Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  10. THAT SINKING FEELING

  JULES WRIGHT HAS a fistful of arty platinum knuckleduster rings and looks you straight in the eye. An Australian boiler-maker’s daughter, she was, like Rickman, a late starter in the theatre. They have humour, directness and a working-class background in common. But she freely admits: ‘I did have a fiery relationship with Alan when I worked with him.’

  It was to get even fierier with the Riverside fiasco. Jules remains convinced that all along Alan Rickman never really intended to get closely involved with running Riverside: his was the name on the marquee, and he caught all the flak. ‘The publicity has plagued him ever since,’ says Jules, who welcomed the chance to put her side of the Riverside story on record once and for all. Legal constraints prevented her from stating the facts at the time; when I approached her in 1995 for the first edition of this book, it was the first time she had been persuaded to speak.

  Her conviction about Alan’s true intentions stems from an incautious outburst he made during their ‘blazing row’ in the Royal Court foyer on 28 November 1993.

  ‘Alan has always been an honourable man, so he would never say something he didn’t mean – even in anger,’ Jules told me. ‘I swear to this day,’ she continues with a husky laugh, ‘that someone set us up to sit next to each other in the Dress Circle in a packed theatre at Max Stafford-Clark’s farewell at the Court.’ (This the Court flatly denies, saying that the box office would have processed hundreds of names for a very packed seating plan. But Jules said, ‘Thanks a bunch’, so Max Stafford-Clark sent her a postcard that thanked her for her support over the years and then added wryly, ‘Sorry about the seating arrangements’.)

  ‘I was sitting in my place and Alan came into the Dress Circle. He saw that he would be next to me, so he turned round and walked out. Then he must have had second thoughts, because he turned round and came back in again. I quickly swapped seats with my husband, who sat between us in the end.

  ‘I suppose Alan was expecting us to have a row after Riverside, because I felt incredibly attacked by all the bad publicity. We then had a very, very loud argument later in the foyer afterwards; all the onlookers were extremely entertained. It was a fairly monumental row which ended up as a rather long conversation, as these things tend to do when you both calm down.

  ‘We had spent an hour or so avoiding each other, and then I went up to him and said, “What the hell were you playing at with all the Press coverage? Why the hell didn’t you ring me up to get the facts?” I think Rima said something angry at that point and then Alan snapped, “I didn’t speak to the Press.” I really felt like replying, “But you were spotted handing out photocopies of the critics” letter of support.’

  ‘He also said, “It’s about time directors had problems. Actors are always getting stick.” But what was curious in the middle of all this was a remark he made when he said: “I’ll never lend my name to anything again.”

  ‘I can only take his word for it: that he was only lending his name to the project,’ concluded Jules.

  A close examination of the Rickman camp’s proposals for the New Riverside Studios shows just what kind of role Alan envisaged for himself: giving tone to the place as a visiting star with creative input. Thelma would have been the real powerhouse.

  ‘Riverside should not be a platform for an individual ego,’ stated the first page of the New Riverside policy document, drafted by the triumvirate of Alan, Thelma and Alan’s old RADA contemporary Catherine Bailey. ‘Rather, it should seek to embrace the community it stands in whilst sending out beacons to London, Europe and beyond.

  ‘For a long time now Riverside has held a significant place in the loyalties of a very particular group of actors, directors and designers who cannot always exercise their ideas within the national companies,’ it commented . . . perhaps carrying what might be taken as a faint whiff of paranoia.

  Thelma and Alan are mavericks – always have been, always will be. Widely respected for their innovations, but far too individualistic to fit into a big organisation. This was their bid for a rival to the Royal National Theatre on whose stages, incidentally, Rickman had never performed in a National production (his original debut there in Peter Barnes’s reworking of The Devil Is An Ass had been a transfer).

  (Not that there was a sinister reason behind that curious omission. ‘I’ve often considered Alan for roles here, but for a variety of reasons we’ve never managed to find the right part at the right time. I think he is a wonderfully original actor,’ was the view of the National’s then Artistic Director Richard Eyre when I contacted him for a comment in 1995. It was to be Trevor Nunn, under whose RSC stewardship Rickman had made his great breakthrough in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, who would give him that opportunity in 1998, an opportunity that turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice.)

  Their ideas for a genuine mingling of different art forms under one roof make a nonsense of William Hunter’s pompous letter in the London Evening Standard on 10 August 1993. Hunter, Chair of the Riverside Trust, wrote: ‘Most importantly, Riverside Studios is an arts centre, not a theatre. We present a very wide range of art forms. This has been overlooked during the controversy over the [Rickman] consortium’s proposal.’

  To imply that Rickman and Co. were a narrow-minded bunch of luvvies with only theatre in mind is highly misleading. Their policy document makes it clear that they wanted to create a market place for all kinds of artistic ideas at Riverside . . . ‘an all-day space, a magnetic place where you can look at a painting or buy and read a book over lunch, have a drink before an evening performance and then supper afterwards’. In other words, a West London alternative to the South Bank arts complex and the Royal National Theatre in particular.

  It was always planned as a Steppenwolf operation. ‘Actors there have an itinerant but umbilical connection to the company . . . We want to actively encourage its use by those performers who do not fit into the mainstream of artistic endeavours.’ In other words, a home for talented outsiders.

  All very laudable but fatally vague to the dozen trustees on the Board of the Riverside Trust, which included three councillors. The first thing that strikes you on reading the Rickman consortium’s New Riverside proposals is that there’s no mention whatsoever of their source of finance: i.e. a list of sponsors and their donations. Money makes the bid go around, the bid go around . . . It was a glaring omission.

  Jules Wright’s bid for the Women’s Playhouse Trust (WPT) also carried its fair share of stirring rhetoric, but she provided the names of 21 WPT benefactors in her statement such as Coca-Cola, NatWest Bank and Reuters.

  Hard-pressed borough councillors are constantly trying to balance the books and figures inevitably speak more loudly than words. The rest is just promises. Or, as Hammersmith & Fulham Council Leader, lain Coleman, succinctly put it in a letter to me about the Riverside affair: ‘a wish-list’.

  In times of belt-tightening and general restraint, the average councillor also tends to cut back on syllables as well as money. An encounter with ‘palliatives’ on page two of the Rickman document might have wasted valuable debating time as they thumbed through the dictionary to see if it had any relevance to more meaningful concepts, such as money, sponsorship and start-up capital. Not that councillors are stupid; but they have to be immensely practical. As for bandying about such expressions as ‘community’, councillors use the term themselves with so much gay abandon that they’re hardly likely to be impressed by the C-word from other people.

  And as for the notion of an all-day space, just what does a drop-in centre of artistic excellence do when Johnny Fortycoats or Wandering Mary with her push-pram lurch onto the premises? The streets around Riverside in Crisp Road form a very mixed, partly industrial area, pitted with urban poverty. Most councils would see such a venue as the ideal place for an old folks’ day centre or a youth club with table-tennis to prise the disaffected Yoof of Hammersmith off the streets. Those are the tram-lines along which they tend to think.


  Catherine Bailey was designated Executive Director of New Riverside, co-ordinating artistic policy and the smooth running of the studios. The artistic policy itself would be ‘led’ by Alan Rickman (i.e. presumably starring in it), and Thelma Holt was to be the director of it. The proposal promised that these three people would be the key to its success.

  Again and again the document invoked the National Theatre plus the RSC’s Barbican Theatre, pointing out that Riverside was not far off their scale.

  A panel of Associate Artists, of which Rickman was one, would be consulted about programming. The heavyweight names proposed included director Deborah Warner, designers Hildegard Bechtler and Bob Crowley, playwright Christopher Hampton, the actors Fiona Shaw, Mark Rylance, Juliet Stevenson and Richard Wilson, BBC1 Controller Alan Yentob and Dance Umbrella Artistic Director Val Bourne.

  Thelma and Catherine’s business expertise was obvious in the staffing proposals, which carefully costed everyone down to the part-time cleaners (£10,000 per annum). Ideas for opening the smaller of the two studio spaces to television companies were mooted, with a possible BBC link.

  Projects in the pipeline were productions of Twelfth Night, directed by Deborah Warner; The Way Of The World with Fiona Shaw and Geraldine McEwan, directed by Alan Rickman; Sharman Macdonald’s new play The Winter Guest; and Deborah Warner’s production of Miss Julie, with the French film star Isabelle Huppert in the title role alongside Rickman.

  Geraldine McEwan did eventually star in a revival of The Way Of The World, but at the National Theatre instead in the winter of 1995 (she won Best Actress at the London Evening Standard Drama Awards for it). The Winter Guest was directed by Rickman to great acclaim at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and London’s Almeida Theatre early in 1995. As for Isabelle Huppert, she did indeed come over to London in the spring of 1996 to star in Mary Stuart at the National Theatre.

  Alongside the glamour projects in the New Riverside manifesto were also laudable ideas for community education and youth theatre, unemployment and summer projects. The potential weekly box-office income and annual budget for both studio theatres were carefully costed. The architect, Sir Richard Rogers, already responsible for the Thames Reach complex next door to Riverside in the Crabtree Estate area of Hammersmith, was approached to redesign the interior; and there were even plans to reopen the bookshop and create a recording studio. But all these good intentions mean nothing without the guarantee of start-up cash.

  Confucius say: lack of S-word (sponsorship) lead to F-word. Or some such ancient Chinese proverb.

  Grants were envisaged by Rickman’s consortium as the core funding for running the building, with starry productions plus the hiring-out of space as the income-generators that would subsidise other activities. All this was placing an immense responsibility on the shoulders of a floating population of stars to pull in the crowds; even Corin and Vanessa Redgrave’s Moving Theatre could not work a box-office miracle in a 1995 season at Riverside.

  Catherine Bailey’s draft concluded on an inspirational note, proposing an arts complex the like of which had never been seen before in this country. There was a clear promise that they would put Riverside once and for all upon the international map.

  ‘At first I thought it was a lunatic plan to get involved in bricks and mortar in these economic times, but when you see the abilities of the group behind it, you know it would work. With the pulling power of the actors in the company, the place would be packed. With names like the ones we have, the money will follow,’ enthused Thelma to Michael Owen in the Evening Standard on 20 July 1993 well timed to influence the Board.

  So what went wrong? The capital’s listings magazine, Time Out, was the first to break the news that the high-profile Rickman bid had been rejected.

  According to Time Out, Jules Wright of WPT looked the likely new Artistic Director despite a track record which, according to TO, did not begin to compare with Alan and Thelma’s starry panel.

  The Evening Standard picked the story up and made much of the fact that Jules had been on the Board of the Riverside Trust until shortly before her appointment. It even alleged that she had drawn up a job description for the new Artistic Directorship.

  Even more ominously, the intermediary to whom Rickman and Co. had submitted their proposal was deemed by Time Out and the Standard to have delayed handing in their bid until too late for the crucial Riverside Board meeting on 15 July. So why use a go-between? Because a team rather than an individual was applying for the job of Artistic Director, they felt their unorthodox approach needed explanation.

  Smoke began to issue from various heads. They smelled conspiracy, or at least incompetence. Six leading theatre critics – the Guardian’s Michael Billington, the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, The Times’ Benedict Nightingale, the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, the Independent’s Paul Taylor and Time Out’s James Christopher – felt sufficiently strongly to write a letter of protest to the Evening Standard about the conduct of the Riverside Board in selecting Jules Wright as its director-designate.

  This thunderous missive, published on 6 August 1993, blamed then councillor and Riverside Board member Jane Hackworth-Young for failing to pass on the Rickman submission to the selection panel until after shortlisted applicants had been interviewed.

  ‘The board’s choice as the next director of Riverside was herself on the board of directors until just before the deadline for applications,’ they fulminated. ‘Miss Wright, Riverside Studios has admitted, helped draw up the job description for the new director. We believe it may be a conflict of interest . . .’ They urged the Riverside Board to revoke its decision.

  William Hunter, chair of the Riverside Trust, wrote a languid reply to the Standard on 10 August: ‘It was the Alan Rickman et al consortium’s own fault that the application arrived so late – not only after the closing date but after the interviewing panel had completed interviews. The commonsense thing to do would have been to send the proposal straight to Riverside, not use an intermediary. This is what everybody else did.’

  Further foot-stamping was to come: ‘The reason we did not interview the consortium was that its application was unconvincing administratively, artistically and financially.’ Very damaging, if you take William Hunter’s artistic credentials seriously (he’s a barrister).

  Hunter has since refused to talk further about the entire episode, saying pompously: ‘It’s ancient history.’ But Rickman and Co. took their rejection as a Philistine slap in the face for some of London’s best-known actors.

  Indeed, Nicholas de Jongh wrote in the Standard on 12 August: ‘Perhaps one should conclude that the Riverside Board has a phobia about stars.’

  Catherine Bailey later became convinced that it was a simple case of the turkeys not voting for Christmas. ‘The Board interfered all the time: had we got in, the first thing we would have done was to dismiss the Board. It’s weak. They knew that, that’s why they refused us. The Board is full of councillors wanting to hang on to their honorary positions.

  ‘The idea was to generate our own income from high-profile productions, plus companies and well-known directors from abroad such as Peter Brook and Peter Stein. They were too small-minded to see our vision. Thelma is the only true impresario of our time, a new Lilian Baylis. Thelma and Alan are both such larger-than-life characters. Alan has put a lot back into the business, and people really rate him.’

  But such a mythology has grown around ‘Rivergate’ that someone from outside the Rickman camp even gave me the initial impression that Jane Hackworth-Young was a Tory councillor, as if the scuppering of Rickman’s bid was a wicked Conservative plot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Enter the first Rivergate scapegoat: a neat figure with cropped grey hair and a rather pukka accent. She apologised for that plus the double-barrelled name; people were always leaping to the wrong conclusions about Jane, the Labour councillor for Addison Ward in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. She also had a useful background in th
eatre: ‘I worked with Donald Albery, then I was the director of the British Theatre Association for ten years. And I was on the Board of Riverside at the time the bids were invited.

  ‘It happened like this. Jacqueline Abbott, our Mayor, was the original contact for Catherine Bailey. They couldn’t get hold of her, so they contacted me instead. I had met Alan originally at the BTA; I liked him enormously. He has a nice sense of humour.’

  So far as her left-wing credentials are concerned, she was an impeccably correct contact for the Rickman consortium. A member of Hammersmith and Fulham Miners’ Support Group, she had joined protest marches by the Women Against Pit Closures. Jane’s family comes from Sedgefield, a former mining community. ‘I’m left of centre. I’m not a Blairite.’ Until she talked exclusively to me for this book, she had stayed silent on Rivergate, taking the rap at the time because there was grave doubt about whether the council could continue to cough up cash for both Riverside and the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith.

  For this small London borough is unique in having three high-profile theatre venues – the third being the small but innovative Bush Theatre – within a square mile of each other. Keeping them all afloat is a nightmare for any council.

  But it seemed there were grounds for paranoia over the decision on who ran Riverside. The reason why Alan Rickman’s consortium chose, unlike any of the other bidders, to use a go-between was because, according to Jane Hackworth-Young, they were absolutely convinced that Jules Wright was the favourite for the job of Artistic Director. So they felt they needed, to put it bluntly, some special pleading on their behalf in order to get a fair hearing.

  ‘They thought their bid might not be taken seriously for several reasons,’ claims Jane. ‘The proposal from a consortium would not answer Riverside’s specific job specification. Jules Wright was on the Board, and they believed that the Chair William Hunter supported her very much. Indeed, I had that impression too, and perhaps at the cost of other bids – although I had no objection to Jules. And Riverside had a deficit of £250,000, a debt they didn’t want to take on. So they felt they needed an intermediary to smooth the way and put their case.’