And Furthermore (8 page)

It ran for about nine months at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, and I think it might have run for longer if it had not been for the spate of IRA bombs in London. I remember one going off in Pall Mall just round the corner. Audiences were understandably not keen to go out while all that was happening.

Then I moved up the road to the Albery, to be directed by my great hero, John Gielgud, in Pinero’s
The Gay Lord Quex
, which had been very popular in the early years of the last century. Daniel Massey played the title role, Siân Phillips was his old love the Duchess of Strood, and I played the manicurist Sophy Fullgarney, the role which made the name of Irene Vanbrugh in the first production in 1899. Sir John had seen her act in the Thirties, and had wanted to direct this play for years, but even he came to recognise that it had become very dated. His production had a beautiful look, but it was not a good play.

We rehearsed in the crypt at St James’s Church in Piccadilly, and one morning when we had been working for a couple of hours, suddenly out of the loo came a man carrying a pair of trousers, who ran straight through the room and up the stairs. Then came a man not wearing a pair of trousers, who rushed after him straight up the stairs. Sir John laughed so much that he cancelled rehearsals for the rest of the day.

As a director he changed his mind a lot during rehearsals. He would always find a very good reason for giving you a note, and it always seemed to hang together, and then he would come in the next day and it was all out of the window. He would say, ‘I don’t think anything I gave you yesterday was any good, we’ll do something else.’ So we had to keep adjusting it, but because we were all completely in awe of him, and wanted so much to work with him, anything he said went, anything was OK by me.

My favourite story of that play happened outside the stage door. Ours was opposite the stage door of Wyndham’s Theatre, where John Gielgud was appearing with Ralph Richardson in Harold Pinter’s
No Man’s Land
. As we were going in one door Sir John happened to be going in the other. He called out, ‘Oh, hello, Dan, I hear your play’s coming off. No good? Oh my God, I directed it!’ Just one more of his famous ‘bricks’.

HAVING BOUGHT THE HOUSE AT
Charlecote for all the family, it was a relief when Michael and I were able to move back to Stratford and rejoin the RSC for the rest of the Seventies, even if some of the time it meant that we were commuting back and forth to the Aldwych. My first play was in fact scheduled to run there: Shaw’s
Too True To Be Good
, which was once again in the skilled hands of Clifford Williams. It is one of Shaw’s strangest, with a Microbe in Act I and a send-up of Lawrence of Arabia in Act II. I was originally asked to play the part that was eventually taken by Anna Calder-Marshall, but then I read it and realised that Sweetie Simpkins has a much better time, and I was absolutely right. She has to pretend to be a French Countess, and I had a wonderful time dressing up as the Countess, and putting on a French accent with Sweetie’s own Cockney twang breaking through it frequently. Ian McKellen was a burglar turned preacher, and we both had a lot of fun.

There were some challenging Shakespeare plays to come, but we had a very strong company to tackle them – Donald Sinden, Ian McKellen, Michael Pennington, Bob Peck, Robin Ellis, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Griffith Jones, John Woodvine, Greg Hicks, Roger Rees, Nickolas Grace, Mike Gwilym, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Francesca Annis, Marie Kean, and of course my own Michael, who was going to play
The Good Soldier Schweik
as well as the Shakespeares, and took over the Lawrence part in the Shaw. Somebody later christened that company the ‘Golden Ensemble’, and it certainly felt like that to all of us at the time.

In
Much Ado About Nothing
Donald was Benedick to my Beatrice. John Barton, who was directing, had the idea of setting it at the time of the British Raj in India, and John had the view that this was the last summer that they would get anything together at all. It was very nice that they weren’t young sparring partners, that they weren’t quite over the hill, but almost over the hill. Beatrice is a difficult part, because there is this brilliant repartee between them both all the time, and then suddenly she turns and says, ‘Kill Claudio.’ I used to get a laugh on it, and of course the laugh should not have been there, it should be very shocking and make the audience gasp. I had to work really hard not to get that laugh, I tried the line differently every evening, but still it came more often than it should. Strangely enough, much later on when I directed Kenneth Branagh as Benedick, and Samantha Bond as Beatrice, she never got the laugh at all. (But we will come to my brief foray into directing in a later chapter.)

We all had beautiful and exotic costumes in
Much Ado
, designed by John Napier, and it was a brilliant idea to have John Woodvine play Dogberry as a Sikh in a turban, which made sense of him getting the language wrong. He was hilarious, but he is a terrible practical joker, worse than me, and his jokes made the actors playing the Watch corpse on many nights.

The costumes for
Macbeth
were almost minimal by comparison. It was the play that Ian McKellen and I most wanted to do, but Trevor Nunn was very reluctant. The three of us were having supper in Hampstead, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve done it so many times I’m not sure I have any new ideas, I think it should be someone else.’ Well, he had a mutiny on his hands. I said to Trevor, ‘Come on, let’s do it, we’ll have a laugh.’ Eventually he agreed to direct it in The Other Place at Stratford, in a simple production to suit that small space. It was an old shed with a corrugated iron roof, which had been adapted into a small studio theatre. We went to look at it, and walking back to the main theatre I said, ‘This is not going to work, is it? It’s just not going to work.’ And at that moment I fell off the pavement. I got up and walked a bit further and said, ‘It really isn’t going to work,’ and then I fell over again. But that didn’t bode ill actually, as it worked like a dream when we got down to it.

The next day we went back for a rehearsal, and Trevor had got the stage management to block out every chink of light with paper stuffed in all the gaps in the corrugated iron roof. He didn’t put any lights on and said, ‘Ian, go to the top of the stairs. Judi, wait at the bottom. Ian, come down the stairs, knowing there are people asleep all around you, and now play the scene of coming down after the murder.’ That seemed to unlock something within us all. The small auditorium could only seat 150 people, and with very little room backstage we were all in one room getting ready. There was a very small cupboard off it, that usually housed wig-boxes, and that was where the girls dressed. We were all cramped in there, while the chaps were in the slightly larger room. But this induced a wonderful company feeling, and an unbelievable air of levity, with lots of stupid schoolboy and schoolgirl jokes. When we actually came to do the play, straight through without an interval, it was a very concentrated piece. That is what creates a company, and an audience will always register if members of a company have a rapport with each other.

The play opened with us all sitting on orange boxes in a circle, and there were no understudies. Roger Rees, who was playing Malcolm, had broken an ankle and was in a wheelchair. The management said, ‘Well, you know this is booked out every night.’ Roger said, ‘If it can be explained, I’ll play Malcolm from the wheelchair.’ So he came into the circle in the chair, Griffith Jones as Duncan in a white habit and long white beard was helped forward by two people, and then the Witches came on. Susie Dury put on a limp and dragged her leg, and dribbled out of the side of her mouth a bit, followed by the other two. Marie Kean was playing the First Witch, and as she passed she said to me out of the corner of her mouth, ‘It’s the Lourdes production!’ She looked terrifying, and at one point she had to go through the loos to get back onstage, and found some schoolboys hiding in there. She hissed at them, ‘What are you doing here? Get out, get out.’ She gave them the fright of their lives, and we heard a scuffling in the corner as they came out. I think they regretted skiving off.

The claustrophobic atmosphere in that confined space helped to evoke such a strong sense of evil that we came to recognise a priest in the front row most nights, holding up a crucifix to protect the actors from it. This was Neville Boundy, and it was flattering that he should get so carried away, but it has to be said that he is a very theatrical priest. The production was such a sellout that we had to transfer it to the main house, because of all the complaints that no one could get tickets. But that was a kind of disaster, because it didn’t work there at all, it lost its intensity. That was recaptured at the Young Vic when we took it there, because we were back in the right-sized theatre for it.

I never agreed with Edith Evans’s belief that there is a scene with Lady Macbeth missing from the play. Just before he speaks to the murderers Macbeth says:

and she leaves him. After he has seen the murderers, and before the two of them meet again, her soliloquy says it all:

It charts every bit of the breakdown. Then you see the beginning of the banquet, when she is trying to make this tremendous effort, and suddenly the whole thing just cracks into thousands of pieces. She can’t go on, she answers in single lines from then on.

That is why it is so important at the beginning that she is not a woman who could do it on her own. I am always against those Lady Macbeths who are so strong and evil at the beginning. If they can do it on their own, why do they invoke the spirits to help them? When she says: ‘You lack the season of all natures, sleep,’ it tells you absolutely what has been happening to them. He starts to exclude her from everything, and obviously paces around alone at night. So it is right that she disappears from view, and then suddenly you see her with her mind completely gone. I don’t see where there could have been another scene, and what it would say that is not already said in the play. I said to Trevor, ‘We must play it so that any schoolchildren who come to see it and don’t know it will think that they might not do the murder.’

After we finished the run at the Young Vic we recorded it for Thames Television. It was well received on transmission, but I made the great mistake of watching it, and I was desperately disappointed in what I had done. I had imagined that my performance was better than what I saw on the screen. It stopped me watching anything else. I thought, I am not going to watch myself again, I will just have this fantasy in my mind of what I actually do. So there are quite a lot of my films that I have never seen, except for a few premieres I could not avoid.

Many of the
Macbeth
cast were also in
The Comedy of Errors
, which came next, and when John Napier showed us the set for it everybody just burst into applause. It was centred round a Greek taverna, with balconies and tables outside, and at the beginning we all came on and waved to our friends; that was very exciting. When the audience came in, waiters were brushing up in the street and would talk to them. I have never had so many letters from schoolchildren, because they suddenly saw something that was very unstuffy, and they could not believe that it was so immediate and modern, just like a place they might go on holiday. We were very faithful to the play, but it had music and dancing.

Gillian Lynne was the choreographer, and she used to put us through an hour’s movement class every morning before we started rehearsing. She even got Trevor Nunn doing it. We all did split leaps across the room, and got very fit, which was necessary as it was a very physical production, running up and down stairs and on to the stage. Gillian was very strict with us, and my Michael got so peeved with her once that he nearly threw a chair at her, but fortunately thought better of it.

That joker John Woodvine took over from Robin Ellis as Dr Pinch, and on the last night he excelled himself. He had an entrance through the audience, and as he came up he turned and said, ‘Keep my seat, Aphrodite, I’ll be back,’ which nearly brought the house down. I had to say, ‘Good Doctor Pinch…’ and before I could finish the line he interrupted, saying, ‘I’m not a good doctor, I don’t have the patients.’ That brought the whole house to a standstill, including all of us.

Somebody used to fire a gun up into the flies, and a bird dropped down, but this night the bird dropped down about six lines later, the whole thing was chaos – the audience loved it. This was the first season when the RSC toured to Newcastle, and at the end when we invited people to come up and join the dance onstage, they stayed dancing for so long that we thought we would never get back to our digs at all. We finally had to say that perhaps it was now time they all went home. The whole experience with that play was a very joyous one.

Which is more than I can say for the next one –
King Lear
. It was my own fault, because originally it was the only play in that season I was not to be in. When I asked Trevor if I could change my mind, he said, ‘Yes, I’ll put you down to play Regan.’ But then I didn’t enjoy playing it, and I still don’t know why really. I had a wonderful grey fur coat, a grey fur hat and boots, which I thought was frightfully glamorous, until at the dress rehearsal Mike Gwilym and Nick Grace said, ‘For goodness’ sake don’t run in that, or somebody will take a pot-shot at you.’

Donald was wonderful as Lear, and my Michael was quite brilliant as the Fool, but I didn’t feel wonderful because it didn’t feel right that the three of us playing Lear’s daughters were presented as if we were at the State Opening of Parliament at the beginning, in white dresses with blue sashes and tiaras. Somehow I could not reconcile that world with one where someone would come in and say of the bound Gloucester, ‘Pluck out his eyes.’

In that scene John Woodvine was not much help as my husband, the Duke of Cornwall. On the first night I just caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye as he took something out of a plastic bag with his back to the audience. Then as he said, ‘Out, vile jelly,’ he threw this eye, which flew across the stage and stuck on the side of the proscenium arch. At that moment I thought it was faintingly frightful, what a wonderful effect. But the next night I came on, and saw the eye from the night before, still stuck on the proscenium arch, and thought this was not promising for the rest of the run. When the production transferred to the Aldwych I asked to be released from that part. I found it just as unpleasant as playing Portia.

My memories of the next two plays I did at the Aldwych are hazy in the extreme. In Ibsen’s
Pillars of the Community
I played Lona Hessel to Ian McKellen’s Karsten Bernick, and I only had three short scenes. All I can remember is that I had red boots, whistled, and had a vaguely tartan dress; I can’t recall a single thing about the story. As for Congreve’s
The Way of the World
, I never understood the plot, either in rehearsal or in performance – and fortunately there were not too many of those. The best thing about it was playing Millamant opposite Michael Pennington as Mirabell. We were to co-star several times in the coming years. The next time was in
The Gift of the Gorgon
by Peter Shaffer, when we played Mr and Mrs Damson, so after those two plays we always greet each other now as Mr and Mrs Plum.