Alan Rickman (31 page)

‘The decision by Hammersmith and Fulham to continue funding the Lyric from 1994 to 1995 was taken in the autumn/winter of 1993. The lawyers didn't want me to go to the Press at all, and they wanted me to keep my explanatory letter to Thelma very, very short. It was really just an apology.

‘Thelma and Alan rushed to the Press. If only they had held for 12 hours, I felt I could have done something. I wish they had talked to me before they went to the papers.

‘In retrospect, I don't know what I would do differently. I don't think it would have had a different outcome if they hadn't used an intermediary. There was nothing anti-Alan about the whole affair at all.'

In fact there was a certain coolness between Jane Hackworth-Young and William Hunter that hardly helped to advance the Rickman cause. A one-time political rivalry meant that she was not, perhaps, the best choice of cleft-stick messenger under the circumstances.

‘Hunter was Treasurer and I was Vice-Chair of Hammersmith Labour Party. We both stood for the Chair, and I got it over him.

‘Alan's consortium just saw the problem as a threefold one: the deficit, the future funding and the fact that Jules had been on the Board. They had deep concerns about being treated fairly because of that.

‘And it was also very strange that the Riverside Board didn't go back to the other original bidders after Jules decided not to go ahead. They offered the directorship to William Burdett-Coutts instead.'

Burdett-Coutts himself was equally mystified. ‘I went through a rather strange process with this whole thing,' he admits. ‘I went for an interview in July, but I thought that Rickman had got it. Then as soon as they approached me, I phoned up Alan. We must have had three or four meetings about ways in which his team could work together with me, but I never really got a final response on that.

‘Thelma did once request both the main studios gratis while I ran the building; they didn't even offer to pay rent. But I would still happily work with Alan. I'll work with anyone; I'm in the business of survival,' added William, valiantly trying to keep his head above water.

Riverside was forced to close for five months from April 1994 for a face-lift under the directorship of Burdett-Coutts, who had made his name by running the Edinburgh Fringe's Assembly Rooms. He moved the entrance from the side to the front and gave it the look of a trendy art gallery instead of the student hang-out it was before. Fingers, not to mention legs, have been crossed ever since.

‘It's all fallen flat,' Catherine Bailey later said to me in 1995 with grim satisfaction. Asked to comment on Jane Hackworth-Young's performance in the great drama, she rolled her eyes, and hummed and hawed.

In 1995, Council Leader lain Coleman confirmed to me the rockiness of the Riverside funding at the time of the Rickman/Holt/Bailey bid. ‘It has been public knowledge since 1993 that the support we gave to Riverside would have to be curtailed and eventually abolished. We gave the Trustees of Riverside as much notice as possible of our future intention.'

Hammersmith & Fulham Council combines the positions of Chief Executive and Finance Director in one job that carries the
title of Managing Director. There is an odd postscript to the Rivergate story that suggests the Rickman consortium made a second attempt to succeed. On 10 August 1993, the Managing Director of the authority received a letter from Catherine Bailey Limited on behalf of Catherine, Thelma and Alan.

They enclosed a copy of their proposal, which had been rejected by the Riverside Board. In it, they declared that they would only reveal their sources of start-up money – at last, the dreaded S-word – if the Council maintained funding. ‘You will note our omission with regard to finance, should the two funding bodies reduce the level of funding, and we wish to state our willingness to reveal our sources of start-up money should the matter proceed.'

In other words, the Rickman consortium appeared to be playing a poker game and keeping their financial cards close to their chest. You show me your willy if I show you mine . . . then we'll see who has the biggest. With cash-strapped councils, however, it doesn't work like that.

‘Although we had no direct locus in the matter, the Council's Managing Director did meet with Thelma Holt and Alan Rickman on two occasions,' admits Iain Coleman. ‘This was done to have a fallback position if the Riverside Board had to cease trading, in which eventuality the site reverted to the local authority.'

In other words, the council would have to pick up the bill. ‘I am advised,' concludes Coleman, ‘that the meetings were inconclusive. The proposals continued to be a wish-list of artistic programmes without any of the financial back-up being substantiated.'

So the sticking-point was money all along. The apparent delay in submitting the application had been a red herring which made people suspect a fishy conspiracy. ‘Jane did pass on the bid to Iain Coleman because he and William Hunter had worked together as long-standing members of the local Labour Party. But it wasn't passed on to Iain as a formal submission; just as an informal consultative exercise,' says Peter Savage, who was head of the Council Leader's office.

‘But the crux of the problem all along was money. One bid was underfunded; the other wasn't. But it was all taken personally, which was a shame. Thelma, Alan and Catherine were given plenty of time to come forward with information about sponsors.

‘And they had just the sort of image that we were looking for; so there was absolutely nothing personal. It was a pity that it was interpreted that way.'

Savage explained to me that it's essential to see the colour of the applicant's money first before other funds are forthcoming; it's a delicate balancing-act.

‘For instance, we are supporting William Burdett-Coutts in his Lottery bid. That means we would look at practical ways of supporting Riverside, e.g. giving them the freehold or perhaps cash funding. But all this would only happen if he was given money from the National Heritage fund. We wouldn't be able to fund him if the Lottery bid wasn't successful. Our help can only be part of a package.'

Nevertheless, London's artistic community was fired up on Alan and Thelma's behalf, sensing an outrageous and unforgivable snub by the Riverside Board. Frankly, William Hunter's rather rude letter to the
Standard
on 10 August had done nothing to correct that impression.

In his feature published on 12 August, the
Evening Standard
's chief theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh demanded that Riverside's Board must go as a result of the Rivergate fiasco. He compared Alan's bid with that of Jules Wright, calling the Women's Playhouse Trust proposal ‘four pages of pipe-dreams, aspirations and vague platitudes'.

A cut-out of Alan's head was thrust like an Aunt Sally above the parapet. So far as the Press and the general public were concerned, his was the best-known face in the consortium despite the fact that he was only one of the trio who drafted the wording of the bid.

And now to the second scapegoat in the affair.

This is where connections become terribly incestuous in the close-knit world of theatre. The President of Jules Wright's WPT was, paradoxically, Alan's old friend and co-star Geraldine McEwan. Even more strangely, Alan Rickman was among the ten actors credited with a close connection to the WPT as one of those who was approached to lead the teachers' workshops. (Unsurprisingly, he hasn't yet taken up that option.)

Those who did lead the workshops were Kathryn Pogson, Prunella Scales, Timothy West, Anton Rodgers, Neil Pearson, Fidelis Morgan, Janet Suzman, Gary MacDonald and Celia Imrie. So the Riverside row appeared to have bust up a beautiful and fruitful friendship between Jules and Alan that had brought together some of Britain's best-known, most adventurous thespians. No wonder there was a feeling of betrayal and treachery.

Thelma was publicly bitter about Riverside. She told the
Hammersmith and Fulham Post
on 5 August 1993 that the apologies received from the Board and from Jane Hackworth-Young had been completely unsatisfactory.

‘It would be difficult to think how a consortium led by Alan Rickman which put forward such ambitious proposals for the Riverside did not even merit an interview.'

However, Jules Wright says: ‘As I understand it, no application from the Rickman consortium was submitted before the closing date, before the interviews or before the Board of Riverside and the representatives of the London Arts Board and Hammersmith & Fulham Council had met to decide how to go forward. I don't understand that.'

Alan forced himself to be philosophical to the Press, telling Michael Owen in the
Standard
on 22 October that year: ‘There's no point conducting an inquest now, it's so depressing. There was a positive result in the amount of discussion it opened up. I felt we'd started a new wind blowing through the London arts scene. But at the end of the day, I do believe a great opportunity has been lost. It comes down to the stifling, grinding mediocrity we have so much of at home.

‘No one is prepared to accept the challenge of making a brave decision, to take a risk on something that might come crashing down or really break through to something new.'

Jules Wright saw things very differently. ‘Thelma and I have not spoken since, which is very sad. None of them knew that I spent £5,000 on lawyers . . . and was unable to pursue it because I couldn't afford it. It was just a waste of money.

‘I suspect that Alan's group might have thought there was public money around; but they would never have got involved if they had known the state of Riverside's finances. I'm glad the WPT didn't get involved either, in the end.

‘It all began when I was pursued non-stop for eighteen months by the then Artistic Director Jonathan Lamede to join the Board of Riverside. I finally did in November 1992.

‘But then Jonathan was removed in an extremely brutal Board meeting after a financial crisis. He was asked to leave the room and then William Hunter, the Chair, said, “I think it's time for Jonathan to go.”

‘I was very suspicious of the way the Riverside accounts were presented – inaccurately, I suspected. There were terrible problems
with the whole finances. I spoke to the London Arts Board about this.

‘WPT has a freehold building in Islington, and we had money in the bank at the time, too. So I thought we could come to some kind of arrangement to solve the Riverside financial crisis.

‘I talked to my WPT Board about it and then resigned from the Riverside Board. I wrote a draft proposal in note form for my Board, which was what ended up being published in the
Evening Standard
.

‘I sent the proposal to Riverside; and I and WPT's accountant, Mark Riese of H. W. Fisher & Co, were interviewed by the Riverside Board, the representative from the Hammersmith & Fulham Council and a representative from the London Arts Board. There was no enthusiasm for my proposal in principle from the other side. But by the end of what I thought was a courtesy meeting, we felt they had shifted ground. They subsequently decided to proceed with further discussions between the two charitable trusts.

‘I have never understood why the Rickman bid was late. I understood that it was delivered after all the interviews, after the Board meeting at which they had made their decision. Nevertheless, I understand it was seriously reviewed by the Board.

‘The next thing I knew was that I got a call from a woman on
Time Out
who said I had been offered the Riverside directorship. I said “Oh no, I haven't.” She said “The entire artistic community of London says you have.”

‘There was just this one draft document to our WPT Board. It was faxed to all those members who had a fax, and a letter was sent to one member who was in New York. Then suddenly it appears in the
Evening Standard
. I still wonder from whom they got it. We can only speculate on this. All I can say is that I know for a fact that none of my Board members or staff was involved.

‘In retrospect, I feel I was incredibly attacked in a concerted effort to discredit me; I was Australian and seen as an outsider. On Sunday the
Observer
followed the
Time Out
and
Standard
pieces. The lawyers told me not to talk to anyone. The coverage appeared to imply that I had fixed myself a job. I was never offered a job!' explained Jules. ‘It was simply two meetings between two charitable trusts. Our accountants were instructed to carry out a due diligence examination of the Riverside accounts, which went nowhere. Riverside's finances were in a pretty parlous state.

‘I never saw a final job description. And I couldn't believe that William Hunter would write a letter to the
Standard
without ringing us up and talking about it: it was impossible to pursue discussions properly thereafter.

‘I felt abused,' she says. ‘I didn't think Alan was doing this . . . but I dithered about phoning him. Then the extraordinary thing was that I got phone calls from seven actors, saying that Alan had been spotted giving out photocopies of the letter from the critics to the
Standard
in the returns queue at the Almeida Theatre. This was the evening of 6 August; the critics' letter had been published in the
Standard
that day.

‘I still think people thought that Riverside was a passport to public money. In actual fact it was one godalmighty headache; I knew it was a financial disaster area because I had been on the Riverside Board.

‘So then I went to the solicitors and said “I can't stomach this.” Citygate are Press troubleshooters in the City; they came and monitored my calls.

‘I have never spoken to William Hunter since. I had met him only three times at board meetings. As for his so-called admiration for me, I was incisive and thoughtful in those three board meetings – maybe William was impressed by that.

‘One thing I think the solicitors were right about was that you have got to retain your dignity. I think the whole thing did Alan a lot of damage – but not Thelma, funnily enough.