My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  It’s very hard to get the day right. A daily visit to the gymnasium is vital, and the earlier you take it, the more good it does you. So, painfully, you crawl there at ten, and then there’s the question of lunch. It must be protein-packed but not heavy, because you’ll need another meal nearer the show. This little meal, taken at about six to allow an hour and a half for it to work its way through your system, is a poser. You’re eating it to get you through the second half of the play, but it mustn’t weigh you down for the first half. Joan Littlewood once remarked that if, before a show, you feel on top of the world, raring to go and awash with adrenalin, you should eat a pork pie. Adrenalin is indeed a dangerous ally, but then, after the first few performances, it disappears. Simple energy becomes the problem. Two weeks ago, I solved my six o’clock problem. An organisation named Spud-U-Like peddles baked potatoes. One of these, filled with chilli con carne, offers exactly three hours and thirty-five minutes of sustained energy; after which, at the end of the show, I drink three glasses of wine. Three! That’s it. I, a three-bottle-a-day man, can hardly believe my self-control, but the play needs every single brain cell, and the self-disgust at missing even a beat out of the play is too high a price to pay for an hour or two’s happy oblivion.

  Playing one of these parts is like having a rare disease. Like most of those it involves a lot of giving up. I gave up coffee, of which I drank upwards of fifteen cups, often espresso, a day, because I felt as if I was going to fall over on stage. I gave up cheese because it was coating my vocal chords. Sex must be taken sparingly. It would seem that Maurice Chevalier’s great dictum remains true: ‘Every time you walk on stage, you must make love to the audience – but you must live like a MONK.’ All of this has, of course, had a highly beneficial effect on my health. I have lost a stone in weight, my complexion has improved and my body is as streamlined as it ever will be. I am thinking of publishing my findings in The Faust Diet (Parts One & Two).

  Finally, the words. There are many, many thousands of these. When I first ran my part to myself it lasted four hours. In order to be ahead of this seemingly unending stream of image, conceit and apostrophe, the words must bubble up of their own accord, not be separately drilled for. That means running through most of it before every performance, getting it into the teeth and tongue, hearing it afresh. The best place for doing this is in the street, and so, like a priest at his breviary, I wander Hammersmith, muttering my divine office. The other night, as I was invoking the earth spirit, or lauding Helen of Troy’s beauty, or something, a merry party, red of cheek and white of beard, accosted me. ‘You’re himself, aren’t you?’ he said, pointing to a nearby poster of the play. ‘I’m no one – I’m just an old Welsh twit, I’m a bit pissed, too – but I just wanted to say one thing; don’t ever stop being an eccentric.’ And he was off. On the whole I think he was right: this job of acting is, like all performing arts, and perhaps all arts by definition, an unnatural activity.

  Goethe, needless to say, is one of the greatest of all writers, and, more surprisingly, a loveable one. But he crammed Faust full to bursting point: he wrote it over the whole of his life, and it contains everything he knew. Rehearsing it was like wrestling an octopus. I began to feel seriously out of my depth, despite the three arduous months of work we had done on it. The night before we started technical rehearsals (a week of those) at the Lyric Hammersmith, I slipped off down the road to see a company I barely knew of, the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg (or Leningrad, as it then was), and saw them do a rather ordinary play called Stars in the Morning Sky. Even as my brain was telling me how ordinary the play was, my guts and my groin and my soul were in turmoil. This was the greatest piece of collective acting I had ever seen: an ensemble, at last! This was it, the ignis fatuus, the hopeless dream, the doomed vision, the thing wiseacres said could never exist. Never, not in all World Theatre Seasons nor anywhere else, had I seen such depth of character from every player on the stage, and the relationships, between the characters and the actors, were palpable, visible, a living tissue. I literally shook throughout the performance, and walked to the station sobbing heavily. There was nothing sentimental about my reaction: I was in a state of physical shock, like being in a car crash. So that is what the theatre can be, I thought. That is what it should be. Always. I crept into the Lyric the next day feeling very small. Subsequently, I became somewhat obsessed by the Maly; some ten years after first seeing its work, I reviewed – for the Guardian – Journey Without End by the director of the company, Lev Dodin. The books editor decided not to print it, saying that it was more like a manifesto than a review. I see her point.

  ‘After a performance an instant of experience remains,’ writes the great Russian director Lev Dodin in this new book of reflections on the theatre; ‘that is the moment when something inside us remembered God.’ Immediately, we know that we are involved in a very different kind of discourse about the theatre. Dodin is the artistic director of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg, unquestionably the greatest ensemble of actors in the world, so it is worth paying attention when he speaks. The company frequently visits Britain; their remarkable Uncle Vanya has just toured the country, and their overwhelming version of Chekhov’s Platonov was seen here some six years ago. This last was astounding in every way: in richness of imagination, in emotional power, in freedom of expression, in depth of conception. It was, frankly, rather shaming: where on the British stage could one see such work?

  Every one of the actors brought lives of startling fullness and complexity onto the stage, performing, with exquisite precision, without the slightest self-consciousness and no demand whatever for applause, feats of great physical and emotional virtuosity which emerged quite naturally out of the action; the narrative focus, despite frequently having the large company all on stage together at any one time, was crystal clear. It was a whole world on stage: a world of experience and of expression, taking us deep into the very core of the layered lives of these people in their time, a kind of MRI scan of their souls. One was scarcely aware of a directorial hand, scarcely conscious of a style of performance: one was too busy intimately sharing the complex crisis in the lives of a community of thirty or so fellow human beings. The production spoke directly and overpoweringly, and left those of who were there at the Barbican Theatre that night astonished, moved, enlightened, and ravenous for more.

  How is it done? How do these artists achieve such miracles? The answers to these questions are to be found in this collection of transcripts, essays and observations by Lev Dodin, and they may be a bit hair-raising for British actors and directors. The book includes a revealing short study on The Making of Platonov by Anna Ogibina, describing the elaborate and lengthy process by which that miraculous production came about. The initial impulse to work on the play came in the late 1980s; in 1990 the company steadily worked on some études, or exploratory exercises, which they continued for five years, while playing and even rehearsing other plays. At the end of this period, in 1995, the play was provisionally cast and the process of reading and analysing it began. Actual rehearsals started nine months later, the actors pushing further and further into the lives of the characters and their forms of expression. Different actors tried different roles; they kept going back to the table to read the play throughout rehearsals. Meanwhile the entire auditorium was gutted, the stage completely reconstructed to install the set, which included a pond, a house, and riverbanks; there were run-throughs of the play on the set, after which Dodin made various further casting changes. It was now mid-1996.

  The company returned to the rehearsal room for a further six months, during which time everyone was immersed in music classes, since the decision had been taken – Dodin had taken the decision – that music would be played live on stage and that every actor would play an instrument; they rehearsed over a hundred musical numbers. Dodin then felt that the play’s offstage dinner party should be part of the action, while the play as written was going on in parallel: to that end a large table was placed on stage an
d an elaborate dinner sequence was devised and integrated; the production was reimagined in its entirety. In April 1997, the company went back on stage; in June of that year one of the leading characters was cut from the play, then reinstated, then permanently cut. The first public performances finally took place in July 1997, some ten years after the initial impulse to do the play. It has changed innumerable times in the subsequent seven years and remains in the repertory, in a state of constant development. Dodin can see no reason to cease playing a production. ‘Theatre is already an ephemeral occupation, so how could we plan our baby’s death?’

  Now, most British actors or directors reading the above will be filled with either scorn or dread. I doubt that there is an actor in the country who would not be inspired and made somewhat envious by the work of the Maly actors, but few, very few of us would submit to the process which produces it. For a start, Dodin is an unqualified autarch: he is the fons et origo of the whole enterprise. Most of the actors are his students, he is responsible for the choice of play, the casting, the physical production, the method of rehearsal. In Journey Without End he makes it very clear that he is not a régisseur, however, on the Max Reinhardt, Tyrone Guthrie, or Franco Zeffirelli model, devising the staging in advance in detail and transmitting it to his actors on the floor. Dodin’s process is entirely different, because his conception of theatre is not a mechanical one. To his newly enrolled pupils he says: ‘Together we will study a theatre that doesn’t yet and may never exist, a theatre that we won’t ever be able to master. We will train our ourselves in a dream,’ sternly exhorting them to remind themselves that ‘the apprentices in Andrei Rublev’s workshop had to fast for several days just to start mixing the colours for the great icon painter’.

  He makes no claim to omniscience. To begin with, he admits to not knowing how long it will take to achieve the production. Rehearsals simply take as long as they need. Solving this scene or that is neither here nor there: the scene as written is merely the tip of the iceberg. Where does the remaining ninety per cent come from? From the actor. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘is more important than human substance… when rehearsing, we try to learn something about ourselves. We try to produce work which concerns us deeply, which we feel very deeply.’ For this, the actors need to feel at ease, uninhibited. They need to develop trust in each other, and real understanding. Nor must they be forced. ‘Interference in people’s spiritual lives is a tyranny,’ he says. It is ‘a despicable lie to impose a false sense of community… enormous inner culture, discipline, and tact are needed.’ This is a slow process: ‘It takes ages to develop quality in art.’ And theatre, for him, is supremely an art: ‘The idea of a commercial enterprise in the theatre is alien for me… the theatre of the one-off show is almost always a theatre factory… if I knew my production would only last for a few weeks I am not sure I would want to do it.’

  The seeming modesty of his discourse, innocent but searching, is typically Russian, simultaneously naïve and hugely sophisticated, and it enables him to ask the largest questions in the most direct way. His view of life is essentially tragic. Utterly repudiating ‘the vile revolution’ of 1917, he admiringly recounts how his mentor refused to interrupt rehearsals as the Kremlin was attacked. ‘Only later did I understand that [he] was one of the very few people who were, on that day in 1917, engaged in something worthwhile.’ He is equally despairing of both the present and the future. ‘I am sure there is something ghastly in human nature, an inbuilt desire to destroy others similar to us.’ But he believes that the theatre offers hope. ‘Troubles help create an artistic impulse in us… I believe that the only thing which will prevent a general collapse in human relations is a constant effort at self-knowledge and a struggle to retain our values.’ Civilisation is only a flimsy veneer – ‘that’s why every manifestation of civilisation is so important. Theatre is still a sign of civilisation even if an inadequate one.’ Only the prospect of self-knowledge, he insists, can bring people to the theatre and keep them there. The more tragic and hopeless the action on stage, the more shocked and ultimately redeemed both the spectator and the actor feel. By rousing an audience’s compassion for someone else, ‘they learn to be compassionate towards themselves.’

  Such unabashed idealism is uncommon in writing about the theatre. It is not simply fine talk: it irradiates every moment of the work produced by his company. Many British actors and directors subscribe equally wholeheartedly to Dodin’s convictions, but to no avail, given the prevailing circumstances of production in this country. His genius is to have evolved a process which makes his glorious sentiments flesh. It costs a great deal of money, and a massive commitment of time, energy and, as he says, ‘human substance’ on the part of the company. Its existence is already threatened in Putin’s Russia. But Journey Without End shows what can be done in the right conditions. The first half of the book is a classic of the twentieth century. The second half, his close analysis of Platonov, is specialised and, frankly, a little dull; it might perhaps have been better to publish the first half on its own as a slim volume of major importance, which without question it is.

  As it happens, the reviews for Faust were rather good, as was business, especially for those days when we did both Part One and Part Two, seven hours in all. Whatever my reservations about the unplumbed depths of the play, it was a revelation for many people to see the work so central to European intellectual history laid out as a whole before them. (Of course we cut large chunks of it: when Peter Stein did the whole text a decade later, it lasted twenty-four hours.) Simon Rattle came to see our version, and at supper afterwards he said, ‘Now I know how to conduct Beethoven.’ He also started conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the second part of which is, of course, a setting of the end of Part Two of the play. My personal notices were on the whole good, though – such is the morbid oversensitivity of actors – I can remember only one of them, Michael Billington’s in the Guardian: in his review of Part One (a mere three hours), during which I started at the age of a hundred, suddenly became twenty-five, engaged in a savage sword fight, plunged into a vast cistern of water, leaped all over a climbing frame and swung on ropes with a lot of witches, all the while haemorrhaging rhyming couplets, he observed of my performance: ‘Simon Callow, as Faust, neatly manages the transition from age to youth’. And that was ALL.

  My parallel career as an all-purpose director, meanwhile, continued to bowl joyously along. I went to the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown Los Angeles to direct my translation of Jacques and his Master by Milan Kundera (he wrote it in French, I hasten to say), and was given a superb cast among whose number were a Caribbean black actress, a Chinese-American one, an African-American actor, a blond mid-Westerner of Lutheran stock, a Jewish comedian from the Bronx and Irving Thalberg’s great-niece. They embraced Kundera/Diderot’s eighteenth-century world with joy and wit, learned that melancholy and depression weren’t the same thing, and collaborated with me on amending the script, which I had translated with slavish accuracy to the French original, but with British inflexions. Having heard them read it, I suggested that we should only change it where strictly necessary – where a choice of words might be actually confusing to an American audience. One of the more important such changes was made in a line which troubled one member of the cast (the Bronx comedian). ‘It says here, “That night I got assholed.” How did he feel about that?’ ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘it was great.’ ‘Huh. Just “great”? I mean, did it hurt?’ ‘Not at all. Not at the time. The next morning he might have had a hangover.’ ‘A hangover?’ ‘Well, yes, if you get drunk, you get hungover, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, but, even if he was drunk, if a guy puts his – you know – his schlong up –’ Suddenly I saw. I explained what arseholed meant to a Briton. ‘But what should we say instead?’ I asked. ‘Pissed.’ ‘Plastered.’ Too genteel I said. Then the Chinese-American woman spoke: ‘I got it: shit-faced.’ ‘Shit-faced?’ I said, aghast. ‘Yeah, shit-faced. That’s what we say. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it?’ �
��Well,’ I said, ‘it’s obvious you and I go to very different parties.’ So shit-faced it was. Big laugh.

  Back home, Scottish Opera asked me to do Die Fledermaus, one of those many musical masterpieces of the operatic stage saddled with an almost impossible book. What I wanted to do – what I always want to do with the plays I direct – was to reproduce in the audience the feelings that the first-night audience at the very first performance would have had, when the piece was unknown. In this case, they would have seen themselves being wickedly sent up. I accordingly transposed the piece to contemporary Glasgow, with which the parallels with the Vienna of 1874 were striking: a newly rich entrepreneurial class (yuppies, in 1989), a country without political power but considerable economic clout, a pervasive culture of hedonism. Kit Hesketh-Harvey of Kit and the Widow wrote the outrageously funny book and lyrics, and the singers (among them the sublime Amy Burton as Adèle and Omar Ebrahim, fabulously decadent as Prince Orlovsky) took to it with gusto, except for the tenor, the fragrantly named Justin Lavender, who thought it was ‘crap, really’, as he explained to me one afternoon, but he got his laughs just the same, and clearly enjoyed them. The leading soprano in the revival was something else. She rehearsed with abandon. Then, when we came to the dress rehearsal, for each act she found a place on the stage in which she was comfortable and stood there, stock still, and released her golden tone into the auditorium (actually it was made of rather baser metal). Afterwards I said, ‘What happened, Cynthia?’ [Not her real name] ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘rehearsals were fun, but this is the performance. Now my loyalty is to –’ here, imitating an action I had been longing to perform all evening, she placed her hands round her neck – ‘la voce.’