My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  During a break, the four of us gathered round the piano in the middle of the rehearsal room while the other actors sat around, chatting, having tea and so on, well out of earshot of our little group. Hall said, ‘Paul, Peter has a small rewrite which –’ He never finished the sentence. Scofield said in a voice that was barely audible but of unimaginable intensity, ‘I’m not. Learning. Another. Line.’ Suddenly the whole room fell silent and the temperature turned to ice. Hall immediately said he was sure it wasn’t really necessary, Shaffer started gibbering and I offered to say all the new lines myself. End of discussion. The veil of courtesy had been pulled away for a minute and one saw the massive power that lay behind the affable exterior. It was this power that underpinned every performance he gave. On another occasion, I was as usual solving the play’s problems, as I saw it, and said, ‘It just needs a line here,’ and Paul roared, ‘Not from me, baby!’ And then he turned to me and added, ‘You monster!’, the word hurled at me like a thunderbolt. I felt duly pulverised, was actually shaking physically, but had the good sense after a suitable interval to go over to him as he fumed behind his high-backed chair and say, ‘I’ve just got a few rewrites for tomorrow, Paul,’ and he laughed and explained his anxieties and we started to know each other properly from that moment.

  When we left the rehearsal room and got into the theatre, I felt him stretching and prowling like a panther in the jungle, sniffing the space out. He seemed, even during technical rehearsals, to be expanding. He started getting taller. When the audience arrived at the first preview, he seemed like a giant. I was physically shocked by the intensity of the public’s response to him. They ached for him, they wanted to consume him entirely, every delicious morsel. I had no experience of this sort of thing and foolishly tried to tug him back into the relationship we had had in the rehearsal room. He would not tolerate it. He and the audience were making love and woe betide anyone who came between them. When I finally got the hang of it and attempted a little gentle lovemaking with them myself, he changed completely. He was more than happy to encourage a ménage à trois. From then on, for the remainder of the two years during which we did the play, there was a deep twinkle in his eyes, as we played the great game together in close communion with the audience. He plumbed the depths and soared to the heights of Salieri’s tormented soul, but behind it all, somewhere, was that twinkle.

  We got on wonderfully well without ever really spending any time together. Our relationship was unspoken, until one night on the stairs on the way back from the stage, he suddenly told me that he would never play Salieri with anyone but me. I swore the same to him. We remained faithful to our vows. I would see him from time to time, we wrote to each other, we did the play on the radio. He had no small talk, but then he had no big talk either. He did not live the usual semi-public life of an actor. When he wasn’t acting, he retreated to the home where he lived in perfect domestic equilibrium with his beloved wife Joy. He didn’t much like to leave the country, except to go to the Isle of Mull where, as everywhere else, he read and thought and nurtured his inner life. After a triumphant John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre, he seemed to have quietly retired. And then, about eight years ago, I asked him to take part in a gala I was directing at the Palace Theatre one Sunday night, and he duly stepped forward at the end of the evening, slightly frail, a little smaller than he had been, but still in majestic command of his great vocal instrument and his adoring audience. It was Prospero’s farewell, and he filled that large auditorium with his unique music:

  But release me from my bands

  With the help of your good hands.

  Gentle breath of yours my sails

  Must fill or else my project fails,

  Which was to please. Now I want

  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

  And my ending is despair,

  Unless I be reliev’d in prayer,

  Which pierces so that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

  Let your indulgence set me free.

  I and everyone in the cast and all the stage managers and the stagehands surrendered to his spell. Perfect silence fell. And now that great voice is silent. It is hard to imagine another such voice being heard in our lifetime.

  After Amadeus, John Dexter, still breathing fire and spitting venom, was back at the National with one of the greatest triumphs of his career, which further confirmed his absolute mastery of the Olivier auditorium. But Galileo was a triumph for everyone, not least Michael Gambon, who suddenly emerged, as people sometimes do, overnight, as a major classical actor. I had known him since 1969, when I was in the box office of the Mermaid Theatre, and he was the shy, sexy, funny boyfriend of the Production Manager’s secretary, Lyn Haill. He dressed oddly: in a safari jacket, with a silk scarf tied round his neck, and his huge long feet encased in suede shoes. We used to pass the time of day together: he laughed so charmingly and naughtily and told the tallest stories. I was a rather self-conscious twenty-year-old who thought he knew everything and who knew nothing, but Michael talked to me as if I was the person he most enjoyed talking to in the whole world. When he became famous, he refused to give interviews. American Vogue was desperate to do a piece on him: they contacted me and offered me a lot of money to write it, so I phoned Mike and told him that I’d give him half. He agreed. A month later, I found that he’d cashed the cheque in favour of his son.

  He is known throughout the English theatre as, simply, ‘Gambon’. Sir Ralph Richardson referred to him as ‘The Great Gambon’ – as if he were a circus act, Michael Gambon believes. The appellation declares both high esteem and familiarity. Within his own profession, he is the most loved actor of his generation. Love is not easily earned in a world as competitive and critical as that of the theatre, but he has it and has had it for as long as I can remember.

  His public acclaim was clinched on a night in 1980 when his performance in the title role in Brecht’s Galileo brought the audience – including several critics – to its feet. This is still rare enough in the English theatre to have warranted a mention on the front page of The Times. The reviews repeated the standing ovation verbally. More than one of them contained the phrase ‘a star is born’, though they might more accurately have said ‘recognised’, since they had been acclaiming him, quietly, for a good ten years.

  At the curtain call that first night, Gambon himself seemed distant, uninvolved. He clung to his fellow actors (I was one of them), until, inevitably, he had to take a solo call. He shuffled forward, nodded a slight acknowledgement, smiled his characteristic awkward grin, then shuffled back to the security of the line-up. We all trailed off back to our dressing rooms, which at the National Theatre give onto an inner well. Gambon appeared at the window of his dressing room. Suddenly every dressing-room window was open, and we all hung out of them and clapped and cheered him. He wept, not surprisingly.

  In twenty years in the theatre, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was not, to repeat, very English. More than a great tribute to his performance, it was an expression of love for the man. And it was private. Actors sometimes applaud each other in public to show what good chaps they are, but this was different. Here, there was no audience.

  On the face of it, both the love and the admiration are a little surprising. Gambon is a shy man, not a great socialite. He has charm and is a supreme raconteur, but he takes no pains to dominate a conversation, to dazzle. He reveals little of himself, and when he does, he is so startling (‘the thing about me is I hate a lot of people’) that one hesitates to investigate any further. He once told me that he needed advice on a very sensitive subject: would I come round his place for supper to talk it over? I arrived only to find half a dozen other people there. The subject, whatever it might have been, was never mentioned.

  Despite the veils drawn over his most private self, there are many, probably countless, people who consider themselves Gambon’s friend. He is most at ease
with his fellow actors, and however large or central his role in a play, he always remains part of the group. He refuses to play at being a star, never makes public announcements, and hardly ever attends the award ceremonies at which he is so regularly honoured. Asked if he would ever like to run a company, his ‘no’ is instant and unnegotiable.

  He genuinely dislikes fame. It has rendered him incapable of passing unnoticed in a pub or a restaurant. Not long ago he could go to the half-dozen – pubs in his neighbourhood, visiting each one in a different persona, using a different voice – Scots in one, Welsh in another – telling a different story about himself. Not any more. Like it or not, he is very famous indeed, both from the astonishing succession of brilliant stage performances he has given since that Galileo and from his television performances – above all The Singing Detective, where, bedridden, his aching, flaking presence dominated the series that kept the nation, from palace to pub, glued to its sets.

  He is more astonished by all this than anyone. Not that his career has been difficult: while training as an engineer, he spent every spare moment in amateur dramatics until, on an impulse, he answered an advertisement for the famous Dublin Gate Theatre run by the great Irish actor Micheál mac Liammóir – the man who had given Orson Welles his start. Gambon played a season with them before coming back to London, where he worked as a stage manager on Spike Milligan’s surreal comedy The Bed-Sitting Room. Then, only a year after becoming an actor – and despite having audaciously auditioned in front of Olivier with a speech from Richard III – he became a founding member of Olivier’s National Theatre Company. His fellow spear carriers included Derek Jacobi, Michael York and Anthony Hopkins. He progressed slowly through the ranks, acting in all the productions in that golden period of the English theatre, until, knowing that he must cut his teeth on a great role, he found himself in Birmingham playing Othello. It was then that some of his extraordinary qualities began to make people sit up: his massive stamina, a huge and apparently indestructible voice, and sudden and exquisite lyrical delicacy.

  But he didn’t return to the classics for some time, becoming instead the supreme interpreter of Alan Ayckbourn’s bourgeois tragicomedies. He is not built quite the way classical actors are supposed to be. Though not short – 5’11” – his body lacks regularity. His great box of a chest – ‘as deep as it is wide’, in his own words – sits on top of legs whose shortness is belied by long tapering feet. His hands, too, are immense, with extremely long, delicate fingers. The contrasts thus afforded – massive weight and elegant, almost dainty precision – are perfectly embodied in a face that is big and open, but whose eyes and mouth are constantly expressing myriad intermediate emotions. The whole impact is of a humorous and subtle warrior, a giant who chooses to tease. A word from his mouth confirms the impression. Strong enough to ride Lear’s storm twice a day on matinee days, or to take Galileo through his four-hour decline eight times a week in the most vocally hazardous auditorium in the country, his voice can have the same consistency as Ralph Richardson’s: a kind of mille-feuille lightness that is almost literally delicious. And when this big man makes love, his voice is strangely affecting. At the end of the first production of Pinter’s Betrayal, Gambon gave the final declaration of love a lyrical urgency, an almost Puccini-like golden melodiousness that hasn’t been heard in the English theatre for many years. It wasn’t until Galileo, in which he was an unexpectedly cast by the great actor-trainer John Dexter, that the range of the tragic was opened up to him. The danger, the anger, and the big shout that dwell deep inside him, fuelled his performances, which have redefined those heroes for the Eighties.

  He has no imitators. Like Katharine Hepburn, what he does works only because it is he who is doing it. His rhythms, his inflections are so unusual that they would be thought mannered were it not that they come, not from a desire to impress, but from inner certainty. He was born in Dublin, and an occasional Irish vowel sound will seep into his speech, but he owes no more to his Celtic background than to anything else. He claims to hate the Irish – ‘low, crafty, grasping people’ – but as he says it, there’s something sly at the corner of his eyes that makes you wonder whether you or perhaps the whole idea of national differences are being sent up. It’s impossible to pin down why he should have endowed Eddie Carbone, in his triumphant revival of A View from the Bridge, with a kind of balletic grace, but somehow it made the final tragedy doubly affecting. He just felt it that way.

  He seems, too, to owe nothing to any other actors. Laurence Olivier is the subject of some of his best stories, but if Gambon acquired the trumpets in his voice from Olivier, the orchestration is so different that you’d never notice. He speaks with awe of Brando and De Niro, but what he has taken from them is summed up in his dictum that ‘You’ve got to be brave, haven’t you?’

  And brave, above all, is what he is – whether in the cockpit of the plane he flies in his spare time (‘I like the power, the authority’) or on the stage. I caught his Uncle Vanya in the last week of its run. I was startled by something he did in the third-act confrontation. At the height of his tirade against Serebriakov, he fell to the floor, apparently in the throes of a heart attack. Pumping his arm, he dragged himself to his feet and retired to the corner of the stage. I rushed back to see him and asked why? And how? ‘I did it for the first time tonight,’ he said. ‘The scene needed it.’ Chekhov doesn’t ask for it, I don’t know how one would ever think of it, but it was perfectly right, and at the same time was the single most audacious piece of theatrical invention I’ve ever seen.

  He is the great original of our theatre.

  Michael’s naughtiness is well-known. It is of the same order as Paul Scofield’s, the playfulness of someone who is so in command of what he is doing, that he is able to maintain his performance with perfect intensity while at the same time attempting to amuse his fellow players. In Galileo, I played the Little Monk, a fiendish part, in that it’s fully ninety minutes into the play before the character comes on, and then for only two unspeaking minutes, to reappear shortly after with a huge ten-minute aria of a speech. Dexter had told me that when I spoke, it must be as if I hadn’t spoken for five years, a wonderful note which I could never convincingly fulfil; in fact, I always had a sense of failure in the part. It’s a very exposed speech, containing the only persuasive counter-argument to Galileo’s, and it needed tremendous focus. Galileo simply listens. As I started the speech on the first preview, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of Gambon’s famously long fingers slowly, over the whole course of the speech, unfurl itself until it was, by the end of it, erect, in an unmistakably obscene gesture. On the first night I gave him, as a present, a large matchbox, in which I had concealed a plastic hand, bought in a joke shop, filled with water and the fingers strapped down all except for one, which, as he opened the matchbox, emerged and stood erect. He always mentions this whenever we meet.

  Gambon apart, one of the abiding memories I have of Galileo is of that fine actor Andrew Cruickshank – in his time one of the great Ibsen actors, as well as Claudius to Olivier’s Hamlet at the Old Vic, and later a national figure on television as Dr Cameron in Dr Finlay’s Casebook – playing the small role of one of the grandees of the Church in the opening scenes of the play. Then, instead of going home, as he had every right to do (if you’re finished in the first half you don’t have to stay for the curtain call), he retired to his dressing room with a bottle of Glenmorangie and his favourite Kierkegaard text. Four and a half hours later, at the end of the play, he would emerge, to take his bow, but somehow – all that Kierkegaard, no doubt – he never quite got to the stage in time, meeting us all in the corridor on our way back to our dressing rooms, and not minding at all, just happy to be part of the company and in a theatre, working.

  I also acted in Ayckbourn’s Sisterly Feelings, again with Gambon, and Stephen Moore, Penelope Wilton, Anna Carteret, Greg Hicks, Michael Bryant, and Cruickshank: a real ensemble play, which also took full advantage of the Olivier s
tage, including a genuinely alarming moment in which I cycled down a steep grass hill at full pelt, generally knocking Anna Carteret into the front row. The possibilities for collective hysteria were all too many, and rather too frequently indulged. The staff director, that genial and deeply serious man Kenneth Mackintosh (Olivier’s understudy as Othello at the Old Vic and a fine actor in his own right), was livid: ‘Sir Laurence would never have allowed it!’ he would furiously tell us. And he was right. Something about the clockwork perfection of Ayckbourn’s comic mechanism, with its perfectly plotted and infallible laughs, seemed to create a mood of anarchy among us, and all it would need was for Andrew to be facing the wrong way when the lights came up at the beginning of the play (easily done: it is very hard to get on in a blackout on the Olivier stage), and we were all on the brink of hysterical laughter. I like to believe that the audience never noticed. Michael Bryant was the worst offender, because his facial mask never cracked. In the picnic scene he would pour a glass of orange juice for me and say, perfectly audibly, I felt, though there was never any audience reaction, ‘Hand that to the pervert.’ This was the same Michael Bryant who, during rehearsals for As You Like It, when Sara Kestelman was getting into her stride, would hold up a large piece of paper with the words ‘Too Jewish’ on it. When it was my turn, the piece of paper would say, ‘Too camp.’ And when I performed all one hundred and fifty-four of Shakespeare’s Sonnets one afternoon at the Olivier Theatre, there was Bryant in the wings, in his underpants, for some reason, with a placard saying ‘1/2’. No doubt he was right.

  For many years, the Sonnets became my main connection to Shakespeare. That extraordinary event at the Olivier was a one-off, never to be repeated by anyone in his or her right mind. But they remain not only one of the most remarkable collections of poems ever published, but also one of the greatest accounts in the language, perhaps in any language, of amour fou. I have performed them across the world in various combinations, always essentially based on the highly controversial sequence by Dr John Padel (father of Ruth); I have recorded them, twice; I have broadcast them for the BBC, twice (one in the 1609 printed sequence, the other in Padel’s); and in 2008 I did a shortened version – a mere eighty-four of them – in an event called There Reigns Love, commissioned by the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. The more I perform them, the less important it seems to me whether they tell us anything about Shakespeare himself, and the more remarkable they seem to me in their account of the psychopathology of love. Audiences in Stratford were astounded by their intensity of feeling, so powerful that in certain poems – towards the end of the cycle, in Padel’s sequence – the verse, as in many of the later plays, threatens to break down completely. I performed them entirely from memory, this time – at the Olivier I had a book in front of me – and this also had a transforming effect on my performance: as I said of As You Like It, in a sense, very little acting is required. The verse tells you everything, does it all for you.