by Simon Callow
Not for him the intensely focused intellectual argument of a Frayn or the severe and savage historical analysis of a Bond or a Hare. His background is liberal humanistic; his concern is the dilemma of the individual faced with the loss of certainty in the world, sometimes in the form of ritual lament – the death of the Sun God in The Royal Hunt of the Sun – sometimes tragedy – Salieri’s increasing conviction that his God is not a benevolent one – sometimes farce: Lettice and Lovage’s declaration of war on modern architecture. His dramatic method is frankly one of seduction: he loves, and has always loved, since childhood in Manchester, the theatre theatrical: music hall, pantomime, opera, melodrama. He loves language, especially rhetorical language. Although as far from Brecht politically as could be, he has been very happy to use Brecht’s theatrical practice, the outward forms of the Epic Theatre. He loves actors and has written some of the most challenging and rewarding roles of the twentieth century. He especially relishes a theatre duel, allowing Atahuallpa and Pizarro, Strang and Dysart, Mozart and Salieri, Lettice and Lovage, to slug it out to the great excitement of the crowd. Above all he has a genius for crystallising his themes into theatre imagery which tells the story unforgettably and in a way which could only happen on a stage (with the single exception of Amadeus, radically rewritten with its director Milos Forman, Shaffer’s plays have proved irredeemably uncinematic). Atahuallpa appearing metamorphosed in the great golden sun; Alan Strang, riding his horse (impersonated by an actor in silver hooves, with a head of wrought metal); Mozart at the piano turning Salieri’s feeble march into Figaro’s ‘Non più andrai’. They constitute pure theatre, as, sublimely, does Black Comedy, its action played out in the dark: the audience can see the characters, though they cannot see each other.
It’s worth noting that his plays, apart, perhaps, from the early Five Finger Exercise, are not at all autobiographical. In person Sir Peter – who celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday this week, too – has very little of the epic about him. Consummately urbane, he is one of the most wickedly amusing conversationalists on either side of the Atlantic, and brings an atmosphere of contagious hilarity with him wherever he goes. His circle of friendship, across the globe, is enormous; his audiences – also enormous – love him too, sensing, quite rightly, that he loves them, which is by no means always the case with dramatists, knighted or otherwise.
Shaffer’s plays (Amadeus was no exception) normally leave the public stunned. He plans his last lines very carefully, shocking and satisfying the audience in equal measure. There is a silence, and then the roar of approval begins. I had never, up to that point (and not all that much since, alas) been exposed to quite so much sheer volume of applause. It was of course entirely delightful, but it took some adjusting to. The Guardian asked me to write this piece, which they called Darling, We Were Wonderful, in 2008.
One of the most universally held beliefs about the theatre is that performers are applause junkies, living for that moment at the end of the evening when they step down to the footlights and gratefully accept their reward. My own experience – and, I think, that of many of my colleagues – has been rather different. Most of us do not view the curtain call with relish. What matters much more is what has passed between us and the audience over the course of the evening – especially if it’s a musical – but even then, it’s the minute-by-minute interplay (as often as not silent) that really counts, the sense of communication, the engagement with an audience. It is generally the case that an audience who have laughed and applauded a great deal during the show will be less forthcoming at the curtain call: they’ve done their bit, and the final bringing together of hands is more a formality than anything else. An audience who have sat silently through a show often burst into vivacious applause at the end – a great relief, though baffling. What was holding them back?
The chemistry of a thousand people sitting together in a room, watching a play, is endlessly fascinating – the way they sometimes react as one from the beginning, or stubbornly refuse to come together, or respond only to a show’s broad physical comedy, or sometimes to nothing at all, beginning, middle or end. But the fact is, something needs to happen at the conclusion of the show: we all need closure. What form this should take is a delicate question. Both the cast and director rather dread the day when the curtain call is set. Partly this is to do with the niceties of hierarchy within the cast, those unspoken but very real gradations of fame and distinction balanced against the size of a role and its impact in the show. The complexities of these protocols are infinite and can lead to tears when the procedure is announced, generally with a promise that it is merely temporary and will be refined before the press night (this is rarely true). Should Sir X or Dame Y, with their distinguished cameos, have precedence over Miss Z, who just left drama school last month but whose part is three times the length of theirs put together? Should the three supporting actors take their calls together even though only one of them is getting all the laughs? There is an element of ego in this, of course, but also the consideration that the audience wants a chance to show their enthusiasm for an actor who has particularly dazzled or who is dear to their hearts. (It can sometimes work the other way. On one production I directed, after a fraught technical period and the cancellation of a number of previews, I nipped into the leading actor’s dressing room to give a quick account of a rough curtain call that would, of course, be only temporary. ‘X comes on here, Y comes on there and then you come straight down the centre stage,’ I said. ‘Why,’ this immensely distinguished artist enquired, ‘should I carry the can for this pile of shit?’)
In the 1970s, I acted with the theatre group Joint Stock. We were performing, among other things, David Hare’s austere play Fanshen, which examined a radical realignment of society – one which, the play suggested, might be worthy of imitation. It seemed inappropriate, after thus throwing down the gauntlet, to come on to our hopefully chastened bourgeois audience all beams and bashfulness, so we experimented with various different ways of ending the evening. The first was to come on and stand in front of the audience – not bowing, not grateful, just standing there, in a sombre row. Resembling as we did a line-up of dangerous criminals in a police identification parade, we soon cowed the audience into silence, then shuffled moodily off. Next we attempted the Russian method of applauding the audience ourselves. The result was that the audience felt deprived of their one moment of self-expression, and stopped clapping. Our final innovation was the most radical: we just didn’t come on at all. That shut ’em up pretty damn quick. In the end, we just did what everyone does: we came on and took our applause.
For some actors, there is an awkwardness about appearing in front of the audience as themselves rather than in character: many actors who appear to be gloriously free spirits during the performance suddenly become crippled with self-consciousness at the curtain call. Some actually remain in character, or take on another character, which is them-as-faithful-servant-of-the-public; in the days when leading actors used to make speeches after every performance, they created a persona in which to address their public, giving another performance. For others, there is a residual resentment about seeming to ask for approval, some race memory of a servant–master relationship between actors and audience that outrages their democratic souls and leads them to stare balefully out into the stalls, as if they were inmates in a prisoner of war camp who had just been forced to perform in front of the Gestapo.
For tragedy, or plays about child abuse and Third World debt, a demeanour of some dignity is appropriate. An actor who has just played Richard III or Mother Courage may legitimately betray some symptoms of exhaustion – Sir Donald Wolfit liked to emphasise this by hanging on to the curtain – though playing the lead in a light comedy can be just as draining. There, sweat-free urbanity is expected, as if giving the show had been, as it was for the audience, a mere prelude to supper. In the end, the curtain call is a sort of good manners, like not rolling off and falling asleep after making love. It says, on both sid
es, ‘Goodnight, lovely seeing you, thanks so much, see you again.’
As an actor, you only think about applause if it doesn’t happen. My first play in the West End was with Harry Secombe. Every night when he got home, his wife, Myra, would ask him: ‘Did you get your claps tonight?’ But it’s a faulty kind of index. Rather than thinking, ‘What a wonderful reception I got tonight,’ you’ll be thinking, ‘Why wasn’t it as good as the night before? What are we doing wrong?’ And there is, too, a danger that the public will feel disappointed if they haven’t cheered and clapped enough. American audiences tend to perform themselves much more than British ones. There the true orgasmic fulfilment of the evening tends to be at the curtain call, rather than during the performance. When I’ve worked as a director in the US, I’ve often received friendly advice on how to engineer a standing ovation – the Holy Grail of performance Stateside. ‘Get the guys to hold hands, Simon, and then run down to the audience and then, on a count, fling their arms right up in the air. It works, perfect, every time.’ I regret to report that it does.
In my view standing ovations should be reserved for something utterly out of the ordinary. I was lucky enough (as an usher at the Old Vic) to see Laurence Olivier on stage many times. He never once got a standing ovation. Maggie Smith once did get a standing ovation for her Hedda Gabler, but that was because the whole of the Swedish Embassy had booked the front row. Needing to get to dinner very quickly, they had stood up as a man, and the rest of the audience simply followed suit.
Still, a performance needs a formal ending of the contract between audience and actors – a handshake, as it were. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says to the audience: ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends/ And Robin shall restore amends.’ In Peter Brook’s sublime production, the actors did just that: they left the stage, came into the auditorium and grasped the audience’s hands. It was the most perfect resolution to an evening’s theatre I ever saw.
Amadeus was a hit of a rare order. Even people who never went to the theatre, politicians, for example, felt they had to have been able to say that they’d seen it. Although the reviews were decidedly mixed, for all of us – and some of them were downright abusive about my performance – we were the talk of the town. At the next word run-through of As You Like It, Greg Hicks, who was playing Silvius, said to me, by no means enviously, ‘So you’re famous now, I suppose?’ It was nothing but the truth. We were all cheered, every night, but the ovation that greeted Scofield was extraordinary, an expression of fealty, or primitive, almost tribal, acclaim; he took it superbly, with a half-smile followed by a sharp, small bow followed by a graceful extension outwards of his arms, opening out the palms of his extraordinarily expressive hands in a gesture of benison. The public felt embraced and blessed. Contact with him on stage, night after night, was enriching in ways that even now I find hard to analyse. His death, thirty years later, hit me harder than I could possibly have imagined. I was touring in Equus, sitting in a taxi heading for the station to take me to Milton Keynes, the next venue on the road, when a text message from a friend appeared on my phone saying: ‘So sorry about Scofield.’ I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. Then the phone rang: it was BBC News wanting a reaction. I gave one, an inadequate, numbed one, then I called the Guardian and asked if I could write something more considered about him. They said I had two hours to write it. I did it on the train heading for Milton Keynes, and immediately emailed it from my dressing room in the theatre.
Paul Scofield was the last of the theatrical Titans, a late flowering of that astonishing generation which included Olivier, Gielgud, Ashcroft, Evans, Redgrave and Richardson, and his death on Wednesday leaves the stage immeasurably impoverished. I say the stage, because, despite his Oscar for A Man for All Seasons and much distinguished work in other films and on television, he was above all a creature of the theatre, and no one who saw him treading the boards will ever forget it. He was such an uncommon physical phenomenon: tall and powerful, a fine figure of a man, but complex, even physically. Every inch of him seemed to be expressing contradictory things. His face was sensationally handsome – as a youth he would have been called beautiful – but there too there were contradictions: the soft sensuousness of his mouth denied by the sharp precision of his nose, his eyes often veiled, his brow imperious, his eyebrows endlessly mobile. His skin was astonishingly smooth and soft.
Perhaps the most extraordinary of his physical gifts, though, was his voice, an instrument like none other – an organ with limitless stops, from the mightiest of bass rumbles, through light tenorial lyricism, to falsetto pipings; he seemed to be able to sound several notes at once, creating chords which resonated to the most remarkable effect, stirring strange emotions. He would swoop effortlessly up and down the register, but always for expressive purpose, never for mere virtuosity. Given this exotic physical endowment, it is surprising that he was able to transform himself so completely. His Uncle Vanya and his King Lear within a few years of each other scarcely seemed to come from the same planet; and could it be the same actor playing the gloriously shabby, bedraggled Wilhelm Voigt in The Captain of Köpenick who would appear a few seasons later in the role of Oberon, all made of air and silver? Equally he had access to a kind of deeply human nobility best exemplified in his Thomas More. These transformations were of great virtuosity, but they never drew attention to themselves. He was unusual among English actors in that, however exuberant his assumptions might sometimes be, he was not an extrovert. Whatever he did had a profound charge of interiority within it. His performances owed nothing to any influence but were entirely original, many-layered and complex. With him, the inner workings of the character were made flesh. In the early 1970s I was an usher at the Old Vic and saw his Wilhelm Voigt night after night. I found myself deeply nourished by the performance. It was like gazing at a great painting and finding more and more in it: endless detail, sudden vistas of great depth, marvels of technique producing immense emotion.
In the light of all this, it may be imagined that I approached the prospect of acting with him with a kind of bliss mingled with dread. The play was Amadeus; he of course was playing the machinating Salieri, I was to be Mozart. I was thirty, in the grip of almost uncontrollable energy which I scarcely knew what to do with, on stage or off. He was fifty-seven, two years younger than I am today, but giving a good impression of the Ancient of Days, with his magnificent silver head of hair and noble mien; the only bohemian element – the only clue that he might be an actor rather than a king, say, or a Nobel prize-winner – was his penchant for pastel-coloured shirts. In person, he was sweet, courteous, without any side whatever. He laughed easily, but it was evident that he was very shy, socially. He wore country clothes and smoked his pipe whenever he could. Once the formalities were over, we swiftly got on with rehearsing the play. He said very little, and was evidently wrestling with a very long part which was being constantly rewritten. I, on the other hand, seemed to be suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, busily offering suggestions on every subject, including his performance. Scofield eyed me warily from behind his high-backed chair. In other words our relationship was pretty well that of the characters in the play, with the difference that I was playing a genius, while he actually was one.
I noted that his approach was to seem to sketch the performance in quite lightly, and then suddenly plunge in deeper, like an aqua-diver. He would emerge from these sudden immersions with another important new note in the character, which would then be incorporated into the role. However it was that Paul contacted his inner life, it had nothing to do with the Method or any conscious seriousness of purpose. He simply sent the character for a swim in his own secret streams, the deeply hidden pools of emotion and fantasy deep within which I suspect even he knew nothing about. As the older Salieri, he had invented an extraordinary old geezer, wheezing and leering, a doddery comic fuss-budget, who then disappeared in the twinkling of an eye when the young Salieri stepped forward and the action of the play commenced. I was ra
ther shocked by how much he seemed to be enjoying playing old Salieri – there was almost a quality of music hall about it. Acting with him in the rehearsal room was inspiring and paralysing in equal measure. I was desperately nervous and overcompensated by being too emphatic, shrieking and giggling over his lines. He bore it with great patience.
What he could not endure was the constant rewriting. One day, Peter Hall, who was directing, told me that he and Peter Shaffer had realised that there were a couple of lines necessary in a certain sequence in one of his scenes with me, and that they were going to give them to Paul.