My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  His anger thus fuelled, Dickens turned it into incandescent words – hundreds and hundreds of pages of journalism, speeches up and down the country, and of course the great novels of his maturity, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit – in which he puts Britain at its industrial zenith in the dock, prosecuting with savage ferocity those whom he held responsible for the iniquities he had witnessed. His compassion had never been in doubt from the very first – from the early sketches he wrote under the name of Boz, from The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist – but to this was added a kind of volcanic rage which made him more than ever publicly identified with the disadvantaged. With A Christmas Carol and its explicit attacks on the disparity between those who have and those who do not, he had given the conscience of the age a powerful jolt, but that was just a beginning. From his early forties until his death some fifteen years later, he never ceased to engage with the howling injustice he saw all around him. This is not in itself, of course, enough to make a great novelist. But when this sort of active, practical, radical determination to reform the system under which he lived is allied to a genius for storytelling and an incomparable imagination in the creation of character, you have a pretty potent combination.

  There is nothing distant or cool about Dickens, nothing formal or academic. His structures are big and unwieldy; he seems to be making it up as he goes along, which of course is exactly what he did, writing in episodes, sometimes knocking off three or four at a time for weekly or monthly publication, as he pursued his active, not to say frantic, other life – corresponding, speechifying, editing (weekly journals and even, for a time, a crusading daily newspaper), partying, breeding (ten children by the time he was forty), performing conjuring tricks with nonchalant ease – the fruit of much serious rehearsal.

  The thing that pulses through his work like an electric current is his almost carnal need to communicate with his readers. His relationship with them far exceeds in intensity any other relationship in his life: those with his children (devoted but formal), his wife (initially affectionate, ultimately disgusted), his friends (passionate but erratic), or even his hidden mistress Ellen Ternan, thirty years his junior; we can only conjecture at the nature of his feelings for her, though it is safe to say that an element of play-acting – he adopted the persona of ‘Mr Tringham’ to throw the curious off the trail – must have formed a large part of them.

  His relationship with his public was something quite different, altogether more real. Simply put, he needed their love in order to exist. Like a lover, he responded instantly to their moods and to their wants; they for their part expected him to speak for them, to express their joys and their miseries, to create for them their monsters and their comic heroes. Almost shamanically, he was possessed by their spirit, the great popular carnival spirit. His playful, metamorphosing language – distorting, personifying, now engorging, now withering, transforming a city into a single breathing organism or an individual into a swarming mass of grotesque features – is the vernacular mode at its most extended and its most exuberant. He embodies appetite, glories in extremes. This is where he can most be compared to Shakespeare, his immediate superior in the pantheon of English literature – in this, and in his matchless creation of character. Only in the matter of sex is he oddly reticent, almost blank. In every other area, his inventiveness is almost surreal, which is why adaptations of his books, attempting to treat him as a social realist, or a psychological realist, are so rarely successful. The screen and even the stage have a confining effect on the psychedelic fantasias of Dickens’s pen.

  In true carnival spirit, Dickens’s work is a performance, generous and unstinting, for his audience of readers. We never forget that it is him that is doing it, nor that he is doing it for us. And, on cue, we laugh, we cry, we moan, we applaud. Dickens is the writer as actor. In life, of course, he acted whenever he had the opportunity, finally, triumphantly, taking to the boards with great tours of England and America in which he ‘read’ his own work. His audiences (who also knew his books by heart and who were more or less chanting the words in unison with him) were in ecstasy: they thronged to him in their thousands and the performances became cathartic experiences, both comic and tragic, on a grand scale. They were unprecedented events, only to be compared today in their emotional fervour to rock concerts; but they were implicit in the novels themselves: the literal performance was the logical extension of the literary one.

  Dickens wrote fiercely and pertinently about the abuses of his day, which are not, alas, so different from the abuses of ours. He attacked imbalances in income, indifference to mental suffering, the venality of lawyers, the heartlessness of capitalists, the death of the soul and the rape of the child. But it is not for this alone that we read him now; not even for the great generous heart, or for the unique literary voice. It is for his huge populist energy that we love him and need him, for his assertion of the glorious vitality of human life and the united diversity of society, for his denial of uniformity and his exploration of the unbounded manifestations of man and woman, both peccable and sublime. Dickens, the hero of his own age, reaches out to a tradition and a culture which long precedes it, which even antedates the Elizabethan period, and asserts, for our own age in which the twin horrors of globalisation and fundamentalism – both tending towards the standardisation of human experience – threaten to overwhelm us, the glorious, contradictory and unsuppressible bounteousness of the human experience.

  Dickens’s passion for the stage and indeed his own performances of his own work brought an inherently theatrical dimension to the enterprise. Although Peter Ackroyd is not a dramatist, his stupendous biography of Dickens, like much of his work, is theatrical through and through, full of mirrors and smoke, and with a superlative sense of the grotesque. He provided me with a wonderful play which at first he called Bring on the Bottled Lightning (one of Dickens’s descriptions of himself as a reader), a title we feared would not be immediately comprehensible. Instead, reluctantly, we settled on The Mystery of Charles Dickens (obviously on the model of Edwin Drood). In the event it turned out to be rather apt: the play grew into the title. I performed it all over the world, in Australia, in Ireland, in Chicago, on Broadway. This is the second part of the article I wrote for the New York Times in time for our opening there.

  As in The Importance of Being Oscar, the central event in The Mystery of Charles Dickens is, we hope, the raising of a ghost, in this case that of Charles Dickens. By the end of the show, we hope that you will feel that you have been swept up in and touched by the life and the unparalleled charisma of that unique author: that you will have spent time in the company of his characters, invoked not so much in rounded psychological depth as by the flickering footlights of the Victorian theatre in all its excess and power: and that you will have walked the dank London streets with him and experienced the vanished idyll of childhood which he so desperately sought to recover. G. K. Chesterton said of Dickens that wherever he went in the world, his journeys were always travels in Dickensland. Here is another, in the company of the author. The form of the piece is perhaps even better suited to Dickens than it is to Wilde. Wilde was a dramatist, which Dickens was not; his plays are peculiarly bad, lacking any individual touches. He was so utterly stage-struck that in his dramatic works, he simply and slavishly imitated the plays of the day.

  But his novels, paradoxically, are supremely theatrical. ‘Dickens enters the theatre of the world through the stage door,’ as Santayana memorably remarked. He himself longed to go on stage, and participated, with some distinction, in innumerable theatrical productions as an amateur, playing a fine Falstaff and a better Bobadill; he even secured an audition with a famous actor-manager. The very form of his novels, the structure of his characters and the arc of his dialogue, are derived from popular theatrical forms of his time, in which he would play many characters in the course of an evening. Eventually, Dickens fused his talents in the public readings which dominated his last years, in the course of which he astounded hu
ge crowds on both sides of the Atlantic with his histrionic genius, producing uncontrollable mirth and asphyxiating horror in his listeners, and inhabiting no less than eighty-nine characters in the course of eighteen different readings, seeming to become each in turn.

  Dickens is the Writer as Actor, finally come to claim a Broadway stage. And in the course of the evening, this one-man play will introduce you to forty-nine characters, Charles Dickens and – ahem – me. Or me as invented by Peter Ackroyd: one more level of ontological jiggery-pokery. It’s all done by mirrors, of course; it’s a conjuring trick (one of which, perhaps, Dickens would have approved: he was a practised and dazzling magician himself, in the guise of the Unparalleled Necromancer Rhama Rhia Roos). Now perhaps it’s a little clearer why we call it The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

  I had been rather in love with Oscar Wilde, but Dickens took me over, body and soul. He is titanic: phenomenal, inspiring, appalling. He is generous and destructive, subtle and stupendous. To be in contact with him and his work is like standing in front of a blazing fire. He is a life force. In his journalism, Wilde affected an amused and fastidious disdain for Dickens’s vulgarity and broadness. But when he was admitted to prison, the first books he asked for were Dickens’s (though they did not include The Old Curiosity Shop, of the death of whose heroine, Little Nell, Wilde had famously remarked that it was impossible to read without bursting into… laughter). From my point of view as an actor, I had the odd sensation that I had found my perfect author. He fitted me like a glove. This was a little regrettable in that he had neglected to write any performable plays, so I would always – or so I assumed – be at the mercy of adaptations. The distinction between drama and theatre is a profound one, and it is not a paradox to say that our greatest novelist is our most theatrical writer.

  Rethinking

  The Mystery of Charles Dickens was my first experience of the so-called No. 1 Touring Circuit in the British Isles, something to which I took with great enthusiasm. Apart from anything else, it was deeply satisfying to act in the remarkable theatres – most of them Victorian or Edwardian – which are still the underpinning of this country’s remarkably healthy tradition. I reviewed John Earl’s British Theatres and Music Halls in 2005.

  Theatres are architecture, to be sure, finished, achieved, but they house a living art and accordingly and inevitably are both influenced by the work that appears on their stages, and exercise an influence over it. The revelations offered by the reconstructed (or, more precisely, reinvented) Globe Theatre on the South Bank are the most vivid example of the interdependence of building and performance; whatever you might think of any individual production under Mark Rylance’s richly idiosyncratic regime, no director or actor of plays by Shakespeare or his contemporaries can think of them in quite the same way again.

  The relationship with the audience is the key. Any player will tell you that certain plays suddenly come to life in certain spaces, although it is by no means dependable that a small theatre will afford you intimacy or that a very large one will inhibit it. The whole business is something of a mystery, and it is hugely to the credit of John Earl’s small but exceptionally nourishing volume on the subject that he acknowledges, as he traces the development of the theatre building from the sixteenth century to the present, that it has above all been a pragmatic process, and that certain individuals (the Edwardian theatre architect Frank Matcham perhaps the greatest of them) have mastered its secrets without being able to pass them on. He traces a steady chronological line, showing how the Elizabethan outdoor theatres evolved out of courtyards, how the move indoors immediately changed the habits of audiences and of practitioners, both actors and writers. He charts the regular decline and fall of enthusiasm for theatre, how regularly it seems to sicken, then on its very deathbed leaps up with new vigour.

  He is particularly good on the growth of the music hall from mere incidental entertainment into a central and unique phenomenon, cutting across classes and giving rise to massive buildings of unparalleled splendour. The London Coliseum was the greatest of these, but, with characteristic vividness of phrase, Earl notes that in its very design ‘it contained an infection that was to prove fatal’ – a projection booth: film would kill the music hall and probably (with its housebound sister, television) for ever destroy theatre as a great popular art. He is no architectural nostalgic, cheerfully contemplating the complete reconstruction of Elisabeth Scott’s unsatisfactory Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, though he professes a surprising enthusiasm for Lasdun’s ugly, dysfunctional National Theatre.

  It is astonishing how much information and stimulation Earl has packed into his sixty pages, and the illustrations are simply superb – plentiful, unhackneyed and magnificently reproduced. And very – improbably – cheap. The book should be put in the Tessa Jowell grab-bag of books that all schoolchildren are about to receive: it’s an utterly alluring introduction to the passion that theatre buildings inspire both in audiences and actors. Now that the Sixties’ conviction that red-and-gold auditoriums were elitist and alienating has quietly died, audiences have voted with their feet on the subject. The theatre building should be an entertainment in itself, an environment out of the usual run, an invitation into the world of the imagination. Earl admirably demonstrates the variety of forms that invitation can take.

  Because the Dickens show, like the Wilde show that had inspired it, had such direct contact with audiences, the venue was of paramount importance. Facing the audience head-on of course creates an immediate and direct relationship with them which is matchlessly exciting.

  Although the solo performances dominated so much of my professional life, and were so deeply satisfying, I was conscious that in a sense, they were divergences from the main path. I wondered whether I had abandoned the proper pursuit of an actor which is, after all, the interpretation of character. In my frustration with, and doubt about, acting, I had been reading and rereading various books on the subject, and had become fascinated by a good new translation of a book I had struggled with some twenty years earlier, To the Actor by the great Russian actor and teacher, Mikhail (or Michael, as he called himself after he fled to the West) Chekhov, Anton’s nephew.

  The more I read, the more I fell in love with Michael Chekhov, both as man and as teacher. Mostly through his writing, of course, but what little we have of his acting on film, and the electrifying descriptions of his stage work – even the photographs of his characterisations – are both inspiring and encouraging. If I cast my eye back over my own work as an actor, it was clear that I was at my best – Arturo Ui, Mozart, Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman – when I was able to be expressively free, not trying to offer photographic or realistic conceptions, but rather creating fantastical projections of character, each one a complete universe of expression in itself. This was the Michael Chekhov route. I attended Chekhov symposiums and weekends, meeting some of the leading practitioners in the world, Russian, American and Australian, discovering what the practical applications of the teaching might be. As a result of these encounters, perhaps, I was asked to write an introduction to a new edition of To the Actor.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are in the throes of a crisis in theatre acting. It is clearly not a crisis in talent: actors are as eager, as gifted, as attractive as they have ever been – perhaps more so. The stars are younger, their bodies are in better condition, they apply themselves energetically to all the physical aspects of the job. But something isn’t happening. Audiences feel it; actors feel it. Disappointment is in the air. The theatre isn’t delivering. Audiences over a certain age start to rumble about the Golden Age when actors were really actors, while actors for their part start to complain about the declining quality of audiences. All sorts of other theatre experiences become more interesting than those which focus on acting: the musical theatre, for example, with its combination of spectacle, noise, rhythm, and sheer energy, which can, properly manipulated, whip up an audience into a state of frenetic excitement; or what is
called physical theatre – as if theatre, which is the word made flesh, could be anything other than physical! – which brings elements of dance, of acrobatics, of circus into play, taking the spotlight away from language and from character and into the realm of choreography. The search for new forms of theatre never ceases. What is curious is that no one ever discusses acting in this context.

  *

  The last time there was a full debate about acting in the British theatre was in the late Fifties and early Sixties of the last century, and it may be interesting to consider what came out of it. The debate was provoked by the revolution in playwriting at the Royal Court Theatre, which led to an urgent demand for new kinds of acting. The old guard of actors, whether suave exponents of drawing-room comedy, or high priests and priestesses of the classics (often they were the same people), had dominated the post-war theatre and they were now denounced as bourgeois, individualist, elitist, shallow, technical. Where were the new actors for the new plays? They were there, waiting in the wings, ready to swing into action, the generation famously trained by John Fernald at the RADA: working class, regional, feisty, real. For a while they and their mentors – the firebrand, mostly left-wing directors of the epoch – plunged into a heady exploration of the possibilities of acting. Sometimes from aesthetic, sometimes from political perspectives, they investigated mask work, improvisation, theatre games; they embraced the theories of Bertolt Brecht. Occasionally they threw a loving glance sideways to the pioneering work of Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop in the East End of London. With her unique mix of theory and sheer bloody-mindedness, she had offered an approach both to new plays and to the classics which was almost medieval in its vitality and impudence and demanded of her actors a kind of magnificent rough poetry.