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

by Antony Sher

  We stand awestruck, our laughter becoming a little strained, as these repulsive creatures come to life. The necks stretch, the heads reach towards us, bloodshot eyes above salivating jaws that snap and bite at the air ...

  Bill D. looks round the splendid room and says, `Imagine a burglar breaking in here and coming across these.'

  `Wolves coming out of people's mouths, and he's talking about pushing reality!' says Bill D. as we drive back to Stratford with Larry silently at the wheel. `There he is surrounded by all this fantasy, brilliantly conceived and executed, and he talks to us about pushing reality!'

  We can all speak our minds now, safely away from Tucker's intimidating authority.

  `We've been hijacked,' I say. Larry, misunderstanding, glances round. This makes Bill A. jump. He swings round too, expecting to find Bill Kerr hanging on the outside of the car, with explosives tied to his middle.

  I continue, `I'm afraid this reopens the whole question of the crutches.' Bill A. sighs deeply and gravely, and says, `I'd be loathe to lose them.'

  I am undaunted. `More and more they become a theatrical effect with no medical justification. We'd worked out that Richard needs them because of his massive upper bulk. Now that's gone.'

  Bill D. says, `But I've watched you in rehearsals when you're not wearing any deformity at all and it still works. If you make something visually compelling enough, the audience isn't going to sit there asking questions.'

  I say, `But that's because we know what Richard is really supposed to look like. We've got the drawings in our minds. An audience isn't going to have that. Look, I really think we should use what's happened today to ditch the crutches. I've been thinking about this a lot. They raise too many questions. The idea lacks simplicity.'

  Bill D.: `No, that's crazy. We don't have to change. Tucker does. We just have to go back on Monday and tackle him again. Play the customer more.'

  Bill A.: `Isn't the problem with the crutches just one of familiarity? Give them another week and I promise you they'll get simpler. Simpler to work with. And thus simpler as a concept.'

  Sunday 13 May

  Second extract from the Sutcliffe book in the Sunday Times. He used to go to a wax museum in Morecambe and, in a room nicknamed The Macabre Torso Room, stare at Victorian models used for medical instruction: `The Nine Stages of Pregnancy'. He was to reproduce these abdominal openings in the bodies of his victims. More and more like a work of fiction.

  Dickie and Bob [Robin Hooper, actor and writer] up for the weekend. It's impossible for me to relax properly these days. They're taken on compulsory country walks by Jim, while I go to the end of the garden on to my little Godot stage and learn lines.

  I'm exhausted by the evening, can't face cramming anymore. Lying in the bath, the lights switched off, Mozart playing. Through the window the nine o'clock sky is still a faint blue; the light rests in the bottles of aftershave and bath foam, making their primary colours shine in the gloom.

  Monday 14 May

  Four weeks to go.

  Bill D. talking about Nicol Williamson in Peter Gill's production of Twelfth Night (the last show Bill designed for the RSC), he says he was `too relaxed in his talent'. This seems to me a perfect description of what happens to some great actors. They develop their style and sit back in it.

  Acting is just your view of other people. It must keep changing as you do, growing with you, improving as you learn more. Of all the arts it is the most human. So it must never stand still.

  V o 1 C E CALL Ciss Berry is back from her holidays. Small and soft like a sparrow, hair like fine feathers. She's a brilliant teacher in that she somehow communicates by spirit. That sounds pretentious, which she isn't. Words are her joy, so how to describe her? Reassuring (the Company's mother in many ways), enquiring, modest. Often she will say `I'm not making myself clear', or `I'm being so inarticulate'. But this is not false modesty. In the next moment she will say, `Richard doesn't fear language in the way that he doesn't fear murder or anything ... Oh, that was a good thought!'

  She listens to me doing the first speech and gently points out that I'm singing the same tune, again and again returning to the note I started on.

  We work at loosening it up. She makes me do it again, banging an upturned wastepaper tin on each reference to nature - immediately I notice how many more there are in the section about his deformity.

  She loves the idea of Richard as a tabloid journalist. We do the speech again, as if dictating to his secretary, relishing the purple phrases, the explicit descriptions of deformity.

  Now she makes me do it while I sketch Richard at the same time. This is the most useful exercise of all. The diversionary tactic liberates the words and thoughts. Phrases that I've been shoving around like dead weights suddenly come to life. The pen bites into the hump and the bent legs. Interesting that by using something in which I'm confident (sketching) I liberate something in which I'm not (verse-speaking).

  Ciss lays a lot of emphasis on observing the grammar. She points out that the first two sentences are four lines long, the third five lines long. She makes me try them in one breath each. Impossible, of course, but the exercise has planted in the mind the necessity to keep moving towards that full stop. She quotes Terry Hands, who says that in real life we always have enough breath for what we want to say.

  She also sees the speech in three sections, the clue being in the opening two words of each section: `Now is ...` (the world like this); `But I ...' (am like this); `And therefore . . .' (these things are going to happen).

  They're building a rake in the Conference Hall to simulate the slant of the stage. This is another unknown factor concerning the crutches. Will I be able to manipulate them easily on an angled floor?

  We're rehearsing today in the Methodist Hall down the road. Memories of a King Lear read-through here.

  B O S W O R T H SCENES (Act v, Scenes ii-v) A high silliness factor creeping in: we've run out of actors to man both armies. (At the Liverpool Everyman, one small group acted both armies by swopping their helmets back to front with different heraldry on each end.) At the moment, Richard's army is made up entirely of four generals. Since he has to arrive born aloft on his throne, they have to carry it. Which is somewhat undignified for high-ranking officers, and does not contribute to the growing sense of tragic doom.

  Bill and Alison Sutcliffe set about scanning the cast list for potential soldiers, but it doesn't look promising. Everyone is either in Richmond's army, preparing to be ghosts, female, or too posh to ask.

  Ciss with us in rehearsals constantly today, an invaluable new factor. Everything being sifted through her. I'm very self-conscious about her seeing the crutches for the first time. She's like Shakespeare's guardian in the Company. Not that she's a purist in any way - the opposite. But her responsibility is to the text, and the crutches are a massive imposition. Afterwards I cautiously ask her what she thinks of them. She says, `Sorry my darling, I was so busy listening I wasn't really watching' - her tact is immaculate.

  She has heard all these words spoken before and, I'm sure, so much better. Now I'm going to have to start some serious work on my voice. Something I've been happily delaying. One thing becomes clear immediately - Richard must be played in my own voice. I've been trying to press downwards into something deeper. But clearly I'm stuck with my own tenor range; I need every speck of variation it can muster.

  Tuesday 15 May

  Excellent day.

  Bill full of aggressive energy. Unusual: he's normally too polite. He and Ciss set about me all day for over-stressing, and not heading for that all important word at the end of a sentence. Unless you hit it you can't pass it on to the next speaker or use it for your own momentum. Ciss's way of describing this is `passing the baton' and `climbing the ladder'.

  Good changes are made all day: in the first scene of the play Richard can't possibly sit on the sidelines reaching for Clarence, pretending he can't get up. They are brothers; Clarence knows the full extent of his disability.
>
  Moving Richard around immediately gives the scene a new vigour and tension.

  And in the Queen Margaret scene, we finally abandon the idea of her wandering among us muttering her asides. Now that she can enter the scene there is the fresh impetus for us of seeing an old enemy whom we thought was safely in exile.

  The scene is taking shape at last. The cackling, sinewy excess of that dreadful rehearsal has been quietly forgotten. No one has mentioned it since.

  QUEEN ELIZABETH SCENE Bill says we must be aware of reducing this scene by resorting to modern English behaviour - reticence, impatience, and so on. `This confrontation has no equivalent in contemporary England. Maybe in Amin's Uganda. The meeting between a mother and a man who's killed her children. A special intimacy, even beyond hatred. A dreadful intimacy. Maternalism versus Power.'

  He says that Richard wins her round because he has a brilliant instinctive understanding of psychology. Queen Margaret, a few pages earlier, had been urging Elizabeth to bottle up her pain until it drives her mad. But Richard knows how to bleed her, to let her poisons out.

  Also, Richard understands her fundamental materialism. Bill says that I'm doing the bargaining section ('The liquid drops of tears that you have shed shall come again, transformed to orient pearl') too prettily: `Richard is saying to her, "Look love, I can turn your tears into jewellery."'

  This gives the scene a much more disturbing quality.

  Wednesday 16 May

  V o t C E CALL I wish I could remember exactly how Ciss put it: the ideas rest on the breath, both come out open and free. (She said it much better than that.) How the humour will be spontaneous that way, not planned or arch.

  She makes me do the speeches sitting on the floor rocking. Says the voice instinctively goes to its proper centre that way, the breath coming from the diaphragm.

  She makes Roger and me sing our duologue as an operatic duet.

  Freeing, freeing all the time.

  Ciss: `In the last two or three years the R S C has started to underestimate audiences. Shakespeare is easier to understand spoken at speed rather than slowly spelt out.'

  I'm developing a stiffness in the left hip. Is this from adjusting to the rake, or is it the deformed position itself? Will have to keep a careful check on this.

  SOLUS `Now is the winter' with Bill and Ciss. The main problem is the first section of the speech. Bill suggests doing it as if Richard is having to address a public function on behalf of his brother, the King, having to disguise his own feelings about peace. Then we try taking that one stage further, a kind ofJackanory treatment, `Once upon a time . . .' I like this. At last something to grasp on to. And it has a kind of anarchic defiance: saying to the audience, `I know you've all heard this speech before, so here we go.' But Bill thinks that is too dangerous to play, wants it to remain more enigmatic.

  I do the deformity section full of aggression and self-hatred. Again Ciss says, `You're telling us too much.'

  I try the whole speech internalising the feelings, making the sections less distinct; in other words, acting less. Immediately feel the character coming through the lines unexpectedly, freshly, not being illustrated on top of them. `That's more like it!' cry Bill and Ciss in unison.

  This has been a breakthrough. We work on through all the speeches, everything now that much easier. For the first time tonight I didn't feel frightened by the soliloquies; more than that, I actually felt comfortable in them. What's happening is that I am surrendering to Shakespeare's Richard. He is funny.

  A letter from Bob today with a well-timed quotation from Shaw about good Shakespearian acting. He's writing about Forbes Robertson as Hamlet: `He does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on with another half line; and then stop to act again, with the clock running away with Shakespeare's chances all the time. He plays as Shakespeare should be played, on the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting simultaneous, inseparable, and in fact identical. Not for a moment is he solemnly conscious of Shakespeare's reputation or of Hamlet's momentousness in literary history; on the contrary, he delivers us from all these boredoms instead of heaping them on us.'

  DIRTY DUCK I ask Bill D. when we're going to have a session in the make-up department to work out the facial prosthetics. He says, `I'm not sure it's necessary any more.'

  `What, you mean, no nose?'

  `No nose.'

  `Oh well, I suppose I was going off the idea too. Just the cauliflower ears then?'

  `No.'

  `What, you mean, no ears?'

  `No ears.'

  `All right, tell you what, how about eyebrows? Huge eyebrows meeting in the middle. Like yours.'

  `No.'

  `No eyebrows?'

  `No eyebrows.'

  `He's going to look like me at this rate.'

  `Why not? Your image of the brute is for another actor. Anyway, isn't that how the Russians played him?'

  It's a shock to realise that, in pulling away from Olivier, I was simply backing into the arms of Chkhivadze.

  So we have agreed to use my own face. Richard is coming up from within now, not painted on top.

  Thursday, 17 May

  Thursdays at the R S C are a write-off. Matinee day, so most of the cast have to break at 11.3o a.m. to have their two-hour Equity break. Which means me doing more solus calls, or busking through scenes with perhaps one other actor, and Bill running round being everyone else.

  But a chance to get to the gym again. The ache in the hip is less today. I'm sure it was having to adjust to the rake. However, it has been a warning. I must increase my fitness programme again. I've been neglecting it to give more time to learning lines.

  CANTEEN Lunchtime. When you order your food they write it next to your name, then call you when it's ready.

  Sebastian Shaw is in front of me in the queue. He gives his order to the girl and is about to go when she says, `Sorry, what's your name?'

  He stops in his tracks. Looks at her. Turns to us in the queue, says, `She doesn't know who I am.'

  The girl blushes. `Sorry, I'm new here.'

  `Sebastian Shaw,' he says, almost apologetically.

  An odd, sad incident. He wasn't being arrogant. He's nearly eighty, has been with the Company longer than anyone in the building, and they don't know his name.

  He's full of the most thrilling stories. At school, W. H. Auden played Katherina to his Petruchio. When he first arrived in Stratford for the 1926 season (he was playing Romeo, Hal and Ferdinand) he found the theatre had just burnt down. They had to play in a cinema. George Bernard Shaw used to sit in the front row making comments and causing the audience around him to giggle. Sebastian says, `As far as my namesake was concerned, the world had only known two great playwrights. Shakespeare and Shaw. And he did not put them in that order either.'

  As for Shakespeare, Sebastian says, `Whenever I come up here for a season I like to go into Trinity Church, usually when there's no one else about, and stand in front of his tomb. Just stay there for a while. You know, in astonishment.'

  MOTHER SCENE I come into the Conference Hall to find Bill and Yvonne Coulette cutting her long speech about Richard's birth and youth. I implore them to leave it intact.

  Bill, grinning: `And this is the man who sits me down in the pub every night and begs me to cut, cut, cut.'

  `But not Richard's mother!' I say. `The man's entire psyche is explained in this scene. Cut "Now is the winter" if you like, but not a comma from this scene.' I argue how brilliant Shakespeare was to reduce the scale to the domestic at this point.

  Bill puts it better: `It reminds us that Hitler was a baby in someone's arms, a little boy on a school playground.'

  The speech goes back intact.

  Yvonne's instinct, quite naturally given the lines, is to play the scene vehemently, aggressively. I feel it has to be odder than that. All the women in the play curse Richard. Water off a duck's back; the mother has somehow to turn him inside out. Bill agrees, and encourages Yvonne to be gentler, more matern
al: `Let him hear something in her tone that takes him right back into the nursery, a woman's voice singing gently, rocking him. That's the cruellest thing she can do to him now. Let her entice him into the curse. She's the spider now, he's the fly for a change.'

  Building on this idea, Bill suggests that, once she has persuaded him to have the throne lowered to the ground, she should offer a hand and lead him gently on to the floor, to kneel together in prayer. He wasn't expecting to be moving about, so is without his crutches. Vulnerable. Now she can let rip.

  Yvonne tries this version, but it's difficult - it means playing against the lines with all she's got. At the end of the curse her instinct is still to throw Richard's hand aside, or to go to strike him.

  I beg her to try a kiss, a kiss implanted with the most maternal intimacy (I'm in fulsome Freudian mood now).

  She looks to Bill imploringly, says, `I feel she might want to, but she can't.'

  Bill: `What if she wants to, and can?'

  Yvonne tries it. It is electric.

  Monty was directing this scene.

  Bill D. has been to Chris Tucker's today. He returns with polaroids of the enlarged arms, which look magnificent. He's given Tucker the go-ahead to cast it all into latex, without building up the back at all. He says, `Following our conversation last night about normalising Richard, I think Tucker may have got it right.'

  I have the evening off to pace my little Godot set and learn the last of the lines: the nightmare speech and `A horse, a horse'. About the latter we made these two fascinating and irrelevant observations the other day: one, that it's the only bit of the play we haven't yet staged; two, that it's probably the second most famous line in the whole of Shakespeare ('To be or not to be' is probably in first place).