One of the reasons why Rickman manages to stay in touch with what’s hip, why he is considered so cool by people half his age, is that he always takes care to listen to and talk to the younger generation, something he calls ‘passing on the baton’. He drags friends along to see such eclectic theatrical innovators as Pina Bausch and the stand-up comic surrealist Eddie Izzard, who has since followed Alan into acting – including a much-admired West End performance in a revival of Peter Nichols’ A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg.
‘Alan is still very much in touch with the whole simplicity of the process; he stays in touch with the basic elements,’ explains Peter James, who persuaded Rickman to give talks to his LAMDA students. ‘Fame and money came later to him; it’s always a better way for it to happen than for young actors who have it too soon. He has astonishing leadership and spokesman qualities and he has passionate views on subjects and issues: training, the subsidy of theatre, new young actors.’ As the RSC found out.
Rickman went on to send himself up alongside a young cast by playing Metatron, a black-clad, spiky-haired angel or ‘seraphim’ without genitals – as Rickman takes pains to show Linda Fiorentino in the film – but with a hotline to God in the cosmic conspiracy-theory movie Dogma. Kevin Smith had written the script while he was still shooting the film that made his name: the award-winning Clerks. Rickman first appears in Linda Fiorentino’s bedroom in a blaze of flames put out only by a fire extinguisher: ‘Sweet Jesus, do you have to use the whole can?’ he screeched. There are those – particularly the self-styled Rickmaniacs on one of Alan’s many websites – who argue that he overdid the black eyeliner and sooty hair, which were to be revisited later in Harry Potter. But he got forgiven when this crotchety angel discovered his inner cherub and walked on water to comfort Fiorentino in a wonderful example of Rickman’s ability to switch from sour to sweet instantaneously. As Mesmer had revealed, films are collaborative experiences; the gourmandising side of Metatron, who demonstrated his superhuman powers by whisking everyone to a ritzy restaurant, was suggested by the bon viveur in Rickman.
Rickman followed up Dogma with more self-mockery in the film Galaxy Quest by creating the perfect parody of a self-obsessive Shakespearean actor reaching his career nadir by playing an alien in a long-running sci-fi series and then getting so locked into that character that a bunch of genuine visiting aliens mistook him for the real thing. If he had been a more limited actor, it could be said that he risked cannibalising himself – as Mike Newell’s so-called ‘over-the-hill’ cast were sometimes in danger of doing on An Awfully Big Adventure. Interestingly, Galaxy Quest’s star, the comedian Tim Allen, seems uncannily like a younger version of Alan Rickman with the same feral looks, though Rickman would never be seen mugging as shamelessly as Allen can do. ‘How did I come to this? I played Richard III with five curtain calls; I was an actor once,’ gloomed Alan’s character, staring at his alien reflection in the make-up mirror. And indeed he might stare, with Rickman resplendent in a sort of fossilised ram’s head that turned his character into a distant relative of Mr Spock from Star Trek.
Galaxy Quest was a cunning, well-sustained romp, with lots of subtle jokes about show business along the way, such as: how do you tell the difference between aliens and obsessive fans? It’s so marginal sometimes . . . Of course, for an alien species to be so inspired by a sci-fi show that it bases its entire culture on Galaxy Quest was the ultimate accolade for anyone’s acting talents. On top of which, Alan got to do the first punch-up in his movie career with Allen’s vain leading man. So much for those who say he never mixes it; that he’s too aloof; inside that glacial English exterior, there is an Irish-Welsh bruiser.
Such a diverse trio of roles one after the other had established a satisfying distance between Alan and the screen villainy that made his name. But then, out of the blue, came the great Asp Disaster in October 1998 that would, for a while at least, blight his stage career and expose a speech impediment which had never once been apparent in the films that liberated him. Yet, to be fair to Rickman, it had never been so apparent on stage either until his ill-starred Antony and Cleopatra. With someone like Alan, who always takes aeons to decide what he will do, one wonders why on earth he decided, on the turn of a sixpence, to take on such a major role as Antony on the cruelly exposed Olivier stage in a production by Sean Mathias, a hot young director who had made his mark in the West End with a sex-drenched production of Noël Coward’s already sexy troilism play Design For Living, but who had never directed Shakespeare before.
Perhaps the fates were against it from the outset, for Rickman took over from Alan Bates who had been contracted to play Antony for some time but then pleaded a knee injury. Not that taking another man’s leavings would worry Rickman – he certainly has an ego, but not to that extent. And the profession is full of stories of people who took on roles almost by default, only to triumph; from 42nd Street onwards, it’s the stuff of show business legend.
Nevertheless it was a big decision to make in a hurry. ‘It’s a mystery why Alan Rickman did Antony,’ says an exasperated Peter Barnes. ‘He had once played a very small part in a production of Antony and Cleopatra by Peter Brook, so maybe that’s why he wanted to do the lead part all these years later. But I said to him, “Why the hell did you decide to do it with that director?”’
The truth is that actors are often attracted to a project because of the other names in the cast. Helen Mirren was already on board as Queen of the Nile so Rickman did the gallant thing and leaped into the breach left by Bates to play opposite one of the world’s great performers. Not only was Mirren an international name from playing Jane Tennison in Lynda La Plante’s ground-breaking detective series Prime Suspect, but also a heavyweight classical actress with a most un-English sensuality that had earned her the nickname of the RSC sexpot in her early stage career. She was no less sexy in her 50s, deciding to go topless in Cleopatra’s death scene. The stage coupling of Rickman and Mirren was widely seen as a dream-team, and it set the box-office on fire, selling out the production long before the reviews were published.
Yet Tim Hatley’s cumbersome and clunking stage design overwhelmed the actors and the all-important intimacy of the play, which would have been better served in the Cottesloe studio theatre – always the actors’ choice – than the problematic Olivier. His voice already muffled slightly by a short moustache and beard grown for the part, Alan retreated into himself and often became inaudible – a problem compounded night after night as the impact of the bad reviews gathered momentum. Most were excruciating, with the headline writers having a field day, though some damned with faint praise instead. ‘The grand fall of the great warrior becomes more of a drunken stagger into disillusionment and despair,’ wrote the Stage’s Tara Conlan, while acknowledging that Rickman ‘does bring out Antony’s common humanity and his war-weariness – when you can hear him.’
So much for the one original idea in Mathias’s production – that the battle-weary Antony should, very plausibly, be an alcoholic. It seemed to have fallen as flat as the rest of the evening, with Mathias lacking the experience in Shakespeare to articulate his theme.
But Rickman was never going to be the ideal man of action; more the ideal man of inaction. With his last Shakespearean role, Hamlet, still lingering in his mind, Alan’s Antony was in truth more middle-aged Prince of Denmark than decorated hero of old Rome – as Michael Coveney’s perceptive review alone suggested. ‘Rickman’s Mark Antony is a spineless poet of a warrior, caught with tragic splendour.’ Coveney did add that ‘his articulation could be sharper. But in his case, what else is new? He cuts a marvellously shambolic and charismatic figure.’ But with the production failing to make clear its governing idea that Rickman’s slurred diction was deliberately imitating an alcoholic, it was an unforgivable bodge that left the hapless actor in the role of the fall guy. Yet it was always going to be a tremendous risk for someone with a speech impediment to make his voice more slurred than usual, and many of the critics simply made
the assumption that he couldn’t speak the verse.
Nearly three years later, when the dust had settled, Rickman tried to defend the production in a BBC News 24 interview: ‘I was playing somebody who was basically an alcoholic. And I think people got very upset that they weren’t seeing a great hero. The point about the play, to me, is that you see these childlike people who were once great and they’re now reduced to being drunk, rowing, throwing things at each other . . . It’s the most extraordinary deconstruction of a great duo, and they’re presented as little children.’ He was to take the same theme later that year and deconstruct Noël Coward’s spoiled Elyot and Amanda in Private Lives; but with Mark Antony, it was a deconstruction too far in trying to turn elements of the play into a Shakespearean Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Particularly when some of the most peerless poetry in the English language had to be delivered in the middle of their spats.
Some elements of the media, scenting blood and detecting a lack of on-stage chemistry between the two leads, stirred things up and tried to make a crisis out of a drama by citing alleged bad karma between Rickman and Mirren as a reason for the fiasco in the first place. But with reviews like the ones the production was receiving, the alleged lack of chemistry would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘I hadn’t heard that they fell out, but it’s easy to fall out if you are in a desperate production,’ says Barnes. ‘You get to the point where you hate going on stage.’
Stories of difficult rehearsals, where the lack of communication between the director and at least one of the leading members of the cast was apparent, had indeed seeped out. Sheridan Morley hit the mark in his Spectator review, when he wrote of an Alan Rickman ‘so patently exhausted and dispirited, presumably from rehearsals, that his defeat at the hands of the Romans and Cleopatra herself . . . also came as no surprise. Whether Alan Bates would have survived any better is debatable.’
Rickman angrily refuted the charge that Cleopatra and her Antony were not getting on: ‘I’ve never been closer to an actress on stage than I was in that production. And off-stage the greatest of friends . . . People wanted to create some kind of furore off-stage as well as on.’
Just as well that Antony and Cleopatra had been planned as a limited season of only 54 performances, for careers can be damaged by a long run in such a critically savaged production. There are, of course, exceptions: Peter O’Toole’s much-panned Macbeth became a must-see, rather like an on-stage car crash, and it merely confirmed him as a maverick steer.
Although Alan was later to tell the BBC that Antony and Cleopatra was a success by virtue of being a sell-out (in the box-office sense), at the time he was so devastated by the adverse reaction that he told his producer friend Paddy Wilson that he doubted whether he would ever go on stage again. And this at a time when American movie stars were already forming long orderly queues to prove their serious acting credentials by appearing on the ultimate live arena, the London stage. But as Paddy knew only too well from their days in rep, when the passive-aggressive Rickman is seriously unhappy with a production, he digs his heels in and retreats into himself – with the inevitable result of an underpowered, muffled performance.
Yet the great shock, of course, was that he had first made his name on stage as a character who was a byword for vicious power and control. Suddenly, it seemed that Alan Rickman had lost it.
15. SHRIEKS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
ONE JUNE EVENING in the year 2000, Alan Rickman clumped on to the main stage of London’s Royal Court with Doc Marten boots, bicycle clips and a bad attitude. Mention to anyone that Rickman was taking part in a benefit for the restoration of Burmese democracy, and they would have expected yards of high-minded worthiness from him as he deployed that cawing voice to its most thrilling extent in a speech or a reading that concentrated minds on great causes. Instead he was performing a Victoria Wood sketch about a stroppy tour guide who had parked his bike in the Brontë Museum before dragging visitors round the place in a take-it-or-leave-it way. The whole thing came complete with a Yorkshire accent – which no one had realised he could do – and the kind of cosmic disgruntlement which men from that part of the world regard as their divine right. He could strop for Britain.
To add to the party atmosphere the assembled actors were all seated at tables on stage while waiting their turn to perform. They couldn’t believe how funny and northern he was (the two are not necessarily synonymous). Especially that working-class icon Miriam Karlin, a legend in her own picket line with a long history of radical theatre, the distinction of being one of the first funny ladies on British television and with no film profile to be tainted by.
The legend goes that it took Alan Rickman three years to get his confidence back on stage after the disaster of Antony and Cleopatra. Not so. Nearly two years after the serpent of Old Nile had apparently done for Alan’s grand theatrical ambitions, he screwed his courage to the sticking-place and went back on stage in a deliberately low-key way for two one-off events: the benefit for the Burma UK campaign, in which he performed the Wood monologue in those black bovver boots, and a masterclass at the Theatre Royal Haymarket three months later in September. His triumph in Private Lives in 2001 was the high-profile return to the stage that rehabilitated him in the headlines, but it was the first two events that really broke the curse and reassured him that he could still cut the mustard.
Rickman had been contacted early in 2000 by Glenys Kinnock, the wife of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock but prominent in her own right as a Member of the European Parliament. The Kinnocks were theatre buffs and had long since become friends with Rickman, a kindred spirit in socialism; Alan is also heavily involved in the charity One World Action, of which Glenys is the president. As organiser of a fund-raising benefit in support of Burma’s imprisoned pro-democracy Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Glenys had asked Alan if he would join a celebrity cast for the show at the Royal Court in June that year.
Philip Hedley, Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, had a long record in directing such events. He, after all, was the man who had once persuaded the great Peggy Ashcroft to make her entrance by riding a bike on stage while John Gielgud was delivering Prospero’s final speech from The Tempest: ‘Our revels now are ended’. She was, Philip recalls, all of 73 at the time. Ashcroft had rushed from the theatre named after her in Guildford, Surrey, where she was doing a one-woman show, to reach the Court for the final minutes of a fund-raiser for The George Devine Award; Hedley suggested a bike as a prop to make a joke of her mad dash. That was an historic occasion, and not just because Peggy got on her bike; Laurence Olivier shared the same stage as Ashcroft and Gielgud that night.
Yet many people on that same stage for the Burma UK benefit in 2000 came from, as Hedley puts it, ‘a different world’ to him and wouldn’t have known that Philip the Radical could also direct these mega-starry evenings with aplomb.
Both he and Alan found themselves in the same boat on this occasion: each had been stereotyped by their peers, some of whom didn’t know how much either man was capable of. ‘I know Alan and Richard [Wilson] from various fundraising theatrical dos and dinners with the usual suspects,’ says Hedley, ‘and they happened to be standing together and talking to me after the Burma benefit and saying to me, “That was really good.” And they’re not naturally effusive people. There was a sense of “I didn’t know you could do that” – and yet Alan was getting the same reaction as well from his fellow actors. He seemed so secure in the character. And people there like Miriam Karlin were very impressed by that, because they hadn’t known that it was part of his range.’
‘Although Alan is very chatty and agreeable when you meet him, I had the cliché in my mind of the highly serious actor,’ admits Philip. ‘He had phoned me up about the choice of material before the show: he gave me, as director, a choice of three pieces – and the other two were much more serious. He actually auditioned over the phone, going through each piece. I very much liked the idea of the Bronte guide being wonderf
ully pompous and unknowledgeable about the Brontës, saying “Mind the bike” when visitors were tripping over it while trying to get round the museum. The character was wonderfully ungracious without meaning to be rude; he was down-to-earth, he didn’t know how crass he was being. So I was attracted by the idea of Alan doing that.
‘I can claim no credit at all for how good it was, because he just did it; there wasn’t a run-through. We were not aware he could play a working-class character. This was a very unimaginative man, worthy of a Mike Leigh play; and Alan could do that difficult thing of playing the character genuinely, not patronising him, but also being enormously funny and adept at the same time. He pressed all the right buttons.
‘If you had a play with that character in it, you wouldn’t have thought of approaching Alan to play it. That’s why it was brave: he wasn’t using the tools you could fall back on when you’re lazy. He obviously went back to his working-class roots in some way; he would have known that kind of man. But,’ Philip adds tellingly, ‘how many people in any position of power know he can do that?’
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