Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Peter Hall seemed optimistic at the beginning of rehearsals for Hamlet. He noted that Finney ‘looks wonderful with his beard: a powerful, passionate, sexy Hamlet, glowering with resentment. I looked at him and felt cheered.’ But an entry from 16 October 1975 shows Hall’s mood starting to pall: ‘Not a bad day’s Hamlet rehearsal, though I have a sense I am hanging on by my fingernails.’

  Angela Lansbury has since said that she felt she was miscast:

  At times Albert resembled a kind of black-clothed paratrooper, while I felt rather like a rather roughly hewn chess-piece as the queen – chained to the ground. There was no sexuality in the piece at all, which was curious. I was extremely disappointed about that because I felt that one of the reasons that I could be cast in this role effectively was the fact that I had a somewhat shady reputation for playing rather incestuous mothers. Yet I didn’t have a chance to display any of those qualities in the production. … those [poor] reviews were fair and square. There was no drama. It was the most untheatrical production I’ve ever been a part of.

  Kenneth Hurren in The Spectator gave Finney a sharp rebuke:

  Albert Finney’s Hamlet is as dreadful as might be imagined of an actor of his unquestionably superior talents. I shall not quarrel greatly with his monotonous verse-speaking, which is no worse than that of most of the company, for it might imply that I feel he should adopt some special ‘poetry voice’, whereas my modest requirement is merely that he should convey the sense of the lines (which often he does not).9

  By the time the production had moved to its new home, the 870-seat Lyttelton Theatre, in March 1976, Hurren had not changed his mind, ‘I am grieved to say that neither Albert Finney’s aggressively ill-spoken, weather-beaten Hamlet nor the production as a whole has improved in the merest particular’.

  Irving Wardle in The Times also disapproved:

  We have given up looking for princely Hamlets but it is no easy task to say what Finney is offering instead. He cuts out pathos, reflective philosophy and melancholy and bases his performance on energy, bluff comradeship and sardonic derision, the voice rasps as monotonously as a buzz saw, bringing the play scene, for instance, to a climax of insult well before the scene reaches its own climax. Mr Finney has the energy and presence to carry the part physically; but he casts no light on it.

  Benedict Nightingale agreed that Finney’s Hamlet lacked delicacy. ‘Albert Finney’s Hamlet was a disorderly dropout from Wittenberg University, a turbulent bull who could hardly enter an anteroom without knocking over the people as well as the china.’

  Not all the reviews, however, were so cutting. Bernard Levin noted a few idiosyncrasies, including words out of place. He added, while the production was still at the Old Vic, that he hoped that when he saw it again he would ‘hear rather more of Shakespeare’s words and less of Finney’s’. But, Levin noted, Finney was wrestling with a full, unabridged text. He acknowledged the muted reception, but concluded with a generous tribute:

  Albert Finney’s Hamlet has not been received with the kind of unanimous acclaim that he has hitherto received for almost every part he has played and not only received but richly deserved, for this great actor brings to mind what Dr Johnson said of Goldsmith: truly Finney touches nothing that he does not adorn.10

  Overall, however, the reception was disappointing. John Gielgud noted in a diary entry for 1976, ‘Have not dared to see the Finney Hamlet. Everyone says the performances are poor all-round.’11

  Perhaps Wardle’s comment on Finney cutting out ‘pathos, reflective philosophy and melancholy’ is the most telling. One can guess at a simple problem. The Great Dane is contemplative, tentative, introspective and disillusioned. None of these characteristics apply to Finney. In Sheridan Morley’s words, ‘Finney is no introverted scholar’. To which, you may say – so what? He’s an actor, and Finney subsequently proved his worth in many films where he was acting someone far removed from himself. Yes, but on stage, it’s harder to suppress one’s true self, especially in such a long part as Hamlet. Perhaps Finney’s natural ebullience shone through so that we ended up seeing a more virile Hamlet than intended. Others wondered if Finney’s instinctive style, to give people an up-front, forceful Hamlet, would have clashed with Hall’s pedantic approach to the text.

  Finney himself was unfazed. In a diary entry for 11 December, Hall noted, ‘Albert is still elated; not put down at all by the abuse, which is vociferous here and there’. On 19 December, Hall dined with Finney at the Dorchester:

  He [Finney] was most complimentary about the Hamlet work and about the experience of working with me – wants to go on, is determined to tackle more big roles, and determined to stay with the National Theatre, with the occasional film away … he said he loved playing the part.

  Finney later said he felt imbued with energy, even after a colossal part like Hamlet. It was as though the play, as written, fulfilled a cathartic need in an actor:

  The great difference between stage and screen is that in the theatre, if you’re playing a demanding part, you can get a physical sense of repletion. At the end of the evening you really feel that you’ve been used and stretched physically, mentally, imaginatively, emotionally. Playing Hamlet is extraordinary that way. You go through the whole evening talking, talking, talking. And then you get to the duel with Laertes, and you feel you’ve got nothing left. But because the playwright asks you to do something physical, it’s actually a very energising moment in the play. You’re using a different part of yourself for five or eight minutes after all this ‘to be or not to be’ stuff. Having been an actor, Shakespeare understood how it would work. In movies you don’t get that physical fulfilment, because you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for just a little burst of energy. You go home mentally tired, but you’ve not used your body. Some days are very frustrating, when you go in full of beans, and three-quarters of the day is lost in lighting the scene.12

  Mediocre, even poor, reviews did not dent Finney’s morale. As he milled around the new South Bank building, at first for rehearsals and then after the play’s transfer to the Lyttelton, he declared he felt at home. ‘I want a decade as an actor in the theatre. I shall be here for a long time if the marriage works, and I’m very happy at the moment,’ he said. ‘It’s just like John Neville in the great days at Nottingham in the sixties,’ said Vivien Wallace from the National’s press office.

  Finney proved a great company man at the National, learning the names of many of the building’s 500 staff: technicians, cleaners and bar staff. Linda Tolhurst, stage door keeper at the theatre, starting at the Old Vic in 1975 just before the move to the South Bank, recalled Finney’s friendliness, ‘Albert Finney was the first famous person I ever met. He’d buy everyone drinks at the bar. He said to me, “Don’t call me Albert; call me Albie”.’13

  Finney even declared he was happy with the acoustics at the Lyttelton Theatre, saying that he had never found the Old Vic’s horseshoe shape ideal. The Olivier, on the other hand, where he took his Tamburlaine later in 1976, he described as like performing in ‘an aircraft carrier’.

  It was impossible to dislike ‘Albie’, who took to enjoying a cigarette and Guinness with the staff. As ever, Finney was a hero to young actors who remembered his anti-establishment Arthur Seaton. A young Ray Winstone, then working in the wardrobe department, described an early encounter with Finney at the Old Vic:

  My job was looking after two actors called Patrick Monckton and Michael Keating but sometimes a mate of mine who was looking after Albert Finney would be off and I’d have to stand in for him. Finney had been one of my favourite actors since I’d seen him in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It didn’t matter that he was playing a northerner – I recognised that character, and that was the first time I’d seen the kind of person I could relate to from my own life up there on the big screen in such a convincing way. I used to love watching him in Hamlet, giving it the full Shakespearean thing but doing it as a man so I’d go missing during the play to watch him from
the seats right at the back … unfortunately I was late getting back once and Albert missed his cue. I went in the bar afterwards knowing I’d fucked up, which I felt really bad about, as I had a lot of time for Albert Finney as a person, never mind how great his acting was. I still wasn’t quite ready to face the music, though, so when he came in looking for me I ducked down behind a table. Through the forest of furniture legs I could clearly see Albert’s human ones walking across the floor, so I crawled off between the stools in the opposite direction. When I came up for air he was standing right in front of me, like one of the twins in The Shining, only with Albert Finney’s face. I don’t know how he did it. It was like he floated there or something. His first two words were not promising. – they were ‘you’ and ‘cunt’ – but when I explained ‘I’m so sorry, Albert, I fucked up, I was watching you from up the back and I just missed the call’ it seemed to do the trick. All he said after that was – ‘what do you want to drink?’14

  Perhaps Winstone’s story explains why Finney was popular but also why some of the critics disliked his Hamlet. He was simply too virile for those used to the cut-glass delivery of someone like Gielgud. But, as a final comment on Finney’s Hamlet, the critics may have sniped, but the box office told a different story. It played to packed houses and some distinguished visitors. Even the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Denis Healey, saw it. ‘He and his wife [Edna] enjoyed Hamlet very much,’ noted Hall in a diary entry.

  Maybe Finney was better suited to playing warriors than procrastinators. Tamburlaine was another colossal epic, and the first production staged in ‘the aircraft carrier’, the 1,160-seater Olivier Theatre. A rare performance of Christopher Marlowe’s epic play, loosely based on the life of an Asian emperor, it was a four-hour marathon, longer than Hamlet. Hall again directed. This time he was more optimistic: ‘It’s a magnificent part for Finney: tough, vital, funny and with a great tragic dimension at the end. He will be remarkable, I think.’15

  An entry a few months later confirmed Hall’s upbeat mood, ‘Albert is in terrific form: one feels all those years of his youth in Manchester studying stand-up comics.’

  Denis Quilley and Susan Fleetwood, who had been in Hamlet, also co-starred. Unusually, because the completion of the Olivier Theatre had been repeatedly delayed, some of the rehearsals had to take place outside. Hall recalled:

  In the hot summer of 1976, in despair as to whether we would ever be able to stage the production, and urgently needing to contact an audience with our work, we performed some scenes outside on the river terraces while the traffic roared by on Waterloo Bridge. The spectators were those who happened to be passing. Many stopped and watched, fascinated by the central figure of Albert Finney in the name part, rakishly wearing a beribboned straw hat against the beating sun … And when Tamburlaine finally inaugurated the Olivier in early October, Albert, surviving severe bronchitis, was magnificent. The drama took the stage and sang. We had successfully launched the second and largest and in my view most exciting of our three theatres.16

  When the play opened for real, Finney was a sight to behold, with a mane of curly hair, pointed whiskers and a gold-encrusted mini-skirted costume adorned with trinkets and bracelets. At the opening, on 4 October 1976, Finney confronted not just a marathon part, first-night nerves and the dreaded critics but also his lingering illness. Hall wrote:

  Albert sounded badly bronchial for the first three-quarters of an hour, but gradually the tubes began to clear and his confidence grew as he realised he would be able to get through. At the end there was the sort of ovation that is usually reserved for opera and ballet, and it was not just for Albert but for the whole company.

  This time there were more plaudits than brickbats. Malcolm Macpherson in Newsweek said, ‘Finney’s Tamburlaine was superb, catching all of the character’s mad fury and revelling in the colour of the verse to such an extent that he even discovered a hint of humour in the bloodthirsty bully’. John Walker, in the Herald Tribune, described Finney’s performance as ‘very good but not great’ – whatever that means.

  Tamburlaine was certainly a long test for the human bladder and very hard work for everyone involved.17 A bonus was that Finney had also found a new girlfriend, Diana Quick, whom he met during rehearsals on the play. Diana, ten years his junior, was still married to actor Kenneth Cranham when she first met Finney. Not only a great beauty but a formidable intellect, she had won a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before she had even sat her A levels. She was also the first female president of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society. By 1981 she was starring in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and, more famously, the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Her role as troubled aristocrat Lady Julia Flyte brought her international acclaim and an Emmy.

  Diana, serene and sensuous, had an air of maturity about her. She later recalled that Finney once told her, ‘You’re going to find it very hard to have a career in England. The English don’t really like grown-up women. They only like girls.’ Finney was usually perceptive about other people, so she worried about her future. Fortunately, however, she has remained in demand.

  She and Finney co-starred, albeit fleetingly, in Ridley Scott’s first film, The Duellists, about an extended feud between two Napoleonic soldiers. Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel engage in a series of inconclusive, bloody duels. The film was derived from Joseph Conrad’s short story The Duel, itself based on the true story of a long-standing quarrel between two French officers.

  Although the plot seems far-fetched, at least to modern audiences, triggered for no apparent reason other than a ridiculous overreaction to a perceived slight, The Duellists is stunning and compelling. It is Keitel’s Feraud who keeps the absurd vendetta going. And Keitel acts him well, looking at Carradine’s d’Hubert with marvellous scorn as if confronting a bad smell. ‘You have the effrontery to invade my space again,’ he seems to be saying. The feud may be groundless but that, according to Scott, was the point: ‘All the Carradine character needs to say is – “let’s have a drink, shake hands and forget about it”. But because of this ridiculous soldier’s code they are living under, he can’t do it.’

  Scott felt he needed a strong player to portray the small but significant role of Fouché, a secret police chief. ‘Albert Finney, who’s tremendously constructive in the sense that he will help if he thinks a project’s worthwhile, did a cameo in exchange for a framed cheque for £25 inscribed “break glass in case of need”,’ the director recalled.

  Finney’s Fouché was serpent like, slippery and authoritative. Finney rivets you during his encounter with Carradine. ‘I’m something of a virtuoso at survival. You’ll be aware of that, I think,’ says Fouché, a smoky threat rising in his voice. I hate the silly expression ‘scene-stealer’ but it’s apt here. Finney was playing Hamlet at the Lyttelton during his stint on The Duellists. Fouché was supposed to be white-haired and beardless but Scott allowed him to keep Hamlet’s beard and black hair.

  Cristina Raines, who played Adele, remembered Finney’s authority in the film: ‘God, he just opens his mouth and he just commands the room and he really is a wonderful man’.18 Many others have commented on Finney’s captivating voice, rich, resonant and stentorian, and just perfect for the old actor manager he was to play several years later in The Dresser.

  Finney went to Cannes in May 1977 to publicise Scott’s film, conversing in excellent French as he strolled along the beach. He mentioned his love of rugby, recalling that he had played as a youngster in France. ‘I adore the current moment and the infinite possibilities of tomorrow, the secrets of tomorrow … I love that,’ he said as the Med brushed his toes. Who wouldn’t?

  In 1977, the year of The Duellists’ release, Finney, always testing his artistry, broke new ground. The actual trigger was a play in London that he was involved in producing. Finney recalled:

  I needed a record of organ music for one scene. I rang up Denis King, a friend, who used to be part of the King Brothers, which ha
d been a very important singing group but then broke up. Anyhow, Denis said he would be delighted to make my organ music record. And the man who ran the studio came up to me and said: ‘Remember me? Fifteen years ago, I asked you if you wanted to make a record.’

  Finney decided to make an album of original material. Within a few weeks they had completed twelve songs, mostly about Finney’s childhood and early years in Salford. Many were written during extended rehearsals for Tamburlaine. One ditty reflected his feelings about his place of birth:

  What have they done to my hometown?

  They’ve pulled the terraced houses down

  And put the people in the sky,

  In towers twenty storeys high.

  Another, ‘Those Other Men’, reflected Finney’s easy come, easy go, play the field attitude to love – with a nod, presumably, to the other men in his girlfriends’ lives:

  I’d like to thank those other men

  They helped to make you what you are

  They made you wise in making love

  And now your love is shared with me

  So how can I regret when I think about those other men?

  The gentle warmth of your caress

  You didn’t learn that yesterday.

  Another song, ‘Bird of Paradise’, could have been an evocation of Finney’s exotic Hawaiian holidays, accompanied by the sound of rolling surf and chirping in the trees:

  The bird of paradise is very rare

  Of a kind beyond compare

  You have to handle with great care

  The bird of paradise

  The way that she moves

  To see how gracefully her limbs unfold.

  Reactions? Judith Simons said in the Daily Express, ‘He has a wonderfully poetic, declamatory style … and proves himself a first-class lyricist. His songs should prove a treasure chest for other artists.’ Barry Coleman in The Guardian merely wrote that Finney ‘should have known better’. Lindsay Anderson – surprise, surprise – thought the album was ‘dreadful’. My own opinion? I’m sure that the likes of Perry Como or Frank Sinatra would not have lost any sleep.