Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition

by Antony Sher

  Coming into Stratford I feel a little wobble. The last time I saw this place, a year ago, I was making a hurried exit in a taxi to London for the operation on my Achilles tendon. A few belongings packed, a canvas I had started crammed into the back seat, it was drizzling, the future rather bleak.

  But today the town is welcoming, it smiles. You can't drive over that bridge, see that stretch of river, see that great ugly building floating on it, flying the R S C flag, and not feel your heart leap.

  The welcome at the theatre is wonderful in a totally matter-of-fact way. Round every corner there is a familiar face that looks up and says, `Oh, hello Tony, what are you doing here?' When I tell them I'm coming back they say, `Oh good', and seem to mean it. Eileen knitting at the stage door, Traude buzzing around the canteen, Vic from the props staff and ... Black Mac.

  Mac was my dresser on King Lear. A fearsome army sergeant from the camp nearby who, improbably, dresses at the theatre in his spare time. Short, squat, glasses, no teeth and an impenetrable Newcastle accent. His only softening feature is a floppy fringe of grey hair. When I first joined the company, he terrified me so much I almost asked to be moved to another dressing-room. His army slang is crude beyond belief and brought back gruesome memories of my National Service. He seems to re-invent male chauvinism every time he opens his mouth. Women are known as `split-arses'; his own wife is known as `the Vampire'.

  He divided actors into ranks: stars are known as Mark-Ones, supporting actors are Boffins, and play-as-cast actors are Peasants and treated accordingly. He'll gleefully tell how in one company the Peasants finally revolted, stuck a coat hanger down his back and hung him on the back of a door for several hours.

  Needless to say, all of this macho aggro is superficial. Mac has a heart of gold, is a gentle vulnerable man, brilliant at his job and eventually we got on famously. I was nicknamed Animal (or `Animil', as he spelt it on a card) because of my wild curly hair. He used to ring me up in London after the accident. `How's the fokkin paw then, Animil? Cushy, skiving get-out innit? I'd've kep you working on it if you were under me down the camp.'

  We are delighted to see one another, stand there patting stomachs, commenting on weight gained.

  `What you gonna do here then, Animil?'

  `Richard the Third.'

  `Oh yeah? We haven't done him for a while. You'll be a fokkin Mark-One then.'

  `And I want you to dress me.'

  `Righto. Well, you have a word with the split-arse upstairs.'

  The theatre manager, Graham Sawyer, takes me to view various RSC properties. Finding a decent place to live is almost as important as the parts you play. I've decided to live outside Stratford this time. Instantly fall in love with a cottage in Chipping Campden where the actor Dan Massey is living this season. He's pottering around with a mug of coffee, classical music playing. Magnificent banked garden; I run across it, hail plopping down, to peer into a glasshouse at the far end. Perfect to paint or write in. Upstairs the bedrooms have low sloping ceilings, thick beams, little windows in strange places. Dan says, `I know you're going to come and live here, I know it.'

  He's right. The others I look at don't compare. I tell Graham to book it for me.

  Sunday 8January

  Murderers and Monsters.

  Sketching Ronnie Kray's face. It's a more feasible version of the head I drew in Hermanus. It has the thickness, the strange heavy brow, the eyebrows joining over the nose, a puffiness round the eyes (from boxing). A bruised sadness in the expression.

  BBC 2'S `Horizon' - an episode called `Prisoner or Patient'. Using the Dennis Nilsen case to consider the whole question of psychopaths, a term which divides the medical profession. A psychiatrist defines it as `a term used to describe people who've behaved anti-socially from a very early age. The core of their personality seems to be an extreme egocentricity, a complete disregard for the feelings of others, and as a result they tend to leave a trail of chaos behind them, in human terms.'

  (Richard's mother, Duchess of York:

  `Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;

  Thy school-days frightful, desp'rate, wild, and furious;

  Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;

  Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody:

  More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.')

  Another psychiatrist (who gave evidence for the prosecution at Nilsen's trial) refutes the use of the term completely since it implies there can be a cure, which apparently is not the case. Nilsen was sent to prison rather than to a mental home because his condition was considered to be untreatable, incurable: thus evil rather than mad.

  Some mental patients are interviewed, filmed in ghoulish silhouette, made more sinister by their voices thick with drugs. In talking about his psychiatrist, one commits a spectacular Freudian slip: `He washed his hands with me.'

  `The World About Us' on the Great White Shark. Interview with Peter Benchley who wrote .lams. Asked why this shark has suddenly become such an international superstar, he suggests that in appearance it is `a nightmare creature' which touches a primal nerve in our subconscious. This is made worse by the fact that it can cross over from our nightmares to real life and commit the ultimate horror - it can eat us.

  I like the phrase `nightmare creature'. It's an image I've got to find for Richard.

  Monday 9 January

  BAR B I C A N Meeting with I Toward Davies about The Party. I tell him that I believe Shawcross is underwritten and needs a personality actor (someone naturally watchable) on whose shoulders the whole play could gently rest.

  Howard: `That kind of actor will make it boring.'

  `No, I'd make it boring. I need a character to play.'

  I have made up my mind not to bring up the subject of Sloman unless he does. fle does. I tell him I wouldn't consider playing it now unless Mal has first choice of the two parts without knowing that I'm after one of them. Mal is so selfless he'd do anything to keep everyone happy.

  Howard says he isn't sure himself if he can see the casting the other way round, but agrees to get Mal to read the play, looking at both parts.

  CITY GYM In the changing-room I'm lamenting the fading of my South African tan when I notice a middle-aged man limp in. Using the mirror I discreetly watch him change. One leg is stick-thin. He limps off to the shower, using his crippled leg only for balance; it has no strength, has to be hoisted along by a hip movement, thrown forward to the next step.

  Could be useful. But didn't somebody tell me that is how Alan Howard played Richard? Lifting his bad leg with a chain and hoisting it along?

  Tuesday io January

  MONTY SESSION As it's drawing to a close, I mention the `Horizon' programme and ask his opinion on psychopaths. He agrees with the psychiatrist who refused to use the term, and says, `It's just a convenient way for Medicine to sweep certain people under the carpet.' But he doesn't accept that anyone is incurable.

  I ask, `How do you explain Richard the Third then?'

  `Well, how did you feel when you were on crutches last year?'

  `I hated people staring at me.'

  `What did you want to say to them?'

  `Fuck offl What are you staring at?'

  `Precisely. Anger.'

  He says Richard is revenging himself on the world, destroying a world he sees as hating him.

  I mention the angelic-cripple syndrome of Quasimodo, Smike and the rest. Monty says that's where Drama falsifies the world, romanticises it. Like whores with hearts of gold.

  `We treat the disabled appallingly,' he says, `they come up against dreadful prejudice. For example, people in wheelchairs are automatically assumed to have no sex-drive because the lower halves of their bodies appear to be out of use. The disabled person experiences all this frustration and given the chance, will lash out.'

  `So are you saying Richard's behaviour is normal?'

  `In the circumstances, absolutely normal.'

  I suggest we set aside one of our sessions to discus
s Richard's problems instead of mine. Monty roars with laughter and says he'd rather do it over dinner, after-hours.

  Friday 13 January

  The first Friday the Thirteenth in the year 1984, and the weather is bizarre. A powerful wind. Driving through Regents Park, the car is suddenly surrounded by thousands of brown leaves. Then the wind, growing stronger by the minute, rocks the car along Westway, rips at the door when I try to get out, wrestles with me rudely as I walk towards the Acton Hilton, clutching at my specs. On the seventh floor a very uneasy feeling. The windows seem to be taking a lot of strain. The sky is weird, lit from underneath, it might boil over.

  Evening. Watch a video of the South Bank Show Arts Review of 1983. I recorded a speech from Maydays for them. Not a pleasant sight. For the first time I understand why friends like Dickie warn me against staying too long with the R S C. The speech has flair but is quite, quite empty. It can happen so easily at the R S C given that we play to a relatively uncritical audience who come along expecting to see brilliance. Also, you easily develop a swagger from having to prowl those vast stages in Stratford and the Barbican. Taken to the extreme (who shall be nameless), R S C acting can cease to bear any relation to recognisable human behaviour.

  Saturday I4 3anuary

  News report - yesterday's wind reached hurricane strength. Several people were killed, a concrete tower collapsed and, amazingly, a gargoyle was torn off the side of York Minster and flew through the air.

  Last run-through of Tartufe for the technical crew. An army of cameramen, sound men and other technicians follow the action around the rehearsal room, their noses buried in large fold-out studio plans. Discussion with Cherry Alston, the make-up supervisor, about my bum. The problem is that my legs are still very tanned from South Africa, my bum very white. Bill giggles and says he rather likes the idea that Tartuffe has been sunbathing on Orgon's patio. Cherry professionally jots down, `body make-up for Tony'.

  Sunday 15.7anuary

  Fellini's Satyricon. Must be about the tenth time I've watched this inspired, inspiring film. You want to hold on to image after image, treasuring each one like a painting. The two men collapsing in a ploughed field with a smoky dawn rising. A human carcass on a crucifix with a vulture flapping on it. A giant stone head being trundled through the streets. His re-creation of another age is totally convincing, in an impressionistic way. People behave differently: kiss by pecking, chew food with an unfamiliar rhythm, stare at you through heavily made-up, stoned eyes. A sense of decadence in the colours he uses: the colours of illness, milky blues and yellows, watery greens and purples, the colour of runny eggs, of mould.

  Everything we want for Tartuffe and Richard III is here in this grotesque world. Fellini uses real freaks and cripples with no moral qualms at all, so there's lots of useful material for me. A cripple - the sequence where they kidnap the hermaphrodite - is a bundle of clothes on crutches, knees bending the wrong way round, like a bird's. No single bit of the body seems connected to any other bit, a looseness, so that if you undid the ragged clothes the whole thing would tumble apart.

  The ferryman, in the sequence where the hero screws the Earth Mother. Like my foetus idea: half formed features, damp strands of hair, no eyebrows, lazy eyes. A bit like Brando. He kills someone and does it almost gently, without anger or emotion, but like an animal holding on until the prey stops struggling.

  Tuesday 17 January

  Urgent message to ring Harold Pinter. I have to steady myself. With him, I tend to go hurtling backwards over the years, deflating like a balloon, until I'm a sixteen-year-old schoolboy taking those blue Methuen Playscripts to Esther's Elocution classes. The photos of Pinter on the back always seem slightly blurred (as if he was hurrying past the camera), adding to his mystique.

  I dial. It rings. Is answered.

  `Harold?' A terrifying silence. (If I was tasteless, I would write `a menacing pause'.) I lean into the phone nervously: `Harold?'

  `Yes?' Stern, guarded. Clearly no one he knows addresses him as Harold.

  `Hello . . .' My voice growing thinner and squeakier by the moment, `yes, uhm, it's Tony Sher, I have a message -'

  Instant warmth. 'Tony, hello, how good of you to ring hack, how arc you;,

  Ile's directing a new Simon Gray play and wants me to do it. 'I've spoken to your agents but there seems to be some uncertainty. Are you staying with the R S C

  'Well, yes, I think I am, I think I'm going to do Richard the Third, I mean, I am, yes, I am. Definitely.'

  'Richard the Third, Isn't that funny, I was just saying to Simon Gray this morning that he's hound to he going hack to Stratford to do a Richard the Third.'

  'I know, it's terribly predictable.'

  He laughs. 'What a pity. The part in Simon's play is wonderful.'

  'Oh dear. Don't tell me.'

  'Still, so is Richard the Third I suppose.'

  Ile wishes me well, says he'll come up and see it and makes me promise not to stay with the R S C forever.

  Put down the phone and it rings again immediately. Howard Davies. lie says Mal has read The Party and is willing to play either part, but that he (Howard) can't really see it the other way round. Also he doesn't see why Mal should always lose out in casting because of his generosity. I heartily agree, thank him for his honesty and wish him good luck with the production.

  So it's still just Richard 111. Slight temptation to read the Simon Gray play ...

  14 ednesday 18 - Saturday 21 January

  BBC STUDIOS, WHITE CITY Recording TartuJJe.

  I'm not needed on the first day, but pop in for a make-up test. Find they're moving so fast they might get to me by the evening. The make-up stays on, my costume is hurriedly found, and before I know it I'm on the studio floor doing my first scene. Rather like someone popping into hospital to have a corn removed and finding themselves undergoing major heart surgery.

  The atmosphere in the studio is tense and rushed, everyone working against the clock - television's disease. First takes are being accepted far too easily. At the end of the day Bill looks like a ghost. It was his first time ever in a studio. Says it was one of the scariest days of his life, and rather like those disaster movies where the stewardess finds herself flying the plane.

  But Bill and Tom Kingdon, the technical director, find their feet quickly over the next few days and it all becomes much better paced.

  `Top of the Pops' being recorded in the next studio. I go out into the assembly area where the groups are lounging about. I am dressed in full Tartuffe gear, long black wig, black smock, stockings, but don't look at all incongruous. I could be the lead guitarist from any one of these bands.

  Complete chaos on Friday. Nigel Hawthorne is suddenly summoned to accept an award for `Yes Minister' from Mary Whitehouse's Viewers Association. It's to be presented by Margaret Thatcher, who has written a sketch(?!) which she is going to perform (?!!) with Nigel and Paul Eddington. So, Nigel heads off to help launch Thatcher's new career while, back in the studio, schedules are frantically re-arranged. I end up working non-stop from I o.oo a.m. to I o.oo p.m. with lunch and tea breaks being used for make-up changes. Spend all day in a state of suppressed fury that this has been caused by a publicity stunt for Mary Whitehouse, who ranks high on my list of major irritants, alongside queuing in banks and can-openers not working.

  Nigel returns and we do our main scene in two takes, both excellent, both very different and inventive, trusting where the other leads.

  In the evening much merriment over the bum scene (which might cause Nigel's next meeting with Mary Whitehouse to be in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey when she digs up some ancient law - Aiding and Abetting the Airing of an Arsehole?). In the make-up room all the actors are sitting in their chairs being made up, while I have to kneel on mine pointing in the other direction. In the studio it gets quite embarrassing. Whereas in the theatre the whole scene just flits by (trousers down, trousers up, before you know it), in the studio they keep calling a halt and I'm left stranded on t
he table, exposed bum in the air, while technicians stroll around whistling, adjusting lights and camera angles. The make-up girl dashes in to touch-up the false tan on my nether cheeks. As she's bent over her task, I happen to burp violently.

  `Oh, that's very nice,' she says.

  `You're lucky it didn't come out the other end.'

  `I dunno. I've always wanted a parting in my hair.'

  I glimpse one of the scenes being played back on a monitor. I'm no longer sure I have successfully scaled down my performance. I thought I was going from the theatrical to the televisual, but might have taken a wrong turning and ended up with the operatic.

  On the last evening we finish with time to spare so they decide to do re-takes on the much over-exposed bum scene. Back to kneeling in the make-up room and then on to the table in the studio. During the take Nigel starts corpsing and the scene grinds to a halt. He says, `This isn't like me at all. I'll be all right now.' Again we try and again he corpses. Ali and I take a sadistic delight in this, having disgraced ourselves so often in the theatre. Eventually they have to compromise on a different angle and actually remove Nigel from the studio. He is led away, still protesting, `But it isn't like me at all, I promise you.'

  Wednesday 25 January

  BARBICAN Press conference. In this morning's Guardian, Nicholas de Jongh has somehow got hold of all the information about next season and leaks it, making today's conference somewhat pointless.

  Waiting to go in, I meet Ken Branagh for the first time. We share a common problem - living in the shadow of Olivier's films, Henry V and Richard X. Because they're on film, they have entered this century's consciousness in a way that is quite daunting for any actor or director approaching the plays. However much people might glory in the memory of Gielgud's or Warner's Hamlet they are not there to be hired from the local video shop. Branagh says when he was at school he used to do an impersonation of Olivier's Richard without even knowing what it was. He says, `Olivier's performances are there, indelibly. We might as well put them to one side and just get on with the job.' Which makes me feel much better.