My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  I have known Waiting for Godot quite well since I was sixteen; I have seen productions of it all over the world, in several languages. A few years ago, when Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for Godot came to London, I was asked by the Guardian newspaper to write a piece about it, and in preparation for the piece, I reread the play and browsed through a biography or two and some critical studies. So you might have thought that I was pretty well prepared when Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Ronnie Pickup, Sean Mathias and I assembled to rehearse the play.

  In fact, as we read it, I realised that I had never understood the play at all. Not in the sense of failing to grasp it intellectually: contrary to its reputation, it is fairly transparent from that point of view. Nor was the form of the play so very difficult. Partly under its influence, plays have become far more exploratory both in terms of language and of technique. No, what I had absolutely failed to realise until I sat down and read it with my fellow actors was the scope of the action: the scale of the journeys made by each of the characters and the epic, even heroic energy that was involved in doing it. I’d written in the Guardian that ‘like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.’ Yes, indeed, perfectly true, Professor, but actually doing it, staking out that path, working through all the stages along it, following every twist and turn, ending up in the extraordinary place to which Beckett takes the characters, was quite another matter. After the first read-through, I turned to one of the producers, Arnold Crook, and said ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to do this.’ Again, it wasn’t that the character was hard to recognise or that his emotions were obscure: it was a question of how one would rise to them, how one would make them real and overwhelming – of whether I could, as the old actors used to say, ‘come near it’.

  I have never been more terrified of any play. I am aware that this sounds like luvvie-speak, but it is terrifying to contemplate one’s own inability to do justice to a part. And Beckett, like the Greek tragic dramatists, offers no carefully graded development, no psychological entrée into the emotions depicted: you simply have to open yourself up to them and let them course through you; you have to become their conduit. And the way to do this, we quickly discovered, is by absolutely mastering the text and then letting it do its work. This is how it is with musicians; and Beckett is as much a composer as he is a dramatist. In the first weeks, we talked through every line, every phrase of the play. But it was when we stood up and began to find the play’s music that it started to seize our souls. And this meant listening with extraordinary intensity, to ourselves and to each other. Increasingly, we were reminded of Beckett’s famous reply to an actor who had asked him, ‘What does this line mean?’ ‘What does it say?’ he had answered. Not ‘What is it about?’ – ‘What does it say?’ And the more we attended to what the characters actually said, the more astonishing the play became. Again and again Sean would say: ‘I think there’s more to that speech. Keep digging in.’

  Once we hit the road, we were hugely relieved to discover that the audiences that came to the play in their coachloads were quite undaunted by Godot’s fearsome reputation. They were immediately intrigued by these two dropouts: they knew exactly what they were saying, their anxieties and their meagre hopes; they enjoyed their jokes and their domestic frustrations; and then they were horribly disturbed by the sudden eruption on to the stage of a blustering man brandishing a whip, with another, silent man at the end of a rope. The audience, as audiences always do, taught us the story. The play has been haunted by a remark by one of the play’s first admirers: ‘In Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, twice.’ But the audience’s response told us that, on the contrary, in Waiting for Godot, Pozzo and Lucky happen, twice, and each of their appearances has a shattering effect on the other two characters. On the road, the response to the play was astonishing. I believe it is true to say that we never consciously tried to make the play funny, but the more we played what the lines said, the louder and louder the laughter rang round all those great regional theatres, and the deeper and deeper the awe with which the terrible truths Beckett exposes was received. He once said: ‘I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them.’ Nor did we. But the audience got it, loud and clear.

  It was not until the third week of the tour of Godot that I began to feel wholly on top of the physical demands of Pozzo: the props, the rope, the coat, the eating. These had to be absolutely precise. Until they were, there could be no movement forward. Once they were, and the text was deeply rooted in my brain, it became possible to try to discover what was really there. Following Beckett’s advice, I simply looked at what the characters said. Pozzo’s account of himself is astonishing – he speaks of having slaves, of taking Lucky to the market to sell him; especially surprisingly, he speaks of Lucky having taught him all he knows, of having been his tutor (‘knook’). He hints at some terrible catastrophe that reduced Lucky to the subhuman creature that he is. Ronnie Pickup and I began to build a deep, complex, murky relationship. It was as if Pozzo and Lucky were a married couple: the second married couple in the play, because Didi and Gogo are similarly spliced. But the more we played the play, the more clearly it seemed to me that what happens in the play is that Everyman and his twin brother pool their anxieties, and then human history erupts on stage: a man enslaved by another man. This is the essence of Empire. I reread Heart of Darkness: Pozzo seems to share, as well as Kurtz’s crazed colonial savagery, his sense of primal horror. Idi Amin came into my mind, a tyrant who, like Pozzo, desperately needed an audience, wanted to bask in approval; a man who had waded through blood. Pozzo’s manic-depressive descents into abject melancholy had to be real, almost life-threatening. And yet, from somewhere he always finds the impulse to continue. ‘On, on!’ is his great cry. I listened to music of epic breadth: as I walked around the streets I sang – to the alarm of passers-by – the great brass chorale of the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the top of my voice, to expand my instrument; and then I remembered the terrible third movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, which seemed to me precisely to describe Lucky and Pozzo’s journey across the blasted landscape, the strings’ savagely ticking ostinato pierced by shrieks of pain from the woodwind. Every time I ever did the show, I listened to this music, had it running in my head as I stepped on stage. When Pozzo comes back in the second act, blind and broken, both physically and vocally, I wanted to show his frailty, certainly, but behind that his indomitability. I replaced his stentorian basso profundo with the querulous but penetrating and determined voice of my old friend Frith Banbury, who had just died at the age of ninety-six. ‘What do you do when you fall over far from help?’ asks Vladimir. ‘We wait until we can get up,’ says Pozzo, impatiently, ‘and then we go on. On!’ Beckett demands a huge impersonality, truly epic acting. Despite my dread and uncertainty, I felt licensed to go down this path by Beckett’s own choice of actor for the part: when asked by Roger Blin who in an ideal world he would like for the roles, he said, ‘For Vladimir, Buster Keaton, for Gogo, Chaplin, and for Pozzo – Charles Laughton.’

  I felt that I had really done something with Pozzo, that it was, as Laughton would say, ‘a creation’. I like to think that Michael Chekhov might have approved of it; it sits with half a dozen other performances – Arturo Ui, Mozart, Molina, Falstaff, Verlaine, Lord Foppington – by which I would ask to be judged at the theatrical pearly gates.

  While the revival of Godot was playing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, I was acting at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, two monologues by Dickens. He performed them as public readings, in his habitual tails at the lectern, but spoken in the first person, in character and in costume, they amount to monodramas. At last I had found the Dickens plays he had neglected to write, so much more satisfactory, as Michael Billington pointed out in the Guardian, than ‘cut-and
-paste jobs adapted from the novels’. Written in the last decade of his life, at the very height of his powers, they have the full span of Dickens at his most extended. Dr Marigold, in particular, in its tumultuous narrative flow, swooping in and out of sentiment and comedy with breathtaking speed, exemplifying the technique he called ‘streaky bacon’, affected audiences in Hammersmith as much as it had affected the Victorians, who loved it second only to A Christmas Carol. I wrote a piece for the programme about one of Dickens’s great inspirations: I called it He do the police in different voices (the original title of The Waste Land, as it happens).

  As a young man, Dickens’s appetite for theatre-going was insatiable. He claimed that for a three-year period during his young manhood, he went to the theatre every single night. His taste was catholic, embracing variety, melodrama, Shakespeare and sentimental comedy. But his favourite by far was Charles Mathews, an extraordinarily original performer who pioneered a form of theatre he called monodramatics – one-man pieces in which he played a dozen or more characters. The first of these pieces he called At Home; all his subsequent plays were known generically as At Homes. They were in two halves, in the first of which Mathews appeared as himself, narrating a journey, in which he described and increasingly became the characters he encountered. The second half – a straightforward farce made unusual by the fact that he played all the characters – was dubbed by Mathews (ever the enthusiastic neologist), a monopolylogue. They were no mere show-off pieces. Leigh Hunt observed that ‘for the richness and variety of his humour,’ they were ‘as good as half a dozen plays distilled’.

  As the characters in the monopolylogue came and went they changed costume, taking the performance to a high pitch of virtuosity, for which he must have combined the transvestite skills of Arturo Brachetti with the ear of Mike Yarwood. In Youthful Days, a big hit of the 1830s, he played, in rapid succession, a servant, a dandy, a French organist, a knight (Sir Shiveraine Scrivener), Monsieur Zephyr, a stout Welshman (ap Llewellyn-ap Lloyd), a skinny snooker player (Mark Moomin), and, finally, Moomin’s wife Amelrose. It could so easily have been a generalised blur of stereotypes, but the quality his contemporaries above all admired in Mathews was his verisimilitude. He departed entirely from the set types of comedy, thereby, according to E. B. Watson, introducing ‘what later would have been called “character acting”’. He toured America, where he is credited with introducing demotic language into local playwriting: a piece he wrote specially for the tour, The African-American, in which he performed, in blackface and in dialect, a version of ‘Possum Up a Gum Tree’, had a surprisingly liberating effect on contemporary American drama. He died at fifty-nine, in 1835.

  This is the extraordinary performer Dickens so admired; indeed, he had memorised a chunk of one of the monopolylogues to perform at the audition for the Covent Garden Theatre he had so fatefully to cancel because of the flu. But Mathews’s influence stayed with him, and was recognised as such; indeed, when The Pickwick Papers appeared, he was roundly accused of plagiarising the character of Jingle from Mathews (by then dead), which is as may be. But his art is felt throughout Dickens’s novels in the constant sense of vocal virtuosity, of projected performance. Like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, and like Mathews before him, Dickens – the author as actor – did the police in different voices.

  Even in his models, Dickens is unexpected. In some unfathomable way, I feel deeply connected to him; in 2012, the year of his bicentenary, I’ll be playing the character in all of Dickens that I love most: Mr Pickwick. To embody that bonhomie, that profound optimism, that eternally springing hope that Dickens placed at the centre of his first novel, trying to convince himself against all the evidence of his early experience that the world is essentially benevolent, fills me with joy. As the Inimitable puts it, inimitably: ‘And in the midst of all this, stood Mr Pickwick. Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light; we, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at our visionary companions, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.’

  *

  One of the most pleasing things that has ever happened to me is the superb translation into French of my first book by Gisèle Joly, a French actress who learned English in order to perform the task, and who furnished the new edition with a comprehensive glossary of all the people mentioned in the book, which thus stands as a sort of monument to all my colleagues and partners in crime over the thirty-five years of my life in the theatre.

  Two years ago, some actors from the Comédie Française read out passages from the translation at the Maison de Molière itself, to a large audience of actors, who responded with recognition and hilarity. That the book I wrote twenty-five years ago could reach this entirely new audience, and that that audience felt that what I had written was both true and funny, was deeply satisfying. I end the present book with these words I wrote for the French edition.

  When I wrote Being an Actor, my first book, hoping to paint a truthful portrait of life in the theatre I used autobiographical form, because I believed that only by giving a precise account of my own journey through the theatre, blow by blow, could I convey anything worth telling about my life as an actor and the lives of my fellow actors. This was a gamble. Not all actors’ lives have been like mine, and when I remarked at the beginning of the book that I hoped actors would say, ‘That’s what being an actor is like,’ I knew that there was a very good chance that they might say, ‘Oh no it isn’t.’ As it happens, to my infinite gratification, it seems that despite my really rather brief experience then of the theatre and acting – I wrote the book when I had been professionally employed for only nine years – I had told a truth that many of my fellow thespians in the British theatre were able to recognise. I never expected that it could speak to actors from other countries and other traditions. Again, I was most happily surprised. A successful American edition followed quite soon after the book’s appearance in Britain, and then, astoundingly, the first half of the book was translated into Russian; a few years ago an intrepid translator even rendered it into Slovenian (Biti Igralec). Again, the results were warmly received. Actors in these different countries seemed to feel that I had hit the nail on the head in two main areas: the experience of actually performing, and the things that lead one to become an actor. And I have begun to feel that, despite the wildly dissimilar structures and even aspirations of different theatrical cultures, there are some universal elements that we can all recognise.

  I am especially delighted that this book is finally being translated into French. My grandmother was French – her father, an English teacher in Lyon, was said, according to family myth, to have taught Sarah Bernhardt the part of Hamlet – and I have always been profoundly engaged by French culture. French is the only foreign language I speak and I love the music of it, its shapes, its constraints, its passionate precision, its analytical aptitude, its innate intelligence. I have translated four plays from the French (Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale, my stage version of Prévert’s Les Enfants du Paradis, Milan Kundera’s Jacques et Son Maître – a play originally written in French, not Czech – and La Crampe des Écrivains, a little squib by the composer Camille Saint-Saëns), and my hope has been to try to convey something of their essential Frenchness – even in the Kundera, which is after all inspired by Diderot. There are certain attributes of French acting, too, that I have longed to see on the British stage, above all what might be called the sexiness of the intellect, that capacity possessed by some actors – Pierre Brasseur, for example – to surrender no part of their brains when playing lovers (or actors). In my youth, I was lucky enough to see many great French actors of different kinds on stage – Marie Bell, Madeleine Renaud, Edwige Feuillère, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques Ch
aron, Robert Hirsch – and, different as they were, all of them were characterised by this keenness of wit, this penetrating power of thought. The great companies I was able to see, like the Compagnie Barrault-Renaud, Planchon’s TNP, Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil and the Comédie Française at various times over the last forty years, were also wonderfully nimble and dashing in their use of language. Nowadays I am more likely to see French actors on film, and they are among my favourite. (I have even acted in a French film, in French: Le Passager Clandestin, one of Simenon’s outre-mer stories.) My training was deeply influenced by Michel Saint-Denis (one of the founder members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as it happens, and Patron of my drama school) and through him by his master, Copeau. Many of the best and most provocative books about acting, too, have been French, characteristically emphasising the philosophical and the exploratory: from Diderot’s Paradoxe to Coquelin’s L’Art et le Comédien (the introduction to the English edition by Sir Henry Irving, no less), the autobiography of the divine Sarah, books of reflection by the great trinity of Antoine, Copeau and Jouvet, Barrault’s several volumes and Vilar’s single masterpiece, to say nothing of the visionary manifestos of the fiery angel, Artaud, and Saint-Denis’ seminal work, Theatre: the Rediscovery of Style, echoes from which will be found in the preceding pages. In fact, it is impossible to think of the theatre without thinking about the contribution of the French.