BEATRICE: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.
BENEDICK: What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?
BEATRICE: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?
Ha, ha, ha goes the company, to let us know how much they all enjoy the way these two always take a pop at each other. But not this time. Zoë and Simon found each other in a corner away from the crowd, in a private acknowledgement of the disdain that masks deep hurt.
The world was Sicilian, late sixteenth century, with a relaxed modernity about it: Vicki and I decided this time to follow Shakespeare in his cavalier treatment of period and location. An ancient Sicilian courtyard enclosed an elegant contemporary belvedere: slatted timber walls divided the vast Olivier revolve into four enclosed playing areas, and provided all of them with positions where eavesdroppers could hide, and overhear, and fail to note, but remain visible to the audience. At the last moment, just before Vicki finished the set model, I asked her whether she could dig a hole in the middle of one of the four playing areas.
“The scene where Benedick hides from Don Pedro, Leonato and Claudio, and they know he’s hiding, but he doesn’t know they know, so they talk ostentatiously about how much Beatrice loves him to trick him into declaring his love for her—when he hides, it should bring the house down. Give me a deep pool, and he’ll jump into it.”
I’ve always trusted Vicki’s rigorous intelligence to put the brakes on my excesses, but her eyes lit up.
The show started before the audience came in. Leonato’s house is an image of domestic contentment. My own private image of paradise has always included breakfast under a fig tree outside a crumbling French or Italian farmhouse, fabulous coffee, apricot jam and conversation. What the hell, I thought, it’s my show, I get to decide what contentment is, it starts with breakfast, and breakfast starts half an hour before the show goes up. When I watched, I used to arrive well before curtain up and wish I was at the table with them.
Breakfast ends when Don Pedro’s army arrives in Messina, and within minutes Claudio has his eye on Hero. They are barely allowed by the playwright to talk to each other, but once Claudio has made sure that Hero is Leonato’s heir, he quickly proposes to her. He’s making a conventional, sensible marriage, and everyone’s happy, so they decide to try to get Beatrice and Benedick together too. The battle between them is less a battle between the sexes than a refusal to come clean with themselves. Like so many of Shakespeare’s protagonists, they construct performances for themselves to conceal real selves too painful to acknowledge. They play resident wit in their respective worlds: they make happier people laugh from the lonely corners they’ve painted themselves into. Their banter is a front for their emotional dishonesty. So Don Pedro decides on a therapeutic trick to make them admit to the “mountain of affection” they have for each other, by manoeuvring them into overhearing their friends gossip about how much the one secretly loves the other. It’s time for them to take the plunge.
Simon was alone centre stage with a book, taking into his confidence an Olivier audience he assumed to be made up of confirmed bachelors like himself, protesting his determination never to fall in love, when Don Pedro, Leonato and Claudio came in. Not wanting to be disturbed, he took himself off to another part of the garden, only drawn back when he overheard their scripted conversation. “Come hither, Leonato,” said Don Pedro. “What was it you told me of today, that your niece Beatrice was in love with Signior Benedick?” Simon stalked them as they strolled through the garden, stunned by the confidences they seemed to be divulging, despite their patent lack of subtlety.
CLAUDIO: I did never think that lady would have loved any man.
LEONATO: No, nor I neither, but most wonderful that she should so dote on Signior Benedick, whom she hath in all outward behaviours seemed ever to abhor.
And at the key moment, as they turned down the wrong path, threatening to walk smack into him, he panicked and hurled himself into the pool and disappeared beneath the water with an enormous splash. They waited for as long as Simon could hold his breath. The longer he held it, the louder became the rolling laugh that started with the enormous splash. Eventually his head slowly surfaced over the edge of the pool.
I get a disreputable kick out of building to and delivering a big laugh. In my defence, when I started seeing Shakespeare’s comedies in the late 1960s, the general assumption seemed to be that they were funny only to the extent that their extraneous comic business was funny. They relied on comic props, pratfalls and routines. The splash was my only indulgence, and both its victims made the most of it. Simon, after his tormentors finally left the stage, still bobbing like an inflatable pool toy, thought over what he’d heard about Beatrice:
Love me? Why, it must be requited.
His hair plastered to his head, his moustache dripping, his eyes wide, he went his own way with the punctuation:
Love me? Why???
If there was an enormous laugh at his incredulity, there was also a flood of sympathy. Simon is an actor as loved as he is admired because of his honesty: when he unfolds himself, he reveals painful reserves of self-doubt. Why would anyone love him? Why would anyone love any of us? Zoë, listening from the water to the much harsher censures of her cousin and friends, found the truth harder to bear. “She cannot love” was like a dagger to her, a spur to prove them wrong.
Vicki’s pool turned out to be a place of baptism. Beatrice and Benedick took the plunge, and emerged from it reborn. When I was later invited by the British Psychoanalytical Society to talk about Shakespeare, I claimed that this was the original idea. Perhaps it was.
As Beatrice and Benedick edge towards each other, the misunderstandings that drive the rest of the plot are the responsibility of Don Pedro’s malevolent brother, Don John, who hates Claudio and uses his cronies to set up an elaborate scam that convinces Claudio that Hero is involved with another man. There is nothing in the play to explain the source of Don John’s hatred. Once again, the actor is left to fill the gaps. And it’s hard to imagine a draft of the play that fleshes out Don John, explores his inner life, and spends valuable stage time providing him with a history that motivated his malevolence. Shakespeare knows where his plays give off heat and where they don’t, where it’s worth hanging around and where it’s best to move on. There’s too much else of interest in Much Ado to make more space for Don John. He’s plainly jealous of Claudio, and as Iago hates Cassio for the daily beauty in his life, so Don John hates Claudio for being the most popular officer in the mess. But nobody says why. Andrew Woodall decided that Don John had once made a pass at Claudio, and that Claudio had brusquely rejected it. It felt right that Don John was eaten up with self-loathing and fury that he’d allowed Claudio to note him. There’s no textual evidence for it, but it allowed the actor to give emotional flesh where the playwright has provided a functional theatrical skeleton.
Claudio turns on Hero at the altar. The evidence of their own eyes seems to favour Claudio and Don Pedro. Leonato impulsively takes their side against his daughter. Beatrice’s instinctive refusal to believe them is based on something truer than the evidence: she has a genuine capacity to know, or to note, those around her. She knows Hero. The church empties and she’s left alone with Benedick, the first time she’s been with him since she heard her friends say he loved her.
“Surely,” he says, “I do believe your fair cousin is wronged.” He’s the only man in the play who does. Then:
BEATRICE: Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right her.
BENEDICK: Is there any way to show such friendship?
BEATRICE: A very even way, but no such friend.
BENEDICK: May a man do it?
BEATRICE: It is a man’s office, but not yours.
The great heart-stopper that follows is like so many of the best moments in Shakespeare, straightforward and prosaic, not a whiff of fancy when he wants to cut to the quick:<
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BENEDICK: I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?
It acknowledges both an evident truth, and the genuine strangeness not of a coup de foudre—they happen all the time, and aren’t particularly strange—but of his capacity to love without narcissism. He and Beatrice have discovered how to note the other, and love the other not as a projection of romantic perfection but as who the other actually is.
Hero pretends to be dead, Don John’s malicious subterfuge is discovered, and Claudio is left to mourn the consequences of his blind haste to condemn her. His remorse is underwritten, but when he visits what he thinks to be Hero’s tomb, Shakespeare calls for music and ritual. Whenever he asks for music, you know that he recognises its insidious communicative power, so it’s a chance to create an event that gives Claudio space for genuine contrition. In the final scene, after he finds out that Hero is alive after all, Claudio reverts a little to the locker room, but in nearly all his romantic comedies, Shakespeare insists on the possibility of repentance and forgiveness. He’s realistic about how hard it is, but he thinks people can change. Maybe Claudio changes. Beatrice and Benedick certainly do. If you work on his plays, you think we can too.
At the end, there’s a double wedding, and the play calls for music and ritual again. “Strike up, pipers!” is the final line, and the final stage direction is Dance. But while Messina partied, Zoë pulled Simon away to sit on a bench on the edge of the dance; as the lights faded and the rest of the world rejoiced, they had too much to say to each other to need to join the revels. It seemed to me to express perfectly what Beatrice and Benedick have found in each other. It was also a final image as self-indulgent as the breakfast at the beginning, as nothing makes me happier than to throw a party and choose to sit on the edge of it.
PART FOUR
Show Business
10
On the Bandwagon
MUSICALS
There’s a wonderful MGM musical about putting on a musical called The Band Wagon. It’s even better than Singin’ in the Rain, which is also about putting on a musical. So is A Chorus Line: musicals are embedded in the American psyche. In The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire is a washed-up Broadway star. Against his better judgement, he’s persuaded to work on a new show with a fancy British director, a veteran of the classical theatre, played by Jack Buchanan. The British director decides the show is much deeper than anyone realises, so he reworks it as Faust, and casts himself as the Devil. He brings in a distinguished prima ballerina, Cyd Charisse, and turns an unpretentious musical comedy into Art. Its out-of-town try-out is a fiasco. Fred Astaire takes over as director. Cyd Charisse trades ballet for jazz. Art hits the scrapheap. Musical comedy triumphs.
In recent years, a regiment of British directors have come at Broadway musicals like Jack Buchanan, the same way they’d come at Faust. “Show me the greatest tragic actor or the lowest red-nosed comic in burlesque and I’ll show you an entertainer,” says Jack to Fred at the start of the movie as he establishes his musical-comedy credentials. “We’re all entertainers!” I’ve said the same thing myself. I’ve said it at intervals throughout this book. Here’s the big difference: Jack Buchanan can sing and dance. He sings and he dances with Fred Astaire. He still ends up driving Fred and Cyd and everyone else crazy. How many of his inheritors, brandishing their success on the London stage, can sing a note or dance a step?
I was still a year off my thirtieth birthday when the producer Cameron Mackintosh called. He’d enjoyed a summer burlesque I’d just done at the 1985 Chichester Festival: The Scarlet Pimpernel, an exuberantly staged show of no substance whatsoever. Cameron had barely started his ascendancy. Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera were in the future. He wondered whether I was interested in musicals. A young American director would have had them in his bloodstream. He’d have been in them at high school, seen them at his local theatre, taken dance classes, learned all the great standards by heart. I’d watched the movies at the Manchester Gaumont with my gran. Cameron asked whether I knew Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. I had all Sondheim’s musicals on LP, so I said I knew it very well.
Follies is more than an American musical about musicals: it is haunted by the ghosts of the theatrical past as our lives are haunted by grief and regret. It was directed on Broadway by Hal Prince and choreographed by Michael Bennett, who were steeped in the theatrical history it referred to, and knew no limit to its expressive possibilities. Stephen Sondheim came to The Scarlet Pimpernel, which was smart and funny as far as it went, but he could see nothing in it that qualified me to direct Follies. He politely asked Cameron to move on, and he did me a huge favour: I was young, inexperienced, and I wouldn’t have got within spitting distance of it. Such is Sondheim’s genius that I’ve since seen his musicals survive London productions even more tone deaf than mine would have been. But I’m glad he saved Follies from me, and have enjoyed his company and hospitality many times, free of the embarrassment that would have been the consequence if I’d been let loose on his masterpiece.
Cameron cheerfully accepted Sondheim’s verdict, and a couple of years later he was back. He had a new show from Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the writer and composer behind Les Misérables. He showed me the poster, and sent me away with the script and a demo of Claude-Michel singing in French at the piano. Miss Saigon was a contemporary reinvention of the story of Madame Butterfly. An American marine falls for a Vietnamese bar girl; they take part in a ceremony that as far as she’s concerned makes her his wife. He’s forced to abandon her when the North Vietnamese arrive in Saigon and he’s evacuated from the roof of the U.S. embassy by helicopter. When he later learns that she has given birth to their child and escaped to Bangkok, he arrives with his new American wife to claim the baby. Like Madame Butterfly, she kills herself for the child’s sake. It was popular opera on a huge scale, through-composed, with no dialogue and minimal dance. Most of my training had been in opera, so I reckoned I was on home territory.
Cameron is one of the great showmen of the age. Judged purely by the number of tickets he’s sold, he may be the greatest showman of all time. He knows what he wants, even if he doesn’t always know how to get it. The composer of a new musical once sat at the piano, playing him a number that wasn’t making the grade. Cameron could barely contain his impatience. “No! No! No!” he cried, pushing the composer off the piano stool, and only when his hands were hovering over the keyboard, ready to show the composer how it should go, did he remember that he can’t play the piano. I wish I’d been there so I could guarantee that it happened.
He knew exactly what he wanted from Miss Saigon: a vast, all-encompassing spectacle for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, that would move audiences to tears. He is entirely without cynicism. He loves the theatre he produces as much as the most refined classicist loves Sophocles. His taste is specific but passionate, and he doesn’t bother to produce anything outside of it. He’s demonic in his enthusiasm for what he produces.
John Napier, the designer, had been hired before me, so the priorities were clear enough. Drury Lane has always cried out for extravagant staging: in 1909, at the climax of a spectacular called The Whip, there was an onstage horse race, with real horses and real jockeys. When I met John for the first time, before the score for Miss Saigon was finished, there was already a helicopter, a sensational piece of engineering. Around it, he created a space of poetic delicacy, where romance blossomed and hearts broke. It was that kind of show. In Claude-Michel and Alain, Cameron had found his ideal theatrical collaborators. Their work was unabashedly melodramatic and totally sincere.
There was, literally, a global search for someone to play the title role. We flew around the world, to New York, then to Los Angeles, Hawaii and Manila. In a rehearsal room in the basement of the concert hall Imelda Marcos built, an eighteen-year-old called Lea Salonga asked Claude-Michel and Alain to sign her copy of Les Misérables. Then she sang from it. She had a fabulous voice and astonishing poise. She came to London with
her mother, and turned out to be the kind of star who seems to be lit from within. She wasn’t even intimidated by a scintillating Jonathan Pryce, who played her pimp.
On the way back from Manila, some of us stopped off in Bangkok, which felt like a good opportunity to check out the bars and brothels which occupied long stretches of the show. I wandered through the red-light district, drinking glumly at bars where girls pulled strings of razor blades from their vaginas, cheered on by sweaty drunks to whose fantasies they were apparently catering. Mystified, I thought I’d cheer myself up at the gay end of the street. I ordered a beer. At the corner of the bar, a disgusting old white guy leered at a boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve, and slithered his arm around him. I fled and found a taxi. “You want girls?” asked the taxi driver. I said I didn’t. “You want boys?” I said I’d take a pass on them too. “No problem,” said the taxi driver, “I take you to nice gift shop, open all night, you buy present for your mother.”
“Thanks, Dr. Freud, but the hotel will do fine,” I said, every time I told the story.
Balancing Acts Page 24