My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  It was self-evident to me and, I guess, to Adrian Noble, that it would be a marvellous thing for a company like the RSC to explore this language of acting. It would be the sort of technical, imaginative and emotional challenge which is the lifeblood of ensembles. Les Enfants du Paradis is the work of a poet – the great popular poet Jacques Prévert, France’s unofficial laureate for over thirty years. Though the film is not in verse (which immediately makes it more susceptible to translation) it is nonetheless of quite exceptional elegance and eloquence and fullness. The film’s exploration of the devastating power of love, so particular to the characters and yet so unerring in its ability to embody the universal romantic experience, is one of the most comprehensive expressions in existence of that fascination with romantic love which is undergoing something of a shy revival at the present moment, in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, and plays such as Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing and David Hare’s Skylight. The question was – would it work in the theatre?

  I had no qualms whatever about transferring a text from one medium to another – the traffic from stage to screen dates from the earliest days of the cinema; why should it all be one way? In deed, it had struck me forcibly while directing my film The Ballad of the Sad Café that there were several ways of conveying exactly the same script to the screen, mine being just one, even though I had actively collaborated with the screenwriter. Why shouldn’t Prévert’s wonderful material have a second innings? And why should the original interpreters have copyright on the material they first performed? After all, I wasn’t pulping the film. It would always be there, and if people were terrified of a new performance or interpretation tampering with their memories, I suppose I’d just have to say, well don’t come. If they did, though, they might have a whole new and complementary experience of the masterpiece, rather like – but only rather like – seeing Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi’s Otello side by side. My only consideration was whether the material would work on stage.

  I had a hunch that it would: certainly the plot, the spine of the action, is exceptionally well-wrought, with a symmetry and an ingenuity that rivals Twelfth Night (to name a somewhat comparable treatment of romantic experience). While love is unquestionably the theme – scarcely a scene or a character in the entire three-and-a-half-hour span is not concerned in some way with it – the context is that of the theatre. The action takes place largely in or around theatres of various kinds, offering extremely promising opportunities for staging – not to mention splendid value for money: three mime shows, a chunk of melodrama spoofed and a three-minute Othello. But all of this would be of no interest if the text itself were not dramatically conceived. I had not seen the film for fifteen years when I made my suggestion; to find out whether it was I went, not to the film, but straight to the screenplay.

  Close scrutiny of the text revealed that, in a way unusual in film, every single speech both advanced the action and disclosed more about the characters. The director Marcel Carné – who was of course closely involved in creating the screenplay – was a strictly classical director; camera work per se was of no interest to him. He created the physical world of the piece in studios in the South of France and Paris, and then trained his cameras on it, in almost documentary style, always concentrating on the human figure; a vast amount of the film consists of single shots, two-shots and three-shots. Even tracking is used with great restraint. Putting Citizen Kane on stage would be absurd, or an exercise in visual theatre on the grandest scale. It lives entirely in its visual style. The essential test of a play, however, is whether or not it lives in its language, and this, Les Enfants du Paradis most decidedly and triumphantly does. Not only in its dazzling eloquence, but in its exhilarating commitment to the principle of action, which has nothing to do with action shots in a movie, and everything to do with the momentum of the characters and their needs.

  The text we play is virtually intact. The action needed only a small amount of relocating to avoid restless cutting from scene to scene. There are nonetheless some fifty scenes in the play (not quite as many as Antony and Cleopatra, I reassured a gobsmacked RSC) and my brief to the designer, Robin Don, was simple: no scene-change must take longer than twenty seconds. He solved this monstrous demand with perfect sangfroid, and his solution was such as to make it quite impossible, even if one had been tempted, to reproduce on stage the physical life of the film; every scene had to be rethought in theatrical terms alone. In some ways, though, the approach to the play has been not unlike approaching a film: the costume requirement has been enormous – some three hundred and fifty costumes specially designed by Christopher Woods; musically too, it is an enormous undertaking. John White, avant-gardist of the class of ’65, a musician of vast sympathies and irrepressible originality, has composed over two-and-a-quarter hours of new music, and is still at it. Steve Wasson, mime and teacher, last assistant of the great Étienne Decroux, has, to brilliant effect, taught the actors the essentials of a discipline that normally takes years to absorb, and created entirely new versions of the mime shows. At every level, the piece is an epic – a huge panorama on the subject of love created at a murky period of French history (1944) to affirm the essentially human values that had been compromised during an occupation out of which few French people had come unscathed.

  My greatest anxiety once I’d translated the thing was how the young actors to whom I gave the script would respond. Casting actors more or less the age of the characters in the first half of the play – mid-twenties – rather than the forty-year-olds in the film (Arletty – ‘une jeune fille’ – was actually forty-six), I had no idea what they would feel about this material, with its entirely direct acceptance of the premises of romantic love. The work is the antithesis of cool; the inverted commas which enclose a great deal of modern acting are of no use here. I shouldn’t have worried. Every actor who received the script – many of them had never seen the film – walked into the casting office eyes glowing, scarcely being able to believe their luck at having material like this in their hands. Such work calls for acting of a particular commitment and freedom, which it immortally received from its first interpreters. Watching the RSC actors, all twenty-six of them, flower with it (and they were after all the starting point for the whole project) has been uniquely moving and exhilarating, the most remarkable experience of my working life in the theatre.

  That article was one of the worst misjudgements of my professional life. My opening sentences about Adrian Noble jumping to his feet were quoted and requoted in review after review as an example of my pretentiousness and idiocy. Adrian and I became a kind of self-congratulatory mafia scheming to make fools of the public. The press were anyway quite determined to loathe the show: I knew this in advance because a perfectly harmless, scholarly fellow called Ronald Bergan, whom I knew slightly, and who had been deputed by the Guardian to interview me, sat down, switched on his tape recorder and launched into some very spiky, confrontational questions. ‘Hold on, hold on, Ronald,’ I said, ‘what’s got into you?’ He switched the tape recorder off, and smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘only they told me: “Don’t let him get away with it”.’ Well, I didn’t. They made sure of that.

  Not only were the reviews bad, all attacking my temerity at tampering with a masterpiece, there were shock-horror state-of-the-RSC stories about how expensive it had been, how many actors had been specially hired for the production, and how I had disappeared after the (triumphant, as it happens, with curtain call after curtain call) first night. I had disappeared, but only because, thanks to the vagaries of repertory planning, there were no performances of the show for a week afterwards. I had the pleasure of reading the reviews the following morning at the airport as I departed for the cross-country American book-signing tour of the first volume of my biography of Orson Welles, The Road to Xanadu, which was being serialised in the New York Times, had been joyfully received up and down the country, and propelled me on to every chat show in the land. There I was, being interviewed by
the great Studs Terkel in Chicago, and Charlie Wilson in New York, and every hour, on the hour, it seemed, they were faxing me yet more bad reviews for Les Enfants. It was an oddly schizophrenic experience. I toyed with not going back to England. Ever. On my return to the Barbican, the stage management all greeted me warmly, none of the actors tried to punch me, and there were dozens of letters from the public to say how much they’d enjoyed it. As some sort of salve, the French critics who had seen the show wrote of it with high enthusiasm, only regretting that I’d been too respectful to the original. One shouldn’t whine about failure, and as often as not it’s deserved, in some measure (vide My Fair Lady). But this time, I think the show was better than it was said to be: too long, certainly, because we had had unending technical problems with the revolve, and been obliged to cancel a number of previews, which meant we could never work on the play on the set, and the cutting which I’d always known was needed had not been possible. After we opened, I slashed about twenty minutes, and of course it was better. In fact, the last night was like the first night: awash with tears and cheers, people saying that it was the best thing they’d ever seen and so on. Whatever else it was or wasn’t, it was different: a different acting vocabulary, a different temperature, a different story.

  By now, it was clear that my honeymoon with the critics, such as it was, was over. I had been remarkably lucky, over the years; had, as Ronald Bergan’s editor might have said, got away with it. But now there was a distinct feeling of ‘Oh no, not him again’ in the response to my work.

  And in truth, I was fairly fed up with myself as an artist, insofar as I felt entitled to call myself that at all. I had sworn in public – in print, indeed, in the pages of Being an Actor – that I would never become a jobbing actor; now I had become a sort of jobbing director, although, ironically enough, my latest, biggest flop had been a conviction project par excellence, born out of love of that film in particular, and of French acting in general, whose essence I had tried to bring to an English stage. I felt the need to stop, to think, to rediscover, to reconnect. Whenever I directed in America, I would tell the actors, before they went out in front of the public during previews, to remember why it was that they had wanted to be actors in the first place. Now I needed to give myself the same note. I found that I was just doing things in order to be doing them. Not even, really, to make money, just in order to be perpetually busy.

  Then I went to America to direct Cavalli’s La Calisto in Glimmerglass, in James Fenimore Cooper country, in the bear-inhabited forests of upstate New York, and something about being in that wild, pioneer landscape and working on one of the earliest of all operas, on a subject taken from the dawn of Western civilisation, changed my whole pulse as a director. To my slack-jawed astonishment, Jane Glover, conducting, orchestrated the music as she went along with her group of baroque instrumentalists, inventing it in the instant. I sat and listened, I encouraged the singers to listen – to each other, to the instrumentalists, to themselves – to allow the piece to breathe with its own inherent vibrations as naturally as the rhapsodic Orphic strummings of the theorbists in the pit. The production was simplicity itself, inspired, visually, by the paintings of Piero di Cosimo, which have a unique quality, seeming to be not generic evocations of the ancient world, as in so many Renaissance canvases, but an actual record of it, as if Piero had not imagined that world, but visited it. His fauns are not frolicsome or riotous as in Titian: they are rutty, iddy creatures, rough and hairy; you can almost smell them. Even the animals that emerge from the forest in The Forest Fire, Piero’s great canvas in the Ashmolean, are weirdly miscegenated, still evolving, some with human faces, others with ancillary limbs. In La Calisto, Endymion’s lovelorn addresses to his divine mistress seemed to speak of a purer, simpler world.

  Immersion in this world was stirring something in me, a dissatisfaction with my life in art, to put it rather grandly. In fact, my feeling was that art was precisely what I was not making. While I was staying in Cooperstown, where Glimmerglass is located, I was writing an introduction to Snowdon’s collection of photographs, Snowdon on Stage – it’s easy, he had said, you just have to write everything that’s happened since Suez – and this, too, forced me, in considering the evolution of the British theatre over the previous forty years, to question what sort of a contribution I thought I was making. I was painfully conscious of the erratic nature of my career as an actor: two Shakespeares, no Ibsen, no Chekhov, no Pinter, no Beckett. What kind of a path was I pursuing? Certainly not that of the classical actor I had set out to be. Hoping somehow to catch up, I leaped at Bill Alexander’s invitation to go to the Birmingham Rep and play Face in The Alchemist, a play I had enjoyed seeing in the past. Once in rehearsals, however, I found that I loathed doing it. It was not a happy production, but the problem went beyond that. I found Jonson’s world view so unrelentingly misanthropic, so contemptuous of the foibles of his fellow human beings, that I had a sort of physical reaction against playing the character. I had no real idea what I was doing, apart from hurling out a lot of wilfully obscure language at a baffled audience and desperately trying to whip up some sort of comic energy. I felt as if I was idiotically prancing behind a huge glass pane, in front of an audience which was viewing me with resentful incomprehension. I feared that I was losing my pleasure in acting altogether, and resolved to step back from the theatre. In fact, The Alchemist had been my first play for five years; I hoped it would be at least another five before I did one again.

  Going Solo

  At that point, in 1997, the producer Brian Brolly asked me to revive Micheál mac Liammóir’s one-man play The Importance of Being Oscar in the West End. I refused immediately, not just because of my vow to keep out of the theatre but because I felt that the play was inextricably bound up with his unique personality. I wrote this piece about him and it for the Sunday Telegraph in 1997.

  To a remarkable degree, my adolescence was dominated by Oscar Wilde: I only ever spoke of him as ‘Oscar’. This was the man I wanted to be, generous, eloquent, intellectually brilliant, provocative, fun, and, of course, gay, though I kept rather quiet about that bit; this was, after all, 1963.

  When I was about fifteen I borrowed a couple of LPs from the record library, their sleeves exotically printed in gold and black, the title printed in curling Beardsleyesque letters: The Importance of Being Oscar. The title was irresistible, of course, to a thorough-going Wildean, the presentation exotic and promisingly decadent; even the actor/author’s name was fascinatingly foreign, not to say unpronounceable: Micheál mac Liammóir. What I heard did not disappoint on any of these counts. It was an astonishingly ripe and evocative odyssey through Wilde’s life, spoken with a kind of immediacy, an intimacy, almost, that took one directly to the heart of the life and the work. The acting style was one I had never encountered before: its rhetorical sweep alternated, in a brilliant exercise in contrasted rhythms, with sudden throwaway quips that had the air of improvisation about them. The actor was playful and magisterial, conversational and ritualistic, high priest and cheeky altar server all at once. The Irish accent was like none other I had heard, too, neither upper-class cut glass, nor Dublin demotic, certainly not stage-Irish and yet not life-Irish either, but it was a supremely musical and utterly compelling, and I came to know its cadences as one learns a piece of music.

  Time passed; I went to work at Olivier’s Old Vic, in the box office, where I fell in love with actors and acting, and determined to make the theatre my life. I decided to go to university to find out whether I had any talent; there was not the slightest pretence that I would be doing any academic work. I had intended to go to Trinity College in Dublin – Wilde’s Alma Mater, of course – but the British Government had just ceased to offer grants to go there so instead I went to Queen’s University in Belfast, thinking, in my boyish innocence, that it would be much the same thing. It wasn’t, but it was rather wonderful nonetheless, and the day I arrived I enrolled in the Drama Society, and proceeded to immerse myself in its
work. Our year built towards the competition, in March, of the Irish University Drama Association, and presently it was announced that the adjudicator for that year would be Micheál mac Liammóir. I walked into the office of Gown, the student paper, and proposed that I interview the great man in Dublin, and found myself, furnished with a tape recorder the size of a large suitcase, on the train a week later.

  What I found there, I described to the readers of the paper. I continued:

  I went back to Belfast a changed man; I had been vouchsafed a glimpse of a whole other way of being, like something out of my reading, out of my dreams. Olivier’s National Theatre, my beau idéal up to that point, seemed terribly dour after this; I knew then the real meaning of a phrase of Cocteau’s that had stuck in my mind, ‘red-and-gold sickness’ – of a theatre of poetry and magic and a sort of opulence of spirit.