Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  The elliptical Tango was not popular with either reviewers or public at the Piccadilly Theatre, at the time a somewhat jinxed venue that had had more than its fair share of flops (it has since recovered its fortunes with a string of hits).

  David Nathan in the Jewish Chronicle wrote: ‘Sei’s plight is not gripping, especially as conveyed by Alan Rickman, who . . . declines from his usual melancholic lassitude into terminal lethargy.’

  Benedict Nightingale in The Times thought it lacked coherence as Rickman reeled about, ‘filling the stage with his sardonic self-absorption’, in the role of the actor who goes mad because he fears he has lost his talent. Could this be a dry-run for Hamlet?

  ‘“This is embarrassing,” announces Alan Rickman halfway through, and the guy ain’t joking,’ wrote Lyn Gardner in City Limits. Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail found Rickman ‘languid to the point of torpor’.

  Yet Michael Billington in the Guardian felt that ‘the play is a dense tissue of allusions to Hamlet, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Casablanca, Limelight and an old Ronald Colman movie . . . Rickman exactly captures the Hamlet-like melancholy, the doomed romanticism, the exquisite narcissism of this falling star. It . . . makes me hope someone will cast Rickman as Shakespeare’s gloomy Dane forthwith.’ Someone did: Thelma Holt a year later.

  Although the finale featured a beautiful transformation-scene, most critics, nevertheless, felt the journey there wasn’t worth the effort.

  The lack of narrative drive made it a difficult vehicle for the West End, which at least demands a good story from its artier endeavours. So the production was a commercial failure, despite a strictly limited season that turned out to be something of a loss-cutting exercise. Alan’s old English teacher Ted Stead feels strongly about it to this day. ‘Alan was very disappointed with the reaction to Tango At The End Of Winter,’ says Stead, who took a party of schoolboys to see Alan’s performance. ‘Alan found eight performances a week very trying and demanding, and the reception was lukewarm. He was going to do Peer Gynt with the same director, but that never materialised.

  ‘I’m convinced it flopped because Alan wasn’t allowed to have star billing in the West End; it was the director who got the billing,’ argues Ted, who believes that the crowds would have come if Alan’s name had been prominently displayed. Certainly, Peter Barnes testifies to the enthusiasm of the Rickman fans that did make it to the stage door. But Thelma Holt explains: ‘Alan specifically didn’t want star billing. It was an ensemble company, therefore the billing was alphabetical.’ And Alan himself had gamely told the Sunday Times’ Peter Lewis on 4 August 1991: ‘I’m trying to make myself like an empty vessel, a piece of equipment labelled actor.’ This was test-tube theatre.

  In Japan, Ninagawa is a god whose word is not questioned. For once, Alan didn’t argue; and he was also obliged to submit to the strict regime of the Taiwanese director Ang Lee on the film Sense And Sensibility five years later. All very noble in the cause of good global relations, but such self-effacing modesty just didn’t make commercial sense in the West End where Alan Rickman would have brought the faithful flocking to theatre’s equivalent of Eric Cantona, had the billing deified the right guy. Alan’s fans had to search for his name near the end of the list underneath the banner headline ‘The Ninagawa Company’. In retrospect, it was pointlessly purist of him. His talent and personality elevate him.

  In a curious twist ten years later, the Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri was to recruit him as her dancing partner in the video for ‘In Demand’ and thus enhance his street-cred even more. As she explained, ‘I thought it had to be someone who would rip your coat off and pull you into the tango, so I thought of Alan Rickman.’ Well, quite. Who wouldn’t? He does rather throw himself into these things, as Emma Thompson found out when he whirled her round the room at a Sense And Sensibility location party.

  But the bold experiment in international theatre was not to be the last for Alan and Thelma. They had taken the hint about Hamlet.

  9. IMMORTAL LONGINGS

  THE FOYER OF the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square is well accustomed to the odd loud-mouthed wino who comes in from the cold steps outside. No problem. Even after it reopened in February 2000 with an urban-chic redesign which included a front-of-house revamp that left the box-office looking more like the maitre d’s desk at a fashionable restaurant, the home of the theatrical angry brigade can still cope with noise pollution on any scale. If the evening – either on or off the stage – has been completely devoid of what Dr Feelgood used to call firkin this and firkin that, I never feel I’ve had my money’s worth from the Court. The old 70s chocolate-and-orange decor of the main house used to scream at you, of course; and if you’re a sensitive vegetarian, the gorgeous new leather seats now scream at you instead. And even after its refit, the late-Victorian building that first introduced George Bernard Shaw’s loquacious jaw-jaw to British audiences still regularly rattles to the sound of the tube trains entering and leaving the underground station next door. It’s not a place to go for a quiet time.

  However, a public shouting-match between the actor Alan Rickman and the theatre director Jules Wright over their rival bids to run the Riverside Studios arts centre shocked even the hard cases. Three years later, everyone at the Court still remembered the row.

  The acrimonious confrontation took place on 28 November 1993, the night of departing Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark’s fund-raising party for his new Out Of Joint theatre company. That well-known character, ‘Arfur (Half of) London’, had been invited to send Max on his way; all the more amazing, then, that the furious exchange of views between the irate Alan and Jules was never leaked to the outside world.

  What Jules now describes as ‘a fairly monumental row in which everyone else was extremely entertained’ was the culmination of five months of tension and acrimony directed towards Jules Wright.

  The so-called ‘Rivergate’ affair in the summer of 1993 led to a furious campaign in the Press by the supporters of Alan Rickman and the producer Thelma Holt, who headed a starry consortium to take over a dilapidated white elephant in West London’s Hammersmith. It was their ambition to turn it into a new Royal National Theatre.

  Among the allegations were stories about a missing – perhaps stolen – document that was leaked to the Press, plus the extraordinary sight of Alan Rickman handing a queue of bemused theatre-goers copies of a published letter of support from leading theatre critics. That kind of activism hardly goes with the languid image of a man who likes chaise-lounging around.

  The previous year had begun exceptionally well for Rickman’s career, but Rima’s political ambitions were to be bitterly thwarted. On 26 January 1992, Alan was named Best Actor in the London Evening Standard Film Awards for his threefold triumph in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Close My Eyes and Truly Madly Deeply. For her performance in the latter, his friend Juliet Stevenson deservedly won the Best Actress trophy.

  ‘Now I know it’s possible to win an award for over-acting,’ quipped Rickman, referring to that witty old slimeball, the Sheriff of Nottingham.

  He was busy, busy, busy. Rickman and Ruby Wax had formed their own production company, Raw Produce, to develop ideas that would exploit their shared sense of humour. It was Alan who put a shape to the Ruby Wax phenomenon, bringing her one-woman show into London’s West End for a short season in April before a provincial tour. Rickman was turning out to be quite a Svengali with his American Trilby.

  At the same time, he was also quietly helping Rima with her General Election campaign. A slightly scowling Rickman could be spotted lurking modestly at the edge of a photograph of Labour candidates and their supporters in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

  He turned out by her side on polling day, although he was spared the rigours of door-to-door canvassing. Other celebrity Labour supporters recruited by Rima included Lord Longford, Baroness Ewart-Biggs and the novelist, Ken Follett. Yet Rima is very protective of her boyfriend’s privacy. ‘It w
ouldn’t have been fair on Alan to ask him to canvass for me before. He’s got such a famous face,’ she told the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough diary, whose 7 April edition mischievously published the most unflattering picture of a glowering Rickman that it could find. ‘I might have produced Alan before if it was more of a marginal seat,’ she conceded. ‘But he may sway the odd wavering voter on polling day.’

  Indeed, four years later she was to explain to the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster on 3 March 1996: ‘Alan is committed to the cause and he gives me a lot of moral support, but he doesn’t come face to face with voters. He just delivers leaflets and then leaves. It could be embarrassment which stops him, I don’t know. I won’t push him. Not everyone enjoys being questioned on policy detail.’

  The constituency was split in two for the purposes of the election: Ann Holmes was the Labour candidate for Kensington, standing against Conservative holder Dudley Fishburn, and Rima Horton was up against 58-year-old Sir Nicholas Scott’s massive majority in Chelsea – the safest Tory seat in the country with an average of 60 per cent of the vote.

  A somewhat strenuous private life had nearly led to Sir Nicholas Scott’s deselection. In 1987 he was appointed Minister for the Disabled, but was to leave the post in 1994 after tabling amendments to wreck a Bill of Rights for the handicapped. In the process, the Tory Wet publicly fell out with his Labour-supporting daughter Victoria, a campaigner for the disabled movement, Rights Now, who had exposed the governmental tactics that halted the Disablement Bill.

  It seemed as if nothing would unseat the accident-prone Sir Nicholas Scott, who drove a car that crashed and killed a man in 1957. A verdict of accidental death was recorded. In 1995, he ran off when his car shunted another into a toddler’s pram; Sir Nicholas was later breath-tested. He was banned from driving for a year and fined £200 with £450 costs.

  Rima had become the local Labour Party spokesman on education and town planning and, by 1992, she had become a senior lecturer in economics at the Surrey Polytechnic that is now Kingston University. Although she was the youngest, Rima was the only one of the three Chelsea candidates who coyly failed to give her age – 51-year-old Susan Broidy stood for the Liberal Democrats. Rima’s manifesto, published in the Kensington News, simply recorded that she was born in Bayswater and had lived in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea for fifteen years. That was the time when she and Alan had first moved into her current flat in Holland Park in 1977.

  Her brisk manifesto didn’t even mention her marital status, or, rather, the lack of it. This was surprising, given the residual prejudice from some quarters of the electorate against married women standing for office. A single woman without children had and still has a positive advantage; single men had a harder time of it until openly gay Labour candidates began winning seats and thus made marital status irrelevant. The Tories, though, still tend to prefer their candidates with wives attached.

  New Labour had sent Rima on the obligatory power-dressing course for the right business-like image, urging her to put her shoulder-pads to the wheel. Lecturing had taught her all about public speaking. Surprising, then, that Peter Barnes says she tells him that she still finds speech-making difficult. She speaks in a husky contralto with a slight lisp that makes her sound not unlike the actress Frances De La Tour; the effect is decidedly sexy. Rima owes her deep, rather thrilling voice to her smoking habit: she can be a bit of a Fag-Ash Lil and has been known to puff away during speeches. In argument, she’s forceful but not strident. Of course there’s nothing like the line ‘when I was talking to my MA students’ to impress fellow Kensington & Chelsea councillors . . . those not covertly reading their horoscopes or Private Eye or playing with their pocket calculators at the time, as happened during one meeting in the council chamber that I attended.

  Alan Rickman is frequently to be found in the public gallery, taking an active interest in Rima’s latest pronouncements on pelican crossings or guardrails. Not that this chic and attractive figure with her distinctive dark-brown bob appears to need any moral support. She’s incisive and highly articulate, pitching her arguments some way above certain heads in the council chamber who find themselves getting a free lecture on economics.

  ‘She’s not rent-a-quote,’ said Ian Francis, at the time news editor of the then Kensington News when I first contacted him back in 1995. ‘She’s not on the phone to us straight away about some local issue. She usually waits to be approached, so she doesn’t set herself up to be a great local media figure. She tends to stick to what’s going on in the council chamber, so she’s not a great public person.

  ‘There’s no gimmick with her. Perhaps she hasn’t mastered the public aspects of local politics – or has chosen not to.’

  Certainly Rima is highly sensitive to Alan’s phobia about the Press in general and critics in particular. If she were elevated to a political position at a national level, it would make life very difficult for him which is why she has forced herself to be philosophical about election disappointments.

  ‘She’s very feisty and no-nonsense: she doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ added Ian. Nevertheless, he criticised the Labour Opposition in Kensington & Chelsea for being ‘exceptionally inactive. They’re active on things like roofs leaking on local estates. But the council tax has just gone up, and there was no outcry whatsoever from the Opposition.’

  Certainly it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the political scene is just a little too cosy in this Royal borough with its cast-iron Conservative majority. With Labour in a minority group there’s a limit to what the Opposition can do with its numbers. Certainly Rima, whose politics are Centre Left and whose understated glamour is very much New Labour, is not about to woman the barricades.

  ‘It’s a very boring political scene in Kensington & Chelsea,’ was Ian Francis’ verdict on the Nicholas Scott years. ‘Scott will give you a quote, but he won’t be proactive.

  ‘Rima strikes me as a bit of a do-gooder. The ambitious ones are on the phone to us all the time; those who are more sanctimonious just get on with their work.’

  She’s certainly popular with colleagues from both sides of the political fence. She can be glamorous and she has a certain style. She wears chic, expensive-looking clothes, and, unlike many of the other councillors, her official photograph looks as if it was done in a studio

  Indeed, the serious-minded Rima is almost a Sharon Stone in comparison with one (male) councillor, whose rugged features have been unkindly likened to a ‘Wanted’ poster of an escaped convict and who is affectionately known as Magwitch behind his back.

  She has a big voice and a glint in her eye, but it has been suggested that she’s not a natural politician who maintains eye contact. This might come from being an academic, but she tends to fix on a point on the wall instead and her language can sometimes be a little high-flown.

  Most Labour councillors are not exactly gad-about-town figures, but a sophisticated woman of the world like Rima adds a little local colour: she’s a great fan of restaurants off the Portobello Road. Even Tories like her: when I contacted him in 1995, the late Conservative councillor Desmond Harney swooned with old-fashioned gallantry at the mere mention of her name.

  Nevertheless, her time had not yet come in 1992: the Kensington News’ pre-election coverage was forced to conclude that Sir Nicholas Scott remained the firm favourite in the opinion polls for the General Election.

  Ruby’s show, Wax Acts, opened on April Fool’s Day, 1992. The Election was held on 9 April, but Kensington and Chelsea, unlike most other constituencies, didn’t start counting until 9 a.m. on 10 April. It would be another 24 hours before the results of Rima’s bid to become an MP were known.

  The public and most of the critics liked Ruby a lot. She had been directed by Alan only once before at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986, but the formula clearly worked for the grander stage of the West End.

  Since Rickman and Wax had worked together at Sheffield Crucible in Peter James’ production of As You
Like It, they rehearsed her one-woman show on the Lyric Hammersmith stage where Peter was by then the Artistic Director.

  ‘Alan Rickman was the creator of Ruby Wax,’ confirms Peter. ‘He suggested a format for her on TV. There was always something unlearned and spontaneous about her thing. Scripted stand-up was not as good for her as the spontaneous stuff.

  ‘Even Ruby doesn’t know what she will do when she steps on stage. She starts with a clip-board and nothing else. Her career was greatly shaped by him. Yet there’s nothing of the extrovert in Alan. In performance terms, she goes to get ’em while he waits for them to come.’

  Alan himself told Valerie Grove in the April 1995 issue of Harpers & Queen: ‘People assume she just stands at the mike and delivers routines. But she is the most deeply serious person about her work, tussling with very personal material about herself and her parents. It was achingly funny, but you can’t be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and lots of bloody hard work.’

  Perhaps he allowed her a little too much leeway, according to Anthony Thorneycroft in the Financial Times: ‘Her show is discreetly directed by Alan Rickman, who might try to sharpen up the first twenty minutes.’

  Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, however, emerged as a convert: ‘I’d only seen her fleetingly on television and approached her one-woman show as an agnostic. After two hours in her company, however, I’m convinced that Ruby Wax is one of the finest comic talents of her generation . . . Constructing wonderful crescendos of fury and indignation . . . She has a splendid way with words, and her sheer vitality breaks down all resistance.’