Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (38 page)

The whole day feels like someone has their finger on the fast-forward
button. Dashing into town to buy booze for tonight's party and presents,
dashing back for the afternoon call, the stage door now looking like a
florist's and greeting-card shop.

2.00 P.M. Conference Hall. The cast in a circle. Bill asks us to speak the
play quietly, stopping one another if there's a word or phrase we can't
understand. Very useful to hear the story again. Atmosphere sober. Blessed
bubbling and twinkling as always, but I resist the temptation. Important
for this exercise not to disintegrate into corpsing. Hope my whispering
seriousness is not misinterpreted as nerves, which I don't feel yet.

4.30 p.m. On stage with Ciss. All of us standing in a circle (`A circle is
always aggressive,' she says, `use it to get rid of tension'), humming,
rocking, chest-patting. Words from the play exchanged across the circle.
Animal words, religious words. The atmosphere very similar to the end
of the play - an army gearing themselves up.

5.00 p.m. Now the two-hour wait. No sickening nerves yet. Maybe they
won't come this time.

Jim's first night present is beautiful - a huge joke-shop spider in a
rather elegant Victorian perfume bottle.

Massage. Doze off to Don Giovanni.

THE OPENING NIGHT 6.oo p.m. Cold shower. Muttering `Now is the
winter ...'

6.15 p.m. Mac arrives, relaxed and chatty, bearing piles of cards from
downstairs. The heat of the evening is intense. As he advances with the
hump I say, `I don't think I can bear wearing that tonight, Mac.' He says,
`Righto mate, I'll go and tell them Richard's got better.' Phone rings. Bill,
sounding stiff and formal: `Just want to say have a good one.'

6.40 p.m. Fight rehearsal in the Conference Hall. The tension backstage
relatively low. `Good luck, good luck' is the constant greeting as people pass one another. Some of my cartoons have been opened and are being
passed round, making people laugh.

6.45 p.m. Dressing-room. 'Give me ten minutes alone, Mac.' Strolling
around doing `Now is the winter . . .' Oddly calm.

6.55 p.m. Beginners' call over the tannoy. Look at myself in the mirror
and say aloud, `Right, let's go and play Richard the Third.'

6.57 p.m. Waiting in the wings with Allam, Paul Gregory, Jonathan
Scott-Taylor and Guy Fithen. We peer at the audience through the tracery
walls of the set.

`Come on, you buggers, get into your seats.'

`Look, the critics are writing already.'

`Tony, when your crutches first appear, expect a cacophony of scribbling.'

7.00 p.m. Graham Sawyer arrives from front-of-house to give the final
clearance. Philip mutters into his mouthpiece `Going', and the house
lights start to dim. The music crashes and I scurry on stage. Get into
position and feel the lights change. Open my eyes.

` "Now is the winter ..." '

The first thing that strikes me is that the audience might be in more of
a state than I am. Waves of tension that you can reach out and touch.
How stupid first nights arc! The frosty passivity of the critics ('We're not
actually here, we're just observing') mixed with the nervous supportiveness
of friends, relations and theatre staff. It's like playing to a dozen audiences
at once. The laughter is muted and only starts about a third of the way
back, behind the scribbling heads. A feeling that there might be some real
people, ordinary members of the public, out there somewhere.

I underplay moments, overplay others, in an attempt to reach this totally
untypical jumble of spectators. I dry briefly in the Lady Anne scene and
have to do one of my Shakespearian rewrites. Later in the same scene
I'm horrified to hear my line `I'll have her' come out as 'Oil 'av'er!' Still,
there is an exit round, albeit rather token.

Better from here on in. Realising that I'm expending too much energy
in trying to sort this lot out, I calm down to the point of indifference.
Whenever I go backstage, worried faces loom out of the dark to whisper,
`How's it going `Extremely well,' I keep replying and take a perverse
delight in their expressions of surprise. Know they're thinking, 'Well, he's
not getting the laughs he got at the previews.'

At the coronation the big moment comes - Mal comes to disrobe me.
We share a smile and I whisper, `Your big chance Mal, go for The Money.' Don't know whether he managed it or not. Forget to ask afterwards.

The second half is much better. The audience appears to have decided
it's not at all bad. They're more relaxed and confident and therefore so
am I. Who's in charge here?

My voice lasts well and, thank God, I've got some big guns left for the
oration. But no breakthrough on the nightmare speech.

Curtain call. The applause is disappointing, but I'm told there were
some bravos and we are called back for another one. Blessed, Mal and I
yell to one another over the applause, `Well, you're on yer holidays!'
Glimpse the scribblers scurrying up the aisles, dashing to their deadlines.
Wonder how they find enough telephones?

Great relief backstage. People surround me, hugging and patting,
Blessed sweetly saying, ' 'Kin marvellous performance, inspiration to us
all, great triumph.'

In the dressing-room, a race to get out of the drenched deformity and
into the shower before people start arriving.

Standing naked under a stream of water, shampoo, soap, stage blood,
running mascara - the most beautiful feeling. I survived.

A knock on the door and, through the rushing water, a familiar hoarse
voice: `Tone, where are yer?' Gambon!

Lots of other faces from the old Company: Chris Hunter, Monica
McCabe, Ludo Keston, Dusty Hughes. How wonderful that they should
have come all this way.

Now the dressing-room full of R S C hierarchy. Suddenly Trevor Nunn
pushes his way through and `Trevs' me. I've heard a lot about this
`Trevving', but never had it done to me. From what I'd heard, a `Trev' is
an arm round your shoulder and a sideways squeeze. But this `Trev' is a
full frontal hug, so complete and so intimate that the dressing-room
instantly clears, as if by suction. I'm left alone in the arms of this famous
man wondering whether it's polite to let go.

He says, `When this show moves to London there are going to be
queues round the block. It's going to be one of those.'

A flash of a night in Joe Allen's some millennia ago.

At last alone. Step outside on to the little balcony, gasp at the fresh air.
The storm never happened. It's a gloriously warm, almost Mediterranean
night.

At The Duck, Pam whispers that the word is good and nods towards a
table where they sit: Billington, Coveney, Tinker and others. These crazy
evenings in The Duck after an opening night, when we all pretend we don't know one another - us and them. I miss James Fenton because he
used to cross no man's land and offer you a drink.

Mal and I sit with Gambon and his companion, Lyn. Try and
recapture the patter of two years ago, but there is something melancholy
in the air. Beginning the descent. Gambon starts to talk about how strange
it was driving into Stratford tonight, and his eyes fill.

We go to the party. It has been arranged by Steve, Jonathan, Guy and
Hep. They have floodlit the garden of their digs. There is a barbeque and
a Richard III cake to cut. Something which has happened, invisibly, over
the last couple of weeks is that the Company has cemented together round
this show. The cynicism and indifference are gone. There is a new
enthusiasm for the work. I think that's one of this production's triumphs.

The only wet blanket this evening seems to be me, sitting alone at the
back of the garden, forcing myself to eat although I still have no appetite.
The exhaustion is massive, preventing me from having even one wild
night of celebration.

Eventually find Bill. He has slumped alone in the living-room. Looking
as wrecked as I feel. We smile at one another. Nothing left to say.

Later, I'm glad to have the opportunity to tell Gambon that at last I
understand why he felt so disparaging about his great performance as
Lear. At the time his behaviour seemed like destructive modesty. But
Shakespeare's great parts are humiliating to play, or at least, humbling.
You get to meet his genius face to face.

Leave the party early. Have to do it all again tomorrow and then again
on Thursday.

Walking through Stratford on this warm, clear night. Not a soul about,
just the beautiful timbered buildings, which often you can't see for the
crowds. Late at night, this place looks like any quiet country town.

Jim and Lyn fall behind as Gambon and I stroll along Waterside
saying very little. It means a great deal to me to have him here tonight.
Lear and Fool. Where this chapter of my life began.

Summer again. A glorious summer. As you come up over the hill from
Chipping Campden, the world below has turned the colour of straw. One
of the worst droughts in years, but droughts are in my blood, so I love
these dry, bright days. The countryside is baked and cracked; sheep pant
in little shaded groups under the trees.

Much has changed at the theatre and yet somehow it remains the same.
Hamlet is in rehearsal now, and so the Green Room chat is about that:
when the question of ghosts comes up now, it's hamlet's father; when a
head is passed around, it's Yorick's skull.

But the days following the opening were, for me, some of the worst I
can remember - dominated by the news that a friend had been murdered.
Drew Griffiths, writer, director, actor. We worked together in the early
days of Gay Sweatshop. He was murdered on the afternoon of Saturday,
i 6 June, and they still haven't found the killer.

This, together with the usual post-natal depression, made these days
very bleak.

As far as I can see, the only disadvantage in not reading reviews is that
they can't help to fill these horrible days. They don't supply a new charge,
fuel for excitement or fury. Suddenly - time on your hands. Suddenly -
nothing on your mind.

But it does become apparent that we have a success on our hands,
perhaps even a big success. Without reading reviews, you have to rely on
other signs: now the applause at the end is rapturous, we are regularly
called back for a third time, people stand and cheer.

Celebrities start flying in to see the show. And I am asked whether I'd
mind if they came round backstage afterwards. If I'd mind? Michael
Caine, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Peter Brook, Donald Sutherland, John
Schlesinger, Chariton Heston ... Charlton Heston? I was making
plasticine models of him when he was in The Ten Commandments and I
was in nappies. Best of all, Mum and Dad are in the audience that matinee
and are invited to have tea with him during the interval. Dad goes round
for days afterwards shamelessly name-dropping, telling everyone that he
had tea with Moses.

Michael Caine should have the last word on the reviews: `What about
those reviews then?' he said.

`I don't read them.'

`Don't read them? You wrote them didn't you?'

The Richard III Society descends in force. Most of them celebrate our
production and write thrilling letters, but one or two are less enthusiastic:
`I read in the papers that you are yet another actor to ignore truth and
integrity in order to launch yourself on an ego-trip by the monstrous lie
perpetrated by Shakespeare about a most valiant knight and honourable
man and most excellent King.'

As soon as we opened, the lines ceased to be any problem at all. Now
they all come out effortlessly to the last `thee' and `bath'. I have not
become prematurely senile, I have not lost my powers of memory. It was
simply this show's special gremlin.

Otto Plaschkes has successfully raised the finance for Snoo's Shadey film.
So this gentle character, this little misfit whose only ambition is to change
sex, will live alongside my psychopathic bottled spider for a few weeks in
October and November, as I commute between Stratford and London.

Busy, full days, in what I thought was going to be such an empty year.

The dollar is strong. Americans invade. Stratford gets so full it might
be sick. It's a perfect time to be far away in Chipping Campden in a
beautiful cottage, dictating a book to a lovely lady called Ainsley Elliott,
who plays her typewriter like a piano.

We work with the French windows open to the garden, the dry lawn,
the drooping, still trees. With one hand we have constantly to fend off
wasps and bees, with the other we encourage ladybirds to land and bring
us luck. Or money spiders. There are spiders everywhere these days.
Every known species seems to be spinning webs in the garden, or under
the eaves, or all over this room. Each morning I come in to find new
running, glinting lines tying everything together, the furniture to the
ceiling, the windows to the doors, the grandfather clock to the table on
which lies a pile of notes and sketches from this past year, my battered
copy of the play resting, in pride of place, on the top.