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

by Antony Sher

  The problem remains - will the hump contraption be strong enough to take this', Secretly, I'll not be too sad if it isn't. I have the Brando/gorilla impersonation up my sleeve as an alternative. And Bill did say the other day, `It would be good if somewhere in the play Richard parodies his own deformity.'

  As Hastings leads the Princes off to the Tower, I hear Blessed mutter to them, `Come on lads, lots of fun in the Tower, video games and everything ...'

  QUEEN ELIZABETH SCENE (Act Iv, Scene iv) Richard is persuading Queen Elizabeth to let her daughter marry him, despite the fact that he's murdered most of their nearest and dearest.

  When we're working on Richard's big speech to Elizabeth, the section `Day, yield me not thy light, nor night thy rest!' comes out sounding like King Lear summoning up the elements. Gambon haunts this rehearsal room for me. I didn't realise at the time how much I was learning from him. You plant your feet on the ground, you reach up or down, and you drag the elements towards you.

  At several points in the scene Richard refers to Elizabeth as `mother'. This follows the cursing by his own mother - there is something crucial here, linked to Monty's theory.

  Friday 4 May

  The R S C employs two local taxi drivers, Larry Adler and Bill Kerr. Larry is German and Bill Kerr was in the RAF during the war. A fierce rivalry exists between them, partly because of their work, but also because Bill Kerr is convinced Larry was actually in the Bunker. Nothing could be further from the truth. This morning it is Larry, with his quiet Continental manners, who drives me down to Chris Tucker's home in Berkshire to have the cast taken of my back. I use the journey to learn lines. On the back seat the diving-suit is crammed into a cardboard box like a great pet slug asleep in its basket.

  As we drive south, the fields of rape are startling on the landscape. One of the most breathtaking sights of the year. Unearthly yellow against the surrounding green fields and the slate grey of the sky. You round a corner, see it, and your mouth falls open at nature's chutzpah.

  CHRIS TUCKER'S His home/workshop is a magnificent sixteenthcentury manor house in several acres of land near Newbury. He is much friendlier on his own territory. His study is filled with awards, video tapes, scrap-books, and his masterwork - Hurt's head from Elephant Man. It stands on a little plinth in gruesome three-dimensional technicolour. Convincing even to the touch. The bony bits are hard, the pendulous sponges of skin soft and clammy. Next to it, equally whole and real, stands Gregory Peck's head from Boys from Brazil, with dog bites in the neck. `Looked much better when it was bleeding, of course,' says Chris.

  Into the workshop where a bespectacled lady sits patiently sewing chest hairs on to a limbless torso. The shelves are lined with face casts of famous actors - it's difficult recognising these white masks without hair or distinctive colouring. For instance, a beautiful young girl's face turns out to be Peter Firth. `People as they really are,' says Chris.

  There are several of Olivier. `That's Sir about ten years ago, that one's more recent. He wasn't at all well when we took it.' He removes this one from the shelf, and I instinctively reach out for it. Rather reluctantly he hands it over, as if it's a priceless antique. Strange to hold this face in my hands. The expression rather grim as the plaster was applied. You can't help thinking of a death mask.

  `Is that Charles Laughton up there?' I ask Chris.

  `Alas no, I haven't got a Laughton. A friend in New York has one. But there aren't a lot about.'

  The Plaster Room. I strip to the waist, wrap a plastic skirt round my middle and lean forward on the crutches. Chris glues a rubber cap over my hair and with two assistants, applies the algernate - a thick orange jelly used by dentists to take tooth casts. It's icy cold and doesn't warm with the body heat. That's the first shock. This iciness settling round your neck, shoulders, back. Gallons of it are slapped on, heavy streams coursing round my neck, globs plopping on to the newspaper on the floor. Stalactites forming from my nose, chin, ears.

  `Mister Sher doing his Oscar-winning performance as a candle,' says Chris merrily. And the constant instruction: `Please try not to move at all.'

  Now dusty white strips of plaster are dipped in water and layered on top. Ile has to work fast now, forming sections with ribbed breaking points. As the plaster sets a warmth mercifully permeates the alginate at last. But it also gets heavier and heavier. I struggle to keep still as the weight increases. My arms and hands on the crutches are taking the worst of it. They start very slowly to go dead. You feel it happening and can't do anything to relieve it. I go into a numb daze. Watching all that's happening in a large mirror above the work bench: three people working round my body with the silent, concentrated urgency of a heart transplant.

  A noise like ice cracking. I have almost been asleep. They are levering off the hardened sections and laying them upside down on the table. A huge white beetle trapped on its back. Next the algernate is carefully peeled off and laid into it. The cast itself will be taken from this floppy mould which contains details of every pore, hair and mole.

  `You can move now,' says Chris. I look at the clock. I have been standing here for one and a half hours. My forearm has swollen where the crutches were digging in.

  Salmon and pate sandwiches, apples from the orchard and coffee are supplied to revive this torture victim.

  Chris measures the diving-suit using a pair of pincers as if he can hardly bear to touch so amateur a creation.

  `Now are you sure you don't want a hump to one side like Sir had?'

  `Quite sure.'

  Driving back, dozing against the window, ticking, tapping, in its frame. In and out of consciousness. The fields of rape luminous even on a cloudy landscape. Astonishing. As if chunks of the sun have fallen to earth.

  HASTINGS' HEAD SCENE (Act III, Scene v) Shakespeare doesn't specify where this scene - Richard and Buckingham plotting their next moves after the execution of Hastings - is taking place. Bill wants to set it on the forestage. I argue for using the whole set.

  I must confess to an ulterior motive. I'm keen to fly somewhere in the play and this seems to be the scene. In the text, when the Mayor enters, Richard and Buckingham intimidate him with lots of Errol Flynn acting ('Look to the drawbridge there!' . . . `Hark, a drum!'). I see Richard flying through the air on a rope, crutches dangling, the spider image complete. I've been going round for days suggesting it to whoever will listen - the Bills, Jim, Mal, Eileen at the stage door. All greet the idea with blank faces. One or two shake their heads gently. Bill A. uttered a disapproving sigh. I've taken to sulking and muttering, `Adrian Noble would've let me fly.'

  Today, when I suggest it again, someone reminds me that there's a memorable moment in the film when Olivier slides down a bell rope. I drop the idea like a hot brick and will never bring it up again.

  When we get to the bit where Hastings' head arrives I am irresistibly drawn to suggesting business nicked from the Liverpool Everyman production: dropping the head into the Mayor's hands, passing it around like a rugby ball. We must be careful though. This kind of Ortonesque excess is tempting. You could do the whole production like this. (We did do the whole Liverpool production like this.)

  I think it's important for the head to be better made than stage heads normally are; the one we're using in rehearsals is a featherweight papier mache thing with a perfect lacquered smoothness to the neck wound. Hastings's head is fresh so it would have a certain floppiness - Richard could put his finger in the cheek or mouth if he felt so inclined - and the windpipe and neck muscles would be sagging through the hole. Also the human head is one of the heaviest parts of the body.

  I argue that if it's made well enough we could do anything with it and it will still be horrific. Bill dispatches a shrieking Charles to go and weigh his head (by lying on his stomach, propping his chin on the bathroom scales and squinting at the gauge) and to see if the budget will stretch to another Tucker commission.

  I want Richard to have a moment alone with the head at the end of the scene. Not sure what
for yet. I offer Bill an image of Richard laying the head on the floor and lifting both crutches high to smash down on it - blackout!

  `I don't understand what that means,' Bill says, `Richard wanted Hastings dead. That's all.'

  `I think he's kinkier than that.' (Dennis Nilsen; Hitler watching film of the executions.)

  I hold the head wondering what else I could do with it and immediately Bill cries, `That's it! That's disturbing. Just looking at it and thinking, "This was a person." ' A chorus of `Mmmmmm's from the others watching.

  Perhaps sniffing it, scenting it like an animal finding another dead? A parody of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull?

  SOLUS Who is Richard actually talking to in his early soliloquies? Bill's idea is rather brilliant: `He talks as if to an equal. Or perhaps just slightly down - he does have to explain things a bit, recap now and then. Think of the audience as a convention of trainee Richard the Thirds. An EST session.'

  ARDEN HOTEL BAR Jo Scanlon, our historical researcher, is bringing in reams about the coronation ceremonies of the time. She has also done historical biographies of all the characters to distribute to the cast. But Shakespeare's play departs so drastically from history that these will be of curiosity value rather than of any real use.

  Bill and I discuss how to end the coronation (and the first half). He suggests ending with Richard and Lady Anne's naked backs to the audience; Richard reaches for her face and kisses her. I suggest adding to that, the throne arriving down the aisle, Richard kisses Anne, crawls towards the throne, clambers into it and, leaving her far behind, is hoisted into the air.

  Bill wants to have a grotesque dancing figure on one of the tombs during the coronation ceremony, `a dwarf or a jester or something. A gargoyle come to life.' I suggest this person could then become Richard's Fool. Another hunchback perhaps? Now that one of them is King they'll all be flocking out of the closets. Dive into the text. `Look!' I yell, `In the nightmare speech at Bosworth, Richard says, "Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter." '

  Bill winces and shuts the book. `The whole point of that speech is that he's alone.'

  `Yes, but the Fool is a kind of mirror-image -'

  `Shut up and go and buy us a round.'

  A long day ends with the other R S C driver, Bill Kerr, taking me home. Larry, this morning, drove silently; his car smelt of after-shave. Bill Kerr smokes a lot, is loquacious and tonight is in a ghoulish mood. As we pass a dark humped shape on our left he asks, `Anyone told you about Meon Hill?' There was an infamous murder there some thirty years ago, thought to be a ritual black magic killing. A quiet Stratford street sweeper was found on the hill with a pitchfork through him ('Quite dead of course,' remarks Bill Kerr) and his constant companion, a mongrel dog, was hanging from a nearby tree, its throat slit.

  A fox suddenly appears in our headlights. This prompts Bill Kerr to relate the story of how his neighbour had all his chickens massacred by a fox. Apparently they don't eat them, just kill them for sport and pleasure. The next morning there were only three survivors among the carnage. These three had not been touched, yet sat on their roosts stock-still staring without blinking. They had gone mad with shock. Nothing could be done to revive them - eventually their necks had to be wrung so they could join their murdered brood.

  Saturday S May

  I dream a clear image of one of the crutches catching between paving stones and myself crashing forward on to my face. Blood and smashed bones. Hurry into rehearsals to find out what the stage floor is like. Stage-managers are dispatched to fetch samples. The simulated paving stones prove to have almost no gaps between them. And so, alert over, the day can begin.

  BAYNARD'S CASTLE SCENE (Act III, Scene vii) Whenever we come to this difficult scene we usually just stand and stare at the text dumbly. But today this yields results. In Shakespeare's stage directions it says, `Enter the Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens'. And Catesby asks why `such troops of citizens' have been assembled. Clearly they've got a large audience; Richard and Buckingham are performing here for the citizens, not the Mayor or Aldermen. We can't have crowds of course, but we could play it out front and use the theatre audience. Bill wonders how to suggest the large crowd. A tape is the answer, but what do we hear? Shakespearian rhubarb would be fatal - `Zounds, alack, and by my troth!'

  We try the scene out front. Immediately much better.

  I'm playing Richard very holy and wet. Bill says, `Richard is going to have to act a lot better than that. He can't just suddenly change character completely. He's a famous man. These citizens know him. They see him every evening on the nine o'clock news launching ships and visiting armament factories. Everyone knows he's an angry, volatile character. His religiousness can't be soppy. He can't offer them another Henry VI. His must be a stern, chastising piety. He's right wing, he's Moral Majority.'

  This solves a contradiction in Richard's public persona (violence and piety) which I hadn't been able to reconcile, and is a perfect example of those moments in rehearsal when the whole character suddenly comes into sharper focus. But building a character also involves leaving some ends untied, embracing the complexities of human nature.

  Tye o T Ft E R PLACE Camille. It's increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything else other than Richard these days. As I sit reading the programme waiting for the lights to go down, my mind keeps drifting away to him and my face slouches into his. I glance up to find several people staring. I pretend to have something stuck in my teeth.

  Ron's production is brilliant. It moves from salons to pastures as effortlessly as a film. Frances Barber is astonishing. Her cough is not a stage cough. You haven't heard it before - except in real life. You don't sit there thinking, `Gosh, that's a good cough, wonder how the actress is doing that.' You fear for Camille's throat and lungs.

  Meet her in The Duck afterwards. She's great fun, says, `You and Branagh only have Laurence Olivier to follow. What about me? I've got Greta Garbo.'

  Sunday 6 May

  I have fallen in love with this eighteenth-century cottage Jim and I have in Chipping Campden. Julia's Cottage. I particularly love the view of her from the banked garden. The line of the tiled roof - it's grown soft from age and wear. Like driftwood.

  At the other end of the garden there is a little raised stone patio with a tree which is still bare. This area looks like a set for Waiting for Godot in a rather twee production.

  This is where I spend the day pacing up and down learning lines, being rather brilliant to the empty sunny garden, in the same way that in the bath I often sing like Pavarotti.

  The Sunday Times magazine carries an extract from a new book about the Yorkshire Ripper, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, by Gordon Burn. Fascinating. If an author was inventing this mass-murderer, writing a novel, would he dare make him work in a graveyard?

  Plenty of fodder for Richard. The way Sutcliffe is ashamed of his body as a youth, and this description of him opening a coffin: `He'd slide the lid back slowly until you could just see the face. Very carefully, he'd lift away the square of lace they used to cover it, and stare hard for about thirty seconds, concentrated, intent, like he was waiting for something to move.'

  Monday 7 May

  Jim takes me through the lines. They still haven't stuck. The fear. This isn't like me. Lines have never been a problem before. But Shakespeare's interweaving grammar is confounding me. And I can find no logic to why he sometimes uses a `hath' instead of a `have', a `thee' instead of `you', or vice versa. These little dents in the road trip me up constantly, making the journey rather nerve-racking. Part of the problem is having to learn the lines too quickly, so as to free my hands to practise with those fucking crutches.

  Drive in, feeling very edgy again. I do a Monty session on myself in the car:

  `What do you fear?' he would ask.

  `I can't learn the lines,' I would answer.

  Monty's face - gently mocking. No, not mocking, he would refute that. Gently amused. No, not gently. A strict amusement, a challenging smile to
jolt me out of my indulgence. He would say, `Do you really believe you've lost the ability to learn lines?'

  `No, of course not.'

  It's Bank Holiday and Stratford is wild, drunk and ugly. I had forgotten how this place can change character. Skinheads and punks day-tripping from Coventry and Birmingham, here for the river - to sail on, fall into and puke all over. Blaring portable stereos, the smell of beer, cider and cheap wine.

  On the lawns outside the theatre, a group of punks all in ash-black. They look like charred people, survivors of some terrible explosion that has torn and frayed their clothes and has left their hair tinged with blue, red and green.

  The theatre stands in the middle of this wild funfair looking totally incongruous.

  VOICE CALL Ciss Berry, the R S C voice coach, is on holiday at the moment so I have a session with her assistant, David Carey. We look at the first speech. It's a shock to realise that I don't understand the first two lines. They are so famous you assume you understand them. Or rather, the first line is so famous you think it's a statement in itself: `Now is the winter of our discontent'. But there is no full stop there. The sense is, `Now is the winter ... made glorious summer.' It immediately becomes easier to say now that it means something.

  A disturbing talk with Mal. He has been increasingly distant and aggressively silent. It turns out that he's so excited about playing his first major part in verse that he wants us to stop imposing so much on the text. Now I understand why most of my suggestions have been greeted by `It's not in the text.' This is a tricky area. It's my first big verse part as well and, God knows, I could profitably spend the next five weeks working exclusively on that, but I instinctively know that that wouldn't fully serve this play. A good production of Richard III (the Rustavelli for example) is going to thrill by being theatrical in the best sense of the word. Maybe I'm not being honest. Maybe it's more to do with the fact that, as a member of an audience, I find the classics difficult to watch and to understand. So I like them done by Brook or Adrian or the Rustavelli Company; I need them to be made vivid, illustrated to some extent. If Mal wants Richard III to be a purist's production we are going to fall out over this; it's really quite upsetting.