by Simon Callow
Harcourt Terrace, No. 4, a fine Georgian building somewhere in Dublin, that complex, vital, intermittently beautiful city full of books and flourishing theatres. The house is something of a mac Liammóir museum: prints, theatre bills, designs, line the walls. Inside the sitting room, shelves and shelves of books, with Beardsley designs on the walls. I was met by two intelligent if rather emotional Siamese cats and engaged with them till the entry, in style, of mac Liammóir himself. ‘I’m infectious,’ he said; perfectly true, of course, but on this occasion he meant that he had a cold. The interview began.
– Mr mac Liammóir, you are associated in the minds of most people of my generation with your brilliant and witty one-man shows, particularly The Importance of Being Oscar, in which your own personality comes over as strongly as the material you’re presenting. Is it distressing for you when you’re billed as a witty person, to have to produce a bon mot to order?
– Well do you know, I’ve never thought of myself as a witty person. I’ve never felt obliged to produce anything if I didn’t want to. I’ve never felt on a tightrope except with certain people whom I invariably dislike and avoid as much as I possibly can. I am only productive of wit or anything at all if it comes out with a certain sympathy or is spontaneous. It is no good putting me on a tightrope because I immediately fall off with the greatest crash. As to Oscar, Oscar has never had the faintest effect on me… I regard him as an uncanny, dead friend: he’s like somebody I know terribly well and like enormously; and the only thing I don’t like is being – what you said just now – continually identified with him – not because of any dislike of his personality; or being coupled with somebody who was primarily in the popular mind a figure of scandal – not at all – but I dislike being coupled with anybody except myself, if you see what I mean; nobody wants to be the shadow of another man: Wilde himself said that cheap editions of great books were delightful, but cheap editions of great men were perfectly detestable.
I chose him because I feel equipped to interpret him. I’ve been influenced if at all by his humour more than his philosophy; his good humour more than anything else; the absurdity, the glamour and the luxury, the danger of it all. To think that he was an Irishman! And that this rather drab little country of ours should produce such a glowing peacock.
– You have devoted a great part of your life to instilling some colour through the medium of theatre into this ‘drab little country’.
– Yes, though of course I didn’t return to this country – when I was seventeen and after years on the London stage as a boy actor – to act; even I wasn’t crazy enough to do that.
– How’s that?
– Well – I’ve said before in print – if a London, New York, Paris, Berlin actor has a success he buys a new car, a new house, a new stair carpet, he keeps fixing himself more and more; the Irish actor if he has a success has to pack his suitcase, he has to go away and take his goods elsewhere: you run through the Irish populace like a dose of salts, do you see; there are so few of us. The entire theatrical problem in Ireland is lack of population. It has a degrading effect on the work; it drives us all to repertory and ill-prepared, there’s not enough time. In a huge city you can run in a play for a year, probably soul-crushing if you don’t like the part, and during the last few weeks, once you know the dates, you can start preparing your next part, slowly and in plenty of time, whereas we have two weeks to put on some great dramatic work of art. This problem of adequate rehearsal time is especially evident in Belfast.
Belfast is very tragic; a city the same size of Dublin; it is not as lucky as Dublin, but it is one of the most brilliant audiences in the world, I’ve found; astonishingly receptive and perceptive – what the whole of Ireland wants, North and South, it doesn’t matter, is a form of specialisation; what we lack here is discrimination as a result of seeing perfect work; and perfect work is presumably only the outcome of a certain amount of specialisation. Nevertheless, there is abundant room for both amateur and professional – their feud has been exaggerated by both sides – as long as they are criticised separately as different things; I first played Hamlet in Dublin when I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine – some years ago, as you can imagine – and was received with glowing almost hysterical reviews. Then a couple of weeks later I opened the same paper, the same critic, and almost exactly the same review, for a boy of sixteen at the local grammar school! The best amateur performances are students’; the hope is that student drama will act as an incubator and that some boy or girl will go into the proper theatre. When the talent is genuine, I think it will find its way.
– There is also, with university productions, the opportunity to experiment because box-office is not the overriding consideration.
– That is a blessing – and a curse because sordid as it might seem, the box office is one side of a set of values, of a proof; it’s a proof that the public is coming, that the public has been touched. The theatre at its best is essentially popular: the Greeks knew that, Shakespeare knew it, God knows.
– The opinion has been expressed that merely theatrical criteria are hopelessly ostrich-like in a situation such as we have in Ulster at the moment, and that the political situation should be used to bring people into the theatre; a production of Oedipus with Ian Paisley in the title role…?
– I should’ve thought he’d be better as Jocasta, wouldn’t you? We’ve all done that sort of thing, or course; Hilton and I produced Julius Caesar once in a sort of Fascist manner – at the time when all that was current, you know – I forget which side the Fascists were on… but it was very effective and wonderful; and it brought the war home. The great error with these updated settings is the error of modern detail… Ophelia wearing a miniskirt would ruin any romance, I should think. All these girls going around thinking they look like Rosalind and in fact looking like a very bad Dick Whittington.
– Mr mac Liammóir, one thinks of you now, as I said before, almost exclusively as a performer of one-man shows.
– That reminds me of a very funny story told me by Emlyn, Emlyn Williams, a great friend of mine; he does them too, Dickens, Dylan Thomas. He was asked on one of his tours, ‘Tell me, Mr Williams, do you like this better than acting?’ It’s the same art with a difference; it’s a soloist performance. I don’t miss all the things in the theatre which Emlyn misses: the fun, the gossip, the scandal, the slammed doors; I love being without all that, I love it: the privacy and the dignity of it, in a way; always…
– But is it an essentially theatrical thing for one man to hold the stage alone, displaying his own personality; does it really use the medium of the theatre?
– I think so, yes, in a different form – invented, incidentally, by a woman, Ruth Draper – and it seemed to me for a long time an essentially feminine art: she dressed up for each characterisation, and of course women can do far more with that sort of thing than we can; when John Gielgud did The Seven Ages of Man – which I think is wonderful (though I think it’s a mistake to do those things in three parts – it gives them too long to think and discuss you and wonder what the hell you’re going to do next); I thought, well, that’s Shakespeare – that’s different – and then Emlyn with Dickens and I never thought of being a one-man performer though I’d always suspected it in Hamlet because I was always so relieved when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern went away. ‘I’m SO glad those little bores are going off,’ I used to think… ‘God be wi’ ye, sir…’ ‘God be wi’ ye… thank God.’ So probably that was the beginning. It isn’t necessarily that you’ve got to be a great actor to be a one-man performer – probably indeed the greatest actors wouldn’t have done it well – it’s a talent or a knack, just like having a talent for languages – just a knack of personality.
No doubt my subsequent ventures in one-man performances have been deeply influenced by Micheál’s example; he was also the most completely open gay man I had encountered (though of course I never so much as hinted at it in the piece). What would I have said? There was nothing fey about
him, nothing limp or nancy. The word ‘outrageous’ better describes him, but the most striking fact to me was simply that his homosexuality seemed to be the very foundation of his personality.
I looked after him when he came to adjudicate the Drama Festival, and then all the peacock brilliance went out of our lives and things settled down to a more regular level. For a brief while, I thought that I would stay at Queen’s, seize power in the Drama Society and create dazzling theatre. I had seen a play in London which thrilled me beyond measure, The Ruling Class, by Peter Barnes, and I had written a passionately enthusiastic letter to his agent, the legendary Peggy Ramsay, to ask for the rights. She had at first pooh-poohed me, writing to say that regional rights had to be granted first and I would have to wait my turn, dear, but the following day I got another letter from her saying that she’d sent my letter to Barnes, and that he’d told her to release the rights to me. Too late; the die was cast. I had decided to run away and become an actor. It was a sort of turning point: had I done The Ruling Class, and had it been a success, I suppose I would have stayed at Queen’s, and finished my degree, and learned to make theatre of a sort. But my instinct to go away and subject myself to the most challenging training I could find was, I believe, the right one – indeed, the only possible one. So I must be very grateful that Peggy said no, the first of many good turns she was to do me.
As it happens, Peter Barnes subsequently became one of my very dearest friends. I wrote this obituary for the Royal Literary Society in 2005.
When I saw The Ruling Class at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1968, I had no doubt whatever that I had witnessed a work of genius, an authentic modern masterpiece. Pinter and Bond were the heroes of a slightly older generation than mine: they were already established and revered and had around them an aura of profundity; their very crypticness and unknowability put them in the running to be the heirs of Beckett, and though I made the conventional obeisances in their direction, I was secretly frustrated by their lack of communicativeness. The Ruling Class was what I had been craving for: eloquent, anarchic, theatrical, hilarious, exhilaratingly anti-Establishment.
It was designed to get up people’s noses – ten people walked out at the performance I saw – their seats thrillingly springing back ‘Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!’ when Jack Gurney’s marriage vows commenced with the phrase ‘From the bottom of my heart to the tip of my penis.’ But for me when Tuck the butler confessed to having pee’d in the Thirteenth Earl’s soup every day for forty years, when Jack came on for his wedding night on a tricycle singing Verdi, when the House of Lords was pushed on from either side of the wings bearing their lordships’ skeletons draped across the benches, the serried ranks of corpses covered in cobwebs, I felt that as long as writers of this vitality, passion and rage continued to write for the theatre, it would live for ever. I was at university, and asked if I could do the play for the Drama Society. Against all known practice, and with minimal chance of his earning a penny, he said yes.
I didn’t meet Barnes for some years, but when I did I realised that that was him all over: he didn’t care about the money, he didn’t even care whether the plays were done to the highest level of professional polish, he just wanted them done, wanted to be allowed to tell his hilarious ‘anecdotes of destiny’ (his admiration for Isak Dinesen, whose phrase that is, was absolute) – above all, he wanted to make ’em laugh. On the whole, he felt that Macbeth had got it more or less right: life was indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but somehow this fact – far from depressing him – gave him endless satisfaction. His own life was a perfect case in point: dozens of brilliant plays and adaptations piling up which no one who had any money would put on, though stars were queuing up to play the parts – plays crying out for the resources of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose actors and audiences would have revelled in them; while television companies simply couldn’t pour enough money into his bank account for writing the screenplays he turned out before breakfast and the serious work of the day had begun. He actually tried putting up the money out of his own pocket for a production of Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie, one of his most delirious and outrageous inventions, but somehow they even managed to stop him from doing that.
In his domestic life he watched his beloved first wife Charlotte slip away mentally, and would sit stoically and practically as she succumbed to paranoid delusion, reasoning with her, supporting her, feeding her, all the while behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. ‘That’s life,’ he seemed to be feeling. Ben Jonson was his great hero, but it was the language, the energy, the invention that he loved, not Jonson’s dark and bitter heart. Peter had no judgement to offer on his fellow human beings: ‘We’re all in it together,’ was his view. ‘None of it makes any sense, let’s have a laugh.’ He winkled out laughter from the most unlikely places: Belsen, the court of Ivan the Terrible, the bubonic plague, horrors to which the only possible human response was a joke. He was astonished, and delighted, when American companies suddenly started performing his plague play, Red Noses, Black Death, because they construed it as a response to AIDS. His point had simply been that purity of heart and a good belly laugh can cure the world. ‘I jest, therefore I am’ are the words that should be inscribed on his tombstone. When he died, I sent a card with the flowers: ‘Was it something I said?’ I like to think he saw the card from the great Reading Room in the sky, and let out one of his great banshee laughs.
This rare man leaves behind him a beautiful wife, four bonny babies, and a legacy of plays produced and unproduced – including his stupendous adaptations of the other Great Unperformed of dramatic literature – which could keep a theatre company going for half a century without once repeating itself. His voice is to be heard in all of them, loud, profane and clear; how we need that voice as the coalition of the correct goes about its business of extinguishing all traces of the great medieval carnival world that Peter never ceased to celebrate. Now he’s swapping jokes with Rabelais, Chaucer, Marie Lloyd and Max Miller. Lucky them, poor us.
I also wrote the following paragraph for the ‘Lives Remembered’ column of The Times obituary section.
While properly jaunty, given its indestructibly jaunty subject, your fine obituary of Peter Barnes somewhat underplays the tragedy of a writer out of step with his times – or, more precisely, with fashion. Admired and indeed deeply loved by many of his fellow professionals – actors, directors, fellow writers who would gather together at his annual Christmas party – Barnes never found the sort of influential friend in high places who might have ensured productions for his plays, the only thing, apart from his wife Christy and their almost miraculously late-appearing brood, that Peter really cared about. He belonged to no discernible group, and was influenced by no one who had not been dead for four hundred years. That glorious, darkly exuberant neo-Jacobean anatomy of the English class system, The Ruling Class, one of the greatest of post-war plays, has never even had a significant revival. Some of us struggled vainly for years to mount one, or, more ambitiously, to stage a season of some of Barnes’s numberless unproduced works (including many fine and imaginative versions of the plays of the lesser-known masters whose work he so loved), but as they were all enormous in their demands – and as often as not set in the thirteenth century – they required the resources of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, and recent artistic directors of both those organisations made no secret of their lack of enthusiasm for his work, which is perfectly reasonable, but rotten luck for him, and for us, audiences and actors alike. Peter and I once came very close to raising the money for an inaugural three-play season of what we only half-jokingly referred to as the Royal Barnes Company, but at the last minute, as so often, the funding melted away. Peter simply sighed, and got on with writing the next play – also unproduced. His unperformed legacy amounts to an Aladdin’s Cave of glittering and hilarious dramatic audacities which it is be hoped a new generation might be allowed to see in the theatre, where t
hey belong.
Now, with The Ruling Class unperformed, I was liberated from academia, and I had to find a drama school. But before that, I needed to earn a living. Hearing that I was about to sign on with a cleaning agency, my old National Theatre chum Roger, who was now No. 2 at the Mermaid Theatre box office but about to return to the National, got me a job there before he left, and the great Joan Robinson, Bernard Miles’s legendary Box Office Manager, found herself saddled with this overexcited aspirant actor with almost uncontrollable energy. The high point of my time there came one Monday morning in autumn 1969 when my colleague Arthur (Arfs Mincewell, I dubbed him, for fairly obvious, in fact screamingly obvious, reasons) and I, expecting a restful morning, found ourselves fighting our way through a huge and totally unforeseen queue which wound its way round the building all the way down to the river. The Prospect Theatre Company was opening at the Mermaid for a season of Richard II and Edward II with an admired but not especially famous young actor called Ian McKellen in the two title roles. There had up till now been only the mildest interest in the shows, but the day before, the Sunday Times had carried a review by the critic Harold Hobson of positively ecstatic fervour, acclaiming McKellen in terms that would have made the Saviour Himself blush. So, the following day, there was a queue. Arfs and I threw open the box-office window and started selling for all we were worth. We gave up putting the money in the till quite early on, so that when Joan Robinson arrived at midday, we were knee-deep in banknotes. Instead of being acclaimed as box-office heroes, as we’d fondly imagined, we were soundly berated for having let all the house seats go and told to pick up all the money and not go anywhere near the window. (Eventually poor Joan was reduced to buying back tickets from the public so that she’d have something to give the agents, on whose business she relied during leaner times.)