Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (29 page)

Larry Adler is parked at the stage door. Bill A. hurries into the car with
head down and jumper held over his face.

`What's the matter Bill?' I ask.

`I don't want Bill Kerr to see Larry driving me,' he whispers, `he made
me swear allegiance to him.'

`I doubt if he'll be up at this hour.'

`You never know. He's fiercely possessive. He once caught Terry Hands
with Larry and it took months for them to make it up.'

We exit from Stratford with Bill A. crouched low in his seat.

CHRIS TUCK ER's Great excitement as we're ushered into the workshop.
Squatting on the floor is a white plaster cast of my torso. And built on to
it in grey clay is the deformed back. Brilliant anatomical detail - the skin
bunched at the twisted hip, the vertebrae straining through the surface as
if trapped. A magnificent shape, but bearing not the remotest resemblance
to what we've asked for.

Despite the last thing we said to one another ('Are you sure you don't
want a hump to one side?' - `Quite sure') Chris has made the back
scoliotic. When I ask why, he says that kyphotic humps are all much lower
down. He produces medical books to prove it. I could produce the opposite
evidence from my sketches made at Marylebone Library, but it's too late anyway. Or at any rate, he's not the kind of man to whom you could say,
`This is all wrong, please start again.' The Bills are perplexed as to why
this is so crucial to me. The fact is, a severely scoliotic back like this would
cause a twisting of the whole torso, displacing the rib cage considerably
and causing the `respiratory problems' so beloved of Tom `Poliomyelitis'
Wadsworth. None of which I've been practising. Nor do I intend to. It
would be painful and dangerous to sustain. Of course, the audience is
never going to know all this - except for the odd orthopaedic surgeon -
but I'm furious that my painstaking research has been swept aside like
this.

The other alteration he has seen fit to impose is reducing the size of
the deformity by about half and not building up the shoulders and upper
arms at all. `It would be pushing reality,' he says, producing the medical
books again and pointing to the thin shoulders and arms of the victims.

`But with respect,' I say, my voice beginning to shake slightly, `these
people haven't devoted their lives to building up their strength and
becoming dangerous fighting men.'

Chris shrugs and looks to the Bills. They are standing hushed. I feel
very confused; his sculpture is magnificent but it would mean re-thinking
everything. Unless we have an approximation of the diving-suit bulk, the
optical illusion of wasted leg muscles won't be achieved.

He finally agrees to build up the arms, but he feels that to build up the
shoulders would be, as he's fond of saving, `pushing reality'.

He gets bored with the discussion and says, `Come upstairs and see
Bert.'

We're all rather relieved to end the session and troop upstairs to view
his latest monster creation. It's for the film The Company of Wolves in which
Stephen Rea has to turn into a wolf before the audience's astonished eyes.

In a drawing-room of inappropriate grandeur and elegance stand four
gruesome figures, life-size and lifelike, known collectively as Bert. Each
represents a stage in the transformation which begins with Rea tearing off
his outer layer of skin and the wolf snout pushing through his face.

The Bert figures are stripped of skin so the muscles and fatty tissue
are exposed. `Looked much better, of course,' says Chris, `when they were
all wet and slimy and covered in KY.' They are worked by a variety of
means, some muscles are moved by handles like beer pumps, others by
remote-control. He is an expert in electronics as well as being skilled in
chemistry, engineering and sculpture.

He's in his element now, a relish and pride that hasn't yet surfaced for
our modest commission. He steps back with his remote-control device and starts punching buttons, looking like a cross between a child genius
and a mad professor, and the models start to move. The naked muscles,
blackish red like bad meat, begin to ripple. The eyes blink and cry real
tears, pulses beat in the forehead, lips flicker into those twitching halfsnarls wolves use to signal an attack.

We stand awestruck, our laughter becoming a little strained, as these
repulsive creatures come to life. The necks stretch, the heads reach
towards us, bloodshot eyes above salivating jaws that snap and bite at the
air ...

Bill D. looks round the splendid room and says, `Imagine a burglar
breaking in here and coming across these.'

`Wolves coming out of people's mouths, and he's talking about pushing
reality!' says Bill D. as we drive back to Stratford with Larry silently at
the wheel. `There he is surrounded by all this fantasy, brilliantly conceived
and executed, and he talks to us about pushing reality!'

We can all speak our minds now, safely away from Tucker's intimidating
authority.

`We've been hijacked,' I say. Larry, misunderstanding, glances round.
This makes Bill A. jump. He swings round too, expecting to find Bill Kerr
hanging on the outside of the car, with explosives tied to his middle.

I continue, `I'm afraid this reopens the whole question of the crutches.'
Bill A. sighs deeply and gravely, and says, `I'd be loathe to lose them.'

I am undaunted. `More and more they become a theatrical effect with
no medical justification. We'd worked out that Richard needs them
because of his massive upper bulk. Now that's gone.'

Bill D. says, `But I've watched you in rehearsals when you're not wearing
any deformity at all and it still works. If you make something visually
compelling enough, the audience isn't going to sit there asking questions.'

I say, `But that's because we know what Richard is really supposed to
look like. We've got the drawings in our minds. An audience isn't going
to have that. Look, I really think we should use what's happened today to
ditch the crutches. I've been thinking about this a lot. They raise too many
questions. The idea lacks simplicity.'

Bill D.: `No, that's crazy. We don't have to change. Tucker does. We
just have to go back on Monday and tackle him again. Play the customer
more.'

Bill A.: `Isn't the problem with the crutches just one of familiarity? Give
them another week and I promise you they'll get simpler. Simpler to work
with. And thus simpler as a concept.'

Second extract from the Sutcliffe book in the Sunday Times. He used to
go to a wax museum in Morecambe and, in a room nicknamed The
Macabre Torso Room, stare at Victorian models used for medical instruction: `The Nine Stages of Pregnancy'. He was to reproduce these abdominal openings in the bodies of his victims. More and more like a work of
fiction.

Dickie and Bob [Robin Hooper, actor and writer] up for the weekend.
It's impossible for me to relax properly these days. They're taken on
compulsory country walks by Jim, while I go to the end of the garden on
to my little Godot stage and learn lines.

I'm exhausted by the evening, can't face cramming anymore. Lying in
the bath, the lights switched off, Mozart playing. Through the window
the nine o'clock sky is still a faint blue; the light rests in the bottles of
aftershave and bath foam, making their primary colours shine in the
gloom.

Bill D. talking about Nicol Williamson in Peter Gill's production of
Twelfth Night (the last show Bill designed for the RSC), he says he was
`too relaxed in his talent'. This seems to me a perfect description of what
happens to some great actors. They develop their style and sit back in it.

Acting is just your view of other people. It must keep changing as you
do, growing with you, improving as you learn more. Of all the arts it is
the most human. So it must never stand still.

V o 1 C E CALL Ciss Berry is back from her holidays. Small and soft like a
sparrow, hair like fine feathers. She's a brilliant teacher in that she
somehow communicates by spirit. That sounds pretentious, which she
isn't. Words are her joy, so how to describe her? Reassuring (the Company's mother in many ways), enquiring, modest. Often she will say `I'm
not making myself clear', or `I'm being so inarticulate'. But this is not
false modesty. In the next moment she will say, `Richard doesn't fear
language in the way that he doesn't fear murder or anything ... Oh, that
was a good thought!'

She listens to me doing the first speech and gently points out that I'm
singing the same tune, again and again returning to the note I started on.

We work at loosening it up. She makes me do it again, banging an
upturned wastepaper tin on each reference to nature - immediately I notice how many more there are in the section about his deformity.

She loves the idea of Richard as a tabloid journalist. We do the speech
again, as if dictating to his secretary, relishing the purple phrases, the
explicit descriptions of deformity.

Now she makes me do it while I sketch Richard at the same time. This
is the most useful exercise of all. The diversionary tactic liberates the
words and thoughts. Phrases that I've been shoving around like dead
weights suddenly come to life. The pen bites into the hump and the bent
legs. Interesting that by using something in which I'm confident (sketching)
I liberate something in which I'm not (verse-speaking).

Ciss lays a lot of emphasis on observing the grammar. She points out
that the first two sentences are four lines long, the third five lines long.
She makes me try them in one breath each. Impossible, of course, but
the exercise has planted in the mind the necessity to keep moving towards
that full stop. She quotes Terry Hands, who says that in real life we always
have enough breath for what we want to say.

She also sees the speech in three sections, the clue being in the opening
two words of each section: `Now is ...` (the world like this); `But I ...'
(am like this); `And therefore . . .' (these things are going to happen).

They're building a rake in the Conference Hall to simulate the slant of
the stage. This is another unknown factor concerning the crutches. Will
I be able to manipulate them easily on an angled floor?

We're rehearsing today in the Methodist Hall down the road. Memories
of a King Lear read-through here.

B O S W O R T H SCENES (Act v, Scenes ii-v) A high silliness factor creeping
in: we've run out of actors to man both armies. (At the Liverpool Everyman,
one small group acted both armies by swopping their helmets back to
front with different heraldry on each end.) At the moment, Richard's army
is made up entirely of four generals. Since he has to arrive born aloft on
his throne, they have to carry it. Which is somewhat undignified for
high-ranking officers, and does not contribute to the growing sense of
tragic doom.

Bill and Alison Sutcliffe set about scanning the cast list for potential
soldiers, but it doesn't look promising. Everyone is either in Richmond's
army, preparing to be ghosts, female, or too posh to ask.

Ciss with us in rehearsals constantly today, an invaluable new factor.
Everything being sifted through her. I'm very self-conscious about her
seeing the crutches for the first time. She's like Shakespeare's guardian
in the Company. Not that she's a purist in any way - the opposite. But
her responsibility is to the text, and the crutches are a massive imposition.
Afterwards I cautiously ask her what she thinks of them. She says, `Sorry
my darling, I was so busy listening I wasn't really watching' - her tact is
immaculate.

She has heard all these words spoken before and, I'm sure, so much
better. Now I'm going to have to start some serious work on my voice.
Something I've been happily delaying. One thing becomes clear immediately - Richard must be played in my own voice. I've been trying to press
downwards into something deeper. But clearly I'm stuck with my own
tenor range; I need every speck of variation it can muster.

Bill full of aggressive energy. Unusual: he's normally too polite. He and
Ciss set about me all day for over-stressing, and not heading for that all
important word at the end of a sentence. Unless you hit it you can't pass
it on to the next speaker or use it for your own momentum. Ciss's way of
describing this is `passing the baton' and `climbing the ladder'.

Good changes are made all day: in the first scene of the play Richard
can't possibly sit on the sidelines reaching for Clarence, pretending he
can't get up. They are brothers; Clarence knows the full extent of his
disability.

Moving Richard around immediately gives the scene a new vigour and
tension.

And in the Queen Margaret scene, we finally abandon the idea of her
wandering among us muttering her asides. Now that she can enter the
scene there is the fresh impetus for us of seeing an old enemy whom we
thought was safely in exile.