My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  For me the great thing about Lincoln was that I had found my director. Or rather, he had found me. Robert Walker, who had been running the Close, the studio space of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, and before that had been electrifying the citizens of Watford with his work at the Palace Theatre, had, like Peter Farago, seen me at the Drama Centre and invited me to be in his opening season at Lincoln in September 1973, immediately after the Edinburgh Festival.

  The directors I had had in Edinburgh were as different from each other as they could possibly have been: Bill Bryden, sharp, smart and Scottish, had handled his somewhat unruly gang (‘No, no, Bill, Sir Tyrone always had me move right here’) with aplomb and energy, but there was no time for nuance and personal touches; Radu Penciulescu was an intellectual and a teacher and an experimentalist, and very very clear about what he wanted, though he spoke no English and communicated his observations in French, which I, the new boy in the company, translated for him.

  Robert Walker was something altogether different, a huge, rather beautiful man with the physique of a rugby player, in love with language, exceptionally well-read and entirely on top of all the theories of drama, wildly, surreally funny and playful to the point of anarchy. Above all he wanted the theatre to be alive with a crazy, reckless sensuality; sex had to be at the back of everything, for him, which led to some unusual departures when we were doing Aladdin. The inventiveness and audacity of his rehearsals were thrilling and liberating. He was utterly and totally actor-struck – actor-struck as opposed to stage-struck. Everything he did – the design, the music, the staging – flowed out of what the actors were doing. And we dared recklessly for him, carried along by his joy in our work. He was the best audience any actor could ever hope for, agog at what we came up with, ruthless at editing it. He was not without rigour of a sort – a poetic rigour, which demanded perpetual spontaneity and heightened awareness. He would countenance anything except what was wooden and mechanical; he also had a hatred of what is usually called beauty. Beauty to him was whatever was smudged, raw, naked. Finish and polish were hateful to him. This was a wholly new concept to me: I was a homosexual aesthete, after all. But I trusted him and came to see that this sawn-off beauty of his was indeed poetry of a different order. He himself was polymorphously perverse, like some magnificently articulate baby, endlessly stretching out and touching, all appetite and no inhibition, and his theatre was like that, too. Swept on by his enthusiasm and permissiveness, I soared. It seemed impossible for me to displease him. I managed, just about, to hang on to the logic and discipline of what I had learned at the Drama Centre, while taking more and more risks.

  The panto (see above) might have been a risk too far. The audience openly rebelled at times. Things were looking a bit rocky at Lincoln by then. Business – apart from the Christmas shows – had not been good; Howard Brenton’s rewritten Measure for Measure, with the Duke as Harold Macmillan, Angelo as Enoch Powell and a black Isabella, had emptied the place, and the local council was asking for more familiar fare, done more normally. Robert was deflated and enraged, as he often was, by being required to be realistic. So when Peter Farago of the Young Lyceum, my first boss, asked me to go back to Edinburgh, Robert told me to go; a couple of months later he threw in the towel too. Lincoln was my only real experience of rep; it was probably enough, but it was a wonderful time, absurdly overworked, but bursting with camaraderie and good humour and broken hearts and discovery. One of the great discoveries of that time for me, an extra-curricular one, was Max Wall. I came face to face with the music-hall tradition which was, so to speak, in my blood, but of which till then I had had no direct experience. I wrote this for the Max Wall Society’s organ, Wallpaper.

  Was there ever a time that one didn’t know what Max Wall looked like or how he sounded? And yet, growing up in the Sixties, I can’t recollect seeing him on television or hearing him on radio. But that image of a professorial sort of chimpanzee was so familiar, so deeply rooted. Like the greatest clowns, he seemed to come from deep in the collective memory, from some unknown past of the race, and the very sight of him stirred not only instant laughter but also some other emotion, a disturbance of the soul, a touch of pity and terror. I was a young actor at the Lincoln Theatre Royal when it was announced that he was playing at the local working men’s club, and the whole acting company immediately booked tickets, running in our make-up direct from the theatre, where we were doing A Taste of Honey, to sit excitedly in the back row, just managing to squeeze in.

  It was a small space and his appearance in it was somehow shocking: the moment he walked on the stage he seemed in close-up, in extreme close-up, in fact, as he leered at us like an ape in a cage, his arms swinging loosely at his side, his undershot jaw hanging slackly. He was underway without warning, before the chatter had subsided, precise, rhythmic, with slight intimations of a cleft palate, his eyes glinting like the Ancient Mariner’s. ‘Max Wall, Max Wall, I come from a long line of walls, my grandfather was the Great Wall of China, my father was a marvellous man, he had a long hair growing out of his left nostril, when he sneezed, it cracked like a whip, one day he caught the flu and he flogged hisself to death.’ A bit of fancy footwork, a shudder, lips curled strangely, and he was off again. The actors were beside themselves with joy. It wasn’t until about five minutes in that we realised that no one else was laughing. At all. Stony resentful silence was all around us, and finally defeated us. We smiled idiotically in his direction. He carried on regardless, indifferent to the indifference. He sat at the keyboard. Each arm proved longer than the other; a cowed actor let out a gurgle of pleasure but couldn’t sustain a full laugh against the waves of circumambient disapproval.

  On Max went. Lifting up the strut of the piano lid, he said, hollow-voiced: ‘Brings back memories.’ At the end of the forty minutes or whatever it was of distilled comic genius, we cheered, a few members of the audience applauded, and the auditorium emptied. ‘Last time ’e ever comes back ’ere.’ ‘’E’s ’ad it.’ ‘Load of old rubbish.’ It was shocking for us stripling actors to hear. A few months later, he was announced for the Garrick Theatre in London. He performed exactly, to the comma, to the flare of the nostril, the act he’d played in Lincoln. This time, however, it lasted twice as long because of the laughter which threatened at times to become uncontrollable. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said at the curtain call, ‘you have been half.’ He’d said the same thing in Lincoln, but it hadn’t been true. He had done it all. After that Garrick season, he could never have had the bird again, though no doubt, after long and bitter experience, he never ruled out the possibility.

  Back in Edinburgh, Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Fantasticks (on tour across Scotland for the Young Lyceum) were differently delightful; then I joined Mike Ockrent at the Traverse Theatre. He was attempting to create a company there again, and for a year we did a staggering amount of work, starting with a play which I had seen in Ingmar Bergman’s pared-down version at the World Theatre Season with no less artists than Harriet Andersson and Max von Sydow, Dream Play by Strindberg; we went on to do Brecht and the Israeli writer Hanoch Levin. Another play in the Traverse season, Schippel, tamed by C. P. Taylor from Carl Sternheim’s savage German original and rendered anarchically hilarious in a particularly British way, turned into a runaway success, as it was when we revived the whole season for the Edinburgh Festival. We were invited to take it to Belfast, in 1975, when we played to a soundtrack of distant and sometimes not-so-distant exploding bombs and machine-gun rattles so alarming that one of the actresses was unable to suppress her fearful farts, which only added to the soundtrack of explosions, as well as eliciting some spontaneous re-blocking of the play to avoid wiping out the rest of the cast. Then on to London, to the Open Space Theatre, my first experience of the London Fringe. There the play was seen by that sweet Goon, Harry Secombe, who took it (and me) into the West End, under the name of The Plumber’s Progress; all too predictably, it flopped, Harry’s fans failing to see the point of it. I then app
eared at Verity Bargate’s Soho Poly in The Soul of the White Ant, an extraordinary and visionary one-act play by Snoo Wilson, which soon after became a full-length play and transferred to the Bush; later we took it on a tour of Holland, playing every night to standing ovations of up to ten people. West End stardom (my name had actually been up in lights at the Prince of Wales Theatre, however briefly) gave way to an extended period in the Fringe, then at its first great peak. Thirty-five years later, in a piece for the Guardian written when I was doing a play at the Southwark Playhouse, I looked back on the period with great tenderness.

  For those of us starting out as actors in 1973, as I did, the theatre was a house of many mansions. Or perhaps an estate of many dwellings, with the Big Houses – the RSC and the National Theatre and the West End – at the centre and innumerable smaller places elsewhere in the grounds. Foremost, there was rep: over a dozen theatres each with its own year-round company; many of the actors retained for two or three or more years. Most reps also had studio theatres and Theatre-in-Education units. Then there were touring companies, some also with an educational bias, others with political or community or other philosophical programmes; there were arts centres, with budgets to stage plays; there were a few club theatres (notably Hampstead). And there was the Fringe.

  For many of us, the Fringe was where our theatrical hearts lay. The disciplines of rep and TIE were clearly invaluable and helped to build our vocal and physical instruments; the touring companies were character (and muscle) building – the actors generally unloaded and erected the sets with the stage management, and took them down again afterwards – and the work was inarguably important. We were aware, too, of the rather distant goals of the National and the RSC and the (to us, then) somewhat suspect lure of the West End. Theatres like the Glasgow Citizens’, the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Royal Court were all inspirations in their radically different ways.

  But the Fringe belonged to us. It was our laboratory, our playground; it was where we made our statement, where our voices were heard. It was experimental by definition, in production and in writing and in acting. You had an idea for a play or for a production and you simply put it on. At the Soho Poly, for example, the wittily provocative Verity Bargate had the courage to be undiscriminating. If a new writer with a spark of life in him or her had thrown something lively onto the page, Verity would run it up the flagpole and find out what was there – a real play, or just a sketch; a flair for dialogue or a weird take on life. Either way, a writer was given a chance to learn, in the only way that matters. With an almost non-existent budget, Verity would whip together a brilliant cast at a moment’s notice from actors between jobs, or even doing jobs. It was a lunchtime theatre, to begin with. A director and a designer with nothing to lose and a fiver to spend would transform the tiny space, and someone’s passing inspiration would come to life. Out of just such a process emerged, for example, Barrie Keeffe, one of the key writers of the post-war period, whose humanist rage and surreally fantastic humour were first seen in the trilogy he wrote for the Soho Poly; his energy and inventiveness seem to sit unhappily in the institutional theatre, though he is as close to what we mean by a radical popular dramatist as we have had since the glory days of Joan Littlewood.

  The Almost Free Theatre was run by Ed Berman, a burly, bearded American maverick whose company was based on a tiny farm located in his back garden in Kentish Town; they also, inexplicably, had a West End base in Rupert Street, off Piccadilly, where they gave space to, amongst other things, the Gay Sweatshop company, which staged a rapidly convened season including, amongst many other plays, Passing By, the first of Martin Sherman’s to be seen in England, and Kennedy’s Children by Robert Patrick; the performers included mainstream actors like Antony Sher and me as well as the core Sweatshop company who, on a shoestring, transformed lives and attitudes and generated some remarkably innovative work. I vividly recall going along to Ed’s farm to meet Drew Griffiths, the director of Passing By, and reading, as the cow mooed and the goats bleated, the simple boy-meets-boy/boy-loves-boy/boy-leaves-boy romantic story, stunned with disbelief: this was the story of my life, but I had never for a moment expected to see it represented on stage, much less to be performing it. For me personally, I have to confess, it was far more radical than anything that the Royal Court was offering. I tremblingly agreed to do it, half believing that I was destroying my career; if I’d had more time to think about it, I might have said no. As it was, a mere couple of weeks after that first meeting, we were up and doing it in the little theatre in Rupert Street, and those lunchtime audiences were as moved and shaken by it as I had been at first reading. And I continued working.

  Was it art? Most certainly. The imaginative contrivances with which we responded to the limitations of budget and space were as stimulating as anything that might have been achieved by chequebook designing. By some paradox, it is easier to go further with a style or an idiom on slender resources than it is with a fat Lottery grant. When I took Buddy Dalton – another stage-struck eccentric who, after converting the old morgue at New End into a theatre, founded the even smaller Offstage Theatre in Chalk Farm – an odd, haunting little play called The Passport which didn’t seem to make any sense except as a nightmare, I told her that I wanted to do it like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and without comment she gave my designer Bruno Santini a hundred pounds from which he conjured the most thoroughgoing Expressionist set I have ever seen or worked with. Equally, when I devised a one-man play called Nicolson Fights Croydon for Angus Mackay (about the patrician diarist’s election campaign as a Labour MP), we had an even smaller budget, and lit it without any theatre lamps at all, using only the electric lights in the room in which he was supposedly staying, creating a Joseph Wright of Derby effect of striking beauty, which would have been impossible in a larger space.

  Freedom, spontaneity, risk, imaginative challenge: all these things were central to the experience of the Fringe. They are all notably elusive in the other available theatrical environments. It’s true that since those reckless days of the early Seventies, the Fringe has itself become a house of many mansions. Theatres like the Bush and Hampstead now constitute a sort of Higher Fringe, with production values not unlike those of the national theatres and the West End. This is an inevitable and by no means negative development: people and organisations must always move forward. Faking innocence is both offensive and doomed.

  But for me it was very exciting when the Southwark Playhouse, a relatively young organisation with a dazzling recent track record, and blessed with a playing space of exceptional character and inspiring limitations, decided it wanted to do Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1975 play Through the Leaves. The way it came to their attention was this: the young American director Daniel Kramer had been looking for a play which would enable him to work with that superb actress Ann Mitchell, whose recent performance in Tantalus had been so overwhelming for critics and public. Through the Leaves stirred her deeply, and merely as a matter of interest Daniel let me read it. I felt then exactly what I felt twelve years before when by chance I read Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman. I knew that I was reading a masterpiece which had something utterly original to say about the human arrangement, and that within the confines of its relatively short duration and its two-character cast, it achieved an epic image of the struggle to find some sort of truth in a seemingly doomed relationship.

  I asked if I could be in it. And Dan said yes, though Otto the alcoholic steelworker would have seemed to most people rather further out of my natural range than had the hot-pant wearing little queen in Puig’s play. Just as I had approached the Bush all those years ago with Spiderwoman and after a single reading of it they had said yes, Dan approached Thea Sharrock, the artistic director of the Southwark Playhouse, and by a miracle they had a slot in their schedule when Ann and I were both free, and gave it an immediate thumbs-up. There was money to be raised – sums that would have seemed surreal to us back in the Seventies – and there was a full team to be
assembled, twice the size of what we would have used at the Poly. But what happened is essentially the same: we fell in love with this play, the theatre fell in love with it too et voilà, tout.

  At the end of his life, Orson Welles said that the fun had gone out of movie-making because the gap between the impulse to do something and its realisation had become so enormous. In this case, in Cromwell’s wonderful phrase, we are not merely striking while the iron is hot but making it hot by striking it. The rehearsal room is like a boiler room, bursting with violent energy and excitement as we engage with the dark theatrical world of Kroetz, Ann and I and our young, daring colleagues trying to find the most fearless way in which we can put it on stage. I feel as if I’ve lost thirty years.