My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  The spectacle can be terrifying and pitiful. It is always very funny. And it is wholly novel, always challenging the limitations of what can be attempted in a play. For this reason his work has not, till now, anyway, entered the mainstream. He has not been fashionable. His plays do not express the Zeitgeist, they do not present recognisable mirror images of our life and times. To their critics, they are tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury (plus a few jokes), signifying nothing.

  To those of us who love them, they are magical mystery journeys, laced with wisdom and poetry, deeply farcical, releasing wild laughter and sometimes tears; through them stride strange mutant figures, crazed, amorous monsters, puffed up with vanity, abject with desire. They are the creations of a man who has gone burrowing into some pretty odd tunnels, and come back, covered in mud, with golden nuggets between his teeth. They come from the Other Side. Snoo is the fully paid-up shaman of the Theatre Writers’ Union. I first met him in 1975 when I was cast in his play The Soul of the White Ant. I had been doing a West End show called The Plumber’s Progress with Harry Secombe; the moment I read Snoo’s play, tasteless, recklessly imaginative, essentially theatrical, I knew it was the perfect antidote. But it wasn’t just outrageous. Somewhere, behind the ribaldry, was a huge and rather moving compassion.

  The central character of the play, Mabel, played by a young and brilliant Lynda Marchal (now Lynda La Plante, world-beating author of Prime Suspect), had killed her houseboy, with whom she had been having a somewhat unusual affair: thinking it wrong to consummate with a married man, she has had him relieve himself on the other side of the room into Tupperware containers which she has been dutifully storing in the fridge behind the bar.

  Enter Eugene Marais, the famous South African anthropologist (and author of, inter alia, The Soul of the White Ant), long dead, but now resurrected into this obscure bar, a walking cadaver, covered in mud, eyes staring out of their sockets, worms wiggling out of his pockets and ears. He makes for the jukebox, which bursts into a spontaneous rendition of Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’, after which, somewhat revived, the corpse sits down at the bar and engages in largely incomprehensible conversation with the phrenology-obsessed journalist Pieter de Groot. He disappears, and the murder of the houseboy is covered up, but meanwhile the girlfriends of de Groot and his police chum Van der Merwe, having taken a dip in the river at the very point where the men have emptied the semeniferous Tupperware, have fallen pregnant. Re-enter Marais, now impeccable in a white suit. As before he makes for the jukebox; again ‘Blueberry Hill’ sings out. As Marais passes the girls, he touches their stomachs. Their periods start. Curtain. It was hilariously, outrageously amusing; but it was also full of mystery and tenderness and a most unexpected sense of pain. Once seen, it was not easily forgotten.

  The author, on acquaintance, was perfectly normal to look at, though there was something odd about him. Tall, but seemingly planned on an even larger scale, he had the look of someone on whom a hod of celestial bricks had fallen at an early age, and he was still trying to work out what had happened. His hair was green, red and yellow. In physiognomy almost Ancient Roman, heroic in profile, his handsome features betrayed, as they still habitually betray, an expression of intense attention to inner voices speaking in strange tongues. This rapt concentration on aetheric communications was broken from time to time by explosions of nearly orgasmic mirth, wave on wave of spluttering delight. ‘What? What?’ he would gasp as the joy spread. Our relationship was informed, at that time, by mutual wonder: neither of us could believe that the other had gone quite so far out on a limb in our respective arts. His writing and my acting fitted each other like a glove; we were both then intent on exploring the wilder reaches of the human condition.

  I started my career as a director seven years later with his play Loving Reno, a saga of Chilean incest and bad magic. We co-directed it, though after a while he lost interest in the mechanics of staging and the processes of actors and contented himself with offering guidance and inspiration. It was a wonderful partnership, and we dubbed ourselves not co-directors but Co-Optimists (after the great end-of-pier troupe of the Twenties). The latest Co-Optimistic venture is HRH, or, David and Wallis in the Bahamas, an account, scurrilous but scrupulously researched, of the wartime misadventures and Nazi fraternisation of the ex-King and his American bride, events which have until very recently been suppressed; it is at the same time a deconstruction of the Greatest Love Story of the Century, and a hellish vision of two people trapped in a sort of time-lock with nowhere to go and nothing to be. It is wickedly funny and somewhat tragic and as tight as a drum, Snoo in Racinian mode, strictly adhering to the unities, Aristotle meets Agatha Christie. It addresses, as everything he has ever written does, history, in this case a particularly murky moment in the story of our times, and indeed that of the House of Windsor. This is Co-Optimism at its world-beating best and will, I believe, at last introduce Wilson to the wider world.

  Alas, HRH didn’t quite hit the jackpot, despite the witty elegance of Amanda Donohoe as Wallis Simpson and a bagpipe-playing, ukelele-strumming Corin Redgrave as the Dook. (In my account of Snoo, I omitted to mention his thespian gifts: he gave a definitive performance as the Dolphin in Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater, in which the other roles were played by Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Snoo was effortlessly at ease with this group.) At the time of Reno, I was conscious of the cynical smile on people’s faces when I announced my new career as a director, so much so that when I returned to the fray, at the Offstage Theatre in Chalk Farm, in 1985, I felt obliged to explain myself. The piece is rather innocent, my first excited impressions of directing.

  I never said we could do without directors. Honest, I never did. In Being an Actor I wrote, rather movingly, I thought, about what one demands from the director, how much one needs him, and how little he can expect in return. It was his power that I denounced, the structure – which I called the directocracy – that places him at the summit of the theatrical process, and ensures that the art of the theatre becomes, by means sometimes subtle and sometimes naked, the execution of his will. Everything would be different, quoth I, if the economic relationship were to change, and the actors hired him rather than the other way round.

  And so it comes about that I am directing The Passport by Pierre Bourgeade at Buddy Dalton’s Offstage Theatre. My friend, the gifted actress Anna Korwin, came to me with the play, we sent it to Buddy, and then we set about casting the other role (and luckily got the quite remarkable Peter Bayliss). I then gave an account of what I thought the play was. In a sense, I auditioned for the actors. Had they not agreed with me about the nature of the play we would have parted: that is to say, I would have gone. In the event, they bought my vision, which was not exactly what leapt off the page. Most people who read the play have been critical of certain aspects of it: what I proposed was that – as seems to me not infrequently to be the case – the apparent weaknesses of the piece were actually its essence and its chief attraction.

  All too often, directors, it appears to me, go to great lengths to achieve unity where diversity is the very nature of the work, or to rationalise what is essentially non-consequential. In brief, I felt that the play was a kind of nightmare: the characters are trapped in the twists and turns of a capricious plot. To realise this view of the play, an excursion into the murky realms of Symbolism and maybe even Expressionism (dread thought!) was required. Expressionism is a word which brings a prayer to the lips of the pious and has become merely pejorative. It takes fearless actors rich of resource and bold of means to bring it off; Anna and Peter were two such.

  I hope the foregoing absolves me of apostasy, as if the Pope were suddenly to start selling contraceptives. I have, in any case, directed before, in tandem with my friend and co-optimist, Snoo Wilson, at the Bush Theatre, and very enjoyable it was. But different. One so quickly forgets what it felt like to be on the other side, in much the same way that to drivers the world is plagued with pesk
y pedestrians who deliberately try to prevent one from simply getting from A to B, to the benefit of all, until they leave their cars at home and become themselves pedestrians, at which point the world becomes a nightmarish place swarming with four-wheeled macho brutes hell-bent on killing every human thing in sight in their crazed desire to get from one unimportant place to another. Why don’t the actors know their lines? I find myself asking. Why are they systematically misinflecting every phrase? How can they allow themselves to stand THERE, where they can’t be seen? Above all, why can’t they remember their own inspired inventions from yesterday?

  The thing one forgets is just the sheer bloody difficulty of acting, the paraplegia which overcomes the actor as he strives to recompose his psychic structure. As a director you gaze on the proceedings with a mixture of pity and helplessness until you begin to consider what help you can offer. Simple things, first. Good humour, energy, unfailing interest. Then a kind of osmosis can start to occur, whereby you feel what the actor is going towards, and can either put in words for him what it is he’s beginning to do, or even suggest a shape that might lead to a sensation that might release something. You develop a sense of the kinetic energy that the stage can liberate. If the actor moves two inches to his left, he becomes vibrantly present; two inches to his right, he disappears. So, by suggestion, you can offer the actor short cuts to his destination.

  But the greatest task of the director is in the articulation of the style. One of the most remarkable directors I ever worked with was Jean Jourdheuil, who created Melancholy Jacques, a piece about Rousseau I did a year ago. Only after the production had opened and he’d gone back to France did I realise that he’d never given me a note, as such, never suggested I do this or that. He had simply defined the intention of the production over and over again, in a hundred various ways: what the play was, how it worked, what we were hoping to release in the audience. The moment I grasped those things all problems simply became problems of execution. In the same way, on this play, The Passport, I’m trying to express to the actors the organic principle of the piece, and to some extent the organic principle of the characters, but in such a way that those principles, and not my impositions, dictate everything that they do: so that their work is their own, and so that my work, the actual staging of the piece, can constantly be challenged by reference to this objective thing, the principle of the production.

  Once that has been established, we can behave how we like, I can leap up and show them what I mean, give them line readings – do everything you’re supposed not to, because they can shout me down when I transgress the production’s principle. And oh the joy, the joy unconfined, when that organic connection is made, and the acting starts to flow, a live and dangerous substance. When that happens, it’s both moving and wild, the anarchy of creation itself, when the actors burst the integument of their own personalities and become the conduit of great forces.

  The most cherished compliment I received at the time of Loving Reno, Snoo Wilson’s play, was from the author and co-director. He said, ‘I didn’t know you could ask so much of actors.’

  There is no limit.

  The late Peter Bayliss, who played the customs officer in The Passport, was one of the grand eccentrics of the British theatre. Stories about him were lovingly circulated by his fellow actors. Cameron Mackintosh wanted him to play Doolittle in a revival of My Fair Lady. Peter had no agent, and suggested to Cameron that they might meet and have the discussion at the Soda Fountain at Fortnum and Mason’s. He said that he went there often, and that he would as usual be bringing his dog. When he arrived, he had no dog, but when he ordered, he asked for a bowl of water for the dog. The waitress asked where the dog was; Cameron told her just to bring the water, which she did. Cameron opened negotiations. ‘£1,000 a week,’ he said. ‘Sounds very good to me,’ said Peter, ‘but I’ll have to ask the dog.’ Which he did. ‘I’m afraid the dog says no,’ he said after a while. By the time they left, he’d got Cameron up to £5,000. When he and I met to talk about The Passport, he told me how much he admired Being an Actor, his favourite book of all time, he said. I asked him how he liked to work. ‘Oh, I like to be directed,’ he said: Tyrone Guthrie, that genius of blocking, was his idol. So when we started rehearsing, I explained my interpretation and gave him detailed moves. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘You’re taking my performance away from me.’ I apologised and said that I was only too willing to incorporate any suggestions he might have. What would he like to do? ‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘you’re the director.’ Somehow we escaped from this vicious circle and got on with doing the play, but not before he told me that he was going straight from the theatre to Waterstone’s, where he would move all the copies of Being an Actor from the non-fiction to the fiction shelves. ‘You’re terrible, you are,’ he said. ‘Who do you think you are? Max Reinhardt?’ He tortured Anna Korwin with similar mad mind games, but every day he developed more and more exactly in the quite extreme direction I was keen to explore. We opened, and his extraordinary performance was rightly acclaimed: huge, dense, very Russian, very disturbing, everything I had hoped for. Eventually Pierre Bourgeade, the author, came to see this mad production of his little play. He adored it, he said, the design, the lighting, the production, everything. As for Bayliss, he was astounded by his performance – ‘bouleversant’ – and begged to be allowed to meet this great actor, this genius. I took him to the dressing room, which I found to be locked. I knocked, calling out Peter’s name. ‘M. Bourgeade LOVED the show, Peter. He wants to congratulate you.’ Eventually from deep within, Peter said that he didn’t want to meet the author. He wanted to go home. I cajoled, I begged, I shouted, with no effect. ‘At least let Anna out, Peter.’ She had translated the play, as well as having given a very good performance herself. At last, as if we were under siege in Beirut, the key was turned in the lock and the door opened long enough for Anna to be ejected, then the door was locked again. He never did meet Bourgeade. After supper I was walking home, and bumped into him. ‘I wouldn’t have known what to say,’ he said, amiably. He kept working almost to the day he died; in his will he left instructions that his ashes were to be flushed down the lavatory.

  Peter was the second replacement in the role in The Passport. The first actor was Vladek Sheybal, who had been wonderful in Wajda’s early films. He was, in his own Polish way, a match for Bayliss in the eccentricity stakes. He put in an urgent call to me while I was in the dress rehearsal of a play that I was acting in just before starting on The Passport. I rushed to the phone: ‘Yes, Vladek?’ ‘Simon, you know our play? I’ve been thinking about it. Don’t you think it’s rather thin?’ ‘In some ways, Vladek, but I believe that by doing it the way I’ve proposed to you it won’t seem so.’ ‘Hm. I still think it will seem thin. Do you know Chekhov’s play, The Three Sisters?’ ‘I do, Vladek.’ ‘You know the big scene between Masha and Vershinin?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Don’t you think we could just slip it into our play?’ ‘Don’t you think someone might notice?’ ‘Oh, we change the names, of course. Do you like my idea?’ ‘Vladek, I have no time to discuss it, but no, I don’t think it would work and I don’t think it’s necessary.’ ‘Ugh!’ It was as if I had stabbed him. ‘Very well, I see you’re going to be difficult. I think we should terminate our relationship now. Goodnight.’ The second actor was my friend Vernon Dobtcheff who discovered at the end of the first read-through that for tax reasons he had to leave the country that very evening. And so we got Peter.

  The play whose dress rehearsal Vladek had interrupted was Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, which remains almost my favourite experience in the theatre. This masterpiece is a two-hander: my fellow actor was Mark Rylance, fresh from his definitive Peter Pan at the Barbican. We played at the Bush Theatre – my last appearance there, in fact. This piece was written in 1997 to celebrate the theatre’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

  My debut at the Bush was in a transfer from the old Soho Poly of Snoo Wilson’s The Soul of the White Ant, expanded to f
ull length with the addition of a lurid scene by the roadside during which I was required to quaff a cocktail in which a variety of salads and a small umbrella floated in a liquid looking and indeed tasting very much like calamine lotion; it was called a Pink Flamingo (or ‘Punk Flamungo’ as my character, the knobble-knee’d Jo’burg journalist Pieter de Groot, would have said). The play was full of the rough magic for which the author is so justly famous, and it was my introduction both to the Fringe – of which I was flatteringly held eventually to become, for a while, the King – and to the Bush, which became my spiritual home, theatrically speaking, for some years. At that time, the theatre was at the be ginning of the long journey from high-spirited chaos to ruthless efficiency and matchless production values at which it has now arrived. Though the journey was right and inevitable, there was a certain charm to the chaos, to the informality, of those early days, and it was still then possible for me to wander into the office with a play in my hand and ask to be allowed to do it and a month later we would be on.

  The first time I did that was with Richard Quick’s one-man show called Juvenalia, in which the right-wing Roman satirist was supposed to have slipped through the time warp to harangue the audience for some seventy-five minutes in a DJ, in verse, under a revolving glitter ball on a stage made up to resemble a seaside cinema. Strange to relate, the show worked, both artistically and commercially. As part of the deal, I had agreed – my arm hardly needed to be twisted – to play Princess Anne in David Edgar’s parody of Equus (Hippos, it was called) as part of Blood Sports, a collection of four short plays on politico-sportive themes. This also worked. One that didn’t work was my Charles Bukowski show, Ejaculations. It would have been wonderful, I have always believed – the original politically incorrect man, Bukowski wrote like an angel, a sort of hobo Jeffrey Bernard. We had tried valiantly to get hold of the author for permission, but on the first day of rehearsal the director Rob Walker walked in with a telegram in his hand which simply read: ‘Absolutely not. Bukowski.’ We never found out why. This was perplexing, and also vexing, but only mildly. We just moved quickly along to the next thing.