by Antony Sher
Unable to get back to sleep, I find my copy of the play and have a proper look at the speech.
`Now is the winter ...'
God. It seems terribly unfair of Shakespeare to begin his play with such a famous speech. You don't like to put your mouth to it, so many other mouths have been there. Or to be more honest, one particularly distinctive mouth. His poised, staccato delivery is imprinted on those words like teeth marks.
I sit in shock, in the middle of the night, staring at the text.
`Now is the winter ...'
God. It's as hard as saying `I love you', as if you had just coined the phrase for the first time.
Has Olivier done the part definitively? Surely not. Surely the greatness of the play is lessened if such a feat is possible? Surely contemporaries thought the same about Irving, Kean, even Burbage? The trouble is, Olivier put it on film.
To cheer myself up on the subject, I dig out my tg8o diary to read this entry: 28 January. The Roundhouse. With Dickie and the actor Philip Joseph to see the Rustavelli Richard III. A stunning production by this Russian company. Ramaz Chkhivadze plays Richard like a species of giant poisonous toad. And he touches people as if removing handfuls of flesh. I will never forget the moment of Accession. As the crown landed on his head it seemed to squash the face beneath it like in an animated cartoon. You knew it was going to be downhill for Richard from then on. Dickie thought it was a definitive production, but I'm not so sure. How can we know when so much of the experience was slightly dream-like, that is, in a foreign language? But Dickie was undeterred.
'It makes me very envious,' he said. `Mind you, they do have two years to rehearse.'
`Yes,' said Philip Joseph, `but think of the two-month Technical.'
Saturday rq November
This letter has been pinned up on the Green Room notice board, concerning the moment in Tartuffe when I pull down my tights to commence the assault on Elmire, and my bum is exposed; it's from a College of Higher Education:
`Dear Sirs,
I attended a performance of Tartuffe with my Sixth Form pupils last night and we were all rather offended by the totally unwarranted nudity in Act rv. We have tickets for Cyrano de Bergerac on 2 December and I would therefore be grateful if you could let us know if there is any nudity in that, and if so, how much?'
They're lucky it wasn't more than just my bum: the rest is contained in a posing-pouch hidden under the smock, following a conversation in rehearsals that went, `Bums are funny, breasts funny-ish, but pubes, penises, testicles and vaginas are definitely not funny at all.'
Some thoughts on Richard III.
In several copies I've looked at it's called The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Yet a tradition has evolved of playing it as black comedy. I've never seen anyone play Richard's pain, his anger, his bitterness, all of which is abundant in the text.
Literature and drama are full of angelic cripples, deformed but kindly and lovable: Quasimodo, Smike, the Elephant Man, Claudius in I, Claudius. It seems to me that Richard's personality has been deeply and dangerously affected by his deformity, and that one has to show this connection.
But the problem in playing him extremely deformed is to devise a position that would he too per cent safe to sustain over three hours, and for a run that could last for two years. Play him on crutches perhaps? They would take a lot of the strain off the danger areas: lower back, pelvis and legs. And my arms are quite strong after months at the gym. Also I was on crutches for months after the operation so they have a personal association for me of being disabled. They could be permanently part of Richard, tied to his arms. The line, `Behold mine arm is like a blasted sapling wither'd up', could refer to one of them literally.
The crutches idea is attractive, too attractive at this early stage. Must keep an open mind on the subject.
Worrying silence from Bill. It's about two weeks since we met. I ring him. He sounds evasive. I sense that something's wrong. He says that Richard III is still the only offer. Roger Rees has been talked to about a Hamlet and Ken Branagh about a possible Troilus.
But good news about the videos. Both Moliere and Tartuffe are to be done. Bill will direct them himself with the aid of a technical director.
Monday 21 November
A DAY AT THE BARBICAN Walking through the foyers first thing in the morning, it's like some futuristic city mysteriously depopulated. A pair of automatic doors have quietly gone mad during the night and can't stop opening and closing.
At the top of the main staircase there is a plaque unveiled by the Queen at the Gala Opening on 3 March 1982. I was present and had an encounter which now seems to have a curious significance.
I was leading a little group to this staircase for the arrival of the Queen. Apart from Jim, the group consisted of R S C stalwarts Adrian Noble and Joyce Nettles. They knew the building much better than I did, as I hadn't even joined the company, so why I should have been leading is something of a mystery. At the time I put it down to drunkenness - champagne had been flowing freely - but now I suspect it was more to do with A Greater Scheme Of Things. Anyway, leading I was. The Royal arrival was imminent. DJs and evening gowns shimmered and rustled; the lights tickled over jewellery and hair lacquer; the smell of exclusive scents, the sounds of sophisticated gossip and discreet champagne burps.
I turned back to beckon my flagging group and almost immediately crashed into someone heading in the other direction. I say crashed, but it was as soft and cushioned as befits a collision with Destiny. The recipient of my careless shoulder was an old man with a white beard and rimless spectacles. The face was vaguely familiar, the voice even more so.
`Are you trying to kill me?' he asked with the gentle humour of someone who has looked Death properly in the eye.
`No,' I replied with certainty. And then as an afterthought, `Sorry.'
And that's all there was to it. That's all that was said. It was puzzling that a little circle had cleared around us, me and Father Time, but not unduly worrying. He smiled and passed on. I joined my group who now stared at me with an assortment of strange expressions, as if they had witnessed some miracle. I smiled, nonplussed, a little drunk, and made to lead on.
`Do you know who that was?' demanded Jim.
The urgency of his voice caused me to swing round and stare after the retreating figure. Suddenly I recognised him, or rather recognised his wife - she was holding his arm now and steering him, to avoid further collisions with drunken actors in hired DJs - Joan Plowright.
The Queen arrived, but my encounter had so stunned me that I was pointing in the wrong direction, expecting her to come down the stairs instead of up them, and missed seeing her altogether.
It didn't matter, for I had just brushed shoulders with Richard III.
This morning, almost two years later, a cleaner is hard at work, polishing the plaque. I arrive at the stage door. This is run like the reception desk of a modern hotel. Usually there are a few people standing around clutching briefcases (journalists, members of the government doing financial surveys) and a queue of members of the public who think they're at the box-office.
I will be greeted either by Irish Shamus, large and friendly, `Hillo Towni,' or by Cockney Ron with tomahawk head, `Aw'ri' Toan?'
Into the corridors where Radio 3 is piped during the day: it gets everywhere. The uninitiated may be alarmed, going into a loo to find the 1812 playing. They pee, glancing nervously over their shoulders as canons explode in the cubicles behind them. On Saturdays Critics Forum might be on and if you've just opened in something, you might be under discussion. You hurry along the corridors then, hands clasped over ears, in an Orwellian nightmare, as disembodied voices tell you what they think of you, and it's being broadcast all round the building!
In the evening the show is relayed, Main House or Pit depending on which corridor you're in. It can change from The Tempest to Moliere, Cyrano to Tartuffe, with the slapping of a swing door.
Today it is Maydays, so I move into the Number One dr
essing-room. This involves carrying my large cardboard box (containing shampoos, deodorants, aftershaves, vitamins, glucose, Rennies, Kaolin & Morphine, dressing gown, towel and little cushion for the quick zizz) from the communal Pit dressing-rooms down several floors to the individual Main House dressing-rooms on street level.
The Number One dressing-room (its number is actually Fifty-One, but that doesn't have the same ring to it) looks rather like something out of a motorway motel. Characterless functionalism. Its main feature is a pay phone fixed on to the wall in a plastic module of almost alarming yellow. Otherwise there's a sofa, three chairs, work-surface, wash-basin and a window. Through this you can watch legs and wheels going down the ramp to the car-parks. You cannot see the sky, but by twisting down and sideways you can just see a reflection of the sky in the glass building opposite. This is not to be sneezed at when you're underground for most of the day.
Despite all, I love it, the much maligned Barbican. In a hundred years they will look on it with such affection. `Why can't they build theatres like the Barbican nowadays?' they will sigh.
Tuesday 22 November
MAYDAYS Neil Kinnock in the audience. The play was very moving as a result, like when George Harrison came toJohn, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert (in which I played Ringo). This fiction you're playing is someone else's reality, you hear the lines through their ears, as if for the first time, and they suddenly come out quite fresh. I didn't want my character to defect to the Right tonight.
Afterwards I'm summoned to meet Kinnock. The corridor is full of men - Secret Service? Surely not. He is small, has instant charisma, and is very cheerful; in fact he positively glows with enthusiasm; the light he gives off is orangey, from his hair, freckles and gums. His wife tells us how she couldn't get twelve decent seats for the performance. `They probably thought,' she says in a Welsh accent even stronger than his, `that I was someone from the sticks bringing in a little charabanc for a night on the town.' So they all sat right at the back. It seems they go to the theatre a lot - they recognise Stephanie Fayerman from a feminist fringe show.
Ron [Ron Daniels, RSC director] asks him whether he's enjoying his new role as leader of the Labour Party. `Enjoying it!' he laughs, an orange firecracker going off, `Enjoying it! Enjoyment doesn't come into it. Enjoyment is for afterwards, when it's all over and you can discuss your memoirs on television.'
When they've gone, Ali [Alison Steadman], Shrap [John Shrapnel] and a friend of his have a drink in my dressing-room. We're all very star-struck, like schoolgirls at the stage door.
`Wasn't he nice!'
`And so ordinary and easy to talk to.'
`And so little.'
`Seems much bigger on the telly.'
Discussion about power. Shrap's friend says that you can't want to lead any party without desiring power, which actually makes you unsuitable for the job. Like actors, politicians must have a basic flaw in their personality, or at least a peculiarity, that makes them want to do the job in the first place.
Richard III?
Wednesday 23 November
Moliere has always been a strangely jinxed play. Right from the original 1935 Moscow production when, in order to get it on, Bulgakov had to do battle with everyone from Stanislavsky to Stalin. Last year it finally got its British premiere, ran about three months, and then my accident occurred, threatening to take it out of the repertoire - there are no understudies at The Other Place. Pete Postlethwaite volunteered to take over and was rehearsed into it. On the Saturday before he was due to open he hit black ice driving out of Stratford after a show and found himself upside down in a field, the car a write-off and his back injured. The show came out of the repertoire for the rest of that season. Sadly, in the following months Derek Godfrey, who had been playing Louis XIV, has died. And now David Troughton has to have a knee operation and will be out for six weeks. We're rehearsing John Bowe into the part he plays, Bouton.
KING'S HEAD PUB, BARBICAN With Bill after rehearsals. Still no news. I've made a private resolution not to discuss any Richard III ideas. I must play down my enthusiasm for the part, even with Bill, if I am to get a full season out of them. As casting now gets under way they will have so many people to keep happy that I will quickly be put to one side as soon as they think they've got me. This resolution lasts as long as the first round of drinks. Then we both gleefully plunge into the subject uppermost in both our minds.
A discussion about the play as Tragedy or Black Comedy. Example: the line `Chop off his head' is bound to get a laugh, partly because of its Medieval B-Picture associations. But would the line have been funny to Shakespeare's audience for whom decapitation had a grislier reality? Probably yes, possibly more so. To some extent a modern audience's attitude to violence is similar to then, bombarded with maimings and slayings (real and simulated) on television and in films. On the other hand they faint nightly down in The Pit when Bob Peck's eyes are gently, clinically removed by David Bradley's doctor in Bond's Lear. A score-sheet is kept backstage.
I read Bill some extracts from an interesting City Limits article on the Nilsen murder case: `The Yorkshire Ripper story is usually treated with extreme wariness these days, even by the press. Not so with Nilsen. People who would no more tell a racist joke than a Sutcliffe one can be heard tittering over the latest Dyno-rod story.' The author suggests this is due to the character of Nilsen himself: articulate and droll. Richard's own tendency towards flippancy seems also to steer the gruesome events of the play away from Tragedy. Bill believes a tragic element is reclaimable in the play.
Against my better judgement I outline the crutches idea. He listens carefully - he is an excellent listener - then at the end says, `But would one be able to go into battle if one relied on crutches?'
`Well, absolutely. It could be rather moving. We bring on a real horse and show him having to be lifted on to it. Then they take away his crutches. The next time you see him the horse has been killed and he can only crawl.'
`The trouble with bringing on a real horse is that is distracts an audience. They sit there thinking, "That's a real horse which might shit any moment", instead of listening to the lines.'
`Not if you brought on one heavily armoured, like at the bullfight.'
`Like a tank.'
'A huge walking war-machine, a monster.'
`Of course the idea of lifting him on to it comes from Olivier's Henry V film.'
`Does it? Oh ...'
The unmentionable. Bill leans forward now, and in hushed tones confesses that he's never seen the Richard III film, and wonders if we should hire it to have a secret look so as to avoid overlapping. I tell him that I have already seen the film far too many times and that I would no sooner see it again at this point in my life than play the part in a black page-boy wig, long false nose and thin clipped voice.
`However,' I say, `I think it would be an excellent idea for you to have a look at it to help guide us in a different direction.'
`Thanks a bunch. I think I'll remain in ignorance.'
Friday 25 November
M 0 L I E R E John Bowe's first night after only four days' rehearsal. He does magnificently well. A very different Bouton from the sad-eyed peasant that David Troughton plays; John's is like the fussy, bespectacled dwarf in Disney's Snow White.
KING'S HEAD PUB, BARBICAN Another hushed conversation with Bill, heads close together, while actors around us strain to eavesdrop. He reports on the latest directors' meeting. To mark the tenth anniversary of The Other Place the season there will be exclusively new plays. In the Main House the plays in Slots Three, Four and Five are currently Richard, Hamlet (Ron directing) and Love's Labour's (Barry Kyle directing, with Roger Rees as Berowne). Apparently I am only available for these three slots anyway, because the Tartufe and Moliere videos will happen at the same time as the first two Stratford plays rehearse. Very disappointing news. Nothing for me in Hamlet, nor, as far as I can remember, in Love's Labour's. Bill says the latter could still change to Merry Wives.
`
Ford would be of interest,' I say, `but is still not going to make it worthwhile going back for another two-year cycle.'
`I know. Everyone knows. Nothing is settled yet. We're all trying to sort something out for you. At the last meeting Terry said, "You know, this whole problem with Tony could be solved if it wasn't for the Moliere video in March. What would you say Bill, if I asked you to postpone or cancel it?" To which I replied, "I would say, Terry, get stuffed." And then Trevor said, "Well that's the shortest and most effective statement anyone's yet made at this meeting." '
Ron Daniels has asked me to lunch on Tuesday. That might throw some new light. Is there a part for me in Hamlet?
Sunday 27 November
A quick glance at Hamlet's Dramatis Personae confirms that there isn't.
Try to read Love's Labour's, looking for something in that. Costard? God, Shakespeare's Fools are tedious. They joke in code and their characters are all interchangeable. Costard could be Touchstone could be Feste could be Gobbo could be ...
The thing that made Lear's Fool fascinating to me is that his unintelligible jokes add to the nightmare. In the comedies the Fools are usually the least funny people on stage. The best Feste could never make you laugh as much as the worst Malvolio.
Give up on Costard, look at the King of Navarre. Hasn't he been played by character men? Jacobi at the Old Vic, Richard Griffiths in the last R S C production. Don Armado?
Get nowhere. Abandon the play. Cross with myself for not trying harder or understanding better. Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.