by Simon Callow
After my parents failed to reignite their marriage, my mother decided to move from Fort Jimmy to the capital. Everyone said the same thing: jobs were more plentiful there, there were better educational opportunities, it was safer for a woman and child in the big city than alone in the middle of nowhere. She secured a rather grand government job as Secretary to the Tender Board, and I was enrolled in the Lusaka Boys’ School. Here something marvellous happened to me for the first time: acting. The lovely Miss Isabelle, a classic 1950’s beauty, with shiny bouffant hair, luscious glossy lips, fine rounded figure and a bee’s waist, was in charge of theatrical performances. Despite my lack of experience I was cast in the lead in the big show. I was wearing a very swish purple robe with gold frogging run up for me by my mother. At this age, and for some years to come, all I ever wanted for Christmas was fancy dress; this costume was an early Christmas present. I was playing a king who suffered from seeing spots before his eyes. The kingdom was scoured for someone – anyone – who could cure me; those who failed were arrested or executed. At the end of the play, when every option seemed to have been exhausted, my tailor arrived, insisting on seeing me. Finally granted an audience, he said that he was worried because he’d made my collar too small. ‘What effect would that have?’ I enquired haughtily. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you could, for example, find yourself seeing spots before your eyes.’ Curtain. End of play.
During rehearsals, I suggested to the lovely Miss Isabelle that I could at this point faint. I demonstrated, keeling right over backwards. No, said Miss Isabelle briskly, with that lovely, firm smile of hers, she didn’t think it was a good idea. I saw that opposition was fruitless, and gracefully deferred to her superior wisdom. At the performance, needless to say, having practised my fall for hours in our little bungalow in the Lusaka suburbs, I keeled right over backwards, and brought the house down. Things were never the same between Miss Isabelle and me after that.
Not much later, there was a positive development (never fully explained to me) in the family fortunes, and I was despatched to a very grand school in South Africa, St Aidan’s Jesuit College in Grahamstown. Education suddenly became a much more intense affair. It was all Latin and serious praying and corporal punishment, and definitely no keeling over backwards. I felt intense nostalgia for Northern Rhodesia, not least for Miss Isabelle. I was sure we could have resolved our artistic differences. But alas it was never to be.
The train ride to school was via the Victoria Falls, the Kalahari Desert, the Boer War towns of Mafeking and Ladysmith, down the Cape coast, past Table Mountain and on into the very English cathedral town of Grahamstown. St Aidan’s was a school of some rigour, and I was only there for nine months, because yet again my father’s maintenance payments had stalled. Before I left, though, I appeared for the first time on a proper stage. Of the play I remember nothing, but I have a Proustian memory of the smell of the size used to stick the set together and the canvas out of which it was constructed and the extraordinary sense of warmth and light as I walked on stage. This was purely the effect of the lights, of course, but it immediately struck me as a beatific state. There survives a photograph of me in the play. I’m impersonating a middle-aged gentleman, perhaps of the military persuasion; the word ‘Colonel’ comes unbidden to mind. In this scene I’m in pyjamas, a dressing gown, and a raincoat, raising my fist against a hapless boy, taller than me, who is in his street clothes. He carries a lamp; I am very, very angry. The photo is in black and white, but you can see I’m red in the face, my fist genuinely threatening, my false moustache on the point of falling off under the pressure of so much anger. My fellow player looks at me nervously, as if he were unsure whether the anger was the character’s or the actor’s.
There is another memory: a Christmas concert in the school hall in Lusaka. I have been designated to read the Nativity story from the Gospel according to St Matthew. My fellow pupils have to sing songs and read poems. I – due to the nature of my text – am top of the bill. We sit in a row at the front of the stage. I am restless, bored, squirming on my seat, occasionally giggling inappropriately, looking out into the audience, unimpressed by my colleagues, aching to make my contribution. The other readers and singers must loathe me; parents in the body of the hall are looking daggers at me. Finally it’s my turn. I stand up and I read, and something happens – something in the hall, but also something in me. The story comes to life; I have a sensation of enormous power and profound poetry; the words seem to hang in the air; it’s as if these hoary old words were being spoken for the first time. I come to the end of the passage, but the spell lasts for a few seconds afterwards. Somebody makes announcements, and expresses thanks, and I am again a squirming, restless child on a stool. Afterwards, my mother, severely berating me for my selfishness and my lack of discipline (a quality by which she set great store), ends by saying, ‘But you read marvellously. It was thrilling. Everybody was spellbound.’
Africa saw the height of my religious, or rather my ecclesiastical, aspirations. I was an altar server, and rose quite high in the ranks, to the extent that I participated prominently in the ordination of a bishop in Lusaka. In Grahamstown, I had gone so far as to found my own sodality, and even held services, spontaneously improvising prayers. The rubric of the Catholic Church, before the second Vatican Council, was theatrically uninhibited: Latin, incense, processions, prostrations. We wore very colourful vestments, there was a backstage and an onstage, and I yearned to be a priest, leading the congregation in obscure prayers in a dead language, moving them to tears in my sermon, distributing Christ’s body and blood from golden chalices, communing privately in a whisper with my God. I might have become a priest, too, until Latin was abolished overnight and the Vulgate suddenly revealed the tawdriness of the whole thing.
We finally returned to England, my mother and I, when I was nearly twelve. On the boat coming across, I entered a fancy dress competition as a cancan girl; I won first prize. The best thing was being wolf-whistled as I went up to collect it. I came back to England at the wrong time of the academic year, and missed the 11-Plus, but by sheer persistence my mother managed to get me into a Catholic grammar school, the London Oratory, which – though it was in smartest Sixties Chelsea, with the ultra-modish pop singer Georgie Fame living literally on our doorstep in Stewart’s Grove – was a rather thuggish place. It had once been very good and is now very good again, but then, under a repressive and unimaginative headmaster, it was deep in the doldrums. It had been used as a detention camp during the war, and the bars were still up at the windows. This seemed to us to say it all.
One of the school’s many deficiencies was an absence of drama. Instead, we had Elocution. This poisoned chalice had been handed to an elegant middle-aged woman by the name of Mrs Williams. In my mind’s eye, she was always dressed in a black cocktail gown flecked with silver and blue scintillants, her lovely grey hair gaily coiffed and full of bounce, her spectacles, à la mode, curving upwards, pink, with shiny speckles. I realise now that this cannot have been so, but it conveys the degree to which she seemed out of place in the rough environs of the London Oratory School. She struggled to command attention. Challenged almost beyond endurance by the task of trying to inculcate the virtues of open vowels and precise plosives into her Sarf London pupils, she had a slightly deranged quality. ‘Ray of the Rainbows,’ she would chant ecstatically at us, caressing and shaping the air with her hands and arms, as if conducting an invisible Aeolian orchestra, extending every vowel to breaking point, seductively rolling her r’s like a tiger purring: ‘Raaaaaaay of the Rrrrrrrrraaaaain-boooowsss.’ Meanwhile, her charges went serenely about their usual daily lives, stabbing each other, carving lewd messages into their desktops or closely inspecting the contents of their nostrils. Because my vowels and plosives were, in their native state, pretty much what she thought vowels and plosives should be, I was smiled on by Mrs Williams. One term, with a misplaced enthusiasm that bordered on the delusional, she attempted to stage some scenes from A Midsummer Night
’s Dream. She gave me the part of Bottom, so – although I had no inkling of it myself – she must have glimpsed the latent thespian in me. Or perhaps it was just the plosives and vowels.
And Phoebus’ car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates –
I declaimed, as I strode up and down Room 3. Like Bottom himself, I longed to play all the parts, and I frequently did, because people would find any excuse not to show up for the class. I’d leap in to fill the breach, often happily playing scenes with myself. But Mrs Williams’s purpose was not to produce a one-man show, and in the end, she threw the towel in, a beaten woman, and we went back to ‘Raaaaay of the Rrrrrainbooowssss.’ But it was never the same after that, and she went through the motions increasingly mechanically, the Aeolian orchestra sadly muted.
My Shakespearean explorations were not confined to school. My family were not great readers, but like most British people of the time, they had a Complete Works of Shakespeare on the bookshelf. This particular one belonged to my maternal grandmother, another ample-bosomed, sweet-breathed, spirited old personage like Mrs Birch, and it was a rather splendid affair, in three volumes – Comedies, Tragedies and Histories – edited by Dr Otto Dibelius of Berlin, and illustrated with Victorian black-and-white engravings which suggested some of what I had imagined on the radio on Mrs Birch’s knee (though as it happens the illustrations for Macbeth itself disappointed me by comparison with what had filled my listening imagination, as has every production I’ve attended ever since).
As a no doubt somewhat overwrought twelve-year-old I would stretch out with the precious volumes on the tiger-skin rug in my grandmother’s front room, reading aloud from them, weeping passionately at the beauty and the majesty of it all, though I had only the vaguest idea what it was that I was saying. Big emotions, big beautiful phrases, big expansive characters – it was a better world than any my daily life afforded me, that was for sure.
School did its best to destroy my love of Shakespeare by reducing him to a Set Subject, whose works had to be broken down into formulas which would lead to exam success. Whenever I could swing it, I took the leading parts in the ghastly droned, fluffed, misinflected classroom readings of the plays during English classes. Armed with footnotes and glossaries and starting to become acquainted with the critical literature, I was now, finally, making sense of what I was saying.
This is the second part of Shakespeare and Me, written for the booklet for my sonnet programme at Stratford, Ontario.
I had at last seen some of the plays. My paternal grandmother had some personal connection with the Box Office Manager of the Old Vic in its dying days, in the early 1960s, before Olivier and his glamorous cohorts stormed its bastions and installed the refulgent new National Theatre Company there. Grandma dutifully took me down the Waterloo Road, and there I began to realise something of the diversity of this author, the different worlds – so very different from that of Macbeth – that he had brought to life. And I began to hear the language more and more precisely, not as undifferentiated music but as a succession of images and metaphors with a life of their own.
It always seemed to be somehow part of my life, and my family history – somewhat spuriously, as it now seems to me. In a typically Edwardian association, my maternal grandmother claimed a connection because she and her family had worshipped in St Agnes’ Church in Kennington, at the next pew but one down from Emma Cons and her niece Lilian Baylis, successive directors of the theatre; after the service my grandmother’s family would exchange nods and greetings with the Misses Cons and Baylis. That was the entire extent of the familiarity, but for an Edwardian it was significant, and placed us, in my grandmother’s eyes at any rate, rather closer to the Vic (as she always called it) than ordinary theatregoers. My mother and her brother and sister duly attended plays there, feeling rather special (though they were more often to be found at ballet or opera performances at Sadler’s Wells, that new theatre with an old name which was a late outcrop of Miss Baylis’s missionary passion to spread improving culture to the people). The contact with the Old Vic claimed by Grandma Toto was more personal, less spiritual: she played bridge with Annette Clarke, Lilian Baylis’s loyal Box Office Manager and later assistant, and this pastime resulted in my father and his brothers receiving free tickets for everything at the Vic.
Clarkie was long dead by the time Toto started taking me there, in the early 1960s, when the theatre was under the direction of Michael Elliott, later creator of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. She and I had occasionally been to plays in the West End, but this was a very different experience. For a start, Waterloo was, in those days, a far from salubrious quarter, just as it had been in the 1880s when Emma Cons had transformed the disreputable Old Vic (as the Royal Victoria Theatre was quickly dubbed) into the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern. Her plan was to lure the locals out of the pubs and gin palaces and into the warm, clean and alcohol-free auditorium, where they would be diverted and improved by classical concerts and the occasional scene from Shakespeare; little by little, under Lilian Baylis’s direction, this evolved into performances of operas and the first full cycle of Shakespeare’s plays, and in the 1920s and ’30s, still underpinned by evangelical inspiration and desperately underfunded, it had become the great breeding ground of English classical actors. By 1962, when I started going there, it was as chronically short of money as ever, and the evangelical fervour was flagging. Waterloo itself was of course dominated by the station, at the back end of which the theatre was to be found, a far cry from the ultra-modern glamour of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, with its fine position on the river and its commanding view of the West End.
The Vic itself was a somewhat unprepossessing four-square building, part of a block which included a large branch of the grocer David Greig. The effects of bombing were still apparent and the impression was functional rather than glamorous. The Lower Marsh, just behind the station, was a busy market, selling clothes and household goods rather than food; to the left of the theatre as you entered was The Cut, a run-down suburban street of butchers, greengrocers, pubs and caffs. Directly opposite the theatre was a little green on which were to be found the successors of Miss Cons’s original target audience, the so-called winos, though methylated spirits was their more likely tipple, with an occasional Brasso chaser.
One was nipped pretty smartly past these ladies and gents and into the foyer. This was no vision of loveliness, no prelude to romance: plain, practical, unembellished, it was simply the doorway to the auditorium, the general impression of which was dim, the burgundy seats further darkened by the sweat of thousands of backs and buttocks, the gold paint on the balconies and boxes dulled and peeling, the curtain moth-eaten and sagging. Inexplicably, this tattered and tired interior had a thrilling effect: redolent of past excitements, archaic and mysterious, full of shadows and stray shafts of golden light, it was utterly unlike the outside world. To enter it was to be inducted into a space which was halfway between waking and dreaming, one in which something momentous seemed about to happen. Sometimes, bravely, I took myself to see plays there alone, which meant going to the gallery, to the gods, as I quickly learned to call them. One entered by a side entrance, struggled up what seemed like hundreds of stairs and found oneself sitting on wooden benches, clinging vertiginously onto the metal railings. From this position the auditorium seemed even more dramatic, incorporating as it did a view of the rest of the audience, on whom one looked down, in rather, well, godlike-fashion. Emanating from the Gallery Bar, an aroma of coffee (a direct legacy of Miss Cons, perhaps) permanently hung in the air. And then suddenly the fanfares would sound – it was generally Shakespeare – and one was immediately in the midst of dynastic struggles, or fearing for star-cross’d lovers or chilled by the dank mists enshrouding some Scottish castle.
These productions which so enthralled me were, I realise in retrospect, for the most part serviceable rather than inspired. The d
ays of the Old Vic Company under Elliott were numbered: it had already been announced that the newly created National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier would be taking up residence in the building. And when, in short order, they did, they brought with them – to say nothing of the greatest actor in the world, a superb ensemble and a clutch of challenging directors – a team of brilliant theatre managers, architects and press officers (many from Sadler’s Wells) who radically altered the experience of seeing a play at the Old Vic.
As it happens, in those radiantly enlightened days of the now defunct Inner London Education Authority, we started going in school parties to matinees at the new National Theatre, an electrifying, and, for this particular schoolboy, life-changing experience. Week after week, we were astounded by, say, Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman in Juno and the Paycock, or Olivier’s heartbreaking production of The Three Sisters, or maybe the asphyxiatingly hilarious Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear. Almost beyond belief for sheer delight was Much Ado About Nothing, with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens at their outrageous brilliant best in Zeffirelli’s stupendously Sicilian production, utterly incorrect, in a rewritten text, as our teachers carefully explained to us, replete with anachronisms and cod Italian accents, but releasing more of the pain, the wit and the tenderness of that play than any production I have ever seen. This was an Old Vic transformed.
The exterior of the theatre hardly changed, though the stage door was switched from the left of the theatre to the right, but internally everything was different, from the arrangement of the foyer, which now contained a bookstall and a wide-open box office which radically broke from the tradition of the enclosed, latticed lair of the typical West End theatre, to the graphics announcing the exits and the whereabouts of the bars (very modern), to the colour of the seats (blue) and their arrangement – there was now a gap at row O – and then, most significantly, to the proscenium, which Sean Kenny, Olivier’s first designer, reshaped, thrusting the stage forward and eliminating the stage boxes, which were faced with grey boards. The splendour of the old proscenium arch (however dimmed with age) was now replaced with something functional, even ugly, and the auditorium accordingly lost some of its mystery and charm. The gain was obvious, however, the moment the curtain went up. After the solid and sensible productions of the last days of the Old Vic Company, Olivier and his cohorts offered a riot of colour, in costume, set and performances: sensuality and glamour had returned to the theatre, made all the more dazzling because of the new austerity of the auditorium.