Some journalists tried to identify the women referenced in the songs. A British hack mentioned Jane Wenham, Samantha Eggar and Anouk Aimée, but, said Finney, the writer had got it all wrong. The list, he said, was too short. (Finney always had a good way of disarming the prying press. In 1982, a journalist interviewing Finney for Photoplay magazine told him that she had heard a rumour that he and Diana Quick were about to marry. Finney, laughing, replied, ‘Really? I must go home and tell Di. And how many children are we going to have?’)
Such was Finney’s fame at the time that King’s music publisher, David Platz, was able to negotiate a quick deal with Motown. Finney was one of only two white artists ever picked up by the company. Finney and Denis King took off to the US in June 1977 to promote the album which was called, simply, Albert Finney’s Album. Finney made guest appearances on the Johnny Carson show, with Alan King standing in for Carson.
King tells the story:
Albert was funny and charming as usual and seemed his perfectly relaxed self while being interviewed. Then he was asked to sing and from where I sat at the piano, fingers poised, I could see a strange but familiar light come into his eyes. Not one of total panic exactly but more the look of someone who will be stepping outside his comfort zone. This would not be Albert playing a part or reciting Shakespeare. This would be Albert with no character to hide behind, Albert as Albert, Albert in unfamiliar territory, Albert singing. As an accompanist you learn to recognise this look and you adjust your concentration accordingly; you crank it up to its maximum setting because obviously you want the singer to sound his or her best. Albert walked over from a chair on the dais to the microphone. Behind him, Don Severinson’s band struck up, with me conducting from the piano and the number ‘What have they done to my hometown?’ went as rehearsed. In other words, we got through it. No one screamed for more but it was well received, and Albert seemed much relieved when it was over. Over the next six weeks, across the States, this set the pattern for every time he appeared on TV. He never screwed up but it never got easier for him. And even though we never talked about it I don’t think it was really his bag.19
Finney echoed his friend’s comments:
Singing in front of people was at once frightening and titillating at the same time. When you’re acting on stage or acting in a film, you have an automatic out-clause. If the thing goes badly you can always blame it on the director or the writer or whatever. You are part of a group. But when you are up there singing songs you have written yourself, there is no out-clause. It’s just you. And, if you’re bad, there’s no one to blame but yourself. In that way, being a singer is more difficult than being an actor.20
Finney, Diana and Denis King had a great time, though, having dinner with Al Pacino in Sardi’s. They saw Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge in Phoenix and Diana Ross in New York. Finney also enjoyed a reunion with Liza Minnelli (his co-star in Charlie Bubbles) backstage after her try-out musical, The Act.
Finney’s singing career ended there and then. By 1992, he told Terry Wogan, you could pick up the album as a collectors’ item. ‘It got to 192 in the Top 200, then sayonara. That was the end of my recording career. The fact that it wasn’t a hit doesn’t matter. It looks good on my résumé.’ Subsequently, Finney denied that he could sing at all, echoing other screen stars like Lee Marvin and Richard Harris who admitted they only sounded good with a professional backing group.
Meanwhile, after that rather strange hiatus, Finney was again ready for an assault on another classic part. Would he fall victim to the jinx of Macbeth?
13
HALL OF DOUBT
I don’t give a damn for Peter Hall or his Lear. I want to see the actors’ Lear.
Richard Harris, 1988.
John Osborne later referred to Peter Hall, the director of the National, as ‘Fu Manchu’. Michael Blakemore called him ‘a snob’. For Jonathan Miller he was ‘a safari-suited bureaucrat’.
So Hall was never his own worst enemy; others filled that role. Yet Hall could also be hard on himself. His autobiography and diaries, when covering his stewardship of the National in the late seventies, are strewn with rueful admissions of failure. At turns he blames his excessive workload, his subservience to others’ demands and his inexperience at handling certain theatrical genres. He also cites his lack of foresight in realising that some productions, although effective in rehearsal rooms, were unsuited to the vast auditoriums of the South Bank.
If there was one word to describe Hall’s tenure during this period it was ‘beleaguered’. Seldom did a week go by without the press launching new brickbats against the National. Hall’s salary, the building’s design, the choice of productions, and the rights and wrongs of subsidised theatre – everything was fair game. For some reason, none of his successors attracted this venom.1 Unfortunately, all these controversies coincided with Finney giving classical acting a last ride out. He has never returned to the National since.
Finney’s first work after Tamburlaine was with Michael Elliott, the founding artistic director of Manchester’s new Royal Exchange Theatre Company, on two plays, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Coward’s Present Laughter. Finney won excellent reviews for his Astrov in Uncle Vanya, playing opposite Leo McKern (as Vanya) as well as Alfred Burke and Eleanor Bron.
Irving Wardle particularly liked Leo McKern as Vanya. ‘In scale, the performance eclipses everything else on stage, but it meets an unyielding match in Albert Finney’s granite-hard Astrov, whose dulled responses and wolfish appetites fully confirm his own self-portrait,’ he wrote. Hall also visited the production towards the end of its six-week run. He found the version ‘definitive’ and added, ‘Albert’s Astrov was a country doctor wading through shit and mud to save the peasants from cholera’.
Finney’s second play with Elliott, Present Laughter, co-starring Diana Quick, seemed so not Finney that it ran the risk of provoking unintentional laughter. Think of Coward, and one pictures a leading man with cut-glass, strangulated Oxford English delivery, a suave, debonair air, tall and slim with impeccably coiffured hair and cigarette holder. Finney, with his hefty build and bulldog appearance, did not particularly fit this kind of light comedy. And even less was he Garry Essendine, the preening, self-conscious comedy actor of Present Laughter. (George C. Scott also played the lead in a Broadway production of Present Laughter, perhaps a similar case of unusual casting.) You could see the role being played by Nigel Patrick, certainly O’Toole, with his slightly passé air of rakish sophistication, or Simon Callow – the star of a more recent revival. Finney seemed all wrong for it, yet somehow he succeeded.
Finney’s conviction finally swayed Irving Wardle:
In the role of the champ, however, we find the irredeemably post-war figure of Albert Finney, the least likely sucker for a silk dressing gown or target for request that he should abate his ‘devastating charm’ … What counts, however, is just how far he does go. As on past occasions with this actor, any opening incredulity is finally swept aside by the sheer energy and stamina with which he fights for his view of the character.
Finney made an unexpectedly early return to the National to replace the recently deceased Pitt Wilkinson in The Passion at the Cottesloe.2 He took the relatively minor roles of Annas and the blind man. Mark McManus, later to find fame as Taggart, was Jesus and Brian Glover, the actor usually described as a ‘gritty northerner’, most famous for his role as the bullying sports master in Kes, played Cayphas. One scene called for Glover to consume a flagon of wine to the accompaniment of a drum roll. Grape juice, rather than wine, was the usual liquid for the occasion. But one time, Finney, ever the prankster, decided to substitute the juice with some fine red wine. Doubtless, Finney expected that Glover would detect the ruse and sip the contents more slowly than usual. Not at all – Glover downed the whole flagon in one go, then scurried off to the dressing room during a break in his performance where he threw up before returning to the stage.
Finney’s parts in The Passion were unusual territor
y for an international star. Someone in his position might have been tempted to snooze in the wings and whistle through it; but not Finney. His blind man was as finely etched as any of his leading roles at the National. Jack Shepherd caught a pivotal moment in the production:
Finney played it like the blind people he had seen on the streets of Salford, upright but leaning away, with a worn, pressed suit, and a gabardine raincoat that his mother had folded over his arm before sending him out. To stand behind him and read on the faces of the spectators the moment at which his sight returned was as powerful a theatrical experience as I have known.3
While in The Passion, Finney was simultaneously learning lines for The Country Wife, Hall’s version of William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy in which a rake feigns impotence to have clandestine affairs with married women.
‘The general impression is of waiting for a dance that never begins,’ said Wardle of The Country Wife. ‘There are a good many nice individual details; as where Albert Finney’s Horner drops his hat to a strategic position to allow the suspicious Lady Fidget to approve his manhood.’ He thought that Ben Kingsley, pre-Gandhi, had emerged best, hailing his ‘brilliantly inventive and entirely traditional portrait of a Restoration fop’. But he went on to judge that ‘good or bad, the separate details never coalesce into any rhythmic patterns.’
Hall himself noted in his diaries that The Country Wife was ‘full of stridency and nothingness’. And he blamed himself for the poor reception:
I tried to rehearse The Country Wife during the height of the financial crisis. To make matters worse this was my first [and only] attempt at Restoration comedy, so I was dealing with an unfamiliar world. Although there were pleasures along the way – among them a cast including Albert Finney, Susan Littler4 and Richard Johnson – the production was a failure. The energy I draw from rehearsals and then reapply to administration just wasn’t there.
Better was Hall’s production of The Cherry Orchard at the Olivier in early 1978 which some thought featured Finney’s finest work at the National. Michael Billington noted:
The quality I most remember was that instead of playing Lopakhin in the obvious way, which is a kind of country peasant who has become part of the middle classes, the motivating factor here was that he was obviously in love with Ranyevskaya [Dorothy Tutin].
Ralph Richardson was also singled out for his ‘spellbinding performance’. Nevertheless, Hall was once again dissatisfied:
It had a dazzling cast, Albert Finney, Dorothy Tutin, Robert Stephens, Susan Fleetwood, Ben Kingsley and – crowning it – Ralph Richardson as Firs. Rehearsals were exhilarating … But once we moved from the rehearsal room into the great space of the Olivier, the play simply vanished. All the interplay between the actors seemed to disappear. The Olivier is a theatre for dialectical discussion and big epic statements. Irony, ambiguity, delicacy and the eloquence of the unsaid are very difficult to convey in it.
Dorothy Tutin’s daughter, Amanda Waring, remembers Ralph Richardson arriving at the theatre on a motorbike and that he and Finney taught her mother to ride one too.
All these plays were a preparation for Finney’s assault on Macbeth. (So superstitious are some actors about this play that, for example, Peter O’Toole would not even refer to it by name, calling it ‘Harry Lauder’, when he played the part in 1980.) And from the beginning it seemed that the Hall/Finney version was troubled.
Hall always maintained that he had never wanted to stage it. A diary entry from 15 February 1978 tells the story:
Dinner with Albert. He just wouldn’t give up on Macbeth, which I desperately don’t want to direct. ‘Why worry,’ he says, ‘it’s only a play? Let’s continue our adventures. We have a fine company, a fine theatre, you know Macbeth, I know it, why be so intense about it?’ Difficult to argue with, especially when we need it to add weight to the repertoire. And he did a lot to put my confidence back … The real reason for doing Macbeth is, I’m afraid, this: Albert has stuck by me through thick and thin. If he wants me to direct the play, I must stick by him.
Rehearsals saw gradually deteriorating confidence. Hall began to realise that, for whatever reason, the production lacked that certain something. ‘Final run-through of Macbeth this morning,’ Hall wrote on 22 May 1978. ‘Albert is sporadically superb, Dorothy very deep and complex, but I don’t know what the production’s like. Rather ordinary, I think. It’s not wrong-headed; it just perhaps doesn’t have a head at all.’ Hall wrote that Finney’s performance was variable, at times ‘dry and uninventive’ and with a ‘staccato delivery’. Tutin, according to Hall, was ‘too breathy and fading’.
Nicky Henson, as Malcolm, said he and the rest of the cast knew the critics would be gunning for them. Nevertheless, he found it ‘rather extraordinary’ when Hall, on the day Macbeth opened for press previews, told the company to expect bad notices. (Crying foul before battle commenced?) Finney responded by trying to drum up morale – literally – by taking to the glass roof and banging a drum. According to Henson, ‘it gave us a lift and we then all hung out the windows, cheering away’.
Remember Peter Bowles’s recollection of the 18-year-old Finney’s approach to Macbeth? ‘I’d learn the fucking lines and walk on.’ That implies tremendous bravado if nothing else. Yet, ironically, Hall admitted the final result was dull. ‘John Bury [set designer] and I tried to set an example by doing it economically. We ended up doing it boringly. The notices for me and for Albert were terrible.’
Dorothy Tutin’s daughter, actress Amanda Waring, remembers her mother’s dissatisfaction:
She wasn’t fabulously happy. She loved working with Albert and with Peter Hall but she felt let down by the stark production. The Olivier is a ginormous auditorium, allowing for little feedback with the audience. And there’s no comedy in Macbeth, so little sense of how the audience feels. She didn’t particularly like performing at the Olivier – the Lyttelton and the Cottesloe are a bit more intimate – and she would take the work home.5
She also remembers that Finney would sometimes ‘corpse’ on stage, play a few practical jokes, which sometimes unnerved the cast. Perhaps Finney did it on purpose, to lighten up the atmosphere, because reviews were critical.
Ned Chaillet, in The Times, led the assault, comparing it unfavourably to Trevor Nunn’s ‘superb’ production starring Ian McKellen which had just ended at the Young Vic:
The bare stage is used only to make the text pedantically plain, not to illuminate its drama. The moments in Mr Finney’s performance which are memorable are all near the end, when his face becomes a mass of nervous twitches, revealing the despair that the witches’ prophecies have brought.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in The Spectator, compared Finney’s Macbeth to Alan Howard’s Coriolanus: ‘The National’s Macbeth is another man who can convey great physical excitement, but Albert Finney lacks Howard’s resources as a classical actor and as a verse-speaker’.
Finney’s Macbeth might not have attracted great notices, yet once again, Finney had dared to tackle a colossal role. It’s as well here to take a step back and acknowledge his sheer guts: Tamburlaine, Hamlet and now Macbeth. All three were gargantuan classical parts demanding not only talent and self-discipline but also the toughest mettle.
Occasionally even Finney’s resilience had crumbled. Hall records visiting Finney during the interval of Hamlet, after the play had transferred to the Lyttelton, in which Finney was clearly struggling:
He sat there covered in sweat, crying his eyes out. He cried and cried and cried. I asked him if he would like me to go. No, he said, he felt tonight he’d unblocked something in himself. I agreed. What we’d had before was energy, ferocity, and agility. What we had tonight was a man exposing his own heart in return for the audience’s gift of those few hours of their lives.
Although Finney would face subsequent jibes that he was avoiding classical theatre, in the late seventies the whisperings were just the opposite. Some people said that he had rejected a glittering Hollywood career
to do theatre. His friend Tom Bell, speaking in 1978 about Finney’s long stint at the National, said, ‘I wouldn’t want to work there. Albie climbs mountains there. I’d rather think in terms of films.’6
‘Climbing mountains’, Everest even, was a good analogy for Finney’s repeated efforts. Hamlet and Macbeth were seen as the ultimate tests for an actor. Consider the 1980 Old Vic production of Macbeth starring Peter O’Toole. Audiences were rolling in the aisles as critics took shots at O’Toole’s poor timing and lisping delivery. ‘A cross between Bette Davis and Vincent Price,’ said one. The following day it seemed that World War Three had erupted. As O’Toole told Russell Harty, ‘the house was besieged by the press’. Harty said, ‘You mean the box office was besieged?’ O’Toole: ‘No my house was besieged.’
Ironically, the terrible notice boosted ticket sales for O’Toole’s Macbeth. O’Toole’s continuing in the run was saluted as a feat of heroism, given the bile thrown at him. And although Finney’s Macbeth was not nearly so skewered (compared to O’Toole’s at any rate), to perform it when his Hamlet had not attracted universal adulation also took courage.
Peter Hall, in his diaries, noted the intensity required for performing Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear: ‘Each of the tragedies is a microcosm of a man’s life, full of effort and then exhaustion. So is the actor’s performance. It is a metaphor as potent for the life of the individual as the metaphor of the Globe Theatre is for the world itself.’
Finney deserved praise for tackling the roles and they were a rebuff to those who (subsequently) said he had somehow shirked the classics. But people have short memories. After Macbeth, there was the possibility of another National Theatre production, of Galileo, to be directed by Lindsay Anderson. But Anderson declined. In a letter, he outlined his reasons for turning down Galileo and then added a damning judgement on Finney’s period at the National. (Anderson’s repeated criticisms of Finney are usually a lone voice in the wilderness. And, ironically, Finney would also come to echo Anderson’s dislike of the National Theatre building itself):
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