by Simon Callow
We chatted for a while and I went back to my bed-sittingroom and heard nothing. Nothing at all, for months. Once or twice in the foyer of some theatre I would bump into Shaffer, who seemed to be sick at heart. ‘This can’t go on,’ he moaned. ‘It won’t. I know my plays. They have to be done when they have to be done. Amadeus has to be done now.’
More months elapsed. I was deeply unemployed. I turned thirty. That day I spent my last few pounds on hiring a dinner jacket to go to a party, knowing that the following day I would have to think seriously about finding another profession. Next morning there was a call from my agent. John Dexter wanted me to play Orlando for him at the National Theatre. Oh, and they also wanted me to play Mozart in a play called – was it? – Amadeus, directed by Peter Hall. Paul Scofield would be playing Salieri. And so it came to pass. Dexter and Shaffer had finally fallen out over a matter of royalties: Dexter wanted to be paid every time the play was done, whether in his production or not. That was pretty shocking. But it went deeper. Peter had been rolling on the carpet every night during their discussions, whimpering and sobbing. He could no longer endure John’s view of a play as a piece of crude raw material for him to shape. Dexter thought he was playing out the scene at the piano between Mozart and Salieri in real life, and there were no prizes for guessing which one he thought he was in that relationship. What I had read – the supposedly crude, raw material – told me otherwise.
While we were doing As You Like It, John’s thoughts were only bitter, and the production of that sunniest of plays was infused with his rage and resentment. Amadeus, on the other hand, was as open and even a rehearsal as I can recollect, Shaffer ever-willing to change, rewrite, reshape, Hall amiable, always loyal to Mozart, Felicity Kendal superb as Constanze, cheeky, shrewd, sexy, with a core of obsidian right down the centre, Scofield slowly, quietly marinating the huge role in some profound personal essence, filling it with those notes which are his alone to command. The first preview brought an eruption of passion from the audience which continued unfalteringly for the two years we played it at the National (except of course for the night Margaret Thatcher paid her visit and withheld her compliments).
A few years later, I directed the play at the Theatre Clwyd in Mold. I had some pretty smart ideas about the piece. I wanted to set it in a lunatic asylum during the Napoleonic bombardment of Vienna in 1809. The inmates – all musicians, among them Salieri – would play out the story against that backdrop; they would make music with whatever came to hand, trying to evoke Mozart’s work on saucepans, bottles, washboards. Inexplicably, Shaffer was a little resistant, so I devised another scenario, one where the action came to life in an abandoned theatre. There was a High German Romantic, an E. T. A. Hoffmann, quality to the piece that I was trying to nail, and with the young Rupert Graves at the height of his youthful beauty and brilliance as Mozart, we finally found it. During rehearsals, though, I had sat watching the play I knew so well and despairing. It seemed so flat, so thin. The moment the technical rehearsals began and we had the costumes and the lights and the effects and the music, the old magic began to assert itself, and when the audience arrived, they were as enraptured, as disturbed, as moved as spectators at the National Theatre had been the first time round. Shaffer has constructed a piece of theatre which can be staged in a multitude of ways; only one which denies its theatricality can fail.
I was now back at the National, as a Leading Man, ten years after leaving it as an ’umble box-office clerk. Of course, it was a very different National: Denys Lasdun’s vast Theatropolis on the South Bank was a thousand times better equipped than the Vic, and though the backstage areas were charmless and functional, the whole operation was superbly organised and efficient. The canteen was slick and practical, dispensing a million meals a day, and commanded superb views of the Thames, but it lacked the sweaty, steamy intimacy of the Vic’s underground cubby-hole, with its temperamental little chef. There was a Green Room (the actors’ bar, actually), which the Vic never had, and there were veritable armies of actors, among them some friendly faces from the Old Days (Anna Carteret and Mike Gambon and, indeed, dear old Boddington). In the Green Room I was greeted by the lovely Scottish actor James Grant, who had remembered me from The Thrie Estates in Edinburgh (how? He was the King and I was sprawling on the steps). ‘Hi, Simon,’ he said, ‘Welcome to the Green Room. See that hole over there, in the carpet? That’s where Derek Newark falls.’ This was an allusion to the tall, notoriously bibulous actor who was one of the key members of Bill Bryden’s company at the Cottlesloe. And there was John Dexter, never a comfortable presence anywhere, and inextricably associated with the idea of Olivier’s National Theatre, who was the whole reason for my being there. This monstrous but perversely lovable figure wrote an interesting if involuted autobiography, The Honourable Beast, but the most vivid account of him is to be found in the pages of The Birth of Shylock, the Death of Zero Mostel, by the writer with whose early work he had been so closely involved, Arnold Wesker. Their relationship was nothing if not challenging – but every relationship with Dexter was challenging. (Taunted by Dexter’s constantly referring to him as Ruby, Peter Shaffer had one day said, ‘Now, look here, Rose –’ ‘Rose?’ ‘Yes: as in “rose, thou art sick”.’) I reviewed Wesker’s book in 1997 in the Sunday Times.
At the time of the almost unanimous critical drubbing for my production of Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC, I determined to write an essay called Anatomy of a Flop, describing the love, energy, imagination and hard work that had gone into the making of the show, and attempting to answer the critics’ question, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of how such a – to them – palpable catastrophe had ever been allowed to happen. With the publication of Arnold Wesker’s wonderful new book, which describes the 1977 Broadway production of his play Shylock, my essay is redundant. There has never been such a complete account of how frighteningly touch-and-go is the business of bringing a play, particularly a new one, to the stage, even in the hands of a master director.
Wesker describes Shylock’s genesis: how his violent reaction as a Jewish man against Laurence Olivier’s interpretation of the most famous Jew in dramatic literature resolved him to write a work of his own in which he would try to understand the actions of Shakespeare’s character, and offer an alternative image of him as intelligent, compassionate and deeply moral. Despite the encouragement of friends, producers failed to show any interest; Peter Hall turned it down for the National Theatre. At that point John Dexter, director of Wesker’s greatest successes but somewhat distant since their falling-out over The Old Ones, read it and immediately set up a New York production backed by the Shuberts, with Zero Mostel in the leading role.
The play opened in Washington. After the first preview Mostel fell ill; within days he was dead. The understudy took over, the production resumed and eventually opened on Broadway. Despite wild excitement from the preview audiences, the New York critics, especially the Times, were unenthusiastic, and the play closed at the end of the week. All this Wesker recorded, minute by minute, in his journal, and it is this, with a few letters and pages of notes appended, which comprises the present volume. It is his Anatomy of a Flop.
It is also a great deal more than that. First, it is a book about work in the theatre. Wesker is a deeply, even desperately serious man who believes passionately in the importance of his job and of the theatre itself, and every page of the book celebrates that belief. He describes the endeavour of a large group of people to create a theatrical event of power and substance in language that might be used to describe a love affair, or an illness, both of which it closely resembles. In the ‘making of’ genre, it is a masterpiece, the best of its kind, a detailed study of group dynamics, of collective enterprise and of the nature of leadership. More than that, it is a poignant and sometimes distressing account of a friendship gone wrong. Finally, it offers a full-length portrait of one of the most terrible and wonderful individuals ever to devote himself to the stage, the director John Dexter.
Wesker has lately become a prophet without honour in his own profession, that most unhappy figure, the unfashionable dramatist. For what is an unperformed playwright? The plays accumulate in his drawer, unseen, or seen briefly and obscurely. Once, though, Wesker was the man of the moment, who put the world of working people and indeed their work itself, on stage. Unlike his contemporary, John Osborne, who expressed their rage, and his own, in torrentially rhetorical language, Wesker addressed the aspirations and frustrations of the post-Second World War generation in detailed and concrete terms in a number of strong, sober pieces posited on robust socialist humanist principles.
He had the supreme good luck to find an interpreter who was able to offer his work what it needed: a fanatical commitment to realism, and an uncommon gift for choreographing complex action for maximum theatrical impact. John Dexter, a sometime actor seeking to establish himself as a director, seized on the plays that came to be known collectively as the Wesker trilogy, and staged them first in Coventry, then later at the Royal Court Theatre, with the young Joan Plowright as Beatie Bryant creating an unforgettably radiant image of aspiring, intelligent youth. More plays followed in quick succession: Chips with Everything and The Kitchen, both directed by Dexter, both highly successful. Then things started to go wrong.
Wesker was now being superseded by a new wave of radical writers, more pessimistic, more overtly revolutionary and more experimental theatrically. The era of the well-made left-wing play, it appeared, was over. After two egregious disasters (The Journalists, at the RSC, which was withdrawn when the actors refused to perform it, and The Friends, sabotaged from within by the leading actor), he was beginning to feel out on a limb. It was then that he wrote Shylock. Re-enter John Dexter.
Nobody who worked with Dexter, who died, pointlessly young, in 1990, is likely to forget him. He brought to the stage some of the most memorable productions since the war: apart from Wesker’s plays, and Peter Shaffer’s, he was responsible for the musical Half a Sixpence, Olivier’s Othello at the National Theatre, a glittering Misanthrope, M. Butterfly, and innumerable triumphs on the operatic stage at the Met and elsewhere. His heyday was at Olivier’s National, where he helped form a uniquely flexible acting company, mentally and physically brilliant. He was funny, exciting, and a master of his craft, but he could also be savage, castratingly rude, and as capable of draining the life out of a piece as releasing it.
Dexter had been afflicted with polio in his youth, been tarred and feathered by the women in the factory where he worked in Derby, endured bullying during his War Service and terrible hostility when he went to prison (for the alleged abuse of a minor, who was in fact blackmailing him). All these experiences convinced him of the need to assert himself decisively over both people and materials. He had to believe in himself as an absolute master; when belief faltered, he would attack those who seemed to threaten his success. Most often they would be actors whom he felt were not up to the job that he had unthinkingly given them because they were pretty or nice, or because he was in the giving vein that day; when they fell out of favour, he would attack them again and again in excruciatingly personal terms, generally to little positive effect.
This was not directing: it was spite. He would turn on authors, too, accusing them of not understanding their own plays, of being lazy or of not being able to write. A famous sally of his, understandably not quoted by the author in the present volume, was hurled at him during rehearsals of The Kitchen: ‘Shut up, Wesker, or I’ll direct the scene the way you wrote it!’ He came to believe that he alone was responsible for his great successes. He was also quite capable of being kind, illuminating, witty and even humble. He worked staggeringly hard – fuelled by booze, sex, drugs – willing himself to great heights of scholarship (becoming far more learned than the university-educated colleagues whom he so despised); he could be the best fun, too, but you never knew which mood would prevail, or why. Eventually he alienated almost all of his friends; the exchange of letters between Wesker and Dexter at the end of the production of Shylock in which he formally suspends their friendship, is particularly painful to read.
Artistically, his judgement of plays and actors became increasingly erratic, and the productions themselves seemed oddly punitive, austere and cold, as if he now wanted to dominate and bully the audience, too, to get them to shut up and listen properly and stop fidgeting. There were no concessions; all the old sensuality and sweep were gone.
Despite all this, I and many other people loved him deeply – a love he roughly brushed aside – and mourn him to this day. He is here in Wesker’s pages in all his complexity, angel and demon, tyrant and inspiration; the book alerts us, too, to the existence of a big play with big themes that cries out for a proper production at one of our great subsidised theatres. Meanwhile, read Wesker’s book. It is a totally authentic and powerfully moving account of how plays are made – or broken.
This was the man I was about to work with. I knew enough of his reputation to tremble; but in the event he was only kind to me.
Olivier, of course, was the great absentee from the National – his personal touch, his leadership from the front, on stage, at the head of his gallant band, his eye on every single detail of the organisation, all absent. The current director Peter Hall, whom I had yet to meet, could scarcely duplicate that. But who could? Not even Olivier, as it happens, not even at his height. The place was simply too big. This was not to say that wonderful work couldn’t be done – it was being done, and it would be done, again and again. But the missing element was the one which Oliver had brought to the enterprise: gallantry – an odd word, perhaps, for a gang of thesps, but one which, for me, characterises the theatrical enterprise at its best: a spirit of struggling against the odds, with mingled courage and insouciance, in a great and noble cause. And it is hard to feel that camaraderie across a whole army. Loyalty is to battalion, to regiment.
There were, of course, great actors in the company, and they created a living link with the older tradition that Olivier had so vividly represented: Peggy Ashcroft (once Juliet to Olivier’s Mercutio and Romeo, in alternation with John Gielgud) had been the great beating heart of Peter Hall’s first RSC seasons; Ralph Richardson had run the Old Vic company in tandem with Olivier, until Tyrone Guthrie manoeuvred them out of the job. Sir Ralph was by now an extraordinary presence, like a more or less benevolent dinosaur, stealthily padding through the theatre, his eyes madly blazing. I wrote this brief profile to accompany a splendid photograph of him by Roddy McDowall (who was a great photographer as well as a good actor and an incomparable friend) in his 1989 book Double Exposure.
‘Cup of coffee, Sir Ralph?’ asked one of the younger actors in the National Theatre canteen during a break in rehearsals. There was an electric silence as the great man, head gently shaking, eyes gleaming strangely, contemplated the question. ‘I’d rather have,’ he said, ‘a cup of hemlock.’ This last word was pronounced Hem Lock, which somehow made it all the more real and terrible. And, of course, funny. He was always an alarming presence, on stage and off, never merely avuncular or dotty, as he might so easily have appeared. Anarchy and potential violence never lay far behind the drolleries. In the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, his Shylock suddenly produced, with a frightening flash of steel, a huge knife from his belt, and moved with superhuman speed across the stage, missing Antonio’s proffered breast by the merest millimetre. Only the prompt intervention of his Portia stood between the actor playing Antonio and certain death. Her intervention produced an audible gasp of relief from the audience. Had she missed her cue, Sir Ralph, I have no doubt, would have been a homicide.
In addition to this physical danger he had an earthly spirituality, a quality a million miles removed from that of his friend, John Gielgud. That much mimicked voice, a sort of drunken gargle, could speak of life and death with startling actuality. Though it was not his last, his performance of John Gabriel Borkman remains in memory as a glorious leave-taking. Like many of his performances
it was disorientatingly original. He seemed to play the second act in a sort of trance. The third act was piercingly urgent, and his last act among the greatest things I have ever seen on a stage. At the moment when Borkman stands high above the city, gazing down on the industrial world below, Richardson, who somehow conveyed in his performance a sense of the great height of the mountain and the terrible teeming world at his feet, emitted a mysterious sound: three hoots. ‘Hoo hoo hoo.’ Shortly after, Borkman dies. The sound was heart-stopping, unforgettable. I ran home to find Ibsen’s stage direction. Nothing.
A couple of years later I asked Peter Hall, who had directed the play, how it had come about, how the actor had discovered the exact sound of a soul leaving the body. ‘He just did it,’ said Hall, ‘and we all knew that it was right. No one ever mentioned it.’
When he had arrived at the National Theatre, Richardson insisted that there should be a ceremony of some sort to mark the first performance of a new show. Accordingly, he set off a rocket for the very first night, and thereafter, on every first night, rockets cleaved the sky above Waterloo Bridge. These are his memorials: dazzling, dangerous fireworks and those strange other-worldly hoots.