Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (20 page)

I feel a sense of relief that it's over. I was proud to be in it and loved
the rehearsals and early performances. But in these last few, hectically
busy weeks it felt like climbing a mountain.

At the party, David Edgar thanks me and says, `Although you were
thirtieth or fortieth choice for Martin I want you to know that on several
occasions when I saw it, you were quite, quite adequate.'

ACTON HILTON Technical run-through of Moliere. A depressing, token
affair because of the continuing strike. Everyone's heart out of it now.
Only a third of the technicians turn up. They know and we know that it's
not going to happen on Sunday. Have just to go through the motions until
we're officially cancelled. Wig fittings next door; the hours spent stitching
each hair into those things. Camera scripts arrive; the hours spent drawing
up these. The infuriating, evil, sad waste of it all. Contingency plans
discussed half-heartedly. Postponing is impossible. Many of the cast are
off to Europe with Much Ado and Bond's Lear, Mal and Brian Parr off to
Stratford to open in Henry V and Merchant, and then of course Bill and I
start rehearsals for Richard next month.

ACTON HILTON Bill calls us into a circle. Cedric Messina stands up
and announces that the strike has `delivered the mortal blow' to the show
and we're cancelled. Apparently there is a faint hope of doing it at an
independent studio, as the production company is RKO and not the
BBC. We vote to try for this even though it's fraught with problems. I've
bad flu to add to my misery.

Incredibly, they've made it work! In twenty-four hours Cedric and the
R K O people have found an independent studio and the unions have
agreed to allow us to use the sets - although built outside, they were
designed by the BBC and, had they wanted to be difficult, the unions
could have stopped us - as long as not a single member of the BBC staff
is involved. Sadly, this means losing a lot of people who've worked
devotedly on Tartuffe and this project: Tom Kingdon, Harbi Virdi, Peter
Kondal, Cherry Alston and others. A new crew is being assembled and
we start tomorrow as scheduled. Moliere may be jinxed, but it's a survivor.

All day at the theatre, people congratulate us as if we had worked this
miracle ourselves. Thumbs are held high across the Green Room, actors
whoop and rush into one another's arms.

It's so beautifully American what's happened, so un-English: a refusal
to be philosophical about defeat.

LIMEHOUSE STUDIOS, CANARY WHARF, DOCKLANDS The day

spent doing run-throughs for the new technical team, which includes one
of the top lighting men in the country, John Treays. He's only agreed to
do it on condition that he gets next Saturday off for his wedding anniversary, so a helicopter is being supplied to fly him between here and his
country home.

The studio is a converted warehouse in the docklands. The canteen is
on a barge which, as everyone who works here will immediately tell you,
used to be a floating brothel.

TELEVISING M O L I$ R E A strict discipline, no booze, no cigarettes. I
need all my energy for a schedule that starts with a make-up call at 7.00
a.m., then televising all day and evening, or else a performance at the
theatre.

It's so sad that the BBC set designer, Cecilia Bereton, won't even be
allowed a credit for these astonishing sets. She's understood the play
perfectly. And Treays lights them like an Old Master.

The new production team do wonders (they have learned the show in
twenty-four hours), but are forced to resort to television's worst habit -
every take is followed by the chorus `Absolutely marvellous!' Praise tossed
at us like an anaesthetic; it creates a vacuum, makes one lose all sense of
perspective. Once again the clock is uppermost in everyone's mind. The
acting is snatched at and first takes are almost always accepted. I fear for
my performance.

Another problem is the make-up. Elaborate tests, which had been set
up at the Beeb, got cancelled with the show. So the make-up team are
working blind, not knowing the characters, style of the piece, anything.
My first big make-up change into the old, dying Moliere (half his face
paralysed from a stroke) happens mid-afternoon on the second day. While
the studio waits with growing impatience, my poor make-up girl, Hilary,
has to improvise her way through this complicated transformation. Envoys
are sent, beads of sweat on their foreheads, teeth gritted into horribly
calm smiles: `Can we say fifteen minutes?'

`Say what you like,' says Hils, `we'll be down when we're ready.'

I'm not happy with the end result - the wrinkles lie one-dimensionally
on the skin rather than the face bunching and denting like it does in old
age. This is becoming an increasing problem for me. I cannot perform
with a face less good than I myself have sketched.

We have a little pow-wow on the studio floor. Bill is frank with me ('We're
running out of time, Tony'), others are more patronising: `Everyone in the
control box thinks it looks absolutely marvellous. Would they let you go on if
it wasn't absolutely marvellous?' Of course they would, anything to beat the
clock. I say, `Look, never mind, let's just do it' - angry, disappointed, hating
the idea that people are whispering, `Queeeeny Actorrr.'

They are rushing so much now that they forget to tell us that we're
doing a take and not a rehearsal. It's thirty seconds before we realise we're
doing it for real. I'm so emotional by now that I act the scene rather well,
cry for real, and for once am rather pleased when the take is glibly accepted
and we charge on to the next scene. I just have to keep reminding myself
that it's better doing it like this than not at all.

So these are frantic, unhappy days. In the middle of all this, the Barbican
season draws to a close. The last two stage Moliere's flit by, then the last
three Tartuffe's. It's Saturday night, the last night of the season, and for
many of us the end of the two-year cycle that started in 1982 in Stratford.
It has been a magnificent company built on absolute trust and love. The
chemistry has been unbeatable. And talent-wise, in one company to
have had Gambon, Jacobi, Mirren, Kestleman, Steadman, Hawthorne,
Godfrey, Postlethwaite, Storry, Cusack, Peck, Armstrong, Rylance, Bradley, Coleridge, Talbot, Troughton, Waller, Shrapnel, Bowe, Benjamin,
Carlisle, Hyde, et cetera ... the list is astonishing and endless.

There is a farewell party, but I have a make-up call at the crack of dawn
(and the clocks go forward tonight as well) so can't stay. Try to find the
Tartuffe cast to say goodbye, but they've all gone into the wings of the
main stage to watch Cyrano's last curtain call. It has become legendary -
one and a half thousand people rising to their feet as one. R S C veterans
say, `Nickleby was like that.'

The calmest, best bits of these mad days have been the drives to and
from the studios on Canary Wharf. The docklands are a little known area
of London: miles and miles of wharfs, wide channels of still water;
warehouses, cranes, white luxury yachts in their moorings; and a smell of
the sea. In the early morning no one is about, just seagulls circling. Once
a man went by on skis. These drives have been accompanied by Mozart's
Third and Fifth Violin Concertos played by Itzhak Perlman - so beautiful
it almost hurts.

Now it is Monday and the television recording finishes as well. Utter
exhaustion and post-natal depression as these months of frantic work
come to a pounding full stop.

Richard has not entered my thoughts for two weeks now, but did in a
dream one night. Olivier's face in extreme close-up. Viewing it in a slow
circle, closer and closer, till I realise it's not on a cinema screen as I
thought, nor carved on the side of a mountain as it next appears, but it's
actually there. Circling the giant. Closer and closer it comes ...

Feeling much better after a good night's sleep on two mogodons. Lots of
energy. Pop into the gym for the first time in two weeks. Doing the first
exercise I hear something snap in my lower back. Try to pretend it didn't
happen.

Drive to Stratford with Bev Williams for the first night of Henry V.
Ex-wardrobe mistress at The Other Place, Bev is a Stratford legend.
Liverpudlian, her figure a diminutive roller-coaster of vivacious curves
and circles from her hips to the round specs under a Rasta fringe. `I call
myself the little darkie so that some other stupid bugger doesn't say it first
and hurt me.' She has also been described as `the sepia sex sensation of
Stratford on Avon' (attributed to the actor George Raistrick), but that is
hard to believe as she sits next to me in the car, sucking her thumb,
wearing bib-overalls and looking all of ten years old. However, when we
get to `Stratters' she disappears into a loo and then emerges in a stunning
black trouser-suit, high heels, deep red lips. We go into The Dirty Duck
pub, centre of R S C life. Everywhere she has ex-lovers to greet - they all
seem delighted, no embarrassment or guilt, as she goes from one deep
hug to another. Earth Mother and Baby Doll in one. Or Sally Bowles. I
remember her room in the Ferryhouse with its window seat hanging over
the Avon, stacked with cocktail mixes, scented orange candles, records of
Piaf and Sam Cook.

Last year, after six seasons working in the wardrobe, Bev finally summoned up her courage, changed her name to Beverly Hills and became
an actress.

We are sitting on the patio at The Duck. It's a clear grey evening, the
Avon drifting calmly by - it's seen it all a hundred times before, this first
night tension electrifying the atmosphere. Even outsiders like us tend to
sit rather stiffly, grinning and nodding a lot.

`Tony Sher, there you are! Come here for a hug.'

I disappear into the ample arms and voluminous first-night frock
of Pam Harris, The Duck's famous proprietress and Mistress Quickly
lookalike. When the company impersonate her voice they sound like
Frankie Howerd, but it's so much richer than that - marinaded in brandy
and smoked in Piccadilly's untipped.

She is furious with me. `Why are you living out in Chipping Campden?
I know - to try and be good this year! They all try that. Give 'em a couple
of months and they're in here till closing time, cars have to find their own
way home, yessss. Are you eating after the show, shall I put some champagne to chill? Got all the critics coming in as well, don't know
whether to put them in the back, you lot in the front, or vice versa, always
such a problem keeping you all apart.'

Henry V. Adrian has done a melancholy, anti-war production of the play.
I find myself thinking heretical thoughts - longing for the heroic thrills
of the Olivier film. No doubt I will pay for such hypocrisy. The production's
concept works splendidly in McDiarmid's sinister Chorus. Branagh is
remarkably calm, strolling around that famous stage as if born on it. As
for Burgundy's sticks, I don't think they're going to pre-empt the crutches.

Much later, leaving The Duck, I happen to pass the table where a pride
of critics sit at their supper.

Billington says, `Oh dear, you chaps always have to run the gauntlet
through us chaps writing about you.'

I say, `Yes, Pam was wondering earlier whether she should put all of
you in the back tonight.'

Coveney: `But then we'd have to run the gauntlet through you lot.'

Tinker: `No we wouldn't. We'd leave last.'

Wake hardly able to move my back at all because of yesterday's gym injury.
Phone Charlotte and make an appointment. Cancel tickets for Midsummer
Night's Dream tonight and leave Stratford hurriedly. I don't want the
R S C to know that I've injured myself again - I was off for six months
after the accident and cost them an awful lot of money.

Charlotte diagnoses a torn ligament in my lower back.

`You have been working very hard,' she says as I prepare to winge.

A corset and home to rest.

Wearing this absurd corset, I make my way to Marylebone Medical Library
to research. As I get out of the car I hear something give in my neck. This
is getting silly now.

With stomach strapped in so tight that I have to breathe in short gasps,
and neck at a strange angle (as if trying to look under tables), I introduce
myself to the librarian.

`Hello. Charlotte Arnold phoned you from the Remedial Dance Clinic.'

`Ah yes.' She looks faintly surprised. She was expecting a researcher
not a patient.

`I'm an actor about to play Richard the Third -'she needs no convincing
- `do you have any books on deformities and so on?'

She smiles politely, reaches under the table and straightens her skirt,
which I appear to be trying to look up while panting, and says, `Please
follow me.'