And Furthermore (4 page)

Michael Benthall was never really given the credit that was his due for his achievements at the Old Vic, nobody has written about him in the way he should have been written about. He was not perhaps the greatest director, but he had a wonderful eye as an impresario in choosing a company. In Richard Burton and John Neville he had the precursors of the Beatles and Johnnie Ray, the audiences used to go mad when they came on, and his courage in casting Frankie Howerd and Tommy Steele paid off at the box office. I owed Michael a lot, including the chance to play Juliet, which I am pretty sure he suggested to Franco Zeffirelli, to whom he gave his first opportunity to direct Shakespeare. John Stride was cast as Romeo, and Alec McCowen as Mercutio. Nobody could remember when it had last been cast with actors so young: we were all in our early twenties.

Franco was quite unlike any other director I had ever worked for. I was used to them being down in the stalls, and asking you to make a certain move from out there. He rehearsed the scenes with Romeo and Juliet separately from the rest of the cast, and would tell us what to do, and you would be doing it, and suddenly he would be doing it beside you, which was a bit off-putting, because he was better than either of us. He put a fantastic passion into it, and the whole production had a hot Italian atmosphere about it, using dry ice to create what looked like a heat haze, people putting towels and sheets out over balconies, the boys lying asleep on the fountain – it looked absolutely beautiful. But Edith Evans didn’t like it because, she said, we all looked so dirty.

I did not get very good notices for that, at least at first, and most of the critics hated it; only Kenneth Tynan raved about the production in the
Observer
, and I can still remember thinking, Bless him. We had all been dismayed by the overnight reviews, but Michael was like a rock. He called us all together, and told us to take no notice of critics without any vision. ‘Go on, and listen to your hearts,’ he said. So we did, and audiences flocked to it. We had the longest run of the play for ages – over 120 performances.

My parents came to everything I did at the Old Vic, and it was during this run that Daddy famously got so carried away when I cried out to Peggy Mount, ‘Where are my father and my mother, Nurse?’ that he called out from the stalls, ‘Here we are, darling, in row H.’ When I tell that story now, hardly anyone believes me, but I do assure you that it is true.

Then we took it to Venice as part of the Biennale, and played at the beautiful old Fenice Theatre, which years later sadly burnt down. We went up an hour and a half late, because of a gondola crush. Franco’s relations came round in the interval and drank all the champagne; they had quite a party before they went off, leaving us to get on with the second part of the story. The curtain came down at a quarter past one in the morning, but it was a glorious experience, and those were the final performances I did of
Romeo and Juliet
, a pretty romantic place to play my last night with that production. The rest of the company went on to Turin, then toured at home before taking it to Broadway, but I didn’t go with them because I was leaving the Old Vic to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. I thought that Franco would never forgive me for not going to America with it. Indeed, he was so angry that he wouldn’t speak to me. I had to wait forty years before we worked together again.

I JOINED THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE
Company for the first time in 1961 at the invitation of Peter Hall, who asked me to play Anya in
The Cherry Orchard
. It was to be directed by Michel Saint-Denis, and I had to go to meet Michel at Peter’s house in that little square opposite Harrods. I remember that particularly, because Michel said, ‘Oh, if I’d been looking for Eliza Doolittle my search would stop here,’ so I don’t think that I was his first choice as Anya. But nevertheless I did get the part. The cast included John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Patrick Wymark, Roy Dotrice, Dorothy Tutin, Patience Collier, Patsy Byrne and Ian Holm. It was the end of the Stratford season, which they had all been in, and I hadn’t, so I did feel very much the new girl.

We rehearsed for eight weeks at Stratford, which was unusually long even at that time, before opening at the Aldwych, which had become the London base for the RSC. Not long after we started rehearsing, Peggy Ashcroft said to me, ‘I have a feeling that you’re going to have a hard time. Michel always picks on someone, just don’t let him see you cry.’ That was when my fondness for Dame Peg started, and for Sir John, too, who came to my rescue at a difficult moment. At the end of the first act Michel used to give notes to everybody, but when he got to me he would just shrug and throw up his hands and sigh, so my confidence, if I had any, just disappeared. Then one day when we were rehearsing in the Conference Hall, now the Swan Theatre, we reached the end of Act I, and Sir John said to me as we exited, ‘Oh, if you’d been doing that for me in one of my productions, I’d have been delighted.’ From that minute I was even more devoted to him. I thought, That’s who I’ll do it for, I’ll just ever so slightly shift the emphasis, and do it for Sir John.

Apparently the first production of
The Cherry Orchard
that Michel had seen was by the Moscow Art Theatre, and he kept wanting me to do the same kind of tinkling laugh that the actress playing Anya there had done on her first entrance. He used to pretend that he didn’t understand what I was saying, he kept going, ‘What? What?’ Once we had opened, and the production was a success, I suddenly became his flavour of the month, but it was ever so slightly too late for me by then, after eight weeks of rehearsal misery at Stratford.

I loved acting with Sir John, who got marvellous notices as Gaev, but somebody said on
The Critics
programme on the radio that he didn’t feel Gaev was enjoying the caramels enough. So the next night he came on he was enjoying them so much that he completely dried on the line, and then laughed, of course. There is a story that may be apocryphal that somebody said to him in a play, ‘I don’t think you should wear the brown shoes, I think that the black shoes look better.’ Somebody else said, ‘I think the brown shoes are better,’ so he wore one brown and one black shoe. I love that story.

While I was doing
The Cherry Orchard
at the Aldwych, Peter asked if I would like to go and do the 1962 season at Stratford, first to play Isabella in
Measure for Measure
, directed by John Blatchley, and then to be in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, directed by himself, a revival of his original 1959 production, which I had seen with Mary Ure as Titania.

I enjoyed playing Isabella, with Ian Holm as my brother Claudio, Tom Fleming as the Duke, and Ian Richardson as Lucio, though we only had mixed notices for it. But it was absolutely glorious to be in the
Dream
, playing Titania to Ian Richardson’s Oberon, and Ian Holm’s Puck. Lila de Nobili designed the most unbelievably exquisite set, which looked like an Elizabethan hall when you went in, and suddenly the lights came on and you saw a forest going right back, with Puck coming running through the trees. It was just magical. I thought then that Ian Richardson was simply the best Oberon there had ever been.

It was my idea for the fairies all to have those pointed rubber ears, and I had a brilliant wig that had been made in Paris out of yak hair, it was like the top of a dandelion. The clothes were Elizabethan and very mothy-looking; halfway down, my skirt became a cobweb. We were a bit dirty and all barefoot, which we covered with sparkly stuff, and Ian Richardson had to be told to use a bit less.

When we made the film of it at Compton Verney, Peter said that those costumes looked much too substantial and mortal in a real wood, so they started to get cut down, and cut down and cut down, and it ended up with me just being sprayed in green paint every morning. I kept the pointed ears, but was now given a very long wig, and they used to go out and pick tiny little ivy leaves, which just covered my modesty.

We were doing a pick-up shot one day, of me lying in the bower, and I had to lie in this special position because it was all marked out absolutely perfectly to match the previous shot. They said, ‘We will be ready to go, but we must get all this exactly right,’ so they were just putting leaves exactly where they were. I was very cold and still lying there, and then quite suddenly I had a worm on me – the only thing I am frightened of – so I leapt up and ruined the shot. Not only was I sprayed green, but I wore green Wellington boots all the time because of the worms.

At the same time as I was alternating Titania and Isabella on the Stratford stage, I was also commuting to London to play Dorcas Bellboys in
A Penny for a Song
at the Aldwych. I felt as if I was spending half my life driving up and down the A40. We worked on it with the author, John Whiting, and it is such a brilliant play, about a Dorset village in 1804 fearing a Napoleonic invasion, but the critics didn’t like it at all. The others in the cast were Michael Gwynn, Marius Goring, James Bree, Newton Blick, Mark Eden and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and we had a great time doing it. The Aldwych was a lovely theatre to play in, and much nicer than the Barbican, where the RSC moved later on. The dressing rooms there haven’t got windows, it’s not comforting, not attractive, you can’t get supper afterwards. I felt it had nothing to do with the theatre, and I would never go there again to do a play. But we will come to the plays I did do there later on.

My contract with the RSC was coming to an end when I had a call from John Neville, inviting me to join his Nottingham Playhouse Company for their tour of West Africa. It was arranged by the British Council, and such a tour had never been done before; we went out there long before Peter Brook, who claimed to be the first some years later. The three plays were all the school set books –
Macbeth
,
Twelfth Night
, and Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
, which I wasn’t in. Before we left, John and I happened to meet Paul Rogers one day in Sloane Square; John had played Macduff to Paul’s Macbeth at the Old Vic, and when Paul asked him what he was doing John told him, and then said this very endearing thing: ‘I’m going to copy you.’ I find too that after you have been in a play many times, the echo of how someone played the part is so strong when you come to play that part yourself. When I played Gertrude later I could only hear Coral Browne in the part, she was so wonderful.

In West Africa they had never seen a theatre company before, and had no idea what to expect. I played Viola in
Twelfth Night
, and the moment I met Sebastian at the end, when we did look very much alike, there was incredible excitement, it was almost a riot; in Lagos everybody threw programmes and rushed up to the stage. To bring the curtain down the stage manager had to phone a man called Mr Obeyme, who was looking through a hole in the back of the theatre, and say, ‘Mr Obeyme – curtain – down.’ It must have been an extraordinary system, but he was able to bring the curtain down. So we rehearsed that, and on the first night in Lagos, just before the curtain, he said, ‘Mr Obeyme – curtain – down.’ But he didn’t bring the curtain down, after which he was called Mr Disobeyme.

That was the only real theatre we played in on the tour; elsewhere we were in the open air, often against huge curved cinema screens. Vultures would sit hunched at the top watching us, so during
Macbeth
I used to say, ‘For goodness’ sake twitch when you’re killed, they’re waiting to pick your bones.’

Every time I said, ‘The Thane of Fife had a wife,’ it used to bring the house down; anything that rhymed they found hysterically funny, and would call out, ‘Say that again, say that again,’ and then fall about. Any time we touched each other they absolutely howled with laughter, and they found the witches equally funny. When I went back with James Cairncross in 1969 on another British Council tour, this time just the two of us doing some recitals, we asked them why this was, and they said, ‘Because it’s very funny to see a white man believing in witches.’ Nothing will ever throw you again when you have played to those audiences.

That first visit prompted a great surge of interest in theatre, with a whole lot of drama groups springing up all over the place. Everyone now seemed to be acting
Macbeth
, and in 1969 James and I saw it performed by young people several times. The most thrilling of all was a Lady Macbeth who laughed uncontrollably during it – it was really chilling. She may have been laughing entirely because she thought this was a very funny play about a white man believing in spirits, but nevertheless it was thrilling to watch.

In Ghana the company played for President Nkrumah, who was virtually a prisoner in his own palace; the security was fantastic, you couldn’t even go to the loo without somebody accompanying you. At the university in Accra, I had not been feeling very well, and in the middle of
Twelfth Night
I completely fainted. Peter Blythe was playing Orsino, and he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, she’s not very well,’ and carried me off, to thunderous applause. They asked for a doctor, and he came and looked at me, and said, ‘Undo her jacket please.’ In order to play Viola disguised as Cesario I was wearing a roll-on to keep myself flat underneath the doublet, and he said, ‘No wonder she’s fallen down on the stage, it has the suspender belt round the wrong buttonhole.’

In fact I had caught malaria. The company were flying on to the next stop, and I was told not to travel on with them, but that idea did not appeal to me at all. I thought if I didn’t I would be left there, so I went with them, and John and James virtually carried me on to the plane. I was feeling so ill that I don’t remember much about it, but we had a four-day rest period, and in those four days I recovered, so I managed not to miss any performances. But poor Polly Adams had to once because of a terrible toothache from an impacted wisdom tooth, so I doubled that night as a witch as well as Lady Macbeth. I learnt later that I was not the first: Sybil Thorndike used to do that double regularly on her wartime tours.

During the tour we went to lunch with a man from the British Council, and in the middle of the lunch I suddenly had a premonition that was so strong I asked if I could phone home to England, in a total stranger’s house. I rang home, and Daddy had just had his second heart attack. He had recovered from the first one in 1954, but this was much more serious, and somehow I sensed it thousands of miles away.

After that first West Africa tour, I had a very brief run in a disastrous play called
A Shot in the Dark
– a French play
L’Idiote
by Marcel Achard, translated into American idiom by Harry Kurnitz – and is barely worth mentioning except for the night it ground to a halt at the Lyric Theatre. The cast included Peter Sallis, Patricia Marmont and Polly Adams, and George Baker had to interrogate me. Polly had to enter and play a short scene as his wife, and then exit. This night we came to her entrance, and there was no Polly. Peter, George and I waited, and waited, and then we heard the stage manager go to the back and shout ‘Polly’. There was still no sign of her, and we didn’t know how to pick the scene up, so Peter said, ‘I think I’ll go and ask Monsieur Armand what he thinks about this,’ and he walked off. We heard him rustling through the script trying to find my line, because the stage manager was now racing up the stairs trying to find Polly, and Peter came back to give me my cue, saying: ‘Monsieur Armand suggests this…’ So I said my line, and then George said to Peter, ‘What do I say?’ Peter said, ‘If you think I’m going off to look up your line, you’ve got another think coming.’ It was such a disaster, but thank goodness there was hardly anybody there. I hope it gave the audience a bit of a laugh, because they weren’t having it in the rest of the play. Afterwards Polly said she thought she had already played the scene, and she was in the loo, knitting. This was my first experience of Peter’s gift for improvisation, which came in useful much more often later on, when we were both in
Cabaret
together.

During this mercifully brief run my agent Julian Belfrage told me that Frank Hauser wanted me to join his company at the Oxford Playhouse to appear in Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
. I couldn’t believe it, because on our only previous meeting I had thought he was so rude to me, and I was quite rude back. We each thought we had been snubbed by the other, and it was just a silly misunderstanding. I had also been told, quite wrongly, that he had walked out of
Romeo and Juliet
at the Old Vic. But now I became absolutely devoted to him, he was such a wonderful director. He was very intelligent, witty, funny, and precise. Tall and lean, he worked hard, and had such an insight into everything to do with the theatre. I once said that if Frank asked me to step in front of a bus, I’d do it. I’d know he had some good reason.