Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

  Tony arrived with the script of Homebody/Kabul two days before I was due to perform it, so I had to do a rehearsed reading, directed by Annie Castledine. Later on it took three months to learn for its world premiere at the Chelsea Centre directed by David Esbjornson. I was helped by Sally Simmons in the garden who copied Corin’s method of learning, i.e. to do it out of doors (all Corin’s lines were learned striding over Tooting Common). I am embarrassed to write that I rang Tony several times to plead with him to make it shorter and (worse) to ask if I could do the seventy-minute monologue in a Scots, American, or Northern accent as using a dialect seemed to give me confidence. All these requests were ignored until finally Tony rang from Canada with the reply: ‘Homebody has never travelled, she is London-based – I heard your voice when I wrote it, you are frightened of committing to the role nakedly. You don’t need these props…’

  On the opening night my nerves were both agonising and paralysing. Not for the first time, Corin saved me. But I had to use his ‘infallible method’ – made up on the spur of the moment – which meant being held upside down for several minutes. He convinced me to stand on my head in the dressing room while he held my ankles. It worked.

  On 15 July Tony faxed me:

  Dearest Kika,

  Thank you for asking me to write this play and thank you for inspiring it. I’m very proud of it and very proud of you – I know this hasn’t been an easy journey for you, but you’ve been valiant and brave and I have absolute confidence that the performance is as wonderful as my spies… are telling me it is.

  Tony

  Later Tony wrote Act Two and it became a full-length play. The UK premiere in 2002 was at the Young Vic in a Cheek by Jowl production directed by Declan Donnellan.

  In 1999 Corin took his adaptation of ‘De Profundis’, first performed in the Moving Theatre company season, to New York. The distinguished theatre critic Clive Barnes wrote an enthusiastic review:

  Finally, a brief note on Corin Redgrave’s one-man show at a one-night Actor’s Fund Benefit, last Sunday at Circle in the Square. It was a magnificent virtuoso performance of Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”.

  Redgrave is, very simply, a great actor. Except for cultivating the faintest Irish brogue, he didn’t try to portray Wilde – yet his performance had the magic transparency of truth.

  New York Post, 23 May 1999

  In November 2000 Corin brought it to the National Theatre in London. In The Independent, critic Paul Taylor praised Corin’s ‘wonderful performance’:

  He pours out thought and feeling with just the right manic edge of someone who has spent too much time alone and has begun to talk to absent people as if they were really there. While you were watching and listening to it, this is a performance that lies too deep for tears. It was the next day that it made me break down.

  The family came together for A Song at Twilight by Noël Coward. Vanessa, Corin, me, and Mathew Bose. Bill Kenwright produced, and Sheridan Morley directed for the first time. Rehearsals were not peaceful. Vanessa and Corin argued a lot. Vanessa as the elder felt she knew more, but Corin as the younger always wanted to have the last word. As for me, I sometimes felt paralysed by Vanessa’s fearlessness.

  My scenes were mostly with Corin. I played Hilde, his put-upon wife and secretary. The mixture of irritation and fondness was great fun too; the crosser Corin became, the more the audience enjoyed it.

  Corin wrote of Michael Redgrave’s Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version that there was no safety net under his performance. Feeling safe on stage was an unknown experience for me but there was a safety net when I worked with Corin because he was so very at home on stage himself. Having said this, it was not always an easy ride working with him. When I told Stephen Frears that Corin and I were going to work together, he said, ‘You’d better get a good lawyer.’ Of course, we’ve had bitter arguments. We were doing lines for The Country Girl at Greenwich, directed by Annie Castledine, and Corin was ticking me off, saying: ‘That’s not what Clifford Odets wrote. Stick to the line.’ Then I was hearing his lines – and one was totally different. But he said, ‘No, no, I think Odets is wrong here. It’s better like this. For you it’s better to stick to the text, but for me it isn’t.’ Outrageous.

  At the end of A Song at Twilight, Hilde comes back drunk and explains to Hugo and Carlotta (Corin and Vanessa) in a heart-stopping speech what it was like to be a German after the war. One of the few times in my life I talked for four minutes to my husband and sister-in-law without being interrupted. The play was a huge success and ran in the West End for several months. Our mothers came to see us and sat in a box, blowing kisses at the curtain calls.

  Corin sent me a letter about another family episode, when he and Vanessa took their mother, Rachel, to Venice:

  Torcello is a small island, criss-crossed with canals like a miniature version of its grander patron Venice, but very green, covered in trees, bushes, wild grasses and poppies. There are houses instead of palaces, and even the Cipriani which is famous and expensive is quite relaxed and homely in appearance. We were recommended to the Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo by Tasha and Liam. It was much less expensive and even more unassuming in appearance. The restaurant garden was very beautiful with a meadow in front, and a long line of linden trees. Rachel grumbled a little that it wasn’t the Cipriani, and took some convincing that even Tasha and Liam thought it nicer. But it certainly was. A lovely simple lunch. Tagliatelli ai piselli, and fritto misto di mare. All the time I wish you were there, wondering what you would think of this and that…

  After lunch we went into the church. Late medieval, and therefore quite austere by comparison with Venice’s renaissance churches and cathedrals. Very fine, but the remains of the martyrs, embalmed in glass-sided catafalques, little shrivelled sacred monsters. Despite all its immense beauty and splendour there is something truly repulsive about Catholic Christianity’s worship of death…

  R is becoming more difficult: or rather, the periods when she is her old sweet jolly self have become much shorter, and her periods of fretting over the most inconsequential, unnecessary worries have become correspondingly longer. They are always hydra-headed, so that the moment you succeed in allaying one worry, up pops another to take its place:

  (after I have just bought a tablecloth for you)

  V:

  Isn’t it lovely Mama?

  R:

  Yes. But what can I buy? I so wanted to get a present for Corin, and of course I should get one for Kika.

  V:

  What would you like to buy?

  R:

  Corin says he doesn’t want anything. Not even a tie?

  V:

  Corin doesn’t wear ties.

  R:

  He used to. So he doesn’t want anything? Nothing at all?

  C:

  (An inspiration.) You could buy me a cake.

  R:

  A cake? What sort of a cake?

  V:

  There are lots of lovely little patisseries in the alleyways near the hotel…

  R:

  But will I have enough money?

  V:

  Oh yes, heaps, they really aren’t expensive.

  R:

  Very well. If you say so. I’ll get Corin a cake. Which means getting up at dawn I suppose?

  V:

  No, there’s no hurry at all.

  R:

  Yes, but I’ve got to buy a cake.

  C:

  (Slightly acerbic.) Get up at one o’clock, as usual. That gives you two hours before lunch to buy a cake.

  R:

  So I’ve got to spend the whole morning shopping for a cake.

  C:

  It’ll probably take you five minutes.

  R:

  What size of cake?

  C:

  Average.

  R:

  (To V.) What does he mean, average?

  I often thought that Corin was only really, truly happy when he was working with members of his family. H
e had acted as a child with Rachel at Stratford and in his Guardian article on playing Lear he said: ‘My father was leading the Memorial Theatre Company, playing Shylock, Antony and Lear. My mother played Regan. I learned to love the sound of Shakespeare from my father but it was she who taught me to love Shakespeare’s stories. It had never occurred to me to read King Lear before seeing it. I simply asked my mother to tell me the story’. And later he played Coriolanus at the Young Vic with Rachel as Volumnia, my friend Geraldine Griffiths as Virgilia, and Harvey as Young Martius.

  This was a very enjoyable experience for all three, only marred by Rachel rather too often coming in over Harvey’s only line:

  A’ shall not tread on me;

  I’ll run away until I am bigger, but then I’ll fight.

  It was difficult not to be cross with one’s grandmother in such circumstances, especially so if his school friends happened to be at the performance. Sometimes Harvey would cry with rage to Corin on their way home. However, this was the year of the beginning of a life-long love affair with Arsenal. After his scene Harvey would run backstage to watch football on the stage manager’s TV, and that year, to his joy and amazement, he saw them win the league! His one and only professional acting job (so far) is thus forever associated with Arsenal’s victory. This Arsenal addiction has affected the whole family, none more so than Corin.

  Kate Stokes, who worked with him at the RSC, sent me this short anecdote:

  I met Corin in January 2005, when he played King Lear in the Albery Theatre RSC season. I was part of the stage crew. I was only really on nodding terms with any of the cast, but then somebody told me that Corin was a ‘gooner’ (an Arsenal fan for the uninitiated), so, quite timidly, I approached him in the wings one night and asked him if this was true. I explained that we were the only two gooners in a theatre full of rabid Manchester United fans, which he found quite amusing. There was a point in the show where we would both be in the stage-left wing for a few minutes, me in my set-shifting outfit, Corin in full ‘blasted heath’ regalia; a massive coat made of fur scraps, with two prop hares slung around his neck, and we would talk, naturally enough, about Arsenal. I remember thinking ‘I’m chatting to King Lear about why we can never beat Bolton’. It doesn’t get any better than this!

  In 1998 Vanessa had discovered a little-known Tennessee Williams play, Not About Nightingales, and took it to Trevor Nunn who directed it. It is a dark, passionate play about the penal system in the US, and it had a terrific part for Corin: Boss Whalen. It was the first time Corin had worked with Trevor Nunn since Julius Caesar at the RSC in 1972 and it had huge emotional significance for him. He felt he’d come back in from the cold. It opened at the National Theatre and transferred to Broadway, where Corin won several awards for his performance.

  Corin had found Kathy and Henry Chalfant through Tony Kushner and was happily living in their house in Greenwich Village. Kathy had been in Tony’s play Angels in America, and had won the Drama Desk Award for her unforgettable performance in Wit by Margaret Edson. She shared the house with Henry’s cousin Charles Ramsburg, a painter, and Michele Zackheim, a painter and writer. It was a bright house with tall windows, dark polished floors, comfortable sofas, and paintings everywhere. There were always actors or writers dropping by, and lots of theatre gossip and political discussion. I was able to visit him a couple of times; living there together was one of the happiest times in our lives. It remains our second home to this day.

  This is an extract from Corin’s New York diary, which he kept while I was in London:

  Tuesday 9 February 1999

  Day 10

  It’s an age since I wrote this diary. All my good intentions to write it at least every other day have been sabotaged by the unusually heavy workload of writing for the magazine [The Marxist].

  It’s the second very long day of technical rehearsal. I have a nice spacious dressing room, with a shower and loo. When I get the chance I’ll get a divan brought in, and a fridge, and put some of our beautiful photos on the wall. They made me cry with joy, and a little bit with pain, because they make you seem so close and yet you’re so far. At night I play your “I’m beginning to miss you”, and I could swear you must be thinking of me, except I know – or I hope – you’re asleep.

  My dresser, Dino, has been dressing Uta Hagen. She’s on in a play off-B’way, which will run for another three weeks. Another good reason you should hurry on over if humanly possible, to catch her while she’s still here. Dino says she’s a ‘miracle’ and I’m sure he’s right.

  Wednesday 10 February 1999

  Postscript – Morning of 11th day

  Lynn rang this morning. She’s coming to the theatre in our dinner break, between 6.00 p.m. and 7.30, so I’ll learn more. Then Vanessa. She confessed to feeling depressed and terribly stressed. I said she must take a holiday, in March, and I offered to look after Rachel in New York from March 7th approx, until March 24th, when you come out. I may live to regret this. And, finally, just before I left the apartment, Tasha rang (!!!). She’s just been speaking to Lynn, and now she’s coming with Lynn, to my first preview, this Saturday (!!!)

  When I returned to New York in March I noticed Corin was more tired than usual. He had had a terrible fall backstage and nearly broken his nose. Also, he was having to pee with worrying frequency. But it wasn’t until autumn, just before the rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre began, that he agreed to go for a check-up with our doctor. This led to a hospital referral and a biopsy. Corin kept a diary:

  Roger Kirby Clinic Autumn 2000

  There’s nowhere to sit, so we stand, Kika and I, holding hands. Sylvia whispers that Mr Kirby will see us early, i.e. he’ll leap-frog us over other patients who have been waiting longer. I don’t expect and I don’t really want preferential treatment, and certainly don’t deserve it. Sure enough after a very few minutes more Kirby emerges from his office and calls out my name. We go through dates. He says that I shouldn’t wait till the end of March when The Cherry Orchard is over, I should have the operation at the earliest possible date.

  I don’t feel as sad as I thought I would about leaving The Cherry Orchard early. That will come, no doubt. But it’s as though another age of innocence has ended. The first age came to an end when Kirby told me I had prostate cancer, and Kika and I walked hand in hand, slightly in shock, through the corridors of St George’s, trying to digest the fact that we had crossed a rubicon from good health, well fairly good health, to a very definite kind of disorder. Illness? I can’t yet think of it as illness, because I don’t feel ill.

  The second age, half-innocent, half-knowing, came here, in Kirby’s consulting room.

  Thursday/Friday 2 and 3 January, 2001

  My second immersion in the tube, the magnetic resonance image maker. The same clicking and clacking, like those big wooden rattles which used to frighten horses, but this time the clattering persisted, on and on, for minutes on end. The thought crossed my terrified mind that the machine had got stuck at a certain phase of its programme.

  And since there was an intercom voice to reassure me, I pictured the technicians wrestling helplessly to bring the machine back into control, while I suffocated inside. The investigation took about three quarters of an hour, far longer than before, and that was nerve-wracking too.

  What was it looking for and why was it taking so long? When I was finally released I said, in that feeble jocular mock-complaining tone one hopes will prompt explanations, “Well, that took a long time.” But the technician simply said, “Oh dear, did it?”

  The next day the waiting room was fuller than ever before, and all the old men and their wives (old men? It’s like those villages in Provence where every English person except oneself is a ‘tourist’). We’re sitting in rows of fixed seating, at right angles to each other, so the only thing to look at was one’s neighbour’s gloomy profile. Sylvia, Roger Kirby’s secretary, introduces herself, blonde, middle-aged, attractive. If I were Alan Clark (d. 1999, aged 7
1, of cancer) I’d chat her up. Instead I ask her an inane question about Christmas, “Did you get drunk?” And then followed up by offering her tickets for The Cherry Orchard. I can only hope she put it down to nervousness.

  Kirby asks us if we had a good Christmas. An ominous beginning. I’ve learned to expect that, when the appointment begins with small talk, there is bad news coming. They’re “a little worried” about a lymph node which shows up enlarged on the scan. A warning that I shouldn’t delay any more. All my carefully built defences begin to crumble. I had banked on the tumour being so small and slow-growing that I could finish The Cherry Orchard, say farewell to the cast and quietly exit into hospital.

  Roger Kirby was unable to operate on Corin as there was a hernia obstructing the route, so we had to fight the cancer through radiotherapy and drugs. We were treated brilliantly by Roz Eyles at the Royal Marsden Hospital, and Corin would look forward to going as we sometimes met our friends Jim MacKeith or Harold Pinter at Le Colombier, a very chic restaurant opposite.