My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Inevitably, the fireworks were suspended after a couple of years owing to Health and Safety considerations: not considerations that the whisky-swigging, motorbike-riding Sir Ralph ever took into account (the leather jacket he wore on his bike carried the legend Hall’s Angels). His old chum and sparring partner John Gielgud played a season at the Olivier, too, giving his Julius Caesar and Sir Politick-Would-Be in Peter Hall’s production of Volpone. He and Richardson did not, alas, appear together at the new National, which was a shame after their knock-down brilliant turns in No Man’s Land and Home; what wonderful Broker’s Men they would have made in a panto, or perhaps Ugly Sisters. I wrote this piece about the sales of their respective effects for the Daily Telegraph.

  By curious chance, the collections of two of the last century’s greatest actors have come up for sale at more or less the same time. They were utterly different both as men and as actors, but in later years they became fast friends and – in plays by David Storey and Harold Pinter – members of one of the greatest double acts the British theatre has ever known. Their performances, together and separately, left indelible impressions on all who saw them, but off the stage, their private personalities were every bit as memorable. At Monday’s Private View of the Gielgud Collection, the great and the good of the acting profession turned up in large numbers, more, one felt, to immerse themselves again in the great man’s aura than specifically to buy his effects, which, beyond the superb theatrical memorabilia, and an enormous number of gifts from friends and admirers, consist largely of domestic items – elegant furniture, carpets, china statues, paintings of varying quality (a superb Nicholson, a Lely and a fine Dufy, alongside others with specifically theatrical significance) – that attest to the conventionally tasteful taste of Gielgud’s partner of some thirty years, Martin Hensler, with whom he had lived in comfortable splendour in Wotton Underwood near Aylesbury. All of the items have charm; but a sixteenth-century Buddha head and two ravishing alabaster busts of the Emperor Hadrian’s boyfriend Antinöos are striking, and somehow unexpected. Their London house, in Cowley Street, had been given up some years before: ‘Nobody gives parties any more,’ Gielgud proclaimed, not altogether accurately, in the mid-Seventies when they made the move. What he meant was that nobody gave parties that he wanted to go to any more. ‘So nice to see you,’ he once told Gyles Brandreth, ‘because all my real friends are dead.’

  In a sense, he had outlived his age. The world of theatre to which he had devoted himself had changed out of all recognition, although, paradoxically, he seemed, when he died at the age of ninety-six, younger than ever, a constantly witty figure, perennially fresh and alive. His countenance, once noble and Roman, had become softer, pinker and rounder, the face of the bonniest baby imaginable. Always appreciated, generally admired, he was by now universally loved, even by those who had never set foot in a theatre.

  At Sotheby’s the distinguished guests, including many a knight and a dame of the British Empire, were decidedly of the theatre theatrical, and they were to be observed scattered around the room in anecdotal clusters, telling and retelling their favourite Gielgud stories, all attempting with greater or lesser accuracy the readily imitable voice, with its unique music, starting with a husky warble, oscillating legato around a couple of notes before ending with a characteristic descending fifth. Most of the stories devolved on the failure of his self-censorship mechanism, leading him to blurt out his inner thoughts at the most unfortunate moments. ‘We’ve been working like blacks,’ he said in the presence of the West Indian actor Tommy Baptiste. ‘Not your kind of black, of course, Tommy.’ The solecism was always the more delicious because so felicitously expressed, as if he suffered from a sort of epigrammatic Tourette’s syndrome or as if, perhaps, his subconscious had been scripted by Congreve. Although capable of the silliest of puns, the most direct of Anglo-Saxon expletives and the naughtiest of suggestions, his delight in his own sallies was always so complete and so infectious, and the delivery so impeccable, that one was swept away on a small tidal wave of merriment. ‘Poor Laughton!’ he said to me once, ‘he was so ill at the end, they had to have lorry drivers shipped in for him from the East Coast!’ and then laughed till he almost wept, as did I.

  Equally, he could suddenly be moved to tears of sadness by the memory of something which suddenly struck him. It was all part of the lightning speed of his mind, his instant responsiveness to thought. His heart and his mind were as one. In no sense was he, nor would he have claimed to be, an intellectual, but his active intelligence, the rapidity with which one thought succeeded another, was palpable, visible and in the air like an electrical storm. Congratulated on his consummately quirky performance in No Man’s Land at the Old Vic during Olivier’s regime, he famously remarked ‘Oh, do you think so? I don’t know why I got the part, really, I think it’s only because Larry’s dead – I mean dying – I mean much much better.’ This celerity of brain was at the core of his acting, that and the great openness of his heart. His particular genius for Shakespeare and the writers of the Restoration period derived from his instinctive sense of their rhythm and melody, which formed a conduit for the lightning transitions of thought and emotion he matchlessly purveyed. He spoke the words of these writers as if it was the most natural – the only – way in which to speak, and indeed, being with him one felt as if one was oneself in a play by one of these masters; until, that is, one opened one’s own mouth and spoke.

  He was an all-consuming reader, and his library is one of the glories of the collection at Sotheby’s, including an exquisite edition of Hamlet with Gordon Craig illustrations. He devoured books, his swift brain racing through their pages and delivering instant and often very funny judgements on the contents. He was, too, a tireless correspondent, always replying in person and by hand to letters in which he simply transferred his conversation to the page, bubbling over with gossip, some of it fifty years old, full of non sequiturs, but always faultlessly composed. The letters’ appearance on the page was as distinctive as everything else about him, the left hand margin drifting inexorably to the right, so that the last couple of lines on the page would consist of no more than two or three words.

  In his long career and life, he had had many failures, and no one spoke more openly about them than he, but they were never failures of courage or taste. This was perhaps one of the points of common ground that he and Ralph Richardson may have found when they eventually came to be close friends. They were never rivals – as Olivier and Gielgud had been, though in truth the rivalry in that case mostly came from Olivier – and scarcely played the same line of parts, but, as Richardson later admitted, the odd-looking, powerfully built, vigorously heterosexual fellow with a mad twinkle in his eye, struggling initially to find his niche on the stage, felt nervous in the company of the thoroughbred homosexual aesthete upon whom favour seemed to descend as of divine right from the gods of theatre. From the beginning Gielgud had the manners and the looks of a matinee idol; Richardson was cut of coarser cloth. While Gielgud made Shakespearean role after role his own – Hamlet, Richard II, Romeo, Prospero, Lear, Leontes – Richardson never seemed comfortable with the great heroes. His stupendous Falstaff (a prose role, of course) was a rare success for him in an Elizabethan play; instead he was able to conquer the great outsiders: Peer Gynt, Cyrano de Bergerac. J. B. Priestley wrote a number of plays for him which exploited the unique prose poetry of his acting, the visionaries, the battered romantics, the men of mystery, of which the supreme example was his Inspector Goole in the original production of An Inspector Calls.

  He had within him a divine spark all the more extraordinary for the rough-hewn exterior. He had access, as an actor, to profound darkness and an ability to convey the numinous denied any of his contemporaries. He was capable of an exquisite sentimental tenderness, too, but somewhere underneath the surface there was always a latent power, bordering on violence. When Peter Shaffer told Gielgud in the late Fifties that he was writing a play about an axe murderer, Gielgud told him with
out a moment’s hesitation ‘Oh, you must get Ralph.’ He became ever more eccentric, or perhaps one should simply say he became ever more himself. His mania for fast cars and then large Harley Davidson motorbikes persisted well into his late seventies; he was famous for the parrot that perched on his shoulder when he was at home in Regent’s Park, where he sat in his study at the top of the house, sipping Scotch, brooding over his scripts. In the evening when he and his second wife Meriel – the Lady Mu, as he called her – dined alone together, they both wore full formal dress (it is the Lady Mu’s recent demise which has occasioned the sale of the present collection). Richardson’s conversation, too, bordered on the gnomic. Asked to appear in an Amnesty Gala for Imprisoned Writers, he said, ‘I don’t think so. You see, I think all writers should be put in prison.’

  In life and in his performances he came to resemble a Zen Master, transcending all conventional notions of behaviour or of thought, cutting through to deeper and more surprising truths. His voice, like his bearing, was interior sprung, an astonishingly unnatural instrument in which vowels of no known geographical provenance were rolled on the tongue like a fine dry sherry, but the end result was expressive, true and always surprising. The tremble from the mild Parkinson’s disease from which he latterly suffered added to the sense of otherness, but it was a very earthy, a very English otherness, the strangeness of Herne the Hunter, a figure from ancient folklore. There was nothing fey about Sir Ralph.

  His taste in clothes, in furnishings and in art was equally original but equally grounded, as the catalogue of his collection reveals. Like Gielgud, he had trained as a painter, but while Gielgud’s instinct was towards the beautiful surface, Richardson sought things of solid craftsmanship and profound significance. There is a feeling about his possessions that he could have made any of them; Gielgud is simply a collector. There is in Richardson’s catalogue a magnificent mahogany folio stand of 1825, a fine creation of struts and hinges, at once practical and beautiful, that is particularly expressive of its former owner. There are timepieces of many sorts; each painting and drawing has an individual power. The William Nicholsons are especially fine, but there are watercolours by Rodin and Wilson Steer, drawings by Lear and Gaudier-Brzeska. The Egyptian figures are exquisite and powerful. Gielgud surrounded himself with charming things, but Richardson’s seem to be part of him.

  In both cases, a rich and complex human being is revealed by these collections. Both men, in their entirely different ways, were English eccentrics in the grand tradition, but in both, the spirit, burning so bright within them, transcended affectation. We tell stories about them, not because they were cards, or even because they were exceptionally talented, though God knows they were both both of those things, but because they filtered life through the medium of their souls to create new and rich variations on the human condition: they lived their art to the fullest extent possible. Of whom shall we be telling stories now?

  There were, in those days, still companies at the National. Each auditorium had one, with a director of its own: the Cottesloe, under Bill Bryden (to which James Grant and the so frequently horizontal Derek Newark belonged); the Lyttelton, under Michael Rudman; and the Olivier, under Christopher Morahan, to which I was proud to belong because of the name. I was ‘an Olivier actor’. Actors didn’t move from one stage to another, and there was a certain jokey rivalry between us. Dexter quickly mastered the vast and wide-open Olivier stage, although his bleak and wintry As You Like It, in which, to everyone’s amazement, I played Orlando, pleased few critics (though audiences took to it well enough). But the play moved me deeply, the perfection of its music, the freshness of its discovery of love. I became aware of something I had not quite experienced on Titus (perhaps because Shakespeare hadn’t yet, either): the absolute naturalness of the writing, transforming you into the character even as you speak the lines.

  No sooner was As You Like It up and running than rehearsals for Amadeus started. The play was now being directed – to John Dexter’s intense and unconcealed disgust – by Peter Hall. It arrived at a critical moment in the fortunes of the National Theatre on the South Bank, which was just recovering from its traumatic early birth pangs: the uncomfortable takeover by Hall from Olivier, the industrial action which threatened its very existence, and a number of very public failures. The theatre deeply needed a smash hit. It got it. It was such an extraordinary event for all of us that I think it worth printing another, rather different piece about it, written in 2009 for Gramophone magazine.

  Amadeus is thirty years old. If that makes you feel a little long in the tooth, think what it’s doing to me. Peter Hall who directed it and Peter Shaffer who wrote it and I who first played the role of Mozart assembled the other day on the stage of the Olivier Theatre at the Royal National Theatre where it was first performed, and chewed the fat. Or was it the cud? In fact, having us all together there (for the first time since the play opened, as it happens) only reminded us of how electric and risky it all seemed at the time. Not that we ever doubted that the play was going to be a success. In fact, it was already – as Oscar Wilde might have said – the most enormous success, before a single customer had crossed the foyer. The moment it was announced, the combination of Shaffer, Scofield and Mozart led to a box-office siege. This, of course, made it all the more nerve-racking for those of us who assembled in Rehearsal Room One at the National some eight weeks before the first night to read the play for the first time. Could we possibly satisfy expectations? What Peter had written was deeply provocative. It offered a portrait of the composer that was profoundly at odds with the public perception of him. Students of Otto Jahn’s three-volume Life and Otto Deutsch’s Documentary Biography (and indeed of Emily Andersen’s translation of the – very carefully – Selected Letters) were aware that Mozart was, at the very least, a complex figure, but the general view, the view of music lovers everywhere, was of a rococo manikin, sweetly childlike, tragically early death casting a halo over him.

  So there was tension in the air. Without being competitive in the anxiety stakes, I think I can safely say that I was more nervous than anyone else. Neither Paul Scofield, nor Peter Shaffer, nor Peter Hall, had ever seen me act. I had been cast by John Dexter, who was originally slated to direct the play, but he had left the production amid sparks of vituperation and recrimination, like the Queen of the Night. Not that he’d seen me act, either. I had, thank God, acted with Felicity Kendal, but I had much to prove. I was also nervous because it was a very difficult part. It was Mozart seen through Salieri’s eyes, vindictively and selectively; even the music was misremembered through his distorting ears.

  Mozart makes his first appearance as a pussycat, chasing his wife; there is some seriously smutty talk, after which, uproariously cachinnating, he disappears. He then reappears variously as arrogant, silly, pugnacious and jealous. Shaffer allows him one or two brief moments to speak seriously about music, and then he’s back to his Tourette’s syndrome self. There’s a magnificent long speech to the masked man he thinks is God, but is in fact Salieri, then he relapses into childishness and oblivion in his wife’s arms. All wonderful acting opportunities, but fraught with danger. At the reading, I gave it my best shot. Perhaps rather better than my best shot. In fact, I may have shot my bolt, giggling, shrieking, sobbing. I feared the worst when Peter Hall put an arm round my shoulder and said, ‘That was a very brave performance.’ What he said next, however, transformed my work (and probably my career): ‘But I have to believe at all times that he wrote the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro.’ That became my task for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, Paul Scofield was quietly getting on with his towering performance and we began tentatively to engage in the play’s dance of death.

  The first preview was astonishing. It was as if the audience had been waiting for the play for years. They ate it up greedily and the ovation at the end was like the roar of the ocean. I had never and have never quite experienced anything like it. And it was like that every time we did the play. Many factors w
ere responsible, not least Scofield at his most complexly, sexily dangerous, and the play’s theme – successful mediocrity and its revenge on genius – rang bells with many people. But in the end I believe that what it was all about was music: music as the expression of the spirit, music, one might say, as God’s voice. Shaffer and Hall unerringly chose moments from Mozart’s output – the adagio of the great Wind Serenade, the Masonic Funeral music, the finale of Figaro, the Requiem, of course – which expressed the sublime. This was the hunger that the play fed, for something beyond the realm of compromised life, for the absolute. And Shaffer’s brilliantly melodramatic edifice superbly stage-managed those moments. It was that which sent shivers round the auditorium for every single night over the course of the two years that we played the play, and it was that which transformed Mozart from being a hugely admired composer into being the idol of millions. The film clinched it. I can think of no other instance of a work in one medium so deeply affecting the perception of another.

  Shaffer had done it again. There is something uncanny about Shaffer’s ability to hit the nail on the head quite so resoundingly, a knack not possessed by any other dramatist of the twentieth century. I wrote this piece about Peter Shaffer for the Daily Telegraph to commemorate an auspicious (if rather overdue) event.

  It seems only the other day that Milton Shulman was complaining that while actors and directors routinely received knighthoods, playwrights – without whom there would be no theatre – seldom or never did. Someone up there must be unexpectedly responsive to the testy old Canadian, because there has since been a positive rush to the Palace, with Ayckbourn, Stoppard and Hare all bending a knee within the last couple of years; Pinter conspicuously remains a commoner, presumably from choice. One curious omission will be rectified later this month when Peter Shaffer is shoulder-tapped by Her Majesty. A unique and often controversial figure among modern dramatists, for three decades he produced a series of massively successful plays which tackled huge themes in a spectacularly theatrical manner, making him the playwright who forced the mainstream audience to think about the big ideas of their times. In a series of large-scale public plays from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Nineties – The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, Amadeus, Lettice and Lovage, The Mask of the Gorgon – he put these ideas into general currency in a way that only the theatre can, being, as John Osborne famously remarked, a minority art with a majority influence. Imperialism, psychiatry, creativity, terrorism, modern architecture: these were all dramatised and debated in his plays at the National Theatre, on Broadway and in the West End, but not drily, not dialectically.