My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Unless…

  The reprint of Next Season is timely, because it coincides with a resurgence of the independent spirit among actors. And this novel is the finest fictional celebration of the passionate craft of the actor. There have been remarkable novels of the theatre – from Wilhelm Meister to John Arden’s magnificent Silence Among the Weapons – but no other book has so truly depicted the creative anarchic excitement of acting. Perhaps that’s the real reason it was under brown-paper covers for so long.

  There seemed no end to what the National Theatre at the Old Vic was able to give me. While I was there, I had also found a group of people – my colleagues in the box office – who counted as my first real friends. At school, I had had two very close friends (who eventually married each other), but workmates are a different matter. Your first job is the developing personality’s first outing; you start to become the person you have been in training to be. I owe more than I can ever fully describe to those first friends: I modelled myself on some of them. They taught me how to trust other people, how to be funny, how to not let people down. Because of who they were – an amazing array of human flotsam and jetsam, with remarkable backgrounds, and in some cases real flashes of genius – we had an extraordinary time in what was really a very ordinary job; but we were all touched by the belief that we were involved in something remarkable, something that mattered. We felt part of the theatre at large – the wider community of the theatre – but specifically we were part of Olivier’s empire and in some sort touched by its glory. From my personal point of view, these friends changed me immeasurably. It was with them that I did my first dining out, with them that I started to go to the movies on a regular basis, with them that I haunted theatres (and thanks to box-office connections there was no show to which I did not have access, and many shows to which I went free of charge).

  On one memorable occasion, thanks to one of my box-office chums who knew him a bit, I had supper with the most jaggedly dangerous actor I have ever seen on any stage. I’ve described this meeting in Being an Actor; in 1985, a year after the book appeared, he was dead, and I wrote a piece about him for the Evening Standard which they somewhat incongruously entitled Farewell, Henry the Great.

  Actors no doubt spend too much of their time together recounting stories which celebrate the absurdities, the perils and the glories of their profession. Inevitably, conversation turns on the great figures. We don’t talk about just anyone; you have to be pretty remarkable to be discussed; either very much loved (like John Gielgud or Michael Gambon) or very much hated (like some other people); or simply phenomenal.

  Into this last category falls, or rather fell, an actor little known to the public but a byword in the business, talked about wherever any of us more than thirty years old gather together. His name was Victor Henry, and he died ten days ago.

  He acted mostly at the Royal Court in the late Sixties; unforgettable in the D. H. Lawrence trilogy and in a revival of Look Back in Anger, new-minting Jimmy Porter’s rage; terrifying in Heathcote Williams’s acid trip AC/DC; raw in the part he created in Christopher Hampton’s When Did You Last See My Mother? He also created, magnificently, the role of Rimbaud in Total Eclipse; finally he gave an outrageous and ill-disciplined but quintessentially Jacobean Bosola in Peter Gill’s production of The Duchess of Malfi. A phenomenal actor he certainly was but it was the strangeness of his destiny that made him the subject of our hushed and sombre exchanges.

  Victor was a hellraiser – almost literally; not a mere roaring boy, boozing and smashing the place apart, though God knows he did enough of that, but somehow diabolically possessed. Scrawny, sandy-haired, short, his pebble glasses flashing madly away, once he had a drop of booze inside him (any time after, say, 10.30 in the morning), he set out on his lifelong quest for trouble.

  If there was none readily available, he would gladly provoke it. No one was immune: innocent bystanders, the larger the better, would be urged to hit him. He didn’t really much bother to offer a reason. If they refused he became very angry and would prod or punch them until the desired blow was forthcoming. Fearing that they might not like to hit a man with glasses, he’d obligingly take them off.

  When, goaded beyond endurance, the victim would finally belt Victor, an expression oddly like satisfaction would suffuse his features, like an adder that’s just swallowed a mongoose. If there was no one around to provoke, he’d inflict the damage on himself, taking a beer glass and eating it, for example, or knocking his head against the wall.

  He could have killed himself at any moment, indeed, seemed most anxious to do so. How ironic then that he should have been stone-cold sober and completely placid when fate, in the form of a red London bus, struck. He was standing at a bus stop when the bus swerved and hit the stop, which in turn cracked down on Victor’s head.

  From that moment he never uttered another word. That was fourteen years ago. Since then, his mother and father have both died. His sister, who lived some distance from the hospital, visited him as often as possible, as did many friends and colleagues, all hoping that somehow he might speak again. His brain was apparently undamaged. His eyes were open and clear and expressive, sometimes seeming to be filled with rage.

  From time to time he would be shown a television tape of one of his greatest performances – Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Nothing happened.

  What makes his story particularly haunting is that all the rage and craziness of Victor’s offstage personality was present in his performances, sometimes destructively as far as his fellow actors were concerned, but always at maximum intensity, terrifyingly dangerous, the stark opposite of anything routine or dull.

  Dionysus is a destructive god as well as a celebratory one; Victor was his true votary.

  It was an awe-inducing and deeply serious experience to see Victor act. Perhaps Kean was like that: everything Victor Henry ever did on the stage seemed to be glimpsed by lightning.

  Thank God for him he is dead. Alas for us he is no more.

  Greatness seemed to be everywhere at that time. Thanks to the cross-London box-office mafia, I went to dress rehearsals at Covent Garden: Joan Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor, with an unknown young tenor called Luciano Pavarotti, who cracked on one of many his top Cs and in his frustration hurled his sword into the pit, where it impaled a drum; Boris Christoffin Boris Godunov, one of the most terrifying actors I have ever seen on any stage, in any medium, at almost Victor Henry-like levels of intensity; Geraint Evans supreme as both Falstaff and Wozzeck; Jon Vickers poleaxingly anguished as Peter Grimes. I saw ballet for the first time there, the great Russian masterpieces, all the Ashton ballets, the MacMillans; I saw Fonteyn and Nureyev. I thought him the sexiest man I had ever seen in my life; his photograph, all Tartar animal energy, adorned my bedroom wall. This is my review of Julie Kavanagh’s 2007 biography of him.

  No one who was alive and conscious at the time will forget the dramatic circumstances of Rudolf Nureyev’s precipitate defection to the West at the height of the Cold War, the sudden eruption of this shocking new talent into the rarefied world of classical dance and his subsequent conquest, in short order, of the great stages of Europe and America. Julie Kavanagh’s magnificent and emotionally overwhelming new biography makes it clear that this was no brief dramatic interlude in his career: it was all like that, every minute of his fifty-five years on earth. From the moment of his birth on board the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Rudolf Nureyev’s life was lived out in capital letters. His wartime childhood in the Bashkirian capital of Ufa was one of desperate impoverishment; his early passion for physical self-expression led to his engagement at the age of seven by a folk-dancing troupe; he was then taken up by various local ballet teachers and struggled to progress until, flagrantly defying his father, he arrived, rather late for a dancer, at the Kirov Ballet School. There – despite earlier inadequate training and physical shortcomings which he would never wholly overcome – he showed unyielding certainty about the path he intended to follow. His wilful and of
ten unruly behaviour in class and on stage did nothing to impede his rapid and triumphant progression through the ranks of the company, leading to his ecstatic acclaim on tour with them in Paris in June of 1961 and the unpremeditated last-minute defection, straight from the pages of le Carré, at Le Bourget Airport, abandoning, it seemed for ever, his family, his fellow dancers, his teachers, his country.

  But that was just the beginning. In Julie Kavanagh’s scrupulously researched and supremely well-informed account, the remaining thirty-six years of his life have the trajectory of an epic novel, an exemplary tale of the artist as demiurge – a story of demonic determination, heroic immersion in life and work and ultimate, inevitable self-immolation. Kavanagh’s unfolding of the story is all the more telling for its restraint, clear-eyed but properly appreciative of the uniqueness of her subject. People like Rudolf Nureyev come rarely. When they are artists, the impact is electrifying; they generally leave a trail of devastation in their wake. Nureyev was no exception. Even as a child, he was gripped by the drive, the pressure, the ruthlessness which enabled him to overcome every conceivable obstacle – including, most potently, the fierce opposition of his true-believing Stalinist father, who had spent the 1930s diligently implementing the collectivisation of farms – to reach a goal that must have seemed positively lunar in its unattainability.

  His destiny was set at the age of seven when his mother smuggled him into a performance of the famous Soviet ballet The Song of the Cranes. ‘I knew. That’s it, that’s my life, that will be my function. I wanted to be everything on stage.’ Once he reached the Kirov, his Tartar pride was deeply offended by the racist scorn heaped on him (‘Bashkirian pig’ they called him), which confirmed his determination to show them all; by now, too, at the ripe age of seventeen, he was motivated by a lifelong compulsion to make up for lost time. He worked slavishly, in and out of class, pushing himself forward in every way, demanding the opportunity of partnering the much older female stars of the company, rejuvenating their dancing while learning from them, a pattern which would be frequently repeated over the next decade. He immersed himself in music, literature and art; a virgin at the age of twenty-one, he had an affair with his revered teacher’s wife, another area in which he would soon be frantically making up for lost time, though not, for the most part, with women. Soon after, he started an affair with a male dancer; typically of Nureyev, they didn’t just go to bed together: they became blood brothers. Immature, in some ways technically inadequate, poorly educated, he never doubted that his way was the right way, refusing point blank to dance choreography that displeased him, always demanding to know the meaning behind the steps. He knew the value of his Kirov training but was determined to broaden his technique, and his departure for the West was as much driven by that determination as by anything else.

  Russia was simply too small for him. His ambitions were precise: he wanted to study with his idol, the Danish danseur noble, Erik Bruhn; and he wanted to partner Margot Fonteyn. Soon after his defection, he had met, worked with and started a passionate affair with Bruhn; not much later, he was paired with Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet. His relationship with the forty-two-year-old prima ballerina assoluta made dance history; no one who saw them together in the flesh can ever forget the overpowering sense of aliveness to each other they created, the perfection of interplay, the intimacy, tenderness and mutual inspiration they achieved. Sometimes – as in Marguerite and Armand – it was almost X-certificate; it made you hot under the collar. Fonteyn seemed a dancer reborn; while her young partner was simply the most thrilling performer in any medium we had seen for a long time, if ever. His physical beauty, the power of his presence and the bravura of his dancing, allied to a unique personality, half savage and half almost feminine voluptuary, created a sensation: Rudimania swept London, and soon the world.

  Though he was working within strictly classical bounds, he made the prevailing external perfection of the Royal Ballet dancers seem dull. Immersed in tradition and in appearance the quintessence of romanticism, he was nonetheless intensely contemporary, rebellious, iconoclastic, moody: James Dean in tights. Kavanagh acutely observes the influence of Stanislavsky on Russian dancers: they were accustomed to think in terms of character and an emotional through-line. This in itself transformed our understanding of dance: his Bluebird was not ‘prettily poised for meaningless flight’ but ‘tense with a strong desire to really fly away’. Not that he was a Method dancer: far from it. There was no fourth wall for him; on the contrary, he went out of his way to insist that dancing was ‘a connective art’. The audience was a crucial part of the experience, and he wanted them to be aware of what it cost him. His preparation for a step was designed to signal something remarkable coming: he deliberately created tension, as Kavanagh says, in order to release it in virtuosity. He intended to dominate his audience: to make passionate love to them. In this he succeeded triumphantly; his audiences experienced a kind of collective orgasm. No wonder Mick Jagger went around London saying he wanted to be Nureyev.

  Of course, there were many people both in the profession and outside of it who disapproved. The great Georgian choreographer George Balanchine had no time for him at all. At the hysterical height of his international fame, Nureyev, who idolised Balanchine, offered to join his company. ‘When you’re tired of playing at being a prince,’ the choreographer told him, ‘come back to me.’ Again and again Balanchine, who figures throughout the book as a mordantly judgemental figure, rejected him. Nureyev did work with other modern choreographers (the first classical dancer to do so), learning difficult new techniques at a time when his body was beginning to wear out. He played on Broadway, bringing classical dance and new work to entirely new audiences. In addition, he was choreographing ballet after ballet – some revivals of Petipa, some his own. It was not something at which he excelled, but he was, says Kavanagh, a ‘peerless pedagogue’, determined to pass on what he knew, ‘total body feeling in total body movement’. The design for Cinderella, which he made for the Paris Opéra Ballet (of which he was director), featured a huge clock; he scarcely needed to be reminded of its relentlessly advancing hands.

  Inevitably death figures powerfully in the book. Once Nureyev discovered sex, there was no holding him back. In this area Kavanagh is not prurient, but not incurious, either, and she tells us what we need to know, gamely detailing the bacchanalian gay scene of the Seventies. He renounced love (‘The Curse,’ as he called it: ‘no personal involvement. That’s been abolished.’) For him, apart from one or two passionate relationships, above all with Bruhn, sex was essentially a mechanical release – ‘a liberation’, he called it – and he was increasingly blatant about his need for it. In Paris, when he went into the back room at Le Trap, the entire bar followed him to watch him at his sport: just another performance. Before long he was buying boys by the crateload; it was inevitable that once AIDS was in circulation, he would fall prey to it. Not that he let it hamper him until almost the very end. His sense of time running out pushed him further and further, an insane schedule of performances across the globe, learning new steps, barely rehearsing them, yet somehow giving them his whole personality and all his artistry.

  His body, however, was increasingly battered. ‘Since 1973,’ Kavanagh notes, ‘Rudolf had been dancing with a permanent tear in his leg muscle; he had destroyed his Achilles tendon by years of landing badly; he had heel spurs; his bones were chipped so that even basic walking gave him pain.’ His legs had turned to stone. ‘It’s always bandages,’ observed Nureyev, philosophically, ‘heel-pads for ever.’ None of this deterred him. Friend after friend was dying; Erik Bruhn (unquestionably the love of his life); the critic Nigel Gosling, who had sustained him from the moment he arrived in the West; Margot Fonteyn. At this point, the book, though it remains admirably cool, starts to become unbearably harrowing. I’m glad I was at home when I read about his visit to Fonteyn in hospital to persuade her to have a leg cut off; I broke down abjectly. His attempts to start a new career as a conductor are
almost equally heartbreaking.

  He carried on dancing virtually to the end, on one occasion only six days after a major operation on his kidney; discharging himself from hospital, he flew to Australia and danced with a catheter in place. With perfect symbolism, his last two performances were of an Angel (in Hungary) and, in Berlin, the evil witch Carabosse in Sleeping Beauty. He had both of these in him. His behaviour could be disgraceful, to friend and foe alike. Kavanagh never apologises for him, nor does she try to extenuate his frequently brutal conduct. What she makes clear is that these were flaws in a titanic human being who never ceased to strain every fibre of his being to serve dance. For him there was never any comfort zone. To be a dancer, he said, was ‘sacrificial work’. Violette Verdy noted that he came onto the stage as if into an arena: ‘Is he going to be eaten by the lion or not?’ ‘Audiences come to the theatre,’ he said, ‘to see people obsessed with what they do.’ Kavanagh’s book, apart from its comprehensive and compulsively readable account of Nureyev’s life and art, is an important wake-up call to the lily-livered rest of us: this is what theatre can be, but only if we give it everything: nothing less will do.

  I saw all these things with my box-office colleagues, Christine and Roger and Beverley, and Joan from the bookstall. It was to them that I shyly confessed my new-found desire to be an actor, and that I was gay. Neither confession caused the slightest surprise; they had known both before I did.

  I have described elsewhere how, once I had decided to become an actor, I chose to go to university rather than drama school, how I went to Queen’s University in Belfast, how on the strength of my having come from the box office of the National Theatre I was given the leading male part in The Seagull by the University Drama Society, how absolutely dreadful I knew myself to be in the part, and how that realisation gave me the determination to go to drama school to find out whether I had any talent at all. I have also written about my encounter with a man who changed my life: the great Irish actor Micheál mac Liammóir, who with his partner Hilton Edwards had created the Gate Theatre in Dublin, the exotic counterpoise to the Abbey: the two theatres were famously known as Sodom and Begorrah. I wangled a commission from the student newspaper Gown to go down to Dublin to interview mac Liammóir, which I did, taking a Heath Robinson recording device with me, but on my return, rapidly tiring of the process of transcribing the tape, I switched the contraption off and relied on memory and evocation. I sent a copy of the shamelessly rewritten interview to mac Liammóir who wrote back: ‘Professional journalists could learn from the wonderfully accurate account you gave of what I said.’ It was the first piece of mine ever to appear in a newspaper, in March 1969.