As usual we did a mix of challenging plays and light comedies during the summer and fall. We continued to explore ways to bring a greater sense of reality to the work. We were young, ambitious, and youthfully arrogant but one day it all broke down. We had just opened the American comedy The Gazebo, and we were about to start rehearsals for a dreadful British comedy, The Amorous Prawn, a play that seemed to turn all decency and morality on its head all in the interest of a few laughs.
Meantime, Veronica was about to leave for Zermatt, Switzerland, for the winter. She and I were an item by now and I was good friends with her parents as well. While playing a lot of bridge, I learned drinking habits that have stayed with me to this day. Drink gin, a light drink, before dinner, and Scotch, a heavier drink, after dinner. (We didn’t drink wine then; now that wine is part of the mix as well it does add up to quite a lot of alcohol.) To see her off, I drove to Edinburgh, a two-hour drive (there was no road bridge across the River Tay in 1962), after the opening performance of The Gazebo, and joined her and her parents at a hotel near the airport. We saw Veronica off at the airport at the crack of dawn; sleepless and emotionally exhausted I drove back to Dundee in time for the 10 a.m. rehearsal.
There was only one problem. I was the only one there. The stage manager finally showed up about 10:30. Even the always punctual Hannah Gordon didn’t arrive until 11. As for the less dependable Clive Graham and David Calderisi, I think we finally dragged them in about noon. It seems there had been a very successful opening night party in my absence. And I guess their interest in doing The Amorous Prawn was no greater than mine. (Jack had chosen the play — it had had a very successful London run.) My whole life had fallen apart. My girlfriend had left for six months and my acting company was in tatters. I don’t remember what I said to the company once they were all there, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. I sent them all home and said we would start rehearsals the following Monday, lines learned and on time. And we did. It was a very snappy production, one of the best of the season.
Some time in the fall Jack Henderson announced he would not continue as director of the theatre after Christmas. Where had I seen this movie before? A pattern was developing in my career. First at Chesterfield, now at Dundee, it would happen three more times. Within a few months of my arrival the person who hired me would announce their departure. I really don’t think it was me; I think it was serendipity. But it would have profound implications for my future, sometimes good, sometimes not so. Once again my future was in doubt. Not only was I really enjoying the work, but for the first time in several years I was living in ski country. Despite my first experience of Scottish skiing, I was looking forward to the season when the winter snows would fall somewhere near a ski lift. I didn’t know then that they would fall and fall. Not only would we have to climb to the bottom of the lift, we would have to climb from half a mile down the road. And I was looking forward to Veronica’s return in the spring.
What now? Once again I would apply for the top job. This time the job stayed open. Jack did leave and joined the contract department of the BBC. Why would you do that when you could run a major rep company? Jack had five young children and wanted the job security, an almost laughable concept now, but quite realistic then. And so I did indeed take over. The theatre would now be run by its Artistic Director rather than its manager, or so I thought.
I had ambitious plans. The Board was onside for a major upgrade of the interior design of the theatre; supervised by a local architect, the theatre was redesigned in reds and blacks, a bold look that made the auditorium feel more like a theatre. But more important for my personal goals, we expanded the artistic philosophy I had worked towards in the fall. I wanted to create a true ensemble with shared goals, dynamic interplay on stage, and artistic growth for each actor in a resident company. We made a good start before external forces interfered. I instituted classes before rehearsals, in movement, voice, and improvisation. I invited Kristin Linklater — before she conquered North America — to work with the company for a week. The improv classes were designed to get the actors really talking to each other and working off each other. Under the pressures of the season not all the class work survived, but the intention of the work did. Most of the company remained with us. Pamela and Brian left. Irene — yes that Irene — joined us early in the winter.
Our first production, A Man for All Seasons, was a highlight for me. I wonder if it was as good as I remember. Maybe. Clive Graham played Sir Thomas More with great dignity, supported by Susan Williamson and Hannah Gordon as mother and daughter. Maurice Podbrey was the Common Man and young Brian Cox made a strong presence in a smaller role. Roper was played by Jeremy Clyde, who would go on to fame and fortune as half of Chad and Jeremy. Possibly most interesting of all, though, was David Calderisi as Cromwell, a part Bolt, the author, himself described as thankless. Cromwell is the villain of the piece, but on the first day of rehearsal as I was giving some character ideas and described him as such, David stopped me. I wanted David, who was aquiline and athletic, to use those qualities to create a clear and dangerous presence. David resisted. He didn’t want to play a villain. He had been reading Machiavelli — as had Cromwell — and wanted to play him as a positive force, to really get behind his point of view. The result was dynamic and thrilling. Instead of a play about a hero destroyed by evil forces, it became a conflict of world views and power. The climactic scene of the play is the trial of More prosecuted by Cromwell. Clive and David played the scene with such commitment, such determination to win, I never knew from night to night who would be the victor. Of course, More’s head would fall every night, but who would win the audience sympathy? An object lesson. Play to win. Whether hero or villain.
Mulder, watch out. Here comes the Smoking Man.
Now that the theatre would be run by a director rather than a manager, I needed to engage someone to be the manager. And here I managed to make two mistakes in one. At the time in Canada, the term Artistic Director clearly denoted the person at the helm of a theatre, the person to whom everyone else reports, including a general manager. Even in Canada now, that delineation is no longer clear and we have titles like CEO or Managing Producer or Artistic Managing Director. Anxious to have the artistic title, prestigious in my mind at least, I gave myself the title of Artistic Director. I was happy that the new manager would call himself — yes, him, I don’t think any women applied — Manager. Busy as I was both overseeing the renovations and mounting our opening production, A Man for All Seasons, I did not pay close attention to the preparing of the theatre program. I was somewhat taken aback when I did see it and saw that while indeed I did have top billing, our new manager was now General Manager and in type as prominent as mine. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. Perhaps I should have.
My other error was choice. I engaged David S., let’s just call him that. A red-haired red-faced charmer, I had first met David when we both applied to direct the theatre at Carlyle. He got that job. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention as to why, several months later, he was again job hunting. But his résumé was good, our meeting productive and congenial, and so began a series of poor appointments I would make over the next several years, possibly affecting my future in a number of ways. My appointments weren’t all bad; I did make some good ones. Indeed it is surprising how much David S. looked like Christopher Banks, my general manager for three years at Lennoxville and one of my better appointments, as a more honest and loyal colleague would be hard to find.
But there was little time to ‘watch my back’; I had a season to be getting on with and goals to achieve. I gave Maurice his first directing assignment, the farce Simple Spymen, which he handled well, his work with Brian Rix in London standing him in good stead. We followed that with The Rainmaker, with Sutherland originally cast in the Burt Lancaster role. Sutherland’s size and innocence would have been wonderful in the part, but unfortunately yet another film opportunity intervened. David Calderisi stepped in and did a workmanlike job in th
e part for which he was not a natural.
We followed Rainmaker with my wonderful production of Uncle Vanya. Maurice played Vanya, exploiting his bear-like charm; Clive was Astrov, exploiting his pride and good looks; Susan Williamson was a wonderful Sonya; and Calderisi was a splendidly pompous, self-centred egotist as Soliony. Well, I thought the production was wonderful. We truly revealed the underlying pain of the characters, captured the mood, the rhythm, and music of the piece. The audience was a touch restless; the review was mixed. At the time one could only put this reaction down to the lack of sophistication of the audience. We knew we had hit a home run. Hmm.
Many months later I saw the National Theatre production of Uncle Vanya at the Old Vic. I had seen their first iteration of this production on the arena stage at Chichester. The cast included Laurence Olivier as Astrov, Michael Redgrave as Vanya, and Joan Plowright as Sonya. What I remember most about the Chichester production were the tears flowing down Redgrave’s face during Sonya’s final speech. He was in shadow and facing upstage; probably only a sliver of the audience could see him, yet he was giving himself totally to the moment and to the other actor. But it was the remount at the Old Vic that finally clarified Norman Ayrton’s comment to us at LAMDA about wearing our hearts on our sleeves in The Three Sisters. What an arrogant young man I must have been. As I watched these A-list actors race through the first scene, I smugly commented to myself that they certainly don’t get this scene, not going at that speed. Oh, a moment. Oh, maybe they did get it. But then they were charging off into the next scene. Well, they might have got the first scene, but they are lost in this one. Oh, maybe not. Another moment. And so it went, each scene carrying us along, revealing itself briefly, and on to the next until by the end of the play the entire audience was in tears, including me. What did I learn? If you telegraph to the audience that something sad is about to happen they will protect themselves. If you want them to be moved you have to surprise them. If you play the problem, as we would later learn to say, you will bore them. If you play the actions that are fighting the problem, you will draw them in.
We followed Uncle Vanya with some pretty good productions: Pygmalion, Picnic — Maurice was wonderful as the lonely bachelor — The Rehearsal, and we had an exciting production of The Caretaker with David Calderisi and Dan MacDonald underway when everything came tumbling down, literally.
But first some background. Which may or may not be relevant. A few days earlier I was in my office, the dingy backstage affair that formerly I had shared with Jack, when the secretary, Bunty, appeared at the door. Bunty was the middle-aged woman who had been Jack’s secretary and whose Dundee accent had been almost unintelligible to me at first. This shy, almost retiring, woman had the unexpected hobby of target-shooting and had won many awards for her marksmanship. Her office was at the front of the theatre next to the manager’s while mine was backstage. Fiercely loyal, yet terribly concerned to be respectful of her position, she appeared uncharacteristically awkward as she stood in my door. I invited her in. What she had to tell me was clearly difficult and she apologized for not speaking to me sooner. In short, she had two things to tell me about David S. Through lunches and private meetings it appeared that he was promoting himself with the chairman of the Board at my expense. At the same time he was neglecting the job he was supposed to be doing; she had numerous examples, including finding long overdue bills at the bottom of a drawer. Torn between conflicting loyalties she had finally decided that her overall loyalty was to me.
Now what? I was not prepared for a political battle and clearly I had been blindsided. What were the issues, I wondered, that had been presented to the Chairman in David S.’s favour? Attendance was good, reviews were good, but still it could be argued that the season was not sufficiently popular. Had I overreached with Chekhov, Shaw, and Anouilh? Was I pursuing goals the Board did not share? I phoned the chairman, George Geddes, not a man I had ever been relaxed with, and arranged a meeting for late afternoon the coming Saturday.
Saturday came. We had an excellent rehearsal of The Caretaker in the morning, then broke for lunch before the matinee of The Rehearsal in the afternoon. I was scheduled to meet Geddes at 5 p.m. Some of us went for lunch at the Chrome Rail as we often did on a Saturday when we were feeling flush, payday being Friday. After lunch I started the drive back to the theatre, but the roads were blocked. One of the actresses saw my car and, tears streaming down her face, called out, “The theatre is on fire!” And so it was. Smoke and fire engines were everywhere. I ditched my car and forced my way through the crowd of onlookers. The theatre was ablaze, beyond hope of saving, my dreams for now — up in smoke.
Fortunately no one was hurt, the company being on lunch, and being Saturday the building underneath was unoccupied. When the smoke settled the building was completely destroyed, save for the pictures of the acting company which were somehow, ironically and heroically, still standing in the wreckage of the foyer.
Needless to say, my meeting with the Chairman did not happen. Had I been blindsided again or was the fire purely coincidental? How it started was never determined. Would David S. have gone so far as to burn down the theatre to forward his ambitions or perhaps to protect himself? Certainly Bunty had given me considerable evidence of his basic incompetence. Is this conspiracy thinking? After all, coincidences do happen. Or am I not being paranoid enough? He burned the theatre down just to get me.
At heart, I really think it was just bad luck. But one can’t help wondering. The aftermath certainly played out in David S.’s favour. Although we were able to get a temporary location for a few weeks in a local movie theatre, the Board cancelled the production of The Caretaker, deeming it insufficiently commercial. We did go ahead with a rather dull production of a rather dull play that was current at the time, The Aspern Papers, which Maurice directed. After that we mounted two productions in a tent in a local park. We planned an outdoor production of Macbeth on the facade of Glamis Castle itself. A theatrical extravaganza, we had lined up local cavalry and pipe bands, a tent in case it rained, and Calderisi to play the Thane. But just before firm commitments had to be made, the Board cancelled the project. And then they cancelled me.
In its wisdom, the Board decided they needed someone with “more experience” and guess who that turned out to be. Any details I gave them now suggesting David S.’s lack of competence would only be seen as sour grapes. My dreams for a new kind of theatre were, quite literally, in ashes.
In the arrogance of youth had I been too ambitious? Had I tried to create a theatre appropriate perhaps for a large urban centre, but not really what was wanted in a small provincial town? Were we just not good enough? Or in my enthusiasm to create theatre had I blindly ignored politics? Whatever the reasons, the loss of the theatre was a huge setback, both to my prospects and my confidence. What was I to do? Where was I to live? Not only had I lost a terrific creative opportunity, I had lost the opportunity to work in the only town in Britain with a theatre and access to skiing. Now that really hurt. And Veronica lived in Dundee. The situation was truly bleak.
Nothing for it, back to London.
London
While I wasn’t finished with British rep, London would be my base for the next two years and a few months. Once again a place to live had to be found, a task complicated by lack of funds on the one hand and marriage on the other. Veronica and I were to be married in December.
Ever since that first fateful lunch a trajectory had been laid down leading eventually to a wedding. True, Veronica went off to Zermatt for six months while I was in Dundee, but I visited, along with her parents I have to add, at Christmas. Typhoid struck the resort soon after and Veronica was sent home in quarantine to be visited only by those with typhoid vaccinations, which I soon acquired. For the life of me I cannot recall when we finally had sex though I confess I do remember that while Veronica was in Zermatt an attractive, upper middle class, blonde woman, Allison, would come by my apartment from time to time. Right up until two weeks before h
er wedding. I sometimes wonder how that marriage worked out.
For Veronica and me I located a tiny flat on the fifth floor of an old house in Notting Hill Gate. Red, everything about the flat seemed to be red, but at least the bedspread was white. A cozy hideaway, it had a tiny living room with a double bed at one end, the usual electric fire, and a bathtub in the kitchen. The shared bathroom was down a half flight of stairs, but at least it was indoors. Nothing like five flights of stairs to keep one in good shape in those days before one went to a gym. Going for a run would have been equally weird in 1963. The parks that are now full of joggers were then full of lovers, many young people having nowhere else to go.
Veronica still lived with her parents in Monifieth, a few miles east of Dundee. Her parents, Bill and Wilna, shared a large well maintained house with their two children — Roderick was younger than Veronica and often away at school — and four dogs, or was it five? Bill owned and managed a large department store in Dundee, but as I have mentioned elsewhere would not flaunt his success by driving an expensive car, though his Sunbeam Rapier was tons of fun to drive. I spent many happy hours in their warm, inviting home — Sunday lunches of roast mutton in the renovated kitchen, walks on the beach along the Tay, endless games of bridge, tea in the afternoon, gin early evening, Scotch after dinner — and all of us smoking except Bill, who had to quit because of circulation issues. Trim and distinguished, Bill returned to smoking a few years later, which probably contributed to his premature death. Wilna, who never did quit smoking, was also severely overweight, both factors likely influencing her early demise as well.
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 15