My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  I offer my book to the French public, and perhaps especially to the French profession, with all due modesty. It offers no system, whether analytical or prescriptive: it is a book of observation, mostly, I confess, self-observation. It came from an almost anthropological fascination with the world I found myself in, and with the particular and unique experiences I underwent while in it. It is predicated on a conviction that acting and the theatre are central to the human situation and illuminate a great deal more than themselves. Finally, it is, despite occasional outbursts of melancholy and even rage, an optimistic book, and an idealistic one. The theatre has the power of transforming lives, sometimes on a simple level, sometimes profoundly. It has the capacity to restore us to ourselves, to waken the part of ourselves that has gone to sleep, to throw off life’s oppressions. This is a noble calling. One of the most touching expressions of this is to be found in Guitry’s charming play Deburau. The great mime is pining for love of Marguérite Gautier, to the extent that a doctor is summoned: he seems to be dying. A medical examination reveals nothing untoward, so the doctor, who has not been told the name of his patient, says ‘I prescribe a visit to the theatre. Why don’t you go and see Deburau? He can banish the deepest depression.’ (Deburau of course leaps out of bed and rushes down to the theatre to resume his career, but it is too late: he is booed, and hands his name over to his son, who triumphs. The scene in which the old man instructs his son in what might be called the etiquette of acting will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who loves this profession.)

  A crucial element in what led me to write Being an Actor in the first place was to remind actors that they were not the slaves of either directors or authors or of The System, but autonomous creative artists who had control over their destinies, and who had grave responsibilities towards their audiences. I believe that they should occupy a central part in determining the functioning of the organisations to which they belong. For various historical reasons, in England, the phrase actor-manager has become a term of derision. But in the land of Jouvet, of Antoine, of Planchon, the idea expressed in the manifesto at the end of Being an Actor, which caused such a scandal on its first publication, that actors might resume control of their art, will scarcely provoke anything other than an unsurprised nod.

  Envoi

  I am almost embarrassed to have written so much about acting, the theatre and film: this book contains only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of words that have poured out of me over the past thirty years. If I sometimes seem combative, it is largely because there is, as I say elsewhere more than once, no broad debate about these matters, no sense of differing passionate views. The consensus prevails. As I did when I wrote Being an Actor, I feel that more, so much more, can be asked of actors and of acting. Occasionally an actor emerges who is in himself so original, whose choices are so unexpected that, like Charles Laughton eighty years ago, he shakes up the whole concept of what an actor can do. In the present time, Mark Rylance is such an actor. But what would be thrilling to me would be if whole companies were inspired by their own particular vision of acting. In Being an Actor I made a comparison with orchestras: why could acting companies not be self-governing, as orchestras were, hiring their own directors just as the musicians hired their conductors? But there is a more melancholy orchestral comparison to be made now: with every passing year, orchestral standards get higher and higher, but it becomes harder and harder to distinguish these orchestras from each other, except in terms of corporate excellence. This multinationalism has affected singers too: it is so very much harder now to recognise a singer by individual timbre. Similarly actors, especially in the theatre, seem all to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Once, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company stood for very different things: now their work – of undisputed excellence – is essentially indistinguishable. Once, the Royal Court pioneered a style of acting that served a new generation of authors, but also served us to make us see the classical theatre afresh, as, in radically difficult form, did Joan Littlewood. Now it, too, has adopted the lingua franca of acting.

  My plea is only the old Maoist prescription: let a hundred flowers blossom. After the preceding four hundred pages, it is pointless to deny that I am a romantic about the theatre, which has been the centre of my creative life for forty years. My view is a rather Chestertonian one, dreaming of guilds of actors, each fiercely loyal to each other and passionately convinced of the rightness of their own approach, engaging the public with their different wares. Most people, probably most actors and directors and audiences, are just grateful for good work, and good work is undoubtedly being done. But one could say about performances exactly what Orson Welles used to say about movies: ‘what’s the point of making a film unless you make a great one?’

  *

  While we were playing Waiting for Godot, it fell to me to arrange the memorial service for Paul Scofield, who had died a year before. As I have said, his death hit me hard, not because of our personal relationship, but because of what he represented. What I had said in the Guardian about the end of an epoch was cause for great reflection. By the time of the memorial service, I was sixty, and in some ways felt myself to be part of a vanishing world.

  The service took place in St Margaret’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey before a congregation packed with his colleagues stretching back over sixty years. I believe we did him honour. The choir sang Vaughan Williams; Eileen Atkins, who acted with him in his last public performance, spoke the end of the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets:

  Quick now, here, now, always –

  A condition of complete simplicity

  (Costing not less than everything)

  And all shall be well and

  All manner of thing shall be well

  When the tongues of flame are in-folded

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.

  Ian McKellen spoke the Lesson (from St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’). Scofield’s widow Joy Parker read Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’: ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’; his son Martin read his father’s favourite speech from Shakespeare, Henry VI’s lament:

  O God! methinks it were a happy life,

  To be no better than a homely swain;

  To sit upon a hill, as I do now,

  To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,

  Thereby to see the minutes how they run…

  Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!

  Seamus Heaney read Beowulf’s funeral – ‘They extolled his heroic nature and exploits and gave thanks for his greatness’ – from his own translation of the great poem, and at the very end, before we filed out, Paul’s matchless voice, Prospero renouncing his art, echoed round the chapel:

  Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,

  And ye that on the sands with printless foot

  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him

  When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

  By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,

  Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime

  Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice

  To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid –

  Weak masters though ye be – I have bedimmed

  The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds

  And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault

  Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder

  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

  With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory

  Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up

  The pine and cedar; graves at my command

  Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure, and when I have requir’d

  Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

&nb
sp; To work mine end upon their senses that

  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.

  I gave the Address. I suppose it sums up a great deal of what I’ve been saying in this book.

  Greatness – and from almost the very beginning, there was no question that Paul Scofield, for whose life and work we are giving thanks today, was touched with greatness – takes many forms. In the middle years of the twentieth century, there was in the British theatre an unprecedented outcrop of great actors: the roll call is astounding: Thorndike, Evans, Richardson, Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Wolfit, Redgrave, Guinness, all born within a few years of each other, each radically different from the other. The theatre revolved around these great figures: this was the golden age, not of directing or writing, but of acting. The actors were themselves managers and directors; the theatre was in their hands. Their fame made them public figures, ‘The glass of fashion, and the mould of form / The observ’d of all observers.’

  After the war, everything changed, not immediately, of course, but inexorably. And in the theatre, this meant that in the attempt to build the theatre anew, producers, directors and writers now increasingly became the central figures in the theatre. The great actors were still in their prime, and had great work still to do, but they were less and less leaders, more and more part of the team. Into this brave new world, the young Paul Scofield emerged. He was, in many ways, an actor for the new times. He was without managerial ambition, he had no desire to direct, he was utterly uninterested in the social position that fame conferred. What interested him was acting, and only acting. Discovering at an early age, as so many actors before him have done, that his scholastic gifts were meagre – a discovery that may have been an uncomfortable one, given that his father was the headmaster of the school he attended – he fell with inexpressible relief on acting, for which his gift was instantly apparent. Scofield was not in the least a boastful man, and not given to hyperbole, so we may believe him when he says that his thirteen-year-old Juliet was ‘a sensation’. Other sensations of a similar kind followed, and as soon as he possibly could, he left school to train at various modest establishments purporting to inculcate the dramatic arts, where he learned, he said, not so much technique as an understanding of his instrument.

  From a physical point of view, the young actor had quite exceptional advantages: he was tall and commanding, his face – uncommonly handsome, but in a highly individual way, mingling sensuality with severity, the eyes capable of great warmth and great coldness – was powerfully expressive. As for his voice, it was simply phenomenal, with more stops than any organ, from piping treble to full-throated diapason. Over the next sixty years, the critical thesaurus would be ransacked to describe its astonishing variety of registers: the sometimes grating, sometimes caressing, often sumptuous, sounds he seemed effortlessly to produce. But they were not just sounds: he had an intense relationship with language: he spoke of letting words loose in the echo chamber of his mind, where they would resonate with untold possibilities of meaning.

  There is a danger in such a prodigious endowment for a young actor, the temptation of mere virtuosity, or indeed of laziness, a reliance on mere physical impact. But the defining thing about the young Scofield was that he was never tempted by easy effectiveness. He seems always to have had an innate maturity, knowing that if he was to do his work as an actor he must painstakingly learn to understand and master his physical instrument, however superb; above all he must nurture the source of his work: his imagination, his inner life. Though charming, courteous and full of naughty fun by nature, he instinctively knew that the social life on which most actors thrive would be the enemy of his work. His delight in that work was so complete, his fulfilment by it so absolute, that to abandon the social round for its sake was nothing to him, especially after he found his life’s companion in the actress Joy Parker. They married and had two children, and Scofield wrapped his family round him like a strong fortress, enabling him to engage ever more deeply with his inner world.

  At an impressionable age, he had received a number of jolts to his system which had opened his eyes to the possibilities of the art to which he was devoting himself. He saw Sybil Thorndike playing Medea on a tour of mining villages, an experience which he described as shattering and life-changing. Later he joined her company. Turned down for military service, as a very young man he worked constantly in touring companies, learning, learning, learning, often from distinguished older actors and directors who, like him, had not been called up, acquiring as Christopher Fry said of him at that age, ‘a quiet mastery of his skills’. Luckily for him, though properly appreciated, he was allowed to serve his apprenticeship unmolested by the overheated attentions of the press. After the war, he went to work for that great manager, Sir Barry Jackson, at the Birmingham Rep, where he met the twenty-two-year-old Peter Brook, and a great artistic partnership started. Brook, Scofield said, taught him above all that he must learn to think, to connect with the thoughts of the character and ultimately with those of the author: how to lay what he called the groundwork of the character, the parameters of a role. His plan was to push these parameters as far as he possibly could, to create the richest, most complex and lifelike character feasible. He had success after success in an extraordinary range of parts, each one etched with a precise brilliance which seemed to release the very souls of the characters: the fantastical hidalgo Don Armado, followed by an earthy, dangerous Mercutio, and a tender and scholarly Horatio.

  At the age of twenty-six he played a Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon that for many people was the most perfect of post-war performances of the role. With Brook he proceeded to exquisite romantic comedy in Ring Round the Moon, a second Hamlet, which was the first British production to play in Moscow since the Revolution, and the role of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, a performance which Laurence Olivier, not reckless with praise of other actors, described as the most perfect he had ever seen. He played a sleazy agent in the musical Espresso Bongo, Lord Harry Monchesney in The Family Reunion, and a number of well-wrought West End plays which he transformed with his power to astonish. His reputation grew and grew, steadily but greatly; after his remarkable performance in A Man for All Seasons transferred to Broadway he was increasingly spoken of as the greatest actor in the English-speaking world.

  The more the acclaim, the further he withdrew from the social world, immersing himself ever deeper in his private life. He was a countryman by temperament; his horse, his resolutely untameable dog Diggory, his garden, his reading, his wife, his children: these absorbed him deeply and renewed him. His connection with nature was profound; he listened to its pulses, and through them, to his own, enriching in every way he knew the fertility of his inner soil. On horseback, or striding across the Downs for hours on end alone or with his hounds: it is an unexpected image for an actor. But Scofield was nothing if not his own man.

  At the unusually early age of thirty-nine, with Peter Brook as his director, he played King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest role for a man, and his hardest. Rejecting any attempt to reproduce the external details of old age, he transformed himself into the ancient king by sheer power of imagination, a terrifying and pitiable bull of a man. His voice seemed to be made of granite, granite which cracked and splintered under the pressure of his inner dissolution. This performance, in Brook’s shockingly radical production, toured the world; it was one of the early productions of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company which established it as among the greatest theatre companies of the world, and it set the seal on Scofield’s own greatness. In rapid sequence, from the early 1960s he took on the widest variety of roles, tragic, comic, classical, modern, each transformed by his profound and fantastical imagination: embittered Athenian plutocrats, drunken Russian nobodies, gay barbers in Brixton, German petty criminals revenging themselves on authority, kidnap
ped diplomats, heartbroken provincials, foxy Venetian con men, mediocre and ultimately homicidal composers, pesky old New Yorkers, deranged ancient mariners, each with their characteristic and extraordinary voices.

  All these, of course, for live audiences. He had his successes on film – for his Thomas More he won an Oscar – but his satisfaction was above all to be found working with an audience. The extraordinary surges of power he created in the theatre electrified not only his public but his fellow players too, particularly so because his force was so tightly harnessed. He banked down his flames, for the most part, allowing them to smoulder. But if he unleashed a thunderbolt at you, you knew all about it. He might easily have dominated his audience, but that was not what he wanted. He sought to draw them into the human life he was incarnating, to bring the character’s entire inner world on stage with him, and allow the audience to experience the man for themselves. Wherever you looked in his performances, you found layer upon layer of complexity and depth, amounting to a complete transformation. Laurence Olivier once declared that his life’s work had been to interest the public in the art of acting. Scofield’s might be said to have been the exact opposite: to make the audience forget the art of acting. Above all, he wanted them to forget about him. He said that he was very secretive about his personality: it was not for public consumption. In giving thanks for his life and work, we should be grateful that he flourished in a time when it was still possible for excellence to be admired without its sources being dismantled, dissected, raked over, torn apart.