My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Not long after the West End production of Schippel had folded, in 1975, I had gone back to the Open Space Theatre, a remarkable organisation (long gone, of course) situated on the Tottenham Court Road next to a couple of ‘adult’ cinemas. Thelma Holt, an excellent actress, had created the circumstances at the Open Space to enable the maverick American director Charles Marowitz, Peter Brook’s quondam assistant, to stage a succession of provocative pieces – collages of Shakespeare, pastiches of Oscar Wilde, Picasso’s great play Four Little Girls, new work by Peter Barnes and Trevor Griffiths – which were like nothing else that was being done at the time, literate but deeply radical. They presented plays at lunchtime, too, and in that slot Thelma and Charles decided to do Down Red Lane, a horribly prophetic piece by B. S. Johnson about a diner eating himself to death in a restaurant (Johnson met his own death by striding out into the sea after having eaten as much Indian food as he could cram down his gullet). In the play, I was the waiter and Martin Coveney, brother of the critic, played the diner’s stomach. The diner himself was played by Timothy West, then one of the best-known actors in the country (Edward VII had just been on television, and he was currently playing Judge Brack to Glenda Jackson’s Hedda at the Aldwych for the RSC); this was typical of the fringe of the time, where the most famous and distinguished actors were only too delighted to do a quick run of a play. But it was also typical of Tim, who quite unselfconsciously treated the two unknown young actors he was working with as his equals, simply colleagues.

  After Down Red Lane, I did a play by John Antrobus at the Royal Court (with a cast that now exists mainly as obituaries: Richard Beckinsale, Ian Charleson, Philip Stone, Patience Collier, as well as the happily still living Denis Lawson, Beth Morris and Cheryl Cooke) and then a starry revival, with a now equally melancholy cast list: Derek Godfrey, James Villiers, Nigel Hawthorne, of The Doctor’s Dilemma at one of my Alma Maters, the Mermaid. It wasn’t an altogether happy production: Derek, the dazzling original Earl of Gurney, as it happens, in Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class, was subdued, already suffering from the cancer that killed him, while Jimmy Villiers was very put out about working on Good Friday. ‘I’m sorry, Jimmy,’ said Robert Chetwyn, the director, ‘I’d no idea you were religious.’ ‘Fuck religion, darling,’ said Villiers, ‘it’s the races.’ But Nigel Hawthorne, on the brink of national fame in Yes, Minister, gave an exquisite performance as Cutler Walpole. This is my 2002 review for the Daily Mail of his posthumously published autobiography Straight Face.

  There is in the public mind some idea of what actors are like. I suppose it is summed up by the loathed phrase ‘luvvie’: bombastic, over-the-top, compulsive, shallow, gushing, posturing, self-promoting, raffish, promiscuous, loudly laughing, uncontrollably weeping, always ‘on’. There may indeed be actors who fall within the parameters of this unlovely image – perhaps some of us see it staring back at us when we look into the mirror – but one who most certainly did not was Nigel Hawthorne, an actor as far from the popular conception as could be imagined. Slow, shy, thoughtful, stubborn, principled, middle-class and proud of it, he deviated from the norm in only two ways: he was an actor, and he was gay. Nothing in his background or his upbringing encouraged or accounted for these uncommon proclivities, but, typically, he accepted his destiny in both departments and doggedly tried to make a go of it. In both areas, it was a tough journey, with a slow start, until he achieved simultaneous glory in both, at the age of fifty, when he became famous as an actor and met the true love of his life.

  His story, as told by him, is a curious, in some ways a sad one. The words ‘disappointment’, ‘disappointing’, ‘disappointed’ chime through the book like a tolling bell, as do, only slightly less frequently, two others: ‘guilt’ and ‘guilty’. His early struggle as an actor does not tell the usual rackety but romantic tale of wild indulgence, the sowing of wild oats, artistically and amorously: it is a terrible stop-go affair of small breaks leading nowhere and crushes which were unexpressed or unfulfilled. He seems plagued with ill-luck and wrong choices. After a messy and failed one-night stand with a scenic designer when he is in rep in Northampton, he decides to move in with the man, and stays with him for twenty-seven years in a relationship devoid of sex and fraught with social difficulty. As an actor, he is told, even before he becomes a professional, that it will take him years before he will make his mark; and it does – decades of mere subsistence. Then, by sheer dint of sticking at it, the actor and the parts find each other, and the talent that had never been in question finds its outlet, and overnight he is one of the most admired, best-loved performers in the country. And at almost exactly the same time, he meets the drop-dead gorgeous Trevor Bentham, who, to Nigel’s disbelief, falls in love with him, and he finds the thing he has dreamed of all his life – domestic bliss. And then he dies.

  The tenacity is astonishing. Never was there such a story of persistence rewarded. The sadness that pervades the book comes from a nagging sense that it all should have happened much, much earlier. Those of us who remember his work from the mid-Sixties were never in any doubt that he was an exceptionally fine actor. He felt underused – stuck in character roles of no consequence – but already there was about his acting a sort of inner pressure, an emotional rage behind the comedy, which singled him out as an original. In life, even in those days, he was cautious and respectable and slightly crusty, but just beneath the surface there was a certain element of anarchy, determination and need warring with each other, which produced the tension that any remarkable performance must have, a pull in opposite directions. This quality led to what I continue to think of as his greatest performance (though there is some competition): Major Flack in Privates on Parade, where he endowed the erratic field commander with a touch of madness which was both hilarious and touching, and ascended at times almost to tragic proportions: he made us deeply pity the absurd man. In a way, it was the King Lear he didn’t quite manage to give when he finally came to play it.

  Perhaps the most affecting but also the saddest moment in the book is contained in his last few lines: after he and Bentham were crudely and pointlessly outed by the press, ‘we both believed the world would be looking at us with disgust and that our lives had been irrevocably changed. Things did change – but for the better. We no longer felt the need to pretend. The “Straight Face” we’d worn through the years was no longer necessary. Everybody knew. We’d been liberated.’ All those years of hiding, of feeling ashamed, and guilty: wasted. Nobody minded. He was loved, not for pretending to be straight but because he was a wonderful actor. If only he’d known that earlier.

  The book is deeply honest without being in any way sensational. There are some very funny and very moving sections (his emotional breakdown when he came to act the climax of Shadowlands), and his doggedness is sometimes unintentionally funny; a latent tetchiness keeps breaking through. There is no attempt to conceal it. The author’s self-portrait is superbly complemented by Trevor Bentham’s epilogue (the best writing in the book), in which he tells us, utterly convincingly, what an enchantingly contradictory man Nigel was, and why he provoked the love that he did, in Trevor and in the great public. A most unusual account of a most unusual actor.

  Nigel belonged to a generation that had good reason to fear being identified as gay. By the time I became an actor, the Labouchère Amendment had been repealed for a good six years, and life was loosening up for gay people. I had never concealed my homosexuality from anyone (apart from my mother, fearing an absolute cataclysm). I had told everyone about it at school – though my sexuality was theoretical at that point, since I had not had sex with anyone of any gender – and had made a full and free confession of it to my chums at the National (though still a virgin). The same candour had applied in Belfast, at university, though I was now the oldest homosexual virgin in the land, and at the Drama Centre, where I finally (phew!) lost my cherry. At the Vic, everyone knew who the gay actors were, though none – apart from John Gielgud, for obvious reasons – was publ
icly identified as such. It never occurred to me to conceal my proclivities. When I became an actor, the same was true. But there was now no danger, no disadvantage: as far as I know, there was no director who would fail to hire you because you were gay. On the other hand, there was, as far as I knew, no well-known actor who had admitted to being gay in an interview. Anxiety hedged the subject. When I was asked to appear in Martin Sherman’s Passing By, for Gay Sweatshop at the Almost Free Theatre (you paid what you could afford), I paused for a moment, wondering what the consequences might be for my relationship with my mother. I had no other anxiety: although scarcely what you might call a political animal, I could see that this was an important, useful venture; besides, it was a great part – young and in love with a beautiful young man: I could relate to that. By no means all the actors who worked for Gay Sweatshop were gay, so it wasn’t a public admission of homosexuality; but there would be newspaper coverage, reviews and so on, which my mother might well see. Very well, I thought. Destiny has forced my hand, and I set off to break the glad tidings. ‘If you’re anything like your father,’ she responded, when I told her, ‘you’ll be a sexual beast, and since there were no women, there must have been men.’ I took this as a blessing, and went on my way. I would cross the next bridge – being interviewed – when I came to it. If I came to it.

  Passing By was my first experience of political theatre. Though in essence a very sweet account of a passing love affair between two young men, it was utterly radical in offering no apology or explanation for the affair – it was just an affair, like any other. The effect on the predominantly gay audience was sensational – they wept, not because it was sad, but because it was the first time they’d seen their own lives represented on stage without inverted commas, with neither remorse nor disgust. Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band – ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse’ – had been packing them in, gay and straight, in the West End only a couple of years before: the acceptable face of homosexuality – brittle, anguished, self-loathing. Passing By was the antidote to this seductive but poisonous brew. I was shaken by the effect the play had on the audience. I knew all about political theatre – I had seen the best (7:84) and the worst (7:84) – and was properly electrified, when it was good, by its rousing, invigorating quality. Passing By was none of these. It provoked in its audience a huge collective sigh, as if sloughing off a centuries-old interdict. The defensive, the reflexive, the self-protective mask was shed, and shy, tender, loving emotion flowed gently round the tiny auditorium. The slight play had the power, like a great popular song, of speaking directly not only to, but for, its auditors.

  Not much later, I became a company member of another explicitly political theatre group, Joint Stock. Here the relationship with the audience was very different, and indeed those of us putting on the plays had a very different relationship to each other. Gay Sweatshop’s objectives, initially, at any rate, were very simple: to put gay life on stage from a gay point of view, for the benefit of other gay people. The problem with Joint Stock, an organisation which produced a great deal of remarkable theatre, was that nobody ever articulated the precise political position that we were supposed to be taking. The success of David Hare’s Fanshen, created before I joined the company, had convinced the company that its outlook was essentially Maoist, but it wasn’t (though our starry-eyed uncritical embrace of Communist China is a little embarrassing in retrospect). Very good work was done nonetheless, especially – during my time with the company – Barrie Keeffe’s superb A Mad World My Masters, one of the few really successful large-scale social comedies of the period.

  It was David Hare who had brought me into the company. His brilliant self-assurance, his incisive wit and his extreme displeasure at being criticised sometimes mask his compassion and generosity, his delicious sense of fun and his deep personal vulnerability. Our lives have run parallel without ever really interlinking since those early Joint Stock days, but I have always been astonished by his fearlessness about moving into territory of maximum personal challenge. I wrote this in my Diary column in the Independent after seeing his play Via Dolorosa in 1998.

  Theatre: what is it? Definition is elusive and finally, perhaps, impossible. Theatre, you might say, is whatever takes place on a stage and is compelling. It is clear that plays as such are not the sine qua non of theatre. Among the most extraordinary pieces of theatre I have ever seen, a performance entitled Milva Canta Brecht, staged by Giorgio Strehler, springs to mind. The great Italian cabaret singer with her Titian-red hair, dressed in black, stood alone next to a grand piano. Her hair was up to start with; at a certain point, it came down like a copper gash across her shoulder. We gasped. The light changed. She sat down; she stood in profile; she sang with her back to us. Nothing more happened, or could happen. Her connection with what she was singing, her characterisation, her engagement with the text, creating action out of the emotional narrative, made for a theatrical event of extraordinary purity.

  Even starker in means was another event which I would rank among the supreme theatrical experiences of my life: a lecture by A. J. P. Taylor at the National Film Theatre on Hitler and film. The small bespectacled figure, raffishly bow-tied, stood in the darkened auditorium, brilliantly illuminated in a single spot from which never moved. His argument developed with buoyant lucidity, the lines of thought arching and converging in the dark, a sort of mental callisthenics, pentathlon of the intellect, until with perfect command, he finally brought us past the final tape, all the threads of his discourse firmly in his hand. A cheer went up as the spotlight faded. What is the common element here? Performance, of course, the drama of watching a lone person justify his or her moment in the spotlight, the stage as high wire. Acting is not necessarily indispensable to theatre.

  Take David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, of which the writer gives the last performance tonight. Hare is reporting on an actual personal experience, his trip to Israel and Palestine, but also – and this is crucial – on himself. He offers himself up for examination: this is what happens to a person, he says, when he or she goes to Israel. This is what you find, and this is how it affects you. In the very act of his standing on a stage, without even so much as a lectern, he offers himself up for examination, for contemplation. Unlike Taylor, Hare has not spent a lifetime of lecturing in public, honing his act. He is an intensely engaging speaker, witty, penetrating and often emotional, but he is not a pro in this area; much less has he acted in plays, like Harold Pinter and Wally Shawn. He walks with jagged self-consciousness onto the stage; his body jackknifes as he speaks; words and phrases come accompanied with superfluous or sometimes contradictory gestures. He lacks the actor’s whorish skill of making it seem as if he was saying all this for the first time. It’s definitely a text. Nor does he shape the material particularly well, paragraph by paragraph. It is possible to imagine the text better delivered.

  All of this is beside the point. The point is that it’s him telling us about what happened to him, and in that sense the event is similar to the experience of hearing a poet read his own verse. The sense of authenticity is somehow the greater for the lack of finesse in the delivery. The same is true of the characters whom he describes: Mike Yarwood he ain’t, but you get a remarkably vivid impression of the tone, the personality, of these people and – this is the crucial point – what he thinks about them.

  What he has to say about Israel and Palestine is naturally of deep interest, acute and informative. What is perhaps unexpected is how moving it is. The Israeli experience becomes cumulatively heartbreaking, and Hare the performer seems to sag under the weight of it. He pauses, sits at a table, sips water. What he has witnessed seems to pass before his eyes. The powerlessness of passion, of intelligence, of kindness, all seems to bear him down. He wanders about the set, contemplates the impressive model of Jerusalem that rises up and hovers in mid-air like a spaceship. He looks at these things, but he does not seem to see them. An actor would relate to the set, to his surroundings, with a
conscious effort of focus, but Hare is elsewhere, playing over his memories on a mental screen. When the show is over, he seems to see us for the first time, bows almost absent-mindedly and then walks all the way to the back of the stage, leaves, and then walks all the way back again.

  It is as haunting as anything by Beckett. The event has become a metaphor, and that is what the theatre must never fail to be.

  I was with Joint Stock for two highly argumentative years. My next job after leaving the company was to play Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old Vic, my first Shakespeare and the first of the director, Adrian Noble. Although I had been passionate about the plays since my childish spoutings from Dr Dibelius’s edition, my only actual contact with the work had been the brief and unsatisfactory experience of playing Friar Laurence at drama school in my first year, when it was hard to tell who knew less about what they were doing, the teacher or me. The Drama Centre had a deep bias against Shakespeare, preferring as a matter of policy to promote other Elizabethans and particularly the Jacobeans. So I had played Cocledemoy in The Dutch Courtesan, and Adam Overdo in Bartholomew Fair, but no Shakespeare. Adrian, who was my contemporary at the Drama Centre, may have suffered in the same way, though needless to say he has made up for it since, as, to a lesser extent, have I. Titus was a bracing experience, a wonderful place to begin my journey through Shakespeare, since it is very early Shakespeare: in a sense we were starting together, the writer and I. As he learned to write, I learned to act. This was a contribution for the Globe Theatre’s magazine Around the Globe in 1997.

  I was just twenty-seven when I played Titus Andronicus, and it was, needless to say, the hardest thing I had ever done to that date. I suspect that it is one of the hardest parts in the canon. At that green age, though, it nearly finished me off altogether as an actor. It’s a very long part, but stamina was not a problem of mine. The difficulty is in the length and extent of the journey that the character undergoes, from triumph to tragedy to madness to revenge, and in the evolution in style which Shakespeare himself seems to have undergone as he wrote the play. As Titus is put through more and more of Destiny’s hoops, his language passes from bombast and fustian to a sort of heroic but still formal grieving, until it breaks up completely as his mind gives under the weight of all his woes – or does it? By the end of the play he is thinking with startling clarity and focused purpose, and the language too expresses this.