by Antony Sher
It does help me to think of Richard's verbal style throughout as that of a tabloid journalist, that brand of salivating prurience.
Sunday 29 April
L o N D o N Haven't seen a newspaper all week, and didn't know Animal Farm had opened at the National. Or how it was being done. So reading the Observer theatre review, this phrase reaches up off the page to deliver a hammer blow between the eyes: `Ingenious short crutches in order that they can walk on four legs'.
My imaginary reviews now read, `Mister Sher takes his starting point for Richard the Third from Animal Farm ...' Something in the air is warning me against the crutches. Jim urges me to be patient, not to ditch them yet.
To the Body Control Studio to distract myself with some physical pain.
Dinner with Max [Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director, Royal Court Theatre]. He's full of stories about the battle to stop Rees-Mogg closing down the Royal Court - which, thank God, is finally won.
Every possible avenue was explored. It was discovered that an influential Arts Council personage was landed gentry near Lyme Regis, where the playwright Anne Jellicoe is based these days. Max asked her to go to Lady X on bended knee. Jellicoe replied, `It's no good me asking, darling. I know you all think I'm terribly S D P, but down here I'm thought of as a communist plot.'
Monday 3o April
STRATFORD Bill D. has seen Animal Farm. He says the crutches are much shorter than ours and doubts whether comparisons will be made.
QUEEN MARGARET SCENE (Act i, Scene iii) Pat Routledge (Queen Margaret) arrives, a small fresh figure in a blue and white cotton dress.
The scene is Queen Elizabeth and her faction, the Woodvilles, arguing with Richard and his faction. Queen Margaret turns up (she's been in exile in France) and curses everyone in sight.
Bill wants to try a different way of playing the scene. Instead of speaking her asides in a corner, he wants to have her wandering around us muttering. As if she hasn't just returned from exile but is always around and we've learnt to put up with it. `Oh I see,' says Pat, `it's the mother-inlaw that won't go away.'
WARDROBE The buildings are set behind the Waterside cottages. You go up an alleyway, there's a little courtyard and then the wardrobe stretches beyond. The smell of hot irons, washing powders, dyes.
I try on the rehearsal 'rough'- it lives up to its name. Rather balloon-like, pantomimic, a black diving-suit, it does little to convince me that this shape is still a good idea.
Tony, the armourer, is present. He and Bill D. discuss ideas for Richard's armour. Sounds very exciting - layered plates like an armadillo, or the scales on a beetle.
Now Tony steps forward to start measuring me up. `Hang on,' I say, `you realise we haven't settled on this shape yet?'
A horrible pause. People take refuge in hierarchy in times like these: the armourer steps back with his measuring tape and looks to the Head of Wardrobe who smiles politely and looks to the Designer who, finding no one left but me to look at, goes `Uhhh -?'
`I thought you all knew,' I say. `Bill and I are having a session tonight with this body stocking and the crutches. I've learned a speech and we're going to try it all in action.'
Everyone looks uneasy and displeased.
Afterwards, I ask Bill D. what the panic is about, as we've got six weeks to go. He explains that it's traditional to start with the leading actor's costumes. The prospect of leaving them to last has filled the wardrobe staff with horror.
CONFERENCE HALL Climbing into the diving-suit for the test session, the overriding feeling is one of foolishness. The Bills and Alison chat among themselves, pretending not to watch as I begin my first cautious movements around the room. There is a large mirror at one end in which I can observe as well.
The feeling quickly turns from silliness to excitement. Charging head on, the massive back rolling heavily like a galloping bison. Spreading the crutches sideways, I look like some weird bird or giant insect. The wing-span - Richard's reach - is enormous and threatening. The range of movement is endless: backward dancing movements like a spider, sideways like a crab. And you can cover distances very swiftly with that sweeping, scooping action, almost like rowing, the polio-afflicted legs being carried along underneath.
We try `Now is the winter'. For the section about his deformity I deliberately, slowly, exhibit it. Bill A. likes this, says, `It's like a poem of self-hatred. A mannequin parade of the latest deformities.'
At the end of the session everyone is smiling. `Looks promising,' we all say to one another cautiously, but excited. It certainly does seem to contribute to, not hinder, our early work on the text.
Bill: `But if we stick with the crutches we're going to have to wring every possible change out of them. And have long periods when he's not on them at all. We must make it clear that he can function without them, although not half as well.'
Drive home to Chipping Campden. It has just gone dark. The sky is still glowing blue, the countryside weird grey cut-outs in the swinging headlamps as the car twists and turns down the narrow lanes. It makes a crazy theatrical effect. I'm trying to contain the excitement, the jubilation. Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is playing. Glorious slush.
Yesterday all was lost. Today it is a triumph. I must steady myself.
Tuesday r May
The freak sunny weather is finally over. This morning the fields are in a soft wash of mist.
LADY ANNE SCENE I wear the diving-suit. The first time with another member of the cast. Again I have to muster my courage and again feel immensely silly. Actually it does look silly today because I have to wear my specs and am trying to hold the script and crutches at the same time. But Penny is very encouraging, thinks it's going to work.
I like her enormously. Her enthusiasm, her appetite for work, that Australian directness. Bill D. has designed a conventional Lady Anne costume with tall pointed medieval hat. Penny says, `But the bird's been up all night, carting this stiff around. She's tired, dirty, her hair's wild. It's Cassandra, not Mary Poppins.'
After lunch, another procession of newcomers to read their scenes.
Harold Innocent (King Edward) with that magnificent Hogarth head, beetroot coloured, and clear blue eyes; the aspect of a furious newborn infant thinking, `Call that a delivery?'
Now Yvonne Coulette. She is playing the Duchess of York, Richard's mother (Monty's main culprit). I look up as she comes in and my heart misses a beat. She is the spitting image of my own mother - the same grey bubble curls, strong cheekbones, small deep-set eyes. I try not to keep staring at her, but it's difficult to concentrate.
At the party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Other Place, Trevor Nunn comes over to Bill and me and talks about Richard III. He feels there is a problem in the middle section of the play. `Don't play it uncut like your Volpone,' he says to Bill.
Next Terry comes over and also advises Bill to wield the knife freely.
`Tell him, tell him!' I urge from the sidelines, hopping up and down. Bill's face grows heavy as he wonders whether it's too late to recast.
Terry says to me, `You are wrong about Nicky Wright's play, you know. We must talk about it sometime.'
Now David Edgar, unrecognisably aggressive, in defence of Nicky's play: `What is the matter with you? The play's fine!'
`Let's talk about it,' I say. `This isn't like you.'
`I can't play the nice guy all the time,' he says and strides off.
I'm rather shaken by this. Clearly Adrian has reported our conversation and it has not made me popular.
Wednesday 2 May
It's the full company read-through today. Driving in, I am so nervous I have to stop the car to write this down: `There must be no further hesitation or doubt. There must be no further fear. Richard must be played by a confident actor. Manufacture it. Like with The History Man.'
THE READ-THROUGH The cast gather in the Conference Hall in a huge horse-shoe shape, about thirty-five strong. Bill A. takes the centre.
He talks about how Shakespeare
wrote the play drawing from two traditions - Greek tragedy (the choric mourning scenes) and medieval morality plays (Richard is drawn from the figure of Vice). The death of the real Richard III in 1485 marked the end of the medieval world and the beginning of the Tudors and Modern English History. Up until then there had been an unshakable belief in the control of God; now was the beginning of Humanism, of doubt, curiosity.
He says we can see Richard either as an Antichrist figure or, in Jung's words, as `modern man in search of a soul'.
Now comes the moment of revealing the set (or `wedding cake' as he calls it). The model has been covered with a cloth until now. He whips this off to reveal the cathedral - gasps of approval from the cast. Some creep into the centre to see better and crouch there like a tribe of hunchbacks. Bill says, `As you can see, we resisted the worst idea we came up with - setting the play in Orwell's 1984 with high grey walls and giant portraits of Tony Sher everywhere.'
Bill D. takes over, grinning like a magician at a children's party. He says the set is an almost exact replica of Worcester Cathedral but suggests we should also think of it as a city in miniature, a political anthill. He has been inspired by Queen Elizabeth's line, `Pitchers have ears'. The tents on either side of the stage for the camps of Richard and Richmond will be like the mouths of Heaven and Hell in morality plays.
The dreaded moment has come: Bill says, `Right, let's read it. Tony, "Now is the winter" please ...'
` "Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York ..." '
I charge at it and swiftly stumble and fall. Despite my resolutions in the car this morning, I am shaking so much I have to hold the book with both hands. I read badly in that I act it far too much, shouting and demonstrating. Not surprisingly there is no laughter, but an uneasy tension. Luckily Blessed lightens the atmosphere by getting up out of his seat and being deliberately bad and reppy. He does bits of the blocking we have worked out, whistles, burps and farts.
Richard is such a huge part. You climb up and up. You do `Now is the winter', you do the first Clarence and Hasting scenes, you do the whole of the Lady Anne wooing, you do `Was ever woman', you do that long Queen Margaret scene, and you're still only in Act One - with four more to go.
Am pleased that my voice holds out well (another perk from not smoking), but I must devise a way of saving some really big guns for the final oration.
In the last section of the reading everyone gets very giggly. When the two armies are camped at Bosworth, Ratcliffe's line finally does it -
`Thomas the Earl of Surrey and himself,
Much about cockshut time, from troop to troop
Went through the army cheering up the soldiers.'
- an image that conjures up both a rather naff ENSA concert party, and a gay porno movie: Boys at Bosworth?
WARDROBE Chris Tucker arrives. He is the country's top expert in movie prosthetics (his masterpiece was John Hurt's Elephant Man) and has been hired to build the deformity so that we can reveal it naked at the coronation. He has a sculptured mane of silver-grey hair. Stands looking down at me in the silly diving-suit. One gets the impression that working for the R S C is his idea of slumming it.
He says, `You've got it all wrong. Humps are not central, they go over to one side.'
`Oh, but we're not going for scoliosis,' I say, `we're going for kyphosis,' hoping to dazzle him with the little science that I possess.
He simply ignores me and looks to Bill D. for an explanation, expert to expert. Bill employs charm: `The sight of the back, of the vertebrae, should make the audience arch in their seats and feel it down their own spines. Like when the radio announcer has a frog in his throat, the whole nation clears theirs.'
Building the deformity is fraught with problems. How to design something that won't take three hours to glue on? Where to join it to me if it's going to be revealed naked? How to make it strong enough to withstand the Princes being carried piggyback?
Chris Tucker eventually says, `This is all getting frightfully theoretical. I think we should stop talking, take a cast of his back and try some experiments.'
It will all have to be built of latex. He looks with distaste at the huge dimensions of our rehearsal `rough' and says, `I'll have to get a cement mixer in.'
Dinner with Harold Innocent. He says, `I like my Richards funny. The audacity. He keeps on saying to the audience, "Oo aren't I awful? But I won't sav sorry."
Thursday 3 May
I've discovered I have something in common with Richard; neither of us can afford to indulge in self-doubt or fear. But in the dead of night, when we're unconscious, these horrors creep into our beds. This morning I wake terribly afraid again. No hope of getting back to sleep. Get up and try and learn lines. Something's wrong: they're not sticking. Perhaps it's still too soon. They're just words, there's nothing to hang them on yet. The associations I will use to remember them by - the moves, the gear changes in the scenes - they're not there yet.
Drive in feeling rather edgy. Yesterday I heard the Bills had decided that the tombs on our set won't ever need to be climbed on. Apparently a lot of money will be saved on the budget if they're built much lighter. This seems crazy to me. How do we know yet that we won't want to climb on to them? Again, it's shutting off options before we've started. With them dominating the set like they do, surely they're crying out to be used somewhere? It's not my business though. Do I just let the matter rest? Or do I risk giving Bill A. another `lecture'?
I find him hopping around the rehearsal room on the crutches. We each try out different walks, the other watching.
Then, just before the others come in, I tentatively bring up the subject of the tombs.
He says, `Where are you thinking of using them?'
`I don't know. But I guarantee there'll be somewhere.'
`You're right. We must keep the option open. I'll talk to Bill Dudley.'
QUEEN MARGARET SCENE It's increasingly difficult forcing the text to fit Bill's idea. Richard and Elizabeth are having a row. Margaret keeps wandering around muttering. If we can hear and see her, what do we do while she speaks? How do we sustain the momentum of a row? And if we're that used to having her around cursing and swearing, why do we bother to confront her this time?
Pat is doing very interesting things though. Her walk is very upright, very barmy. She keeps directly behind my back a lot of the time, deftly moving when I turn so I can never face her.
Rich discovery: once she confronts us all, we use mockery and jeering as a defence, banging the tables (I clang the crutches together - another use for them), drowning her out. And I play the court jester, doing mock bows, or sticking my bum in her face. It feels tribal, un-English. Bill says, `Remember that what is thought of as English behaviour is only one hundred years old - people walking in straight lines from their front door to Tesco's, not looking, not speaking.'
Mal has gone very quiet. I ask him what he thinks of the morning's work. He says, `It's all wrong. It undermines Margaret's power.'
I'm rehearsing on the crutches today. For many of the cast it's their first viewing. No one comments until after the rehearsal when Peter Miles (Lord Stanley) comes up to me. `Are those crutches part of the production or are you just getting into character?'
`No, we're thinking of using them.'
`Attack me, then.'
`Sorry?'
`Attack me. Say we're in battle. Attack me.'
`Well, I'd rather not, but I assure you they're formidable weapons.'
He looks unconvinced and goes.
Bill has witnessed this, and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. `Tony, it's a problem any production of Richard the Third has to face. Shakespeare has written this severely disabled man who is supposed to be a great warrior. The crutches only emphasise this contradiction.'
LADY ANNE SCENE Penny has learned the lines and is starting to take off. I can't keep up; although I learned these lines this morning I keep stumbling over them now. Get increasingly
angry with myself. What unnerves me is that it's so untypical of me. Usually lines come easily. I keep telling myself this is a good thing - stops me acting too much too soon.
When Lady Anne spits at Richard it's a crucial moment. Bill suggests I savour her saliva on my cheeks, my lips. But I think it has to shock Richard more. It has to touch the centre of his being, the part of him that first realised that he was different. He could kill her at that point. It releases a charge into the atmosphere. Now he plays for broke. The crying that follows ('Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears') comes effortlessly. I don't mean he is genuinely moved, but the actor in him is performing brilliantly and can produce real tears. It's not difficult for him to bring off the impossible now.
Low and tired after the morning's work. It all stems back to the fear and doubt that crept into my bed during the night. Go for a run round the sports fields, across the river, relaxing in the exertion. A fresh, cold day. The wet grass unrolling beneath me like in the dream I had. Feel much better.
PRINCES SCENE (Act III, Scene i) For scenes involving children, the R S C always has two alternating sets of child actors, and a chaperone in attendance at all times. Vera has been the chaperone for twenty-four years so the children give her no trouble whatsoever. Mind you, apart from the evidence of school uniforms, there is nothing remotely childish about these boys at all. They don't fidget or pick their noses, whisper or slouch. They sit upright and alert and have already learned their lines perfectly.
The idea of Richard playing with the Princes is obviously going to work well. The boy actors abandon their stiff professional reserve and gleefully respond to the chance of punching and kicking me. Then at the point of the famous insult (`... little like an ape ... bear me on your shoulders!') Bill wants the young York to leap on to Richard, who gives him a dangerous piggyback ride. Is it still a game or is he going to throw the child?