Radio had given him unparalleled opportunities, but he was still coming up against the prejudice of people who couldn’t see his peculiar, offbeat allure.
Rickman’s strong sense of style set the pace in The Grass Widow, which Alan began work on immediately after Bad Language. ‘Alan was always the first choice for Dennis,’ said Snoo Wilson. ‘He has a genius for doing everything and yet nothing, which I’d seen him do in Dusty Hughes’s Commitments. In The Grass Widow, his character Dennis is trying to hold things together: he’s peaceful but that doesn’t mean to say he’s not opportunistic. There was a dreamy quality to the play which I think Alan got very well; this is a lazy man’s fantasy of romance.’ The first night was a famously jinxed one at the time, though it’s fair to record that Snoo now can’t recall it being more problematic than any other production. There was one cherishable moment, however, when Alan’s co-star Tracey Ullman turned to the audience when the lights blew and said: ‘At least there’s something in this that’ll make you laugh.’
Milton Shulman in the London Evening Standard found the characters ‘. . . as weird, disconnected and violent as a drug addict’s dream’. But he was impressed by the way that ‘Alan Rickman lolls with indolent ease among all these surrealist and scabrous images and chatter’.
But it was The Lucky Chance at the Royal Court in 1984, which reunited him with his actress friend Harriet Walter, that led directly to the role which changed the entire course of his career. Jules Wright launched her Women’s Playhouse Trust (later known diplomatically as the WPT because of all the nuisance phone-calls from heavy breathers) with this rarely-produced play by the Restoration playwright, Aphra Behn.
Alan was cast as a lustful adventurer called Gayman, the kind of name that really doesn’t travel well down the centuries. His rows with Jules over who was to run Riverside were still nine years away; her only battle here was over her unexpected choice of leading man.
‘People said to me, “Why are you casting Alan Rickman as Gayman! He’s so laid-back and contained.” People have a strong perception of Alan as someone who sits back,’ says Jules. ‘But he has this tremendous range and he’s not really been given that chance on stage. Alan is a really intelligent man, and so sensual. He’s a complete maverick. People had stereotyped ideas about him, they didn’t think that he could lead from the front and galvanise. But I knew absolutely that he could.
‘I was 35 when I directed him in The Lucky Chance; I didn’t then realise that he was nearly 40. In retrospect, that explains a lot. He even asked the stage manager Jane Salberg about me: “Do you think she knows what she’s doing?” We had a couple of big rows, though he was very open. Mind you, Harriet Walter was also quite stubborn in rehearsal (Jules mimes stamping her foot and laughs). She was also incredibly bright, like him, and inevitably there were disagreements between them.
‘We had a very short rehearsal period of four weeks. Alan said to me at the run-through, “There’s a scene we haven’t rehearsed.” I said, “Who’s in it?” And he said, “Just me.” He laughed; so did I. It was about four lines – just him on stage. I suggested he pick up a candelabra and wend his way across the stage. He was impish, imaginative, he retained that playfulness and it was magical at every performance. He’s a very game actor. His strength is that he still has incredible playfulness, fuelled by energy. He’s quite an unEnglish actor, really. He would be just right for an Ingmar Bergman stage production – he fits into that. And a Woody Allen film. He’s so funny and dry, yet that dryness is sometimes seen as throwing lines away.
‘One row I had with him in The Lucky Chance was about him moving other actors around. Both Alan and I came to the theatre relatively late; I was 30 when I first started. We had had a hard week with two performances on Saturday; I was moving house on Sunday.
‘I picked up the review in the Observer and I shouldn’t have; I felt terribly upset. It said that it was not a feminist reading of the play, that it lacked political depth. I was inexperienced, even though I’d just had a huge success with Masterpieces that had transferred to the Court from the Royal Exchange. I was terribly hurt by the review. I think reviews are sometimes unnecessarily cruel, especially about actors.
‘On Monday I had a big note-session with the actors in the stalls of the Court. Alan hit the roof and said, “Don’t give me notes out of a Sunday review. We made this production together.” We really bellowed at each other, and Harriet cried. He was right. Collectively we had made those decisions about the production, and he was very angry.
‘I looked up to the Dress Circle and the entire staff of the building were peeping through the curtains . . . everyone enjoying the row. Especially Max Stafford-Clark,’ says Jules of the then Artistic Director at the Court.
‘But Alan you can take the mickey out of . . . With him, laughter is never far below the surface. He’s very daunting; because he’s a very bright man, directors feel threatened and don’t take him on. If you don’t take him on, he can be dour.
‘Alan always works very hard, and a lot of actors don’t. He comes with a very profound understanding of the material, and people probably find that difficult.
‘He’s a very generous person, and not just on stage. He’s an actor who really makes a point of seeing other people’s work. When someone has established himself in the way that he has, it really matters to other actors that he does this. They really want to know what he thinks of their work. The only other person I know who does that is Alan Bates. It’s to do with being confident and uncompetitive. Not that Alan does it in a measured way; he’s not a patronising person. He’s very honest and disarming.
‘He has a great sexuality and charisma on stage. Terribly sexy, to put it bluntly. I don’t know whether he knows it. He’s certainly always had a lot of women friends. In my experience, there are not many men who are not at some point patronising to women. Alan Rickman is never that.’
It seems an extraordinary paradox that, for someone so sexually constant in his private life, Rickman should be so successful at playing sexual predators. His narcissistic instincts revel in portraying manipulative show-offs; but his particular secret of flirting with danger is to give his vile seducers a superhuman self-control. He always knows how to leave an audience wanting more; it appeals to the dry wit and curious whimsicality of his nature.
Far from being just another boring old bed-hopper who enables us to read the washing instructions on his Y-fronts, Rickman’s studied performances celebrate and prolong the noble art of foreplay. They hark back to an earlier age when sex on screen was implicit rather than explicit: cleverly, he appeals most of all to the imagination, refreshing our jaded modem senses. The lady-killing image he projects is in fact a fascinating throwback to the sneering Sir Jaspers of the barnstorming melodramas and Gothic novels, the so-called ‘shilling shockers’ whose influence lived on in the black-and-white films Alan saw as a boy.
‘I’ve never heard on the grapevine that he’s ever had an affair. I have always seen his relationship with Rima as incredibly solid. They always seemed to me secure and close; it’s a good relationship,’ says Jules.
‘And yet he was so brilliant and funny as this sexual predator Gayman. He was overcome by love and wanted to be smuggled into Harriet’s bed; the audience were dying with laughter at that great lolling body. I really hoped he would win Best Actor for it, but he didn’t.
‘Yet I was really amazed by that outburst in Sloane Square, when he suddenly said to me at two in the morning after a meal, “Nothing’s ever going to happen for me. No one will ever notice me. My career isn’t going to go anywhere.”
‘He is shy, rather diffident. But he’s a hard person to praise, because he gives the impression of being quite secure. His measured way of talking may seem pompous to some people. When on the few occasions that guard was let down, I felt startled by it.
‘He genuinely didn’t know how good he is. He doesn’t look the vulnerable type, so people don’t praise him directly. He waits for them to app
roach him . . . He’s hard to pin down in terms of what he wants.
‘What struck me was that his Gayman evolved into the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It was almost the same costume – the cut of the coat especially. Alan really can wear clothes and he’s not fearful on stage. That rent-a-rake sexual being was there in Valmont.
‘There’s always something quintessentially him there in every performance – he always uses a bit of himself. Character actors do transform themselves. He doesn’t. So he’s not really a character actor.’
True, the Observer’s Michael Ratcliffe had a problem with the production and muttered about miscasting. ‘Mr Rickman, whom none excels at portraying the horror of a man compelled to stagger from orgy to orgy without respite, plays Gayman, a one-woman man.’
But the Financial Times’ Michael Coveney thought that ‘He plays with a superb and saturnine grace . . . and force of personality. He still tends to swallow too many lines’ – that muffled speech defect again – ‘but it must be difficult to make all the material sing.’
The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber found ‘That excellent actor Alan Rickman discovers a fine line in perfervid jealousy . . . and brings a splendid swagger to his character of a penniless but touchy and defiant adventurer.’
And even the Sunday Telegraph’s Francis King purred about ‘the lank, sexually ravenous Gayman (a wonderfully sharp performance by Alan Rickman)’. The message about his maverick sexuality was finally getting through.
Laurie Stone informed the readers of the New York Village Voice about this wonderful new talent in London: ‘Alan Rickman is an amazing discovery. His Gayman is an elegant comedian; he wears his thinness like a man too busy in bed to bother eating food.’
Ros Asquith in City Limits rhapsodised: ‘Harriet Walter and Alan Rickman bring to their acid repartee the kind of bristling sexual equality that recalls great old partnerships like Bogart and Bacall.’ The Bogie/Bacall connection was to be revisited much later by Rickman and Emma Thompson in the 1999 film noir Judas Kiss, when Alan joked that Emma was playing her part like Bogart while he was Bacall. But Michael Billington in the Guardian sensed a disturbing moodiness under the surface: ‘Alan Rickman . . . lends the impoverished Gayman a dark, tortured, faintly misanthropic lust.’
Billington had sniffed the all-important whiff of danger in the performance that suggested even greater things around the corner. Despite all the witty fun and games and the coquettish ringlets added to his real hair, Rickman played Gayman like a man possessed. There was the ferocity, the unparalleled intensity of a manic depressive who is madly in love.
He had already made himself known to millions as the oleaginous Obadiah Slope, but it was a theatre role that immortalised Alan Rickman. The vicious Vicomte de Valmont beckoned.
6. VALMONT IN CURLERS
THE UNGLAMOROUS TRUTH about Les Liaisons Dangereuses was that Alan Rickman took the role that made his name in the West End and on Broadway because he was facing unemployment at the time. With no other offers pending, he accepted the RSC’s invitation to rejoin the company.
‘He did have periods out of work in the early 80s,’ remembers Richard Wilson. ‘He said to me, “I don’t know what to do: the RSC has asked me to go back, and there’s this Christopher Hampton play.” I think he went back because there was nothing else around.’ This is not to say that Rickman, always a devotee of new writing and a very choosy picker of parts, failed to realise the potential of a part like Valmont. Although Obadiah Slope was not a charismatic character on the page, Rickman certainly made him so on screen in his peculiarly insinuating way. But Valmont was a vampire who fed on the emotions as well as the flesh. This dissolute aristocrat, who conducted his amorous intrigues in the spirit of the Marquis de Sade, captured the morbid imagination.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose story takes the form of sly letters that positively invite you to read between the lines, was written by an obscure artillery officer with the cumbersome name of Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos.
First published in Paris in 1782, the epistolary novel caused an immediate scandal; later, in 1824, a decree of the Cour Royale de Paris ordered this dangerous work to be destroyed. Its critics talked of ‘the most odious immorality’, ‘a work of revolting immorality’ and ‘a book to be admired and execrated’. It leaves a taste of bitter ashes in the mouth, and also a feeling of tragedy that the two protagonists should allow themselves to become the engines of so much destruction. For there is no doubt that the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are creatures of vitality and intelligence.
The poet Baudelaire was one of the few who spoke in its defence, but even he prudently judged it an evil book: ‘If you could burn it, it would burn like ice burns’. Clive James quoted him on BBC TV’s Saturday Review on 28 September 1985, just after the production had opened at the RSC’s studio theatre The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Laclos was a revolutionary Jacobin; and the French Revolution began seven years after the publication of this deeply subversive book about two cynics on a mission to corrupt.
Christopher Hampton says that he had first wanted to dramatise the book ten years previously in 1975. ‘It’s a play about institutionalised selfishness . . . absolute indifference to needs, sufferings and emotional requirements of other people . . . it’s about ruthlessness.’
On the Saturday Review panel, Clive James rightly predicted: ‘It’s going to be an enormous world-wide hit.’ That professional gainsayer A.N. Wilson was, as per usual, the only dissenting voice: ‘Alan Rickman has not varied his acting technique one jot since Obadiah Slope.’ But writer Paula Milne strongly disagreed: ‘I can’t see anyone else in the part.’
‘He’s very conscious of what critics say; I often tease him about it,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘He was very upset by some review during his second RSC stint. It was just before Les Liaisons, when he was in As You Like It. I remember him saying to me that he read a review with his fingers spread across the page. Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer didn’t like him.
‘So his eventual success was sweet: it was almost a form of revenge for those of us who thought he deserved better. A revenge on circumstances, not on one person,’ adds Poliakoff circumspectly.
‘His Jaques was unfairly attacked by the critics; they didn’t forgive him for that,’ says Adrian Noble, his director for As You Like It in 1985 and Mephisto the following year.
‘They attacked his voice; he was terribly upset by it. He is easily upset by bad reviews, although he won’t admit it. They did the same with his Hamlet in 1992 – they objected to his voice.
‘His Jaques was a deeply passionate character who lived on the fringes of society and was sought out by the great policy-makers and thinkers. That sums up Alan,’ says Adrian with a giggle. ‘He does court being a guru to a certain extent (is the Pope a Catholic?) It’s a role that sits comfortably on him. He has always lived his career by his own lights, and it’s difficult for theatre folk to do that. He’s quite selective about things, mostly successfully.
‘He can be railing against the world one minute and be at Neil Kinnock’s supper-table the next. Well, most of us were,’ admits Adrian with another giggle. ‘Alan does have a wonderful line in disdain. He doesn’t corpse, but he’s very funny. He retreats into his cave, as Jaques did, but he’s sought after there. Young actors need people like that who say “You’re going on the right path”.’
Rickman’s second attempt at that quixotic philosopher Jaques was unveiled on 23 April – the date generally assumed to be Shakespeare’s birthday.
It was followed by that epic sulker Achilles in Troilus And Cressida on 25 June. Les Liaisons was the late summer ‘sleeper’, in Hollywood parlance, that finished the year’s Stratford season with an opening night on 25 September.
In Howard Davies’ production of Troilus, Alan was judged by some to have made Achilles even more of a heel than usual. He did not meet with Irving Wardle’s approval in The Times: �
�. . . an unshaven Alan Rickman overplays the hysterical tantrums even for Achilles.’ Similarly, Ros Asquith in the Observer wrote ambivalently of ‘Alan Rickman’s over-the-top but disarmingly rakish Achilles’. Significantly, Asquith had seen the sexual potential in Rickman’s portrayal.
But the quills were sharpened for his Jaques in As You Like It: Michael Ratcliffe wrote in the Observer about how Rickman would ‘talk through [his] teeth in a funny manner’ and how he ‘leaves the field of history standing for the outrageous contrivance of his Seven Ages of Man’.
Of course such a staunch socialist as Alan would always get upset about a bad notice in the Observer, though Michael Coveney in the Financial Times praised his ‘languorous Jaques – now the sensational performance it threatened to become’.
Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail wrote of ‘Alan Rickman’s all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wearied Jaques’. Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph admired ‘Alan Rickman’s philosophical Jaques in a shabby dinner jacket who rules the entertainment with a refreshing relish’.
As if to confound the critics, Alan had set forth his views on playing Jaques in his only published work to date: one of a collection of essays by Shakespearean actors under the title of Players Of Shakespeare, published by the Cambridge University Press.
Jaques is all about attitude, which makes Rickman a natural for the role. He wrote of a Jaques ‘who is perceptive but passionate, vulnerable but anarchic . . . He’s very sure of himself and a bit of a mess.’
He admits in print that he made a meal of things in rehearsal: ‘The other actors must have tired of wondering where I was going to enter from next, or if there would ever be a recognisable shape to the scene.’ And there was an air of the dilettante about the character’s self-conscious pose: ‘Jaques seeks, frets, prods and interferes but he doesn’t DO . . . he definitely needs the other lords to cook his food.’
Alan Rickman Page 13