Alan Rickman (13 page)

Which was why he dived back so quickly into theatre after leaving the RSC. Firstly, Nottingham Playhouse, then the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre and, afterwards, the Sheffield Crucible.

Peter James, now the head of the London drama school LAMDA, cast him when directing Stephen Poliakoff's
The Summer Party
at the Sheffield Crucible in 1980.

They had worked together before when James cast him as Jaques in
As You Like It
at Sheffield in 1977, with Ruby Wax in one of her many early ‘wench' roles as Audrey. ‘Jaques was absolutely where he lived,' says Peter. ‘That quality of stillness that allowed him to be as aloof as you hope Jaques to be. He was brilliant, mature beyond his years.' He was 31 by then.

‘You would listen to Alan for his opinion on design and a quasi-directorial feel for the overall, for what is going on.

‘It's either a pain in the arse or a huge advantage. He was very sympathetic to the way things were being done, so he was a huge advantage. He was a marvellous company member, a terrific person to have in a group.

‘In
The Summer Party
, Alan played a pop promoter called Nigel. It was well ahead of its time, a play about how top policemen were becoming media figures. Brian Cox played the lead and Dexter Fletcher was a pop star with Uri Geller properties. It was set in the backstage area, and showed how a pop star and a policeman turn out to be very similar.

‘Hayley Mills and Alan were two city types who put on the concert. Hayley never got the chance to work in rep; she wasn't offered the roles. It's a shame.

‘One felt Alan was going places because of the intellectual vigour he was bringing to the part. He expected very high standards of others, but that didn't manifest itself in impatience. There's a graciousness there; he would assume you were mortified if you
missed your cue, so he wouldn't rub it in. There was no short-temperedness from him.'

‘I don't remember having any audibility or clarity problems with Alan at all,' adds Pete. ‘Sheffield and the Citz are smaller families than the RSC. They're not so competitive and probably more easily open to his influence. One can't imagine him pushing himself in any situation, but always having the same quiet modesty. The scenery in Glasgow was beginning to walk round the actors, he said; so he left.'

Alan had been cast in a total of seven roles in Giles Havergal's acclaimed Citz revival of the Bertolt Brecht play about the rise of Nazism,
Fears And Miseries Of The Third Reich
. Michael Coveney in the
Financial Times
noted how ‘layers of authoritarian corruption are laid bare with merciless economy and real glee' by Rickman's performance as a judge wrestling with his professional conscience.

Prior to that, he had taken the role of Antonio in Peter Barnes' conflation of two plays by the Elizabethan dramatist John Marston:
Antonio And Mellida
and its sequel,
Antonio's Revenge
. That was the occasion when Alan designed the morbid poster of himself, half-naked in an almost crucified pose with a pronounced pout and an embarrassment of rich eye makeup. One of those collector's items that comes back to haunt you.

Marston wrote the two plays for a company of child-actors, Paul's Boys. There was indeed something of the precocious choirboy – as most of the young players had been – about Alan's melodramatic pose.

‘Antonio is the Hamlet story done in a totally different way by John Marston,' explains Barnes. ‘Alan came in, swinging on a rope: inevitably something went wrong and he was clinging to the scenery, suspended in the air. So years later, in
Die Hard
, he was the one that suggested swinging in on a rope. He never forgets anything.'

Rickman returned to work with Peter Barnes after
The Summer Party
at Sheffield, taking part in Peter's version of Frank Wedekind's
The Devil Himself
at the Lyric Studio in London's Hammersmith. Here, the Rickman singing voice was first heard by the public, wooing audiences with bawdy songs for a little-known but extraordinarily erotic interlude in his patchwork career.

Barnes recalls how another cast-member, Dilys Laye, ‘saw Alan looking ashen-grey in the wings. He said, “God, this isn't easy, is
it?”' But it was to prove the most extraordinary liberation for him. This uninhibited musical revue was a collection of songs and sketches on the theme of sex; Wedekind wrote a great deal of experimental cabaret material before embarking on his plays. Rickman played a punter at a brothel in several pieces, with his RADA contemporary Tina Marian as the young tart he visited. Charles Keating also appeared in what was to become Peter's very own repertory company for several of his radio plays.

In a sequence called ‘The Sacrificial Lamb', Rickman asked for Tina's life story or ‘confession'. Addressing her as ‘My child', her john clearly got considerable kicks from posing as her priest. ‘First I want you to uncover yourself completely, not only your clothes but your skin. Are you still in love with the man? The man you are going to tell me about?' he asked unctuously.

Then he launched into various ballads, sounding rather like a sonorous monk with a gloriously deep baritone that strays into the tenor range. This was Rickman letting his inhibitions down: one song carried a comic refrain about ‘frayed trousers':

One song celebrated a boy/girl of indeterminate sex while Alan tap-danced around in the role of a happy drunk. In another liaison between Alan and Tina as a girl called Wanda, he breathed insinuatingly: ‘I know your whole being . . . your way of loving . . .' He claimed to be able to tell what a woman is like from her walk, whether she's ‘free or small-minded'. That languorous, highly suggestive voice was used to great effect on all these coded messages of love.

Above all, humour was paramount when he played a frustrated client with a bad case of ballsache: ‘She almost kicked me out of bed . . . she won't strip! My flame is once again lit, but then she starts pulling back instead of pulling IT,' he added venomously.

A tape of the production records the rest of the cast corpsing at Alan's refrain, ‘Oooh-ahh, the bugs are back again.' Nursing the mother of all hangovers, his voice slid over the notes of a Bessie
Smith melody in a wonderfully liquid way. ‘I groan on my bed . . . I feel dead . . . Oh, Christ, what a picture, I grit my teeth and reach for Nietzsche,' warbled Rickman, archly adding a ‘ha!' at the end of the song.

There was always a sarcastic, slightly facetious tone to his singing voice. Yet many of those flippant lyrics carried a deadly serious sting: of Europe's war-mongering history, he declared: ‘It's a pleasure every year to rearrange Europe's frontier . . . politicians believe that human beings grow like weeds.'

After that came the first of two formative stints at the tiny Bush Theatre above an Irish pub in west London's scrubby Shepherd's Bush, just down the road from where Alan and Rima had played in an amateur production of
Night Must Fall
fifteen years previously in 1965. The Bush must have felt like a homecoming. Its other great advantage was Richard Wilson, later to achieve national fame on British television as the comic grouch Victor Meldrew, among its roster of directors.

‘At that point my whole working life changed,' Alan was later to declare of the move to the Bush for Dusty Hughes' play
Commitments
, the story of vicious in-fighting on the Left during the ill-fated Edward Heath Government of the 1970s.

The Rickman/Wilson association proved a break-through partnership, though they did have one disaster together. ‘Alan was my assistant director on the Robert Holman play
Other Worlds
at the Royal Court. It had terrible reviews and emptied the theatre. Yet, occasionally people say to me “What a great play that was” and I say “Which night did you go?”' says Wilson drily.

‘When I first auditioned people for
Commitments
at the Bush, Alan struck me as very centred and easy. If you take Alan, you take his thoughts as well. He is never lost for a thought; he does speak his mind. But I found him very easy to work with; we are on the same wavelength.

‘Both of us are into openness, a word we use a lot. It's working from the inside, non-demonstrative acting. Minimalism, anti-gestural. That's one of the problems with the RSC, one I'm not so keen on. It's because of the problems of the large Stratford stage, so I'm not surprised he had difficulties there. Alan is a minimalist, so his style of acting works particularly well on film and TV.

‘He's metamorphic in the subtextual sense. His thinking is so accurate, his concentration is total. He concentrates on who he is.
He has a great physical sense of where to put himself. That comes back to his artist's eye.

‘Unfortunately I lost him to the role when I did the TV version of
Commitments
; so I cast Kevin McNally instead. Alan had committed himself to
The Seagull
at the Royal Court Theatre. But he had become a member of the Board at the Bush by that stage.'

Indeed, it was at the Bush that Rickman became a script-reader or ‘taster' alongside Simon Callow and first discovered the playwright Sharman Macdonald when she sent in the play
When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout
under the pseudonym of Pearl Stewart. The congenitally shy Sharman, who still speaks in a whisper, was very diffident about her writing abilities.

She renamed herself Pearl after a song by her heroine Janis Joplin, because the Bush's then Artistic Director, Jenny Topper, already knew Sharman as an actress. Alan suspected the old-fashioned name was bogus, given the new-fashioned, explicitly gynaecological material, but shoved the script at Jenny Topper, saying: ‘I think you should read this. It has something.' It was his ‘feminine' sensibilities again that had recognised the originality of this rites-of-passage play. The result transferred to the West End for a year-long hit run, won an
Evening Standard
Drama award and launched Sharman on a writing career. Years later, in 1995, Alan was to commission and direct another play by Sharman in the hope of beginning a new career for himself.

Dusty Hughes, former
Time Out
theatre critic turned director and writer, has been friends with Alan since that first meeting on
Commitments
. ‘I ran the Bush; then I decided to do what I'd always wanted to do and write plays.

‘The first play was fairly autobiographical. Alan came to the audition for the main part of Hugh in
Commitments
. He was far and away the best person we auditioned; no contest. We even saw Charlie Dance, who was unknown then. Alan's lightness of touch impressed me most, combined with a necessary weight – which is a very rare thing.

‘I got the impression he had never done a huge naturalistic part in a modern play before. He got wonderful reviews and his career really took off. Hugh, the character he played, was me, really.

‘Alan was studying all my mannerisms, pushing the floppy hair back the way I do. I didn't realise that he had been staring at me all through the run.

‘Hugh is a happy-go-lucky liberal intellectual who becomes transformed as a fire-breathing Trotskyist. It was typical of Alan's sharpness that he spotted a weakness in the play, that we never actually got to see that transformation.

‘He came on as himself: dry, droll and sardonic. I think he is a very strong personality and identity. A very likeable one. You wouldn't necessarily put money on either him or Richard Wilson being prominent one day. There's something archetypal about such actors: they are universal.

‘It was a very quiet, ironic performance. He got on very well with Paola Dionisotti in
Commitments
; he's very much an actor's actor. He intensely dislikes actors who work on their own. He's a very hard taskmaster with actors who don't give you enough effort.

‘There's a very clear seriousness about him; he's high-minded. But he's not remotely solemn. He's a wonderful gossip, with a droll sense of humour. There's a very funny, sly side to him.

‘He's very unmaterialistic: he's a genuine heart-and-soul socialist. He loves nice food and wine like we all do, but doesn't make a big fuss of it. On a personal level, he's terribly sweet. I trust him completely. We are not terribly intimate, but we are fond of each other.

‘There have been three phases to Alan. It took him a few years to come to terms with being a star; he's now as easy and relaxed as when I first knew him. In the first stage, he was terrifically exciting to work with; in the second stage, he was trying to come to terms with fame; and in the third stage, he was learning how to deal with a lot of pressure. He always has a ceiling-high pile of scripts: I don't know how you can possibly get through that lot.'

Dusty clearly feels protective about him, and suspects that Alan's socialism has put him beyond the pale in some showbusiness circles.

‘He's not a member of the luvvie mafia; he and I don't belong to the set that they want to invite to the
Standard
Awards. Alan is not a member of that inner circle, so he will always be vulnerable. There are lovely people in that inner circle, don't get me wrong. But I think a lot of people have been sidelined. And being socialist or even mildly Labour is one of the reasons he's excluded.'

It is only fair to record that organisers of the London
Evening Standard
Drama Awards have reacted with incredulity – ‘Absolutely not true,' snorts one of them derisively – to what seems like writer's
paranoia. They point out that Alan is regularly on the guest list of the
Standard's
annual awards. But he's away filming most of the time, hence the non-appearances. And six years after Dusty first made those remarks to me, Alan was a guest of honour at the
Standard
Drama Awards as one of the contenders for Best Actor for his performance in a sublime revival of
Private Lives.
So there was no dire conspiracy. Instead, because of a recurring stage fright that was to cast a shadow over his career in the late 90s after an unexpectedly disastrous production at the National, he had been a rare sighting on the London stage until that triumph with
Private Lives
broke the jinx and changed everything. And as for Alan's membership of the Labour Party, its leader Tony Blair attended one
Standard
Drama Awards ceremony before his landslide election victory in 1997 that felt rather like a Shadow Cabinet dinner and dance. Fired up on behalf of the arts, it was full of anti-Tory Government rhetoric. Alan's impresario friend, Thelma Holt, a lifelong banner-waving socialist, has a table every year at the event.