by Simon Callow
When Micheál came for the Festival I ferried him around Belfast, from play to play; I took down his verdicts on the performances, including my own as Trigorin in The Seagull (‘not a born actor, I fear; a born writer perhaps’); above all, I dressed him for the two performances he gave of The Importance of Being Oscar, and saw for the first time something of the pity and terror of an actor’s life, as well as its glory: minutes before the supremely self-assured performances, he was a shuddering wreck, invoking the Mother of God, Her Husband, Her Son, and all the Saints, to protect him through his ordeal. Once on, though, he was an absolute master.
When he left Belfast, he handed me a sweetly inscribed copy of The Importance of Being Oscar, and was gone – gone, in fact, out of my life for ever, in the flesh, at any rate. As a presence he has remained with me ever since, not as a model, for he was truly sui generis, but as a token of a sort of richness, a ripeness, even, that is quite absent from our new, improved stages. I wrote to him when I was about to graduate from drama school saying you won’t remember me but… and he replied saying you’re quite right, I don’t, but what a very charming photograph. I auditioned for Hilton Edwards, but didn’t get in, and that, you might have thought, would be that. But then I wrote a book a few years ago in which I described my encounter with Micheál in Belfast, and an ex-member of his company, Pat Maclarnon, wrote to me and said that I’d got him dead right, and as a reward he would be leaving me in his will Micheál’s very first theatre design. Then, a few years later, I went to Dublin to make a radio documentary about mac Liammóir, and sought out Pat in his reclusive retirement, and after many clankings and bangings and sliding of bolts, the door opened and a man appeared, red of face and heavily bespectacled, struggling along on two sticks – this was the man, mind, who had played Dorian Gray to Micheál’s Lord Henry Wotton – and said he wondered when I’d come, he had something for me, and he reached into a drawer and pulled out a gold ring, an exquisite thing, with a Celtic motif signifying love unto death, and he told me that it was Micheál’s, that Micheál had designed it and Hilton had had it made up, and then he said, ‘It’s yours, it belongs to you.’ And it fitted, and I have worn it ever since.
Nonetheless, and if that isn’t An Omen I don’t know what is, I resisted suggestions that I should revive The Importance of Being Oscar: how could I banish Micheál’s lush cadences from my ear? Finally, grudgingly, I agreed to read the script, and found to my amazement that it was perfectly possible to play it very differently indeed from Micheál, and very rewarding. I understood for the first time the brilliance of Micheál as writer, which his brilliance as an actor had been masking, and I was able to make the piece my own. So although there is a certain charming symmetry to the notion that once I was his dresser, and now I’m wearing his mantle, in fact the show, like Wilde himself, seems a very different thing now. It remains one of the greatest stories ever told, and it has been an extraordinary experience telling it.
Even though I had made the show my own, Micheál was ever-present. Meeting him had had an understandably large impact on me at the time, but now, thirty years later, he was if anything more vivid in my mind. He carried so much with him, so much history: in terms of theatre alone, the fact that he had played Oliver Twist to Beerbohm Tree’s Fagin, that he had been at the legendary pre-war London performances of the Ballets Russes, that he had seen and met Sarah Bernhardt, gave him a link to a mythic theatrical past. His vocal technique itself belonged to the Victorian theatre: even in his lifetime, Tree was thought to be a throwback, and he had been Micheál’s first teacher. But he was connected to history in other ways, too: he had known Yeats and Lady Gregory intimately and been passionately involved in Irish Nationalism. He was the author, too, of the oldest Irish-language play still regularly performed. He had more or less invented Orson Welles; he certainly discovered him. The theatre he created with Hilton Edwards in Dublin was a blazing torch of avant-gardism, acclaimed across the whole of the theatrical world. To talk to him was to be plugged into a vanished world of art, wit and gossip at the very highest level, as well as to be vouchsafed glimpses of a sort of a mysticism which he liked to say was Celtic, but which was rather more occult than that. His power over an audience was positively uncanny, magical and mysterious, spellbinding in an almost literal sense. The revelation in the late 1990s that he wasn’t Irish at all, that his accent, his name and his supposed Cork childhood were all inventions, only compelled further admiration. What a supreme act of creative imagination to realise who you are in your essence and to reinvent yourself accordingly! Sitting in my dressing room one afternoon after the show, I discovered yet another dimension of this extraordinary man: a beautiful young woman with tumbling yellow tresses knocked on the door and announced herself as Valerie Rossmore, daughter of Brian Tobin, who had been, I knew, Micheál’s manager and his lover. Her father having no gift for fatherhood, Micheál had adopted her, and she was brought up by him and Hilton at Harcourt Terrace – two flamboyantly gay men raising a thirteen-year-old girl in the middle of Sixties Dublin, one of the most puritanically Catholic cities in the world. She and I immediately became fast friends, and so he continues to be a living presence in my life.
Doing The Importance of Being Oscar proved to be my salvation as an actor. The play is a highly sophisticated and brilliantly effective piece of storytelling, and the contact with the audience was powerfully direct and eventually quite profound. They seemed mesmerised by the story I was telling, entranced by the spellbinding cadences of both Wilde and mac Liammóir. And, for the first time in what seemed like a very long while, like my singers in La Calisto, I was able to listen: to listen to what I was saying, listen to the audience, listen to the complex feelings that were passing through me. I could take the pulse of show. The form of the piece was deeply satisfying: this attempt to evoke a man and his work not by impersonating him but by summoning him out of the ether. In The Importance of Being Oscar the narrative formed a framework for sections of great virtuosity in which I would play several characters speaking to each other, or evoke the Victorian theatre (in the brilliant five-minute digest of Dorian Gray), or dazzle with a very flashy speech from Salome in the original French, always returning to the man, Oscar Wilde. With Importance, I had found myself again as an actor. It was nothing to do with a rejection of acting with other people, nothing to do with not wanting to do plays any more: it was a reassertion of the sheer pleasure of storytelling, a return of my delight in the power of language to evoke worlds, a renewal of the pact between me and the audience, a joyous rediscovery of the exhilaration of creating character.
The end of the brief run of The Importance of Being Oscar was perfectly timed to coincide with the anniversary of Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol. The day after we closed, I went down to Reading and performed the whole of the Ballad outside of the gaol, which is now – how Wilde would have wept! – a remand centre for young offenders. A few friends came down and passers-by gathered round and we drank some champagne and ate smoked-salmon sandwiches and it was all very touching. Not the least touching thing was to discover that all the inmates of the remand centre were issued with copies of the poem on arrival.
After The Importance of Being Oscar, I started urgently thinking of another writer whose life and work would be suitable for the mac Liammóir treatment. The qualification was obviously that the life and the work had to be of equal fascination. I at once thought of Balzac, but rejected him – reluctantly: the particular sweep and fervour of French romanticism remains something I long to bring to life on a British stage, but it seemed perverse to do a writer in translation – and then turned, inevitably, as it now seems, to Dickens. Dickens had been my literary hero ever since at the age of twelve a copy of The Pickwick Papers had been put in my hands as I lay in bed trying not to itch the scabs that chicken pox had left all over my body. Once I started reading, I was never tempted to itch again. Later, I played Bob Cratchit and Scrooge, as I have recounted, in rep, and Micawber on television. More recently,
again on television, I had recreated, for two consecutive Christmases, a number of Dickens’s public readings. This was my first direct connection with the man himself. These public readings are central to an understanding of his personality and indeed his life. I reviewed Malcolm Andrews’s Dickens as a Reader in the Guardian in 2006.
Alongside the huge and ever-expanding tide of Shakespeare studies there is a more modest but equally interesting wave of Dickens studies lapping gently along. From a biographical point of view, the difference between these Titans is, of course, that we know so little about Shakespeare whereas – with certain crucial lacunae – we know almost everything about Dickens. Unlike the shadowy playwright from Stratford, Dickens lived his adult life in a lurid glare of publicity, much of it self-generated; he was a tireless speech-maker; his collected correspondence runs to twelve large volumes and his reading tours brought him into direct contact with his public both in America and Britain in a way that no author had ever achieved before (nor has any since).
His contemporaries were fascinated and sometimes appalled by him and many of them wrote of him with detailed discernment. In the matter of the readings – a key and central element in his output – there were no fewer than three books published while he was still alive describing what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. It remains an area of deep interest, not least because it underlines how perfectly unique he was in the annals of literature. There have been plenty of authors eager to read from their works – even in Dickens’s own time Thackeray and others had had a go – but most of them were content, as Dickens wickedly put it, to ‘drone away like a mild bagpipe’. What Dickens offered was a major histrionic event, brilliantly stage-managed, in which he electrified huge numbers of people in vast auditoria, creating stampedes for tickets, rousing his hearers to almost uncontrollable laughter or tears.
He had always had a taste for acting and the theatre, even contemplating a career on the boards. Famously, he cancelled an audition at Drury Lane because he had a cold, and before he could arrange another, his journalistic activities suddenly took off and he was lost to the stage. Instead, he indulged his passion for theatre in amateur dramatics, although there was nothing amateur about the all-consuming seriousness with which he took every aspect of the productions. At a charity benefit in which he participated, a stagehand told him, ‘What an actor you would have been, Mr Dickens, if it hadn’t been for them books.’ The idea of reading from his novels came to him relatively late: his debut was in Birmingham in 1853, reading from A Christmas Carol for a benefit, and the success of that and subsequent readings led him to embark, five years later, on the arduous and very well-paid professional tours which continued until a few months before his death, to which they may well have contributed a great deal, at the age of fifty-eight.
In his subtle and probing study, Malcolm Andrews, acknowledging the great pioneering work of Philip Collins, examines every aspect of this phenomenon, and in doing so comes very close the heart of the mystery of Charles Dickens, at the same time offering some strikingly original insights into the nature of acting and performance. At the core of his analysis is his understanding of the nature of what might be called the Dickens enterprise. What was he up to? What sort of relationship did he seek to establish with his readers (and eventually his audiences)? Andrews acutely notes that Dickens was the most successful – indeed the only really successful – writer of novels in serial form: the directness of the rapport with his readers, the sense that he was coming into their houses on a regular basis, that every fresh instalment was, as the Illustrated London News observed, ‘as if we’d received a letter or a visit at regular intervals from a kindly observant gossip’, appealed to him greatly. In 1841, after Barnaby Rudge, he determined to write a novel without serialising it as he wrote, but when it came to it, he missed the regular rapport with his readers too much. He regarded the relationship between reader and writer as one of ‘travelling companionship’. Andrews notes the sense of intimacy with his readers that approached collaboration: he was inundated by suggestions from the readers of Pickwick as to what should happen next. ‘To commune with the public in any form is a labour of love.’ He aspired to ‘live in the household affections’ and hoped that his characters would take their place ‘among the household gods’ – as they assuredly did.
It was a logical step from this to public performance. Logical to us, that is, but for a Victorian, there was the terrible stigma of the theatre to overcome. Dickens agonised over the propriety of appearing not only in public, but for money; his best friend John Forster argued strongly against it, but Dickens’s compulsive need for direct communication with his readers overcame all objections. At first, the readings were relatively low-key: the characters lightly sketched in and a conversational narratorial tone maintained. Increasingly, however, his desire to escape into character prevailed. He learned the texts by heart and rehearsed them intensively. As a young man and aspiring actor he had been deeply influenced by the actor-writer Charles Mathews, whose wittily designated monopolylogues had the performer playing several different people, as well as the narrator. Like Mathews, Dickens came increasingly to delight in abandoning himself to the characters, and this aspect of his performances drew the astonished admiration of his audiences (many of whom were professional actors themselves). ‘Assumption,’ he said, ‘has charms for me… being someone in voice &c. not at all like myself.’
Before the audience’s very eyes, and without the aid of props or costume, he would become David Copperfield, Mrs Gamp, Fagin. ‘The impersonator’s very stature,’ reported Charles Kent, ‘each time Fagin opened his lips, seemed to be changed instantaneously. Whenever he spoke there started before us – high-shouldered with contracted chest, with birdlike claws, eagerly anticipating by their every movement the passionate words… his whole aspect, half vulpine, half vulture-like, in its hungry wickedness.’ This description underlines the fact that acting is above all an act of imagination rather than of external representation: it is an overpowering mental connection which produces a physical result. Malcolm Andrews finely says: ‘In order to get the right voice, in a concentrated way, Dickens had to move his full being into that of the character.’ I can think of no better description of the art of acting, and Dickens’s readings, bereft of any external aids, show this in particularly pure form. He explored in the flesh, as he had done in his novels, ‘the fissility of self’, the multiphrenia latent in us all.
It cost him dear. He spoke of tearing himself to pieces, seeing himself as some sort of Orphic figure: ‘the modern embodiment of the old enchanters whose familiars tore them to pieces’. But his submission to this self-morcellation, as Andrews calls it, was in paradoxical service to the primary drive of his writing: reconstituting the sundered body of society. Every one of his readings was in that sense a paradigm of the great effort of his work: healing society, restoring it to oneness. There is something medieval in his sense of the interconnectedness of everything. The contemporary Times reviewer who described these performances as a ‘return to the practice of Bardic times’ correctly catches the oddly atavistic quality of Dickens. He was the enemy of Progress, in the Victorian sense, as much as he was of Poverty: alienation was what he set out to abolish, in himself as much as in society. When he read, the surge of affection from the public moved him to tears and helped, however, temporarily, to heal his own sense of internal estrangement; even I, a hundred and fifty years later, acting as a mere conduit for his work and personality, felt this massive affection for him rising up from the audience, the deep-rooted sense that he speaks to us and for us.
The readings gave him a spurious lease of life. His transformation from prematurely old, lame, frail man into energetic, vital, compelling storyteller was widely noted. It is something with which many of us in the theatre are familiar – Dr Theatre, we call it. But in this case, the treatment didn’t cure him: it killed him. Andrews’s last pages, describing the final reading – of A Christmas Carol, ending as he had begun
– are inexpressibly moving. ‘From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful and affectionate farewell.’ Andrews writes with deep imaginative sympathy of the phenomenon that was Dickens. ‘In mid-Victorian towns and cities he arrived in person to conduct people nightly into a world where the great blaze of Christmas celebrations issuing from the red hearth of the reading platform threw giant shadows around the hall of listeners, and where, for Scrooge, Past and Present, reality and illusion became therapeutically confused.’
The more I read about Dickens, the more I sensed that he represented, both in his social attitudes and in his literary vision, a tradition which was almost pre-Shakespearean; Chaucerian, perhaps; carnivalesque, like Falstaff. (He had had rather a success as Falstaff, as it happens, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in his own fanatically well-rehearsed production.) This piece was written for the Chicago Examiner in 2003.
When he was already well-established as the most prosperous and famous novelist of his day – not just in England – Charles Dickens was to be found stalking the streets of London at dead of night, witnessing for himself the atrocious conditions under which laboured the wretched of the earth. ‘There lay, in an old egg box, which the mother had begged from a shop, a feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly parting – there he lay quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said, he seldom complained. He lay there, seeming to wonder what it was all about. God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering – and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be.’