by Simon Callow
Which, of course, is why Peter Hall is such a genius at running theatres. The Nestroy adaptation turned up a year later as On the Razzle, with Felicity Kendal in my part (don’t ask). I carried on with Sisterly Feelings and Galileo and, of course, Amadeus. And then, finally, I left, to play Verlaine in Hampton’s Total Eclipse at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, a play neither critics nor audiences seem to like very much, but which actors, directors and writers adore, and so it proved on this occasion. After that, I played the epically brilliant part of Lord Are in the world premiere of Edward Bond’s Restoration at the Royal Court. And then I did J. P. Donleavy’s own adaptation of his novel, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in St Martin’s Lane. This was my first play in the West End since The Plumber’s Progress in 1975 with Harry Secombe, and it felt like a triumphant return. Until the reviews appeared, that is. Business was not good (though there are people who think my Beefy was the apogee of my achievements as an actor, and who am I to quarrel with them?). So, inspired by a very elegant article Ian McKellen had written for the Evening Standard, I suggested to the press office, as a way of whipping up business, that the paper might like a piece from me. Unexpectedly, they agreed. It was my very first piece for a newspaper. I had a rare old time writing it and took it with high spirits to my new friend Peggy Ramsay, the famous play agent. She read it, tut-tutting the while. Soon she came to a phrase in which I said that Donleavy was ‘a bit of a Ming vase’. ‘Have you ever SEEN a Ming vase?’ she asked. ‘They’re very heavy. Is that what you meant?’ I submitted a soberer, more considered version to her, and the Standard printed it without changing a word. I felt immensely proud, though now I look at it, it seems oddly naïve. I give it as it appeared on the page, headlines and all.
HOW BEEFY AND BALTHAZAR BURST ON TO THE BOARDS
Actor Simon Callow reveals the enterprising story of how J. P. Donleavy’s The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B came to be launched in the West End.
The whole thing started one day in January when Patrick Ryecart – whom I’d never met – phoned me to say that he’d bought the rights of The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by J. P. Donleavy and would I like to play Beefy?
A friend of his, also an actor, was going to direct, and he’d said, independently, that I should play it.
I laughed, because five years previously John Dexter had asked me to play the same part, in a production which fell though. I’d never read the play – only the novel; but I thought that if the role was anything like as funny and outrageous as the character in the book, I wanted to play it more than any part I’d ever clapped eyes on.
So I said yes, of course. It turned out that Patrick had been cast as Balthazar in a later production which had fallen through too. Like me, he’d gone crazy for the character and the book. It’s a lovely funny sad thing, as riotous, as bawdy, as ebullient as The Ginger Man but with a deep tender thread of melancholy running through it.
Pat had been deeply disappointed by the collapse of the production and when he heard that the rights had reverted to the author, he determined to get hold of them himself. Nothing was going to stop him playing that part. So he wrote to Donleavy.
Donleavy doesn’t have an agent. If you want to do one of his plays, you have to get hold of him – which is easier said than done, because he lives in isolation on his farm in Mullingar, in the west of Ireland. The first letter was met with silence. Others followed over the next six months, all unanswered.
Pat nearly gave up hope. Then one morning, out of the blue – he was in his bath – the phone rang and he heard for the first time the halting but exact Anglo-American tones of the writer, suggesting tea at Fortnum’s – not the first place one would expect to meet the creator of The Ginger Man, or the only begetter of Beefy (who would surely be more at home in some murky dive off Piccadilly about perhaps to start his third bottle of Glenlivet). But in fact, your man is a different creature altogether; delicate, courtly, fragile. Fortnum’s was just the place.
Donleavy was enchanted by Patrick and agreed to sell the rights to him. It was an incredible coup. Patrick had bought the rights to a world premiere by one of the top-selling authors in the world. He was that unheard-of thing; an actor who owns a play.
But the idea of setting something up from scratch was daunting. Isn’t that an awful lot of money? I asked. Peanuts, Pat said, it’s a marvellous play, they’ll be falling over each other to put it on.
Developments were astonishing. He’d tried several West End managers, who were rather cool. Coolness wouldn’t do. It had to be passion and love. So he went to someone who’d never put on a play before, Naim Atallah, head of Quartet Books and Financial Director of Asprey’s.
Atallah read the play, fell in love with it – and put up £100,000. Pat then went to Capital Radio, who own the Duke of York’s Theatre. John Whitney and his board all turned out to be Donleavy buffs and welcomed the play with open arms. Now having the backing and the theatre, he went to an old friend, the producer Howard Panter, and asked him to manage the show. All systems go.
Then a big black cloud came into view. The director was obliged to pull out. Suddenly we were without the key person in the whole operation. For the first time, I saw Pat daunted. There was no point in just getting the play on. It had to be done with love and imagination. And time was running out. We couldn’t keep putting the Duke of York’s off, and Pat and I couldn’t keep ourselves available indefinitely. It was ridiculous. We had everything but this one detail – the most important of all. Then, that week, A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened at Stratford to rave reviews for its director, Ron Daniels. They spoke of its magic, beauty and earthy laughter. Exactly what we needed.
We’d assumed that Ron wouldn’t be available because of his heavy RSC schedule, but we checked nonetheless. He was. He came down overnight, having read the play and the novel, and loving both. Everything he said about the project delighted us. We signed him up and packed him off to Donleavy. Together they produced a version of the play which was quite different to the one we’d had all these months: richer, funnier, bolder – truer to the novel.
Ron had ten days to do everything: to work on the script, to cast the play, to work with the designer. When we started rehearsing, we had half a cast and half a script. The designers were working round the clock. The whole cast only got together to read the play a week after rehearsals started. Bits of script arrived daily, completely new scenes were put in, new characters introduced. It was a crazy time. Buoyed along by Daniels’s good humour and sureness of touch, it was also creative in a way that rehearsals often aren’t.
When Pat first said to me would I like to play Beefy, I said, if anyone else plays him, I’ll picket the theatre. And I would.
Patrick was and is an uncommonly optimistic fellow. He was convinced that something would turn up and that the play would become an overnight success. He shared this view with Naim Atallah, who devised a dozen schemes to lure into the theatre what he thought was the play’s core audience: yuppies. Nothing worked. But Patrick’s conviction never wavered. He was sustained by his belief that one day Prince Andrew – the Duke of York – would come to the Duke of York’s, and that somehow, magically, this would reverse our fortunes. It is true that the people who did come – by no means only yuppies – fell in love with the characters and were swept away by the language, which has a real champagne quality, and often came back for second and third helpings, but there were never enough of them. From time to time, Donleavy – Mike to us, by now – would come to see the show, dryly noting the divergences from the text (‘I recognised a phrase or two from time to time and seemed to remember having written something like it once upon a time’). One night, on Patrick’s insistence, the three of us went to a dubious club in Mayfair, where we were greeted at the door by mammiferous lovelies, naked from the waist up; downstairs, even more lightly clad maidens were romping around on all fours, pursued by middle-aged gents in their shorts. Patrick called for madder
music and for stronger wine, I nervously sipped my Campari and soda, and Donleavy surveyed the scene, which could have come from any one of his novels, with fastidious interest, as he sipped cocoa, Patrick roaring his encouragement at the romping couples at our feet. This excursion cheered him up no end, and kept him going through another month of empty houses.
Eventually, Patrick’s dream came true. Naim invited Billy Connolly to see the show, and Billy expressed an interest in taking over from me, which he did. I did not picket the theatre. Every penny that the management had lost during the ten months of my playing the role was recovered during Billy’s eight weeks’ tenure.
Among the very charming cast of the show my special friend was Sylvia Coleridge. When she died in 1986, the Evening Standard allowed me to write a memoir of her:
When people talk about the richness of English acting, they probably mean the brilliant young men and women, the wonderful character actors, the aged knights. But there is another layer of actors and actresses who are quite as glorious, those actors of marked individuality who never play a leading part, but who illuminate what they do with unique truth and distinction. One of these, Sylvia Coleridge, has just died. I am proud to have been her friend for the last few years of her life, and proud to have acted with her.
We met when we worked together in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. It was a typical Sylvia Coleridge role: nothing, or next to nothing, on the page; but she made something so remarkable of it, that were she not as generous in her acting as she was in her self, one might have found oneself seriously upstaged by it. She played a dowager in Harrods, overhearing the scandalous conversation of Beefy and Balthazar. She expressed her outrage by a roll (well, several rolls, actually) of those uniquely expressive eyes and much pantomime with a copy of The Times. In due course, Balthazar leaves the stage, and I, as Beefy, saunter over, in my navvy’s boots, to her chair, where, in a few well-chosen phrases, I melt her into sunshine smiles. The smiles were something rather extraordinary. She had the great actress’s gift of releasing radiance in increasing bursts of delight; her voice, a somewhat unpredictable instrument, was likewise able to strike a word with a shout of pleasure or a quite unexpected growl.
She was always alive and full of play. One afternoon, she appeared on stage wearing a hitherto unglimpsed fox stole. Cheekily I said, ‘May I say, madam, how much I admire that animal on your shoulder?’ ‘Oh do you like it?’ Sylvia replied without hesitation: ‘My husband shot it in the Scilly Isles.’
She used to pop down to my dressing room for a quick cig, or a glass of wine, or a vigorous discussion on the merits of the new Proust translation. Her vocabulary was not without the occasional growled four-letter word, which somehow coexisted quite happily with the rest of her impeccable syntax and phrasing.
Bit by bit I picked up details of her life and background. Everything, it seemed, had happened ‘a million years ago – before you were even thought of’. She was born in India, where her father was a general. She came to England when she was twenty, determined to be an actress, knowing no one except Norman Hartnell, who couldn’t help her at all, of course, but who gave her a dozen dresses, and on the strength of those, she never stopped working for the first few years in rep (although, she claimed, she was always being sacked).
Her career was a bit of a mystery. I had seen her in various roles for as long as I could remember, but every time I mentioned one, the eyes would roll, and despair would set in. Nothing, it seemed, had ever been any good. Her acting days were over, she insisted, and every job was the last, but scripts arrived with gratifying regularity. In the last few years, she gave performances as etched and true as anything she had ever done: Mme Pernelle in Tartuffe, and the aunt in Waste, for the RSC; perhaps best of all was her wonderful performance on television in Bleak House.
The last time I saw her for any length of time was last year, when I took her with some friends to Cheltenham, where I was reading some poems of Coleridge. We had often talked about him – he was her ancestor by direct descent. In fact, I had agreed to do the recital because I hoped she’d be able to come. Though quite deaf by now, she followed with the keenest attention and her usual passionate engagement. Afterwards, we wept a little together; and then laughed a great deal as always.
I cannot doubt that in the nirvana to which – as an unofficial Buddhist – she aspired, she is weeping and laughing and delighting her fellow spirits; as always.
Sylvia was even more extraordinary than I was able at the time to write. She loathed the actress Elspeth March, with whom she was obliged to share a dressing room in The Beastly Beatitudes. They had been girls together in India, and were great chums. But when they came to England at more or less the same time, Elspeth, being very pretty, was taken up by the beau monde, while Sylvia trudged around the provinces with her Hartnell trousseau; whenever they happened to meet, Elspeth would snub her. So when we told her with a triumphant flourish that Lally Bowers was leaving the cast due to ill-health but that her role would be taken over by Elspeth, she was unable to conceal her dismay. Stoically, however, she accepted that they must share a dressing room. The once exquisitely soignée Elspeth, now the size of a small cottage, brought a small, spiteful dog with her and a television set, which she watched throughout the show, while Sylvia struggled to keep half an ear on the play as it was being relayed over the Tannoy, at the same time working her way through the new Proust. Her visits to me in my dressing room were mostly to howl with rage against her portly new room-mate. We kept in touch after the show closed; our encounters were always rather heightened. Once over supper she told me that she had a technique for cheering herself up if she was ever low, and pulled a photograph of me as Beefy from her wallet. Quite soon after the show closed, she received a phone call from a hospital casualty department: an elderly gentleman claiming to be her husband had had an accident, but was now about to be discharged, and had given her as his next of kin, would she please come and collect him? She had left him fully forty years before, and they had barely been in touch since, but she dutifully went to collect him, installing him in her house in Notting Hill Gate, where she nursed him till his death two years later. They barely spoke to each other, she said. She herself died not long after. As a Buddhist, she asked to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered to the wind. We performed the little ceremony, and as we did so, a great gust of wind threw the ashes up into the upper leaves of a tree in the garden. We all went in to raise a glass to her, and as we were remembering her, her daughter’s boyfriend, who had taken it on himself to hose down the tree so that the ashes descended, put his head round the door. ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘the dogs are drinking your mother.’ How Sylvia would have relished that detail.
Despite the bad houses for Balthazar, my ten months at the Duke of York’s had many incidental charms. In a way, it’s like having a pied-à-terre in the centre of town: the stage door is permanently manned, and one can drop in with parcels or read a script or, indeed, write one. Inevitably, given the proximity of the theatres in the West End, one sees a lot of one’s fellow actors, in coffee shops, on the street, in the theatre restaurants – Joe Allen and Orso, Le Caprice, Sheekey’s, the Ivy, now (but not then) the Wolseley. During the run of Balthazar, I spent a lot of time with the very young Rupert Everett. He still is the very young Rupert Everett, though now fifty. I reviewed his autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, in the Guardian in 2006.
The other day I bumped into Rupert Everett in the street. We had a cordial chat and promised to meet again, but we didn’t. Since the heyday of our friendship we have become those well-known personages, ‘Rupert Everett’ and ‘Simon Callow’. Twenty-something years ago we were Ru and Si, still in the throes of becoming. I am ten years older than he is, and when we first met, I was on the crest of a wave, theatrically speaking, while he barely had his toe in the water. Despite my advantage over him in terms of age and professional experience, he made all the running. He had failed to get the part of Rimbaud in a produ
ction of Total Eclipse in which I was to play Verlaine (‘too queer,’ the producer somewhat surprisingly said), and I’d run into him later and told him that it was only a matter of time, which was not particularly brilliant of me: he was extravagantly beautiful and possessed of a unique quality, both boyish and regal, which, though scarcely fashionable in the early Eighties, was too striking not to be snatched up somehow, for something, sooner or later. It happened almost immediately, in fact, and when he triumphantly arrived in the West End with Another Country, which might have been written with his DNA in mind, he phoned me in my dressing room at the Duke of York’s, just round the corner from his theatre, and we went out for some tea, and suddenly we were inseparable. It wasn’t sex, though sex was the subject of most of our conversations; it was a very sweet relationship, based on the idea of us as young bloods in the West End, both given to romantic infatuations and excessive behaviour, a love of gossip, some mutual friends, and boundless joie de vivre. I realised early on that he was dangerously imperious by nature, and also that for a twenty-five-year-old he had had a rich and varied experience of life that made mine – which had not been without its colourful interludes – seem like a vicar’s tea party.