by Simon Callow
Normally, things were very much quieter. There was a production of a play by William Trevor called The Old Boys, of which the star was Sir Michael Redgrave. The great actor had just started to succumb to the effects of the Parkinson’s disease which finally engulfed him. He couldn’t remember a word of the script, so the stage management improvised a sort of walkie-talkie for him which was wired up to the prompt corner. When he needed a line – which was always – he was to tap on his chest and the text would be forthcoming. He found it hard to get the hang of it, and would quite openly ask the stage manager, via the apparatus, to repeat the line, as if he were on the telephone. This made life a little difficult for his fellow actors. A number of the audience, many of whom were almost as infirm as he was, were displeased by this, and would vent their rage at me, demanding their money back. I hope Sir Michael never knew about these complaints. The show was a pitiful spectacle, but Redgrave somehow maintained his dignity, and against all the odds, his performance was rather moving. I reviewed Alan Strachan’s book about Redgrave, Secret Dreams, for the Guardian; Strachan was the director of The Old Boys.
Alan Strachan is right to point out that when John Gielgud’s obituaries were written, and his place in the theatrical pantheon assessed, Michael Redgrave was inexplicably omitted from the list of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century actors. The fine and judicious biography he has written does an important service in restoring a major figure to its rightful place in the theatrical landscape. It must, however, be said that, detailed as never before, both the career and the man emerge if anything somewhat more enigmatic than they were before it. Inevitably, Redgrave, whose last major creation was Jaraby in The Old Boys at the Mermaid in 1971, is remembered by fewer theatregoers than the other great actors who all had Indian summers well into their seventies. His distinguished body of film work – including superb performances in The Browning Version, Dead of Night and The Stars Look Down – is perhaps better known, and fortunately now includes the television film of the Chichester Festival production of Uncle Vanya (made for pay TV and unavailable for many years), which preserves his nonpareil performance in the title role, generally regarded as the crowning glory of his work in the theatre.
If nothing had survived but this one performance, he would on the strength of it have joined the ranks of the Immortals. For a while the complete soundtrack of the production was available on LP and even in this form the performance is both electrifying and heartbreaking from the moment he speaks his first line: the sound of a soul in anguish leaps off the vinyl grooves, all the more potent because of the graceful vocal attributes of the actor, melodious and minutely expressive of every emotional nuance. On DVD the portrait of emotional and spiritual devastation is complete: the great towering physique (6’3” – for many years he thought he was too tall to be an actor), the splendid build, the handsome face, infinitely sensitive, softly rugged, hair flopping about, beard unkempt, limbs limp and loose. The character’s life is inhabited with profound complexity but also a kind of transcendent poetry: absolutely real but on an epic scale, the reality of life itself, not merely of one life. His co-star, the director of the production, is Laurence Olivier, an actor of a very different colour, no less masterful, it goes without saying; his Dr Astrov a brilliantly achieved, deeply felt performance of unique theatrical effectiveness. But Redgrave’s achievement is of a different order. He does what only the very greatest acting does – he opens up the secret places of the human heart, allowing us to glimpse truths about ourselves that we can barely acknowledge, in Vanya’s case the overwhelming sense of waste, the impossibility of love, the death of hope.
Michael Redgrave knew about such things. As if at destiny’s behest, his early life shaped him to experience loss, disappointment, rejection. He was unique among the great actors of the twentieth century in that he was actually born into the theatre – not merely connected to it, as Gielgud was, but of it, although, paradoxically, he was the latest starter of them all. Both parents were actors, as were many of his forebears. His father, Roy, was a feckless charmer of a barnstormer who made his way to Australia, where he triumphed in outback melodramas, occasionally featuring live sheep; his mother Daisy (belonging more to the legitimate theatre) and the infant Michael joined Roy, somewhat against Roy’s will, and stayed with him for a little while, during which time the boy made his stage debut, running on at the end of a sentimental monologue to cry ‘Daddy!’ In fact, he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word and instead burst into tears, which is a very nice metaphor both for his relationship to his father (from whom they parted shortly after and whom he never saw again) and for the unusual degree of emotion he was to bring to his own work as an actor. His childhood, back in England, was as unsettled as the life of the child of a single parent who was a jobbing actress on tour could hardly fail to be, and he was constantly given over to the care of aunts (and ‘aunts’), frequently depending on the kindness of landladies. Then, quite without warning, his mother married a very respectable and comfortably off businessman and their lives changed hugely for the better – in the material sense, at least; Redgrave was plunged into the inevitable Oedipal alienation, in addition to resenting what he felt to be the bourgeois nature of their new life. He was sent to a minor public school where he was blessed by the presence of an inspired English teacher who staged plays to a high level of excellence. He also experienced the usual intense crushes on various fellow pupils; before long he had been to bed both with men and women.
Both sexes were understandably smitten by this immensely handsome, elegant, witty and endlessly vulnerable young man. At Cambridge, in the late Twenties, he had long-term love affairs with several men (among them the publisher John Lehmann), moved in Bloomsbury circles and was in touch with many of the Apostles; this was the epoch of Burgess (who designed a play for him) and Blunt (with whom he co-edited a magazine). He was confirmed in his left-wing political attitudes, though never formally a Marxist. He was not a diligent scholar, but absorbed a very wide culture, particularly during a visit to Heidelberg, where for the first time he saw the latest opera – Rosenkavalier, which overwhelmed him – and subsidised theatre and Expressionist cinema, all of which influenced him deeply in his vision of what the theatre and performing arts could be; he was awed by a performance by Louis Jouvet, whom he took to be the very model of what an actor should be, ‘a real homme du théâtre’, as he admiringly wrote. He had considerable ambitions as a writer (his instinctive verbal sense emerges vividly in a letter in which he describes a girl with whom he shares a dance as ‘round and splodgy with an aggressive sniff and a laugh like the death rattle of a winkle’) but not, as yet, as an actor. Instead he became a schoolmaster at Cranleigh, but plunged immediately into directing and acting in productions there, playing Hamlet, Lear and Samson Agonistes. By the age of twenty-six he felt strong enough to enter the professional fray, and was lucky enough to secure a place at William Armstrong’s Liverpool Rep, where he played a vast range of parts in the course of a year, and met his wife, Rachel Kempson. Within a year he had been snapped up by the Old Vic and was playing Orlando opposite Edith Evans’s Rosalind, one of the great romantic partnerships of the decade; a year later he was cast in the leading role in The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock, his film debut. Four years into the business he was an established star in both mediums.
Despite his splendid physical and vocal equipment – the nearest thing to an acteur noble this country has produced – he did not quite fit into a pre-existing mould. ‘What sort of actor do you want to be, Michael?’ Edith Evans had asked him. ‘Do you want to be like John, or Larry, or me, or Peggy Ashcroft? What sort of standards are you aiming at?’ The very highest, was his immediate answer, those of Jouvet, those of his mentor the director Michel Saint-Denis (who had, said Redgrave, ‘some information about life that he could tell us’). But he believed that could only really be achieved in an ensemble, in the sort of company that Gielgud was intermittently attempting in the West End, though ideally,
he believed, the theatre should be nationalised. As for himself, he was genuinely not interested in stardom, and was a natural democrat, if a somewhat aloof one. He was also fascinated by Stanislavsky, always seeking to create from within; he was in fact that unheard-of phenomenon, an English leading actor who was not an extrovert. He was always in touch with his inner drama, in a way not dissimilar to Charles Laughton, an actor with whom he has surprisingly much in common, and his best work always possesses a sense of fathomless pools of complex life within. Unlike Laughton, his relationship to his own body and his face was not anguished; it is indeed very often the gap between the nobility of his appearance and the turbulence inside which gives his acting its extraordinary intensity. ‘He is always at his best when called upon to undermine the effect of his tall, handsome presence with suggestions of nervous tensions amounting to terror,’ wrote Frank Marcus.
His loyalty to his inner needs gave rise to an almost ungraspable complexity in his private life. He was desperately needy in his sexual and emotional demands. ‘I am shallow, selfish (horribly), jealous to a torturing degree, greedy, proud and self-centred,’ he wrote to John Lehmann; ‘I have grasped at people’s love and done vain and stupid things to get it; I am at times hideously immoral.’ An early indicator is the passionate affair that he had with Edith Evans during and even after the run of As You Like It, starting in the seventh month of Rachel’s pregnancy with her first child Vanessa, and continuing thereafter for nearly a year, an affair of which Rachel remained ignorant till the publication of Bryan Forbes’s biography of Evans some forty years later. Thenceforward the affairs were with men, including at least four long-term relationships, all of which Rachel was told about to the accompaniment of copious tears, and all of which she learned to live with: indeed, she even learnt to live with the lovers themselves. He was so infatuated with Noël Coward during their brief affair that it was with him that he spent his last night before beginning his wartime naval service. Rachel was curiously tolerant, almost unnervingly so: ‘I am glad all goes well with you, Darling Mike. Do you know, I envy you being always able to be with the one you love with no restrictions or difficulties of any sort. I don’t envy you in a horrid way but I hope you feel pleased in the wonderfulness of that. It must give you calm and strength.’ Of course, it gave him nothing of the kind; but it kept his inner life going. In addition to the marriage and the official lovers were unending one-night or indeed one-afternoon stands, for which purpose he had rented an office off St Martin’s Lane, plus pickups in parks and stations; later – territory not covered in Strachan’s book – he was to go into darker and darker realms sexually, usually fuelled by large quantities of alcohol. These lapses were always accompanied with terrible remorse and vows of renunciation, always broken, sometimes the very day of the diary entry that records them. This is something that goes well beyond mere bisexuality or simple promiscuity. It is an unshakable compulsion, driven by unshakable guilt and the constant need for affirmation. But it was inextricably bound up with his art. ‘I like attempting parts of men, as it were, in invisible chains.’
The miracle is that for so much of his career, until he was stopped in his tracks by Parkinson’s disease shortly after his sixtieth birthday, he remained so productive and so constantly illuminating in his work; he maintained an elegance and splendour through some of his most demanding roles and despite the unremitting intensity of his private experience. His classical roles – and in one glorious season at Stratford he played King Lear, Shylock and Antony – were absolute reinventions of the characters, but the reinvention was completely unselfconscious: he worked from profound inner promptings, his transformations organic and radical. His Antony was by all accounts a supreme account of an almost unplayable part – a man who provokes unstinting love from every other character in the play even as he destroys himself. As a director, too, he worked with exceptional taste and intelligence; and finally as a writer he wrote two of the finest books in the language about acting, and a haunting novel, about an actor and his doppelgänger, The Mountebank’s Tale, the epigraph to which (by Rilke) seems to tell us something very personal about the enigmatic Redgrave himself: ‘I can only come to terms with inner cataclysms; a little exterior perishing or surviving is either too hard or too easy for me. In the life of the gods… I understand nothing better than the moment they withdraw themselves; what would a god be without the protecting cloud, can you imagine a god worse for wear?’
After The Old Boys, a tenth-anniversary production of the musical Lock Up Your Daughters, the show which originally opened the Mermaid, had settled in for a long run and with little now to do in the box office, I spent my days tormenting Joan with new systems for this or that, and for a month she managed to get me to join the accounting department, which was certainly an eye-opener, the miracle being that they hadn’t been raided by the police. Finally, she was greatly relieved to hear of a job going in the box office of the Aldwych Theatre, then home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Box Office Manager spoke unto Box Office Manager, and I duly started work there a week later. This was an altogether different sort of operation from Bernard Miles’s inspired lunacy at Puddle Dock, where the spirit of the Elizabethan actor-managers was alive and kicking. The RSC was more like the National, in terms of quality and finish, but in atmosphere it was quite unlike. Apart from anything else, we of the front of house had no contact with the actors, or the stage management or the crew; there was no equivalent of Olivier’s canteen. So the life of the front of house became the whole arena of interest. Again, in the box office I found myself part of a highly original gang of colleagues, from the manager, the sentimental, Wagner-loving John ‘Puss’ Ball, to the No. 2, Vera ‘Lippy’ Lee, a feisty cockney girl with no interest whatever in the theatre but a brilliant accounting mind, and on to Grace Turner, a former Box Office Manager now rendered unsuitable for executive activities by her staggering intake of alcohol (put to answering the phones, she could be observed slowly sliding down the wall until she was a heap on the floor, continuing all the while to converse with her customer) and Tina Adami, a spinster of a certain age with an adorable tendency to collapse in uncontrollable giggles. And the ushers were an arresting collection of gay men, mostly young and dishy, with a sprinkling of ancient grotesques, one of whom minced up to the box office on one of my first days on the window and asked me a question. I can’t remember my answer but whatever it was, it caused him to turn to his colleagues and shout back to them, ‘As a row of tents.’
The RSC of the period was a particularly glorious one; Trevor Nunn, still in his twenties, was the director, and the repertory consisted, amongst other things, of his own electrifying production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, John Barton’s Troilus and Cressida and Twelfth Night with Judi Dench and Donald Sinden, and a play, starring the same couple, which nobody had heard of and whose author’s name no one could pronounce, London Assurance by Dion Boucicault. I saw all the previews of that, and saw the stupendous ensemble of that time – as well as Dench and Sinden there were Elizabeth Spriggs, Michael Williams, Barrie Ingham, Derek Smith and old Sydney Bromley – shape and edit their work as a public that had come on trust erupted in delirious laughter, all the more so for having had no idea of what to expect. During the same period, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream had opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. When the show came to the Aldwych, one saw that, wonderful though all those other productions were, this Midsummer’s Night’s Dream made them seem vieux jeu. Somehow, once again, Brook had reinvented the language of the theatre, making audiences participate in the game of theatre in a way they had forgotten how to do. That one director should have been responsible, back to back, for the National’s Oedipus and this Dream was astounding – although there was a bridge in the musical satyr play Brook had tacked on to Seneca’s savage ritual, in which the company danced deliriously around a huge golden phallus while the band played ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’. Brook was and is the Picasso of directors, endlessly self-reinventing. That he should
also have been able to write about it with unprecedented clarity is a minor miracle: The Empty Space had just appeared in print and now here was the living evidence of his war on what he called in the book Deadly Theatre. Michael Kustow’s authorised biography appeared some thirty-five years later; I reviewed it for the Guardian.
There was an extraordinary mood among the associate directors of the RSC as they returned to London from Stratford in the spring of 1970 for one of their regular meetings. They had just seen the first night of Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and from my peephole in the box office of the Aldwych, I could see the thoughtful faces as they filed past on their way to the office upstairs. They realised, I concluded – having read that morning’s reviews – that Brook had done it again: moved the goalposts for Shakespearean production, redefining himself as a director, as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company, and to some extent the Theatre itself. In his work with the actors he had set out to discover what he called ‘the secret play’, ignoring any realistic pointers in the text, banishing every traditional context in which the play had ever been performed, rejoicing in circus skills and crude music-hall gags while sounding the soaring lyricism of the verse at full throttle, blasting the famous Mendelssohn wedding march out of the loudspeakers and making absolutely clear the nature of Titania’s attraction to her donkey lover. Through all this he somehow released, in a radically abstract white box, all the play’s lewd energy, its beauty, its darkness and its light, and finally, unforgettably and heart-stoppingly, its power to heal. The acting was intensely physical, playful and passionate. Informed critics spoke of the production as Meyerholdian, and certainly what Brook had done was as fearlessly expressionistic as anything his great Russian predecessor had attempted, but it was also – though he had never done anything like it before – instantly recognisable as pure Peter Brook: rigorous, impish; theatrical, high-minded; brilliantly spontaneous, utterly achieved. It was also terribly English, and at the same time perfectly cosmopolitan.