Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (7 page)

I argued that Mike Leigh was devising the play, that it was his responsibility, not mine, at which point David had suddenly lost patience and said,
`Well, all right, if that's how you prefer it. He's the artist, you're just the
actor. Passive and dumb.'

I reeled away from the encounter, stung and challenged by his honesty.
Later that evening I resolved to research in the future with a new
unsentimental rigour and ruthlessness, and thus reinstate myself as An
Artist ...

The Full Tea lives up to its name. I stagger back to the Barbican for
the evening show, several sizes larger than when I did the matinee. A
slight air of sadness in the dressing-room - it's Nigel Hawthorne's last
stage Tartuffe, although Bill is still hopeful of persuading him to do the
video.

The familiar routine. Put on the posing pouch, tights and smock. Into
the small lift, squeezed into a cocktail of characters from French literature,
Cyrano and Tartuffe, down six floors to The Pit (shedding Rostand's lot
along the way) where the Orgon household are gearing themselves up for
the first scene. Into the wings to do the Overture (an intoned Latin prayer
duelling with a frivolous harpsichord) and to sniff the audience. Back into
the lift, alone now. Always at this point, over the tannoy, Jacobi going
`Balloon, buffooon, baboooon'. Into the dressing-room and the long wait
now, almost an hour, for my first entrance: the most delayed first entrance
of an eponymous character in the whole of Drama - until Beckett wrote
Godot. Put on the wig and make-up. Warm up on a few speeches. Can't
help noticing in the mirror that he's here again: the long black wig together
with my own pointed nose have turned me into a first cousin of that
famous crookback.

Out into the corridor, stooping into character, having to go down the
stairs now, not the lift because it wouldn't have been invented yet,
muttering Ave Marias, winding the giant wooden rosary like a knuckleduster round one fist, settling into a pious creeping stalk ... Over the
tannoy, Cyrano has gone to visit some pastry chefs.

Into a corridor where neither show is relayed, imagining a silent crypt
now, drifting along close to the side, one hand trailing behind on the wall,
insect-like.

Through a door into a secret corridor, a back entrance to The Pit,
where Ali Steadman waits in character and we do a brief Mike Leigh
warm-up improvisation, never planned and never referred to, passing one
another slowly, her fan nervously fluttering, my sighs growing more and
more explicit.

Alone into Rehearsal Room One, adjoining The Pit, to do the distant
Ave Marias which will herald Tartuffe's first entrance; the room is a
surrealist's lair with dismembered giants strewn about, Louis XIV's head
from Moliere over here and those colossal boobs from Custom of the Country
over there.

I can smell incense being lit. My cue-light goes red, green, my nerves
go taut. Into the wings where John Tramper as Laurent, dressed and
bewigged identically to me, slides alongside mirroring my walk and stoop.
Stage-managers stand poised on either side of the curtains. We mark
time, all the while Ave Marias looping endlessly. Another green light.
They whip open the curtains, our marking time turns back into a walk
and we slope into the light ...

An excellent show. There's been a queue for returns all day so the
audience are even more enthusiastic than normal; their hysteria is quite
thrilling and occasionally catching. During the rape-on-the-dining-table
scene (or the inter-course intercourse) everything just stops for about
thirty seconds while Ali and I join the audience screaming with laughter.
A most peculiar event, breaking all the rules. The more we laugh, the
more they do. At last we struggle back on to the text and the audience
seems as shame-faced as we are for having misbehaved so badly, which
leads to further sporadic outbreaks.

Why is an actor's unintentional giggling called a `corpse'? It seems to
me quite the opposite. It proves that he's very much alive, and can still
tell how silly this all is: him dressed up as someone else speaking words
written by a third party.

Speaking of whom, Chris Hampton turns up in the dressing-room
afterwards, a little startled that his translation was subjected to that
unscheduled interruption, but since he spends much of life on the verge
of corpsing, not too bothered.

As we're leaving the theatre we pass a group of Cyrano players trooping
into the main lift which is huge; a neon-lit garage filled with Koltai's monochrome people. Black velvet and lace. White faces. The only colour:
some gold, and red tongues.

They look exhausted. It's 10.30 and they're only just starting Part
Three.

`Ta-ra, we're off to the pub,' I call into them.

'PISS OFF!' they yell in unison.

Chris giggles behind me.

`Have you seen it yet?' I ask.

`Life's too short to see Cyrano.'

KING'S HEAD PUB, BARBICAN Interesting discussion about the difficulties we had in rehearsal with Tartuffe. It's going to be excellent trying
it again now for the video, now that we trust the play more and our ability
to perform it. The problem with Moliere's writing is the deceptive thinness
of it. There's no poetry, no sub-text, just a very basic situation, like
sit-com. Chris says, `All there is is what is there, but that happens to be
brilliant.' He says the French find Shakespeare difficult for the opposite
reason. Why is he so oblique? they cry in Gallic confusion, why doesn't
he just say what he means?

Norma, a girl who works in the Stratford box-office, comes over and
says, `Congratulations. I hear you're coming back to play Richard the
Third.'

`Oh, but it's not definite.'

Chris leans in. `What was that?'

`Don't ask. It's a long story.'

OXFORD STREET A steady procession of Christmas shoppers: faces so
determined, so concentrated, round and round we go, the Hajj in Mecca.

Spot two disabled men and can't stop myself from staring. One has his
pelvis so twisted that his feet point away at ninety degrees from his torso.
Walks with two sticks. The impression is of a skier negotiating a difficult
turn.

Strange how, ever since Richard III was suggested, I keep crossing
paths with the disabled. Did I just not notice before or are there vibes at
work?

The other day in Euston Road, a dwarf dodging through the traffic,
one shoe massively built up like a clanging black anchor on his leg. He
reached a traffic island and shouted at the world. My car passed close.
The face was red, unshaven, in pain.

And yesterday, a black couple leaving the local church. Both young and
good-looking. In their Sunday best, but jazzy as well. He had one thin,
very withered leg and had to hobble along on the tip of that foot, in its
white patent-leather shoe. It made his walk seem even more dude-like.
She strolled at her normal pace, making no concession. He kept up with
her. They smiled at one another. After they passed, people stared.

SELFRIDGES 'Hello Tony.' David Hare, towering above me. He always
looks at me slightly sideways, as if not quite sure about me yet, and speaks
slightly from the corner of his mouth. 'Congratulations. I believe you're
playing Richard the Third.'

`Thank you, but it's not decided yet. Who told you?'

'Oh, someone . . .' He gestures vaguely, blaming a passing shopper,
and quickly changes the subject. 'I'm Christmas shopping for my kids.'

`I'm shopping for holiday presents. Going to South Africa on Sunday.'

`You're going to South Africa. Blimey.'

'I know. Very mixed feelings.' (I'm still doing it: apologising for where
I was born. Must stop.)

I ask him about his TV film Saigon, which has just been shown, and
he says, `Well, of course it's been mercilessly hammered by the critics.'

'Critics? But you don't read them.'

'Didn't use to.'

'Oh no. You're back on them?'

' 'Fraid so.'

I stare at him, shocked. Along with Jacobi and Peter Gill, David has
been a guru for me in my own new-found abstention.

`But . . .' I stammer, `... but ... when we did Teeth 'n Smiles, if anyone
so much as came near you with a newspaper, they took their life in their
hands.'

'I know . . .' he says, nostalgically.

`What made you start again?' Gently, as to an alcoholic.

'They get through somehow. So what's the point in not reading for
yourself? I mean, after Saigon someone phoned and said, "How d'you feel
about your battering?" I mean, you know, what does one do?'

Later at home it occurs to me that he's the second outsider to congratulate me on Richard III. Who's broadcasting it? Someone at the R S C
obviously regards it as a foregone conclusion that I'll do it.

Is it?

Bill phones. `God, Tony, I didn't realise you were leaving so soon. We
must meet. Tonight after the show?'

nt 0 LIE R E There is a moment at the beginning of the show when Moliere's
troupe are posed on the upper level, frozen in the backstage frenzy before
a curtain-call. On the back wall little cardboard cut-out chandeliers light
up through a red gauze, a sound effect of distant applause creeps in and a
cello starts to play. It is a low-budget, small-stage compromise for Bulgakov's spectacular description: `We can see the stage now from one of the
wings. Candles burn brightly in the chandeliers - we can't quite see the
auditorium, the nearest gilded box is empty, only sense the mysterious
watchful blue haze of the half darkened theatre.' Quite a sad compromise
really, but it always moves me. The tattiness and magic of theatre are very
close.

And the lunacy ... During a break in the show I stroll into the Green
Room. Caliban, wearing only a loincloth and red island mud, is contorted
over the pool table aiming a difficult shot. Elsewhere around the room,
Ariel's sprites sit reading the Standard or chatting to Louis XIV's musketeers.

Moliere finishes long before Tempest. I am showered and changed and
on my way out, heading down one of the long faceless corridors, when I
suddenly hear Jacobi over the tannoy:

'Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;

And ye that on the sands with printless foot

Do chase the ebbing Neptune ...'

It can stop you in your tracks, those words in that voice, make you put
your head back, close your eyes, and try, as with beautiful music, to hold
it a moment longer. Cocteau talks about the speed of beauty ...

I S L I N G T o N Bill comes back to the house to talk. Slot Five at The Other
Place is now a play by either Nicky Wright or Peter Barnes. Adrian would
direct - that's a plus. Bill wants to sound me out about both writers, but
I tell him I'm more interested in reading the plays in question. He says
these are still being written and he's not sure when there'll be anything
to read. I ask whether Richard could be moved later in the season to
enable me to do the Snoo Wilson film in the summer (Plaschkes has
almost got the money together). Bill thinks not, because of Roger Rees'
availability. He asks what plays I'm dying to do, suggesting we could make
a deal for the Barbican '85 season. I can't see how that would help a thin time in Stratford '84, but trot out the old favourite, Arturo Ui, which is
probably too close to Richard III to be a good double anyway.

Bill leaves with the obligatory, `Well, I'll go back and report.'

It is quite clear now - the offer is Richard III with one new play at The
Other Place, and that having to be taken on trust. So far from what I
wanted.

For the first time I think seriously about not doing Richard. Apart from
a vague notion that I could play the part, there hasn't been a single good
sign for the project. Friends give it a hearty thumbs-down, the RSC
appears not to want to employ me more than they absolutely have to.

Lie in bed unable to sleep, these same thoughts plodding round and
round the exercise yard. The darkness looks the same if you open or close
your eyes.

But I can't leave Richard alone. Driving with Jim; he puts on a tape of
Boris Godunov and the grotesque, baroque sounds instantly bring Richard
limping out into the light again. We talk about how, after he is crowned,
he could be carried around to this triumphant music. Borne aloft on a
bier, the Henry VI funeral bier, this black lump on a tray, deified.

And we talk about how he might get on rather well with the Princes.
He could mimic his deformity and act an ape (I'm thinking of Brando's
death scene with his grandchild in Godfather) to make them laugh. The
famous insult from young York (`little like an ape ... bear me on your
shoulders') is just part of their rapport; and so we by-pass the famous
moment from the film - the leering turn, shot from the child's point of
view. Only when they are gone does he show his true feelings for them.
Presumably a true psychopath behaves like that. Presumably Nilsen's
victims had no warning; they were sitting there happily drinking and
listening to music, he was smiling and chatting, making them feel pleased
to be there.

As the music thumps about in the car I become very inspired again. It
is more than just a notion that I could play the part. I know that I could
do something special with it.

And yet - the memory of last year in Stratford; one or two performances
a week, endless days and nights to fill in between.

What to do, what to do?

KING'S HEAD PUB, BARBICAN Pete Postlethwaite: eerie wisdom, eyes
like blue boulders.

`I hear you might do Dick the Shit. Be a very brave move, very
dangerous.'

`Really? I think it's type-casting.'

`Exactly. You can play the part standing on your head. But if you could
go past that stage, eschew all that, go beyond, surprise yourself, that would
be very dangerous. Worth travelling up to Stratford to see. Otherwise it'll
just be, "Oh Tony's playing Richard in Stratford, I don't need to go all
the way up there, I can just run it through in my head." It would be like
me playing Iago.'