonic.

KING EDWARD'S SCHOOL, HAMPSTEAD We wander through the
large dark grounds until we find a brightly lit hall with a fleet of ambulances
parked outside.

The place is buzzing with activity: bowls, table tennis, badminton and
various board games. Also a rather ferocious game of hockey - a crowd of
people charging around wielding sticks, some on foot, some in wheelchairs.
One of the players stops, grins and waves her stick at us: Carol, from the
works centre yesterday, who interrogated me so thoroughly.

Charlotte starts to giggle. `She's going to wonder why we've turned up
again.'

I wave back and whisper through a clenched smile, `Careful. Remember
the lip-reading.'

The organiser, a friend of Charlotte's, comes bounding over from the game, sweating heavily. Charlotte introduces him by his nickname, Bones.
He's a policeman and does this in his spare time. Tall, well built, rugged
good looks of a movie star. His manner is rather brusque: `We don't do
any molly-coddling here, they have to get off their arses and do a bit.'
But he's very gentle with them, reassuring, encouraging, very tactile,
pretending to bully, but with a Hollywood smile that makes all swoon
before him.

Here comes trouble - Carol's helper is wheeling her over. Charlotte
smiles and deserts me.

`What are you doing here?' Carol asks.

`Oh, I'm ... well, it's Charlotte, actually. She's a visiting physio -'

`Will you be coming back to the works centre?'

`Yes, I might.'

'Why?'

`Barrie suggested I should.'

`But why?'

`It was Barrie's suggestion.'

`But what are you doing?'

`I'm a freelance-artist-friend of Charlotte's. Excuse me.'

As I disengage myself I can't help thinking that this has been a perfect
demonstration of Mike Leigh's golden rule for research - always tell the
truth about why you're there.

My attention is constantly drawn to a group of three who ignore all the
games and remain totally private. In the middle is a man of about fifty.
His arms are around a young, frail, dark-haired girl on one side, an older
red-haired woman on the other. They move around the hall, heads close
together, whispering.

Bones suggests a visit to the archery club in another hall. He dons an
anorak, lights a cigarette, tells me how the whole thing started as a small
venture and has grown and grown. His endless battles to get money from
the council, to organise transport, to find helpers. The ratio has to be one
helper to two disabled. I tell him that I couldn't distinguish the disabled
from the helpers.

`That's because a lot of them are mentally retarded,' he says, `and
there's no visible disability. When new helpers start, I make it a point not
to tell them who's got what wrong. Let the two sides just meet as people.'

At the archery club they sit in a line of wheelchairs. The skill is
surprising. One young man is blind in one eye and severely spastic. He
battles to fit the arrow in place and then, as he aims, it weaves around dangerously. I try not to flinch as it strays over his shoulder towards me.
But when at last he fires, it is with superb accuracy. Another young man
with frail bony features sits in a strange state: he lifts his bow slowly, fits
an arrow, considers it carefully, unfits it, lowers his bow, never fires.

Back at the main hall, there are several newcomers. One of the new
helpers is a policeman in uniform, a tubby cheerful man who laughs a lot.
He twists his cap back to front, does Goon voices, `Hulloooo, I'm Neddy
Seagoooon', mimes karate chops at a thalidomide lady passing in a
wheelchair. Another new face is a boy called Gordon with a thin ginger
moustache and puffy eyes with scars round them. There is a sense of
suppressed violence about him. Someone bumps into him and he says in
a quiet, clenched voice, `I'm very calm. I'm very calm.' The laughing
policeman aims a karate chop at him. I hold my breath. But Gordon just
says `Yeah', and moves away.

The threesome sit huddled on a bench in a corner. They share a
cigarette, passing it around like a joint. I ask Bones about them. The
young girl is the sister of the boy who never fired his arrow. She is partially
blind. The man in the middle is completely blind and partially deaf. The
red-haired woman is mentally retarded. They each come from different
institutions and live for these Tuesday nights. `We get a lot of love affairs
starting here,' says Bones, `and why not?'

I can start sketching. Enough time has passed, I've blended in. Clamber
up on to an exercise horse, an ideal place because no one can peer over
my shoulder. Constantly looking over towards me, smiling, curious, flirting,
Carol is the only one who takes any notice of me.

Home time. The red-haired lady from the threesome fetches their
coats. They rise and almost as one, weave into the arms, hoods, scarves.
It looks like they're climbing into one huge garment that will bind them
even closer together. But now comes the time for them to be separated
into different ambulances.

I have seen enough. I thank Charlotte and Bones, and leave.

Reading the play in bed, the first scene now seems very familiar. A disabled
man sitting in the sun, grumbling to the audience about his lot (the man
yesterday who said, `Life is unfair'). Powerless to stop his brother being
taken to prison, he makes a few jokes to cheer him up. Passes the time of
day with I lastings: 'What news abroad','

I remember now that my first thought of yesterday was: are these people
smiling, or are they in pain, or are they bearing their teeth like animals
do when threatened? All these expressions are similar. Grinning or
grimacing.

I had set out to look for a physical shape, but maybe what I found is
something about being disabled.

I am going to have to give up smoking and get fitter than ever. And then
keep it up for two years. God.

Jim says I should treat it like an athlete's training for the Olympics, says
it's important enough for me to give up alcohol and go on to special foods.

In the meantime, Bill comes to dinner, we drink a lot of wine, smoke a
lot of cigarettes, and he prepares to tell me what the Richard III set is
going to be. `I'm still a bit nervous about the idea,' he says, `so forgive me
if I have difficulty putting it into words.' And indeed he goes into a very
long preamble about religion in the Middle Ages while I sit on the edge
of my seat stopping myself from screaming `Yes, but what's it going to
be?' His eyes are gleaming with excitement and tension. I do know how
he feels: it's the moment when you have to speak aloud an idea that you've
been nurturing alone and you know the other person's face is instantly
going to tell you whether they think it's a very good idea or a very bad
one. The two are often separated by a hair's breadth.

At last: the play is going to be set in a cathedral, with tombs of dead
kings and high stained glass windows. Obviously it will be a perfect setting
for the religious scenes, but he also wants to use it non-realistically, as if
the play is being done as a medieval morality play, so that the battle at
Bosworth can take place among the tombs - the final duel, St George
and the Dragon.

The concept is stunning, it grips my imagination. As we discovered late
in Tartuffe rehearsals, the other side of religion is a grotesque world of
gargoyles and demons. Perfect for Richard III. For much of the early part
of the play he feigns piety; the wretched cripple who is forced out of the
sensual world into the spiritual one, a holy fool.

Now it's my turn. I show Bill three sketches: the bottled spider, the
head I drew in Hermanus, and Ronnie Kray. I try the crutches idea on
him again and find myself describing a concept which is clearly in the
spider drawing, but which I hadn't actually realised until now: `We play
him as a four-legged creature.' In the text there are many animal references
- boar, hog, toad, spider, hedgehog, and best of all (given the cathedral
setting), `Hell-hound'.

Bill says quietly, `This is terribly exciting.' He reckons that playing
Richard as monstrous as this solves in one stroke the biggest problem in
the play - why is he so evil? Also he points out that Richard's deformity
is only ever mentioned by the others in moments of impassioned cursing,
as if it's so extreme that it's normally unmentionable. So when Margaret really lets rip in Act 1, Scene iii, the others can shield their eyes and think,
`Oh shit, she hasn't gone and mentioned that.'

Without prompting, Bill uses a description I wrote ages ago in Hermanus: `His appearance should provoke both pity and terror.' This keeps
happening in our collaboration - thinking as one.

He stares at my sketch of the bottled spider and wonders whether we
could actually create this image, throw a giant shadow on the wall.

I say, `I'm afraid we used it in King Lear - the front-cloth scene.'

`Ah yes. Adrian Noble has already done it. True of so many things
these days.' He looks up and grins. It's a source of mild inconvenience,
not bitter envy. Bill is not an ambitious man.

He leaves, but the excitement we have generated remains. His reaction
to the spider drawing was so positive. Maybe I have found my nightmare
creature. And now there is a setting for him - this spooky church.

Spend all day doing line run-throughs of Maydays. It's been nine weeks
since we last did it. An awful lot has happened to us all since then - Peter
Pan, Tempest, Much Ado, Moliere, Tartuffe video, and so on.

KING'S HEAD PUB, BARBICAN Before the show, first meeting with
our designer, Bill Dudley. An unexpected personality, but then all designers are the least theatrical, the least neurotic members of the profession.
Or at any rate, their suffering is conducted in the privacy of their
workrooms or the dark of the auditorium. Bill has an East End accent, a
passion for playing his piano accordion in a band that tours pubs, and the
hugest eyebrows I've ever seen. He says he thought so too until he met
Denis Healey at a party. As they leant forward in discussion it was like
two stags about to lock antlers.