Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (32 page)

The new crutches arrive; knobbly wooden walking-sticks set into the
iron tops. Although these are much lighter, there is a new confusing
balance - iron at the top, wood below. I realise that Charlotte's old
NHS crutches (battered and twisted after weeks of rehearsals) have
become, without my noticing, the extra limbs we talked about. It's too late
to change to anything else now.

I ring Bill A. who has retired for the weekend. Without hesitation he
comes back to the theatre so we can sort out this nagging problem. Even
if the NHS crutches are covered and disguised they will never have the
gnarled and tapered look we imagine, or indeed the sound of wood. But
he agrees we will have to use them in the show itself. Simply by living on
them for five weeks, they are part of me now - with them I can turn on a sixpence and dance the old fandango. I think that if you pricked them
they'd probably bleed.

Dying for a cigarette tonight. It's been seven weeks without one.

Finish the Sutcliffe book. It's quite brilliant, written from a startling
original viewpoint. There is hardly any violence or gore. What shocks you
is the domesticity of it all. For example, after he is caught, his sister Jane
has a recurring nightmare. He is handcuffed to her and has to accompany
her everywhere. Then suddenly the handcuffs fall off and he says, `I've
got to do it again.' She wakes screaming. Your own brother - a nightmare
creature. So Sutcliffe is demystified as a monster. He is `somebody's
husband, somebody's son' (the police's phrase used when they were
frantically searching the country for that needle in a haystack) and Gordon
Burn shows that it's so easy to overlook or excuse bizarre behaviour if it's
someone close to you.

Nevertheless, towards the end, there is a growing sense among some
of those around him that he might be the Ripper. And perhaps even a
feeling in him that the end is coming. Wanting it to come? He cries
suddenly towards the end. Like Richard, the frightened self breaking
through.

Two quotations are interesting. One of his brothers on what he thought
the Ripper might be like: `I imagined him to be an ugly hunchback wi'
boils all over his face, somebody who couldn't get women and resented
them for that. Somebody with totally nothing going for him.' And a
description at the trial: `His face, even when discussing the most sordid
details of his crimes, seemed constantly to flirt with the idea of a smile.'

This is the aspect of Richard that I have resisted most, the `chuckling
pleasure' Stopford A. Brooke referred to, with its melodramatic connotations. Yet the characteristic everyone remembers about Sutcliffe is a
high-pitched giggle. So, perhaps a sense of pleasure then, a sense of
delight ... a sense of humour.

I've been quoting the book constantly in rehearsals. Some members of
the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written.
Some of the women have expressed more - disgust and anger. What are
they saying? They'd prefer not to know, not to understand? They'd prefer
certain areas of life to be censored? Isn't that partly what breeds the
Sutcliffes and the Nilsens?

As we're leaving the King's Arms Hotel after Sunday lunch, I watch a
beautiful white dove walking down the wet road. A car approaches and
the bird accidentally turns into the wheel rather than away from it. A
gentle crunch. The car passes. A shape like a discarded napkin left in the
road. Still perfectly white, no red stains, but bearing no relation anymore
to the shape of a bird. A trail of white feathers flutter down the road after
the car. The suddenness is very upsetting. That gentle crunch.

Another bad day on the early group scenes. We've all got different
solutions to the problems in these scenes and no one can agree. Bill, the
most democratic of directors, sits silently, looking miserable.

The current bone of contention is whether there should be outbreaks
of violence in the court - the Margaret-mugging episode, Rivers and
Dorset drawing knives on Richard's faction after Edward's death. I am
very much in favour, others feel it's an intrusion on the text. Adam
Bareham (Lord Rivers) says, `The violence should be suppressed, these
people should be able to sustain a politic decorum. Let's just use the text,
not impose and demonstrate.'

I cannot let the matter lie. It seems too good an idea, that violence
should always be a hair's breadth away. It says so much about the history
of these people, the years of bloody civil war, the world that has bred a
Richard.

Bill should decide this one, but he continues to sit obstinately on the
fence, so it's left unresolved.

I go to the G B H to pump iron and deflate aggro. It's Bank Holiday in
Stratford again. Morris dancers skip and drunk punks fall into the river.

BAYNARD'S CASTLE As an exercise, we try the scene for real. As if
Richard was a genuinely honest and religious man and Buckingham was
determined to make him King in order to cleanse the country of `the
corruption of a blemished stock'. It's the old problem of playing hypocrites
and dissemblers. It's so difficult to enter into their play-acting with the
emotional commitment they would be forced to use in real life. You are
drawn like a magnet to the wink at the audience.

The exercise yields hidden treasures: how traumatic for Richard to
have his family's dirty linen displayed in public, how savage Buckingham
has to be to shake some sense into this man. Richard tries to clasp his hands over Buckingham's mouth or over his own ears, Buckingham
wrenches these away, Richard weeps and sobs.

The discovery is so rich that we end up putting back most of what we'd
cut.

And now that real issues are at stake the scene is also, at last, extremely
funny.

It's the first sunny day for ages. The bright light makes you look around
again and everything has changed. The countryside has turned green.
That dusty, summer green I love (I suppose because of South Africa).
Even the fields of rape are turning green now, so mercifully I can stop
trying to describe them. Specks of white fluff on the air. Going over the
bridge at Welford-on-Avon the river is a thicker, warmer brew today.

SOLUS We take stock. Almost all of the original plans for the character
have changed. That's all right, that's healthy. Only by putting him on his
feet (all four of them) could we really find out what works and what
doesn't. The monster to strike pity and terror has gone; the new man has
become funny and even a bit sexy!

`How many severely deformed people are regarded as sex symbols?' I
ask for the last time, because Bill has found an answer: `This is no ordinary
severely deformed man.'

A rather upsetting incident involving one of the boys playing the Princes.

Bill and Alison Sutcliffe have had to choose an A-team and a B-team;
the A-team gets to play the press night and schedules have to be worked
round that.

For the A-team they've chosen a Prince Edward from one pair and a
Duke of York from the other, which means separating the two sets of
`brothers' who have rehearsed together for all these weeks.

The demoted York freaks out and disappears. We assume this to be
the behaviour of a diminutive prima donna, so he doesn't win much
sympathy. Welcome to the big cruel world of theatre, kid. But as the hours
pass, and Vera the child-minder and his parents fail to find him anywhere,
the smiles start to freeze on our faces.

At last he does turn up, tear-stained and grubby. Our assumptions were
all wrong. His despair is not to do with being robbed of the chance to
play his York to the critics. It's because he's being separated from the boy
playing Prince Edward with whom he's been working for weeks. He believes in their rapport: 'Ile feels like my brother,' the boy cries. Clearly
he has the making of a serious actor.

The press night is starting to cause its special mayhem and claims an
early victim.

The tension of the other day is being defused almost single-handedly
by Blessed, the rock on which this year's Company stands. With that
massive smile and manic machine-gun delivery: `Yes Bill, what d'you want
me to do', You tell me, yes Bill, you tell me, I can take direction like the
'kin best of them! Yes you tell me Bill, where's John Barber going to be
sitting, where's little Jack "Pinker-"Tailor?! You tell me Bill, I'm going for
the 'kin reviews, me, you tell me Bill!'

I le and I have developed a running gag - Hastings is always trying
to be of help to Richard, getting him in and out of chairs, with a
commentary under his breath: `Copes well for a cripple doesn't he? 'Kin
marvellous how he copes, never grumbles, there you go your lordship,
you want to have a word with your mate Buckingham, off you go now, on
yer holidays.'

`On yer holidays' has become a catch-phrase shared by a small group
of us, to represent our enforced exile up here in Stratford. We greet by
saying, `Been down the arcade yet?', or 'I pulled a cracker in the Tunnel
of Love last night.' Pat occasionally throws in, `Breakfast is now being
served in the Portofino Room', which she confessed doesn't just sound
like an Alan Bennett line, it is one.

Blessed is a total anarchist; every line that he says is followed by a
twinkling glance to \Ial or me, as if to say, ` 'Kin daft innit?' The wonderful
thing about his I lastings is that he's using this for the character and it fits
perfectly. His I castings is a man who doesn't take life seriously and so
fails to notice that he's heading for disaster.

A solus session scheduled, but both Bill and I are bored with these -
we need an audience now. It's a warm sunny evening so we cancel the
rehearsal and head off to Lambs in Moreton-in-Marsh: the Bills, Alison
and self. Discussion about the privilege of working at Stratford for the
Company, how as students we all made pilgrimages here, hitchhiking,
queuing for returns, sleeping-bags in fields, dreams of working here one
day. We share a sense of wonderment that we should he directing,
designing, starring here now.

The scoliotic patron again a source of intense fascination. As the
evening progresses, and bottles of wine gather and empty, I become
increasingly determined to speak to him tonight. Again a threatened
exodus from the table. Bill D. says, `I'd really rather you did this on a
night when I wasn't here.' Bill A. says, `It's completely bad form, like
chatting up a waitress.'

Again, an argument rages about research. Where to draw the line?

CORONATION SCENE Guy Woolfenden arrives to teach the cast the
Gloria.

Guy is, of course, another R S C legend. He's been with the Company
for decades and composed the music for three previous productions of
Richard III. This makes me very self-conscious again. Like Ciss, he's
heard all these lines spoken before, better or worse.

Bill's conception for the coronation is brilliant. Everyone is there - the
congregation is made up of the living and the dead (ghosts of the early
victims, Clarence, Hastings, Rivers and Grey). The ceremony is conducted
by the clergy assisted by the murderers and Hastings' whores.

So the full Company is assembled (they'll be supplemented by a full
chorus Guy's recording in London next week). I'm the only one who
doesn't have to learn the Gloria. Sitting behind them all, sketching, I find it rather moving. The voices soar. So do my hopes for this production. I
mustn't set myself up for disappointment.

People complain that the hymn has been set too high. Guy says he was
watching the football on TV last night and was amazed to hear how high
the crowd were singing `You'll Never Walk Alone'. He says, `I rushed to
my piano and discovered they were singing a fifth higher than I bet any
of them thought they could sing. The adrenalin supplies the boost.'