Stephen Davis wrote his BBC play Busted, recorded in 1982 some months before The Barchester Chronicles and transmitted on 28 January 1983, for Alan and co-star Michael ‘Mickey’ Feast. It begins with a post-coital bedroom scene after Alan, playing a sulky-looking lawyer called Simon, has rung an old girlfriend up to suggest some lunch-time sex.
He’s living with a manipulative child-woman called Roxy, well played by a fey Sara Sugarman, who never listens to a word he says. So Simon is really in need of a sympathetic ear rather than a touch of the other. ‘I’m a bit fed-up,’ he glooms to his old flame.
Rickman is still wearing his medieval pudding-basin haircut, which makes him look rather like an overgrown schooboy. As ever, he is sexy and intriguing despite himself.
Simon is a barrister, a Chancery law specialist in tax whose rebellious past comes back to haunt him. He receives a midnight call for help from a Dave Spart character: his old friend Macy has been busted. Simon and the scapegrace Macy were socialist activists together, Treasurer and Secretary of ‘Soc Soc’ at Oxford University. The police have found Macy’s Derringer pistol on a spot street-search in a visit to an off-licence. ‘You were always so bloody childish,’ snaps Simon, exasperated by this unreconstructed rebel without a pause.
Simon leads a rather empty, unfulfilled life and envies Macy his primitive certainties. He discovers that Macy was planning to try to rob the off-licence, hence the gun. On a romantic, quixotic impulse that’s very much at odds with his training, Simon does a Sydney Carton (after the example of Dickens’ self-sacrificing anti-hero) and swaps clothes with Macy in his cell to enable his old brother-at-arms to escape. ‘They will bust you right back to the ranks,’ warns Macy. Yet there’s still an element of risk-taking left in Simon, which is what gives the drama tension – and also release – at the end.
He settles back on the cell bunk to await discovery, a smile of relief on his face. He has thrown off his Establishment shackles and found freedom – of sorts.
Simon’s air of self-containment suited Alan admirably, yet he also identified completely with that mad, quixotic urge.
‘Alan is a bit of a gravitational force – the universe tends to shape itself round him,’ says Stephen Davis. ‘I thought that the activists, the student radical Trotskyite Left, were superficial and half-baked when I was at Cambridge University. I was a sceptical leftist in the middle with Jeremy Paxman on the right wing of the Left – if you see what I mean.
‘I think that Simon would have been rescued by the Lord Chancellor in the end as a good man gone slightly bonkers. I was trying to write about that uncomfortable margin between ideologies and the various times of one’s life, about characters whose sense of themselves is confused.
‘There are nuances of distinction between Macy and Simon: Macy is a Manchester Grammar School type and Simon is Harrow. Essentially Simon is a Max Stafford-Clark type, very much in control.
‘A certain element in Alan’s success is genetic. If he didn’t have that timbre of voice . . . Actors are dependent on what nature gave them, that’s what they find out.’
Despite the bedroom scene with the old girlfriend (who was rather jeeringly known as Sociology Sara), Simon was hardly an overtly sexy character. He was one of those men that you would have to work hard to arouse, so overwhelming was his sense of ennui. On the other hand, women do respond to a challenge.
The seductive voice got the biggest reaction of all: it made him a radio star. Alan told Peter Barnes that he received more letters from teenaged girls for the role of a decadent Caesar on BBC Radio than for any other performance. Proof at last that the hypnotic drawl was working its caustic magic.
The work in question was Peter Barnes’ free and witty adaptation of the Spanish playwright Lope De Vega’s drama Lo Fingido Verdadero, translated as Actors – or Playing For Real. Actors was recorded in 1982 and transmitted on 3 April 1983. It began in the reign of the Roman Emperor Aurelius, the year AD 257. The cast was led by Denis Quilley, Timothy West, the late Harold Innocent. Alan’s old RADA chum Tina Marian and Peter Woodthorpe.
Alan was cast as Aurelius’s older son Carinus, a vigorous debaucher of senators’ wives and vestal virgins (he particularly liked to defile property that was out of bounds). Lucky for him that lightning burns Aurelius to a crisp during a storm; he is found with his face blackened and his finger-ends still smoking.
So Carinus becomes the new Caesar, despite the fact that his life’s work is ‘Lust, sir, lust’. As he says disdainfully, ‘Keep me from older women.’ He goes only for the young ones in order to make absolutely sure he is soiling the goods.
‘You begin to tire me,’ he says to his mistress Rosada, sounding very jaded. Hubris looms, however. ‘We are almost equal to the gods,’ he says, using the royal ‘we’ as if suffering from delusions of Thatcher.
‘I’m changeable as quicksilver. All Rome is open, waiting for my pleasure,’ he adds in those languorous, caressing, insolent tones.
When an actor is ushered into his presence to perform in a play by Aristotle, Carinus shrieks: ‘I’ve had enough of actors . . . I want women. Kill the husband and rape the wife.’ Rickman throws himself like a mad abseiler into the role.
A cuckold whose wife was ravished by Carinus turns up to remonstrate with him, complaining: ‘You told everyone, which was worse.’
Carinus is hardly about to deny it, and Rickman’s voice shrieks with sarcasm. ‘I did, I have SUCH a naughty wagging tongue. I grow bored. There is a suffocating stench of morality in the air.’
The cuckold, an outraged senator called Lelius, promptly adds to the stench by stabbing him in the guts. ‘You have killed Caesar,’ gasps Carinus.
‘What a tragedy. I acted my role when Caesar, now I exit from the dirty theatre of the world. Take off the laurel crown of this actor king.’ His mistress weeps over him, for no one else will.
‘He’s here for me now, fierce Death . . . what power can match yours? No one escapes you . . . not even kings,’ he murmurs in a moment of sudden self-awareness that very nearly steals our sympathy. Others would have camped it up to the hilt – and the actor playing his servant Celio is pure Kenneth Williams – but not Rickman. He resists the temptation.
Radio was a great release, particularly for one who was so self-conscious about his looks. As his former co-star Sheridan Fitzgerald says: ‘This is a lookist business.’
Rickman has subsequently recorded a total of eleven radio dramas, among them productions of Blood Wedding and The Seagull . . . though you will listen out in vain for his voice-overs on lucrative TV commercials. He’s too principled – and too recognisable.
The Obadiah Slope effect had given his confidence a huge boost, so much so that he had begun to gravitate towards directing. He had taken control of Desperately Yours, a one-woman show by his friend Ruby Wax, which played off-Broadway for a short season back in 1980. Although Wax didn’t leave the RSC for another two years of playing wenches, the show was the beginning of Ruby’s new career as a comedian with her own lines, rather than as an actress reciting someone else’s. By 1985, Alan was making guest appearances in Girls On Top, the new ITV series that Ruby had co-written with fellow comedians Dawn French and the future Absolutely Fabulous writer Jennifer Saunders.
Having undertaken this new Svengali role, Alan felt he needed a crash-course in gurudom, which was how he became an assistant director to his friend Richard Wilson for a production of Robert Holman’s play Other Worlds at London’s Royal Court Theatre in May 1983. In the theatre, Richard is thought of more as a director than as an actor (the reverse is true, of course, for his TV and film). Yet all his expertise couldn’t prevent Other Worlds, an ambitious epic set during the Napoleonic era, from being a flop.
‘Alan was Richard’s idea,’ says Holman. ‘Alan kept saying he wanted to direct, but then he didn’t. But he was heavily involved in the casting: Juliet Stevenson, for example, was in it because Alan cast her.
‘He wasn’t a lackey; Alan will never be anyone
’s lackey. He took rehearsals on his own and Richard didn’t mind, because Richard is the kind of person who is in full control of his ego.
‘Fundamentally Alan doesn’t tolerate fools. Some people do that with silence; he does it with contempt. You need ego to do that; I suspect he would show his contempt abundantly now.
‘He’s very rigorous on a script. On the script for Other Worlds, he crossed out the adverbs “happily” and “sadly” and said: “You can’t put actors in strait-jackets”. He’s absolutely right: it’s for actors to find the way to play it. He wasn’t afraid to trample on my sensibilities if he thought his point was valid.
‘I’m not good at changing stuff,’ admits Robert. ‘I play a waiting game. I wait for them to see my point of view. Alan always saw my point of view in the end. If he understands what you’re saying, he’s loyal to a fault.
‘At the time, Other Worlds was the most expensive play the Court had ever done. It was a magnificent set built by the people who did 2001: A Space Odyssey. Alan was very loyal and stuck with his own opinion. It had the worst attendance figures ever for the Court; and it was savaged by the critics. Then there was a rearguard action in the Press; it wasn’t orchestrated, I had nothing to do with it. There were letters to the Guardian in defence of it.
‘I had severed a tendon in my hand after cutting my finger; I came out of hospital, saw the first night and then went back in. At the time I was annoyed by the criticism; but I have no lasting grudge. It’s the actors who have to do it night after night, and you have to support them. In the scheme of things, plays are not the be-all and end-all. They are not life and death. You take bad reviews with good reviews.
‘But Alan is a perfectionist. He is driven because of that. I suspect he is as hard on himself as he is on everyone else,’ observes Yorkshire-born Robert, mulling things over in his soft Alan Bennett voice.
‘I always found him very interesting as an actor. I wrote a BBC film about the poet Edward Thomas for Alan . . . it was never made. We had various arguments about the director, then there was talk of Alan directing it. Had it gone ahead, Juliet Stevenson would have played the wife.
‘Thomas was a loner who suffered from deep melancholy. His life was quite harsh. He married a younger woman, they had this spartan cottage in Hampshire near Bedales and grew their own veg. He would leave her with the children and have affairs, disappear without telling her.
‘Alan would have been very good at that melancholia. People who think a lot, as Alan has, to a degree need their own space. I suspect Alan is quite spacious in that way.
‘And I suspect that’s why Alan has given directors a hard time. He was debating whether to become a director, what sort of work he was going to do as an actor and whether he wanted to be a star. All those things are slightly incompatible. As a star, you have control over what you do, but you’re limited in what you do.
‘Alan’s performance is all behind the eyes, in a way. He can be his own rigorous person within the confines of a slightly daft movie like Die Hard.
‘There’s a degree of conceit in Alan, behind those eyes, and conceit is sexy. It’s not arrogance, but it’s a sort of rigorous conceit.
‘His sense of humour is very droll. I think he’s too spacious to be an actor; I can see why he’s not completely satisfied with acting. Even with the directing, he would want more. He would be wanting to do everything, including the publicity.
‘During Other Worlds, he said to me: “Your writing’s on the line.” In other words, there’s no doubt in the actors’ minds when they say something; they have already thought it. So you have to think hard between the lines, between the full stops. He was the first person ever to say that. The thoughts spring fully-formed; you can’t be half-hearted.
‘Theatre has an air of unreality; it’s heightened reality. There’s a suspension of disbelief. Theatre is about how you get people on stage and keep them there. And then the characters can’t get off because of some emotional need. The trick is to keep them there, to sustain the scene. Why do those characters have to stay in that box? Alan understood that.
‘It’s a pity the Edward Thomas film never got made. It was written in 1987 and I was paid for it, but this was around the time when Alan was flirting with Hollywood and then agreed to do Die Hard.
‘But I’m quite well balanced, I don’t go in for troughs of anguish or highs. I suspect Alan would be very good if someone were throwing a wobbly. He is a political animal, and that grounds him.
‘He would have been good at running Riverside Studios; he would have given the Board a run for its money. And I think he would be formidable if he went into politics. But I don’t know if he would be diplomatic enough. He’s undiplomatic about saying what he thinks. He’s an actor, he shows off,’ explains Robert. ‘He wouldn’t be a tough director like John Dexter was; he would care about the actors. Essentially, he’s one of the good guys. He only plays bad guys because of his comic ability.’
Poor old Other Worlds did receive some good reviews, but most were along the lines of the Daily Telegraph’s withering intro: ‘If you ever felt you didn’t know enough about the rivalry of fishermen and farmers on the North Yorkshire coast in the late eighteenth century, go to the Royal Court Theatre immediately.’
The right-wing Spectator thought it ‘a three-hour bore’, while the left-wing Tribune considered it ‘long, measured and thoughtful . . . holds you till the last minute.’ Charlie Spencer in the London Evening Standard, while deploring ‘a perplexing and ultimately irritating enigma’, conceded that ‘there is a compassionate feeling for the strength as well as the weakness of human nature, of ordinary people’s longing for other and better worlds.’
But there wasn’t time to brood: another radio success came to Rickman’s rescue. He had renewed his connection with Peter Barnes for the latter’s adaptation of John Marston’s play The Dutch Courtesan, transmitted by Radio 3 on 19 June 1983.
Once again Rickman was cast as a sexpot, his extraordinarily insinuating voice perfect for the role of the impudent chancer Cockledemoy. He robs Roy Kinnear as the inn-keeper Mulligrub for pure devilment, and lusts after every woman within reach. His lechery is presented as a comic counterpoint to the main story, wherein a seductive Dutch courtesan holds both the hero and his Puritanical best friend in thrall. As ever, Alan walks off with the show despite being part of the sub-plot.
Cockledemoy has a bawd, whom he bullies and calls ‘My worshipful organ-bellows, my right precious pandaress, necessary damnation’ (they really knew how to curse in those days).
Even Rickman’s coughs are instantly recognisable and heavily pregnant with meaning, signalling the crafty approach of Cockledemoy. ‘There’s a smooth thigh, the nimble devil in her buttock,’ he says of one ‘punk’ (tart), singing a carefree snatch of song in his smooth tenor.
Cockledemoy assumes a variety of disguises in order to outwit Master Mulligrub; and the range of accents here shows astonishing versatility from one who is so often thought of as a one-voice actor. He begins with a camp Scottish accent, straight out of Morningside, when he poses as a Scots barber called Andrew Shark.
Then he disguises himself as a French pedlar and languidly addresses Mulligrub as ‘Merseeyur’. ‘Turd on a tilestone!’ is his muttered description of the unfortunate Mulligrub as he plans a raid upon his property. ‘Conscience does not repine. I hold it as lawful as sheep-shearing; I must have the new goblet.’
Rickman then metamorphoses into a Mummerset peasant to annex the aforesaid goblet, gulling Mulligrub’s wife. And he even gets to grope the Dutch courtesan: ‘There’s a plump-rumped wench! Kiss, fair whore, kiss. It’s yours if you come to bed. Hump ’em, plump ’em, squat, I’m gone!’
There’s more unbridled lechery when we hear Cockledemoy’s haw-haw guffaw, as filthy as Leslie Phillips’ snickers in The Navy Lark.
He sings a drunken song as he pretends to be a night-watchman. ‘Maids on their backs dream of sweet smacks. I fiddle him till he farts,’ he adds of
Mulligrub. Cockledemoy reverts to the Mummerset accent, promising, ‘I’ll make him fart firecrackers before I have done with him. My knavery grows unequalled.’
Another disguise has Cockledemoy very plausibly impersonating an Irish sergeant at the foot of the gallows, picking the unfortunate victim’s pocket. Eventually he reveals himself as a master of disguise, the Moriarty of Jacobean drama.
‘All has been done for wit’s sake. I bid myself welcome to your merry nuptials and most wanton jig-a-joggies,’ he adds, inviting himself to a wedding. And Rickman speaks the epilogue too, saying that we may scorn such trivial wit . . . but cannot hope to better it. It’s a virtuoso vocal performance. More than any other medium, radio freed Alan Rickman of all his uptight inhibitions as he allowed his instinctive sensuality free rein. No wonder Caesar had such an effect on those schoolgirls.
Sex was again the driving force when Alan returned to the theatre that August to play a bisexual Cambridge don in his old friend Dusty Hughes’ play Bad Language at Hampstead Theatre.
Milton Shulman wrote in the London Evening Standard: ‘Played by Alan Rickman as a world-weary ringmaster with a cageful of frisky animals, he keeps a wary eye on [the undergraduates] while carrying on literary feuds, furthering his own ambitions and having short-lived affairs with students of either sex.’ In short, the kind of amoral seducer that Rickman was to make famous.
‘Alan Rickman plays this lecherous rascal with chilling power and a shiversome disgust . . . in his snarling self-absorption,’ wrote Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph, fascinated yet repelled. That mixed response would become a common reaction.
‘Alan Rickman invests [Bob] with enough reptilian charm to explain his intellectual and sexual sway over his coterie of students,’ was Rosalind Carne’s verdict in the Guardian. Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph was snider: ‘There is a tellingly acrid performance from Alan Rickman as the sort of arrogant, self-regarding don who has a mysterious attraction for his pupils of either sex.’
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