Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Henry V marked Finney’s breakthrough at Birmingham. Audrey Nightingale, in The Times, said he reminded her of Burton: ‘Always intelligent, moving after Agincourt, he [Finney] takes the stage with an engaging charm of youth … sturdy rather than royal … in the Burton tradition rather than the Olivier.’

  In retrospect, Nightingale said, it was Finney’s performance in Be Good Sweet Maid, as a hardheaded young entrepreneur, that impressed her even more. Nightingale, writing in 1963, said, ‘Here was a hint of his future as Arthur Seaton, an incisive piece of work in which the charm was used deliberately as a veneer for a cool and egoistic calculation.’

  Critic J.C. Trewin also liked Finney’s Henry V. Trewin said that Finney ‘failed in the Harfleur speech, a passage that demands the fullest drive’, but otherwise he was impressed:

  Often in the theatre, Henry has been arrogant, self-righteous, the star of England shining like a gas jet. But Finney could remind us of a cricket captain able to keep our spirits up on a tricky third day. He might not have been a greyhound in the slips; he would have been an uncommonly safe cover-point. This Henry knew his people, and he had enough of the old Hal in him to turn to rough jesting in that moment of relief, the battle over.

  The roles continued. In 2013, to mark the centenary of the Rep’s founding, audiences were asked to reminisce about the old theatre. Someone mentioned The Alchemist. One fan wrote:

  We will never forget the young Albert Finney in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, probably late fifties, at the Old Rep in Station Street with the gas lighting on the stairs to the upper level. Newly arrived in Birmingham, it was one of our first visits.

  It was during the run of The Alchemist that Finney married Jane Wenham – on 1 November 1957 at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Since Jane, like Finney, was due on stage that night, in her case in As You Like It, any honeymoon plans had to be postponed.

  Finney’s biggest role at Birmingham was in Macbeth. Hepton took a gamble in offering the part to someone as young as Finney, but it paid off. It helped that Hepton had a clear idea about the play: ‘I took the witches to be the embodiment of that influence, so when they say to Macbeth, “you will be king”, it starts a process of evil.’ An announcement in The Times on 6 February 1958 stated, ‘Albert Finney, a young British actor whose playing of Henry V a year ago was highly praised, is to act the name part in Macbeth on February 11.’

  June Brown, now forever associated with dear Dot Cotton in EastEnders and easily the best performer in the soap’s three-decades-long history, was then just 30. Brown only played one season at Birmingham. She remembered the production well: ‘Unfortunately, my performance was dire for the first three weeks. Then I caught an awful cold and the part came alive for me. Doctor Greasepaint!’

  A photograph of the production shows a young Finney, hair luxuriant and bouffant, with a sharp, pointed beard, chiselled features and an enviable profile. June Brown also looked alluring. She remembers:

  Albie Finney was very young, only about 21. He was a very nice person and actor. A few years later I was at the Royal Court and he came to see me in my dressing room. He said ‘Do you remember me?’ I said ‘Don’t be so daft!’ as by this time he was very famous.2

  Finney’s Macbeth won mostly rave reviews. ‘He now proves that his Henry V last season was no mere flash in the pan. His Macbeth has an authority truly astonishing in someone of only 21,’ said the New Chronicle. J.C. Trewin thought that Finney’s Macbeth ‘could suggest soldiership and high scholarship’ and that his interpretation was refreshing in its avoidance of excess. Yet it was his impression, and this may give pause for consideration in light of Finney’s future efforts, that Finney was a good dramatic actor rather than a speaker of verse: ‘On Finney’s lips Shakespeare’s verse seemed to lack modulation and variety.’ To be fair, Finney, who seldom read critiques, would probably have agreed. He later said, speaking in 1963, that he was having ‘a bash at parts that are really impossible at 21’.

  Audrey Williamson was impressed by the young actor’s attitude and self-insight:

  Finney’s Macbeth was by no means lacking in weight; his robust build helped him here, and though the full macabre poetry and imagination were lacking, it was a characterisation well thought out, intellectually and technically an enhancement in his powers. By now I knew him well enough to discuss it with him offstage, and was surprised at the grasp he showed of problems raised by the character, and the methods he had taken to solve them onstage. He was too young to have seen any other great actors in the part; he had to build from his own instincts and his own reasoning. Both the instincts and the reasoning were those of a born actor.

  Other actors at the Rep were also impressed. Mark Kingston, just a couple of years older than Finney, played Fleance in Macbeth:

  Seeing this 18-year-old boy walk on and start to do his bit you knew there was something there you’d never have. You just knew that this was a really special talent and quality of sound … He’s gone on to become one of the most distinguished actors in British theatre, one who had the sense to turn down a knighthood!3

  Colin George remembered Finney as ‘very much a Manchester lad, he did the lower class, but wonderful person, Albie. I’ve met him since many times.’4 And Brian Hanbury remembered that Finney combined a heavyweight physical presence, unusual in a young actor, with an impish sense of humour.

  It wasn’t just Finney’s star quality that other actors noticed. Pamela Howard was an apprentice scene painter at Birmingham Rep. She was struck by Finney’s egalitarian attitude:

  I can only say that to us workers in the dark bowels of the Old Rep in Station Street, we never imagined an actor would actually talk to us. It was still the period where everyone called each other ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’, and he was the new generation and a breath of fresh air. He got to know us. He was the first actor I think we had ever known.5

  One distinguished visitor to Birmingham was veteran star Charles Laughton, celebrated for his magnificent portrayals of Captain Bligh6 and Henry VIII. Reportedly, Laughton saw Finney’s Macbeth and said to him, ‘You were bloody awful but what can you expect at your age?’ before whisking him off for scotch and steak at a nearby pub.

  Laughton meant no such thing. What he really meant was, ‘You show great promise and it just has to be nurtured and to that end I’m going to poach you away from Birmingham.’ Actors have a strange code language. And that’s exactly what he did. Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, who had not appeared on the London stage since 1936, invited Finney to join them in a new Jane Arden play called The Party, along with Joyce Redman and Ann Lynn. Laughton would also direct. The Times noted Finney’s addition, mentioning that the actor, still only 22, ‘has done very well for himself at Birmingham Repertory, particularly as Henry V and as Macbeth’.

  The West End beckoned. And was Finney intimidated by Laughton? – What do you think?

  3

  SEIZING THE MOMENT

  Imagine what it was like to be in my dressing room when I heard you all groan.

  Albert Finney.

  It was several nights into The Party with the venerable Charles Laughton, a huge star in more ways than one. During several performances at London’s New Theatre Finney had become irritated that, during his big speech towards the end, Laughton’s concentration was drifting. The old man would be scratching his nose or bottom or making funny sounds. So much so that Finney told producer Harry Saltzman, ‘Tell Mr Laughton that I’ll kick him into the orchestra pit if he fucking does that again.’

  ‘Oh will he?’ chuckled Laughton.

  ‘He will,’ replied Saltzman matter-of-factly.

  It was this certain ‘I don’t give a damn’ quality that endeared people to Finney. He treated everyone the same. But he wouldn’t take rudeness from anyone. He’d tell big stars or theatregoers to shut up if he felt they were out of line. Roger Moore later summed up his friend’s appeal, ‘That’s what I love about Albie – he is completely independent and speaks his mind witho
ut fear of upsetting anybody.’

  The Party had some themes that were risqué for the time, notably a subtext involving possible incest between father and daughter. Overriding all this was the alcoholism of the father (Laughton) who had been away recuperating in a clinic. He then returns home unexpectedly to interrupt a party given for his daughter, Ettie, played by Ann Lynn.

  Arden’s play failed, however, to make the impact of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. And Finney’s part, which marked his official West End debut, was small. ‘Joyce Redman and Albert Finney complete a group of accomplished performances which are directed with a somewhat loose hand,’ said The Times on the play’s opening in June 1958.

  According to Simon Callow, ‘[Laughton] felt a huge paternal warmth towards this northern lad, direct, unactorish, of the real world.’

  ‘Actors are useful people,’ Laughton wrote later. ‘You can tell a lot about what England is like today through Albert Finney.’ Ann Rogers, Laughton’s personal assistant, thought they were like Falstaff and Hal together. Kenneth Tynan wrote, ‘Mr Finney shares the play’s best scene with Mr Laughton, who rises like a salmon to the occasion; few young actors have ever got a better performance out of their directors.’1

  Laughton was past his best, fat and occasionally a little unsteady on his feet. But Finney, according to a young Sheridan Morley, who remembered the production well, seemed to be quietly studying the older actor:

  During The Party you got the sense that Finney was shadowing Laughton, rather in the same way that, much, much later, Edward Fox did when playing with the by then octogenarian Rex Harrison in The Admirable Crichton. You saw Rex handing on the torch to Fox – literally, there on stage. With the extraordinary affinity between Laughton and Finney, something then was clearly being handed on too.

  The Party gave rise to another celebration at home. Jane had become pregnant during the run of Macbeth and on 16 September she gave birth to a son, Simon, at St Mary’s Hospital. Audrey Williamson described the infant as a ‘laughing red-blonde Albert in miniature’.

  Finney, Jane and Simon rented a flat in Bayswater, west London. Photographs show Finney smoking in a makeshift kitchen, surrounded by pots and pans, dressed casually and wearing a cloth cap, perhaps consciously, or unconsciously, aping Laughton’s style of dress.

  Finney looked mature for his years. By the age of 21 he was married and a father and had made a West End debut. Many of his peers had barely started drama school. Finney had also appeared in four episodes of Emergency Ward 10, the medical soap opera which gave young actors such as Ian Hendry and Glyn Owen (the latter accompanied Finney on his New York run of Luther) their first parts on television. He and Jane had also appeared together in a radio play, The Larford Lad.

  Meanwhile, a young up-and-coming director, Lindsay Anderson, saw The Party and delighted in what he called, ‘a kind of truthfulness and directness about the way Finney played which, in fact, was not in the least typical of the people of his generation’. Anderson was asked by producer Oscar Lewenstein to direct a production by Willis Hall called The Discipline of War. The play was about a group of British soldiers in Malaya during the Second World War. The title was eventually changed to The Long and the Short and the Tall. Anderson wanted to cast Finney as the belligerent central character, Bamforth. Finney agreed.

  On the second day, however, Finney arrived looking ill. A doctor examined him and told him he had anything but appendicitis which turned out to be precisely the diagnosis. Finney was taken to hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Anderson was still determined to cast Finney in the lead role until it became clear that his recovery would take too long. Peter O’Toole, whose career would dovetail Finney’s, replaced him.

  Laughton invited Finney to Stratford after he had recovered. The veteran actor was to play Lear, and also Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He wanted Finney in the company. Finney had little choice but to follow his mentor. Finney’s period at Stratford, however, was not happy. One of the problems was that at drama school, and then at Birmingham, Finney had been feted as the great young leading man. At Stratford, however, Finney found himself surrounded by seasoned players – and he was still only 23.

  The stars, besides Laughton, were Paul Robeson as Othello and Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus. Other veteran performers included Harry Andrews, whom Kenneth Tynan had described as ‘the backbone of British theatre’. Also there were Angela Baddeley and Edith Evans – the latter, Finney always said, his favourite leading lady. If only cameras had captured what must have been an extraordinary season. Of these performances, only A Midsummer Night’s Dream was filmed for posterity.

  Zoe Caldwell recorded the magnificent impression made by Robeson:

  We all nervously awaited the arrival of Paul Robeson from Russia.2 Paul was, in so many ways, a giant of a man. All his life he had excelled – as an athlete, a scholar, and a singer – and because he seemed to have no fear he spoke out against injustice wherever he found it. I think envy had a great deal to do with his being driven from his own country. He was a Gulliver among us Lilliputians. He spoke to everyone in the same voice, no matter how grand the person, no matter how small. And he never mentioned his race.3

  Meanwhile, Finney, playing Edgar, watched as Laughton, then pushing 60, wrestled with Lear. An air of sadness surrounded the production. For forty years, Laughton had studied the role of Lear. Intellectually and emotionally he was ready, but physically he was not. He walked unsteadily, occasionally veering to the side. According to Caldwell, who played Cordelia:

  He was grossly overweight and standing was a chore. He loved to sit on a chair at the centre of a circle surrounded by young people sitting or kneeling, listening to his wisdom … Charles had left out the large ingredient for the big roles, stamina.

  Caldwell, acutely aware of Laughton’s debility, took laxatives the night before each performance, hoping to make herself as light as possible. But still Laughton struggled. Finney watched the older man closely. It was a lesson he never forgot. Many years later, when he was about 60, Finney was asked whether he would ever play Lear. Finney, referencing Laughton’s lack of stamina at a similar age, intimated that the moment had passed.

  Zoe Caldwell believed that Laughton, who, we should remember, died just three years later, had taken on Finney as a young protégé and was projecting on him his thwarted ambitions:

  I think Charles felt, somewhat vicariously, that he could play roles that he had never played – Romeo, Hamlet, Henry V, through Albert. This is something older actors sometimes do and it does not help either the younger or the older actor. There was a danger in Albert on the stage but like all young actors he had to make his own mistakes, his way, in order to develop his own talent.

  Reviewers hardly mentioned Finney’s Edgar in King Lear, his Cassio in Othello or his Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But why should they? The star parts belonged to Olivier, Laughton and Robeson. Priscilla Morgan, playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, remembers the contrast with the exceptionally tall Vanessa Redgrave (as Helena) with whom she shared a dressing room. When, in the play, she called Redgrave ‘a painted maypole’, she really meant it!

  Morgan thought that the play’s young director, 28-year-old Peter Hall,4 was all wrong for the production:

  I’m not a great admirer of his. He didn’t have a great sense of humour and, after all, it was supposed to be a comedy. He’d always say to us – ‘show me what you’re going to do’ – but I was looking for something more from him. I never worked with him again.

  She found Laughton’s performance to be ‘heavy and slow’, but she blames Hall. ‘He was just so star-struck.’ She was surprised to hear that Laughton was only 60 at the time of the Stratford Festival, believing that he was at least 70.

  Priscilla married her boyfriend, Clive Dunn, later famous for Dad’s Army, during the Festival. She remembers Finney rushing over on a matinee day with a box of fruit and vegetables. Vanessa Redgrave helped to wash up after the lady in ch
arge of the kitchen had an allergic reaction to an alcoholic drink. Priscilla says of Finney, ‘He was an absolute dear and it was clear that he was going to be a big star.’5 She didn’t see him for another twelve years until Finney produced the stage version of Peter Nichols’s Forget-Me-Not-Lane in London in 1971. (Finney later starred in a television version in 1975.) She found Finney totally unaffected by stardom.

  In Stratford, Finney would leave the theatre unnoticed, riding off on his bike, wearing a mucky-looking beige raincoat. Yet, years later, when audiences reflected on this extraordinary season, it was clear that Finney had won many female admirers. One visitor remembered:

  We also saw King Lear, wherein Charles Laughton was Lear, Robert Hardy was Edmund, Ian Holm the Fool and, I think, Albert Finney was Edgar. Our girls’ school travelled by train from Bury St Edmunds and both plays made a huge impression on us. We also saw a dazzling young Derek Jacobi as Henry IV at Cambridge Arts Theatre. I think Albert Finney won the heart-throb stakes, but it was a close-run thing.

  Yet, heart-throb or not, Finney was unhappy:

  I don’t know what was wrong with my work at Stratford. It was more wrong than it’s ever been before or since. I was aware of it being wrong. It was one of those times when you feel you’re in a tunnel and there’s nothing you can do to get out of it. My work was awful, just vile. Every time I went on stage I thought – ‘get off, get off, what are you doing?’ It was just terrible.6

  Finney’s marriage to Jane was also in trouble. He had settled down too young and couldn’t cope with domestic responsibilities and curbs on his freedom. Later, talking to John Freeman on Face to Face, he blamed himself full-square for the failure. And Finney, who was still only 23, remembers a rare show of unprofessionalism on his part during a performance of Othello, directed by Tony Richardson: