Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (3 page)

MAYDAYS After the show, Otto Plaschkes comes round to my dressingroom. He's a film producer, the latest in a long line to try to finance Snoo
Wilson's screenplay, Shadey. I was first approached about playing the
eponymous hero (a gentle character who possesses paranormal powers
and wants to change sex) over a year ago. I tell him I'm about to be talked
to by the R S C, presumably about returning to Stratford. If he could be
more definite about dates I could ask the R S C to work round them. He
can't, but it's an encouraging meeting.

Wake in the early hours. Meeting Bill tomorrow. It's got to be Richard
III. Got to be. Alan Howard's was about three, four years ago, so it's due
again. And it's the obvious one if they're going to give me a Shakespeare
biggy. Sudden flash of how to play the part - ideas are so clear in the
middle of the night - Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Very
misshapen, clumsy but powerful, collapsed pudding features. Richard
woos Lady Anne (his most unlikely conquest in the play; I've never seen
it work) by being pathetic, vulnerable. She feels sorry for him, is convinced
he couldn't hurt a fly.

The Nilsen murder case - the Sunday papers are full of the trial of this
timid little mass-murderer. The sick, black humour seems to have a flavour of Richard III: Nilsen running out of neckties as the strangulations
increased; a head boiling on his stove while he walked his dog Bleep; his
preference for Sainsbury's air fresheners; his suggestion to the police that
the flesh found in his drains was Kentucky Fried Chicken; even his remark
that having corpses was better than going back to an empty house. The
headlines squeal `Mad or Bad, Monster or Maniac, Sick or Evil?'

Spend hours sketching him, looking for some signs in that ordinary,
ordinary face. The newspaper editors compensate for its ordinariness by
choosing photos that are shot through police-van grills, or where the
flashlights have flared on his spectacles to make him look other-worldly.
But his ordinariness always seeps through. Isn't it that which makes him
really frightening?

I ask Jim whether he believes we all have a Nilsen within us. He says,
`Well, certainly not you. You can't boil an egg, never mind someone's
head.'

TRATTORIA AQUILINO Over lunch, Bill offers me Richard III. Although I've been expecting it, my heart misses a beat.

I don't know whether Bill is any younger than the other directors, but
he is somehow always regarded as such. After seven years with the
company he is the only one titled Resident - rather than Associate -
Director, his missing qualification being a Shakespeare production in the
main auditorium at Stratford. In fact the only Shakespeares he's ever done
for the company were the Henry IV's for the small-scale tour a couple of
years ago. But after his successes this year with two classics (Volpone and
Tartuffe) in The Other Place and The Pit this next step is inevitable.

We complement one another curiously, pulling in opposite directions -
him towards the naturalistic, me towards the theatrical - and, I hope,
stretching one another in the process. Almost the only thing we do have
in common is a serious commitment to scruffiness. We both seem to find
our days too short to waste time on shaving, brushing hair, or doing
anything with clothes other than washing them and jumping into a familiar,
unironed assortment hurriedly.

He is quite frank about next year's Stratford season. They did try to
get Howard and McKellen, but failed. So they have resolved instead to
introduce a new, younger group of Shakespearian actors. Roger Rees has
been mentioned as well as one or two others whom he won't name yet.

I am flattered to be thought of in these terms, but am keen to know
what else they have in mind for my season. Last year in Stratford convinced
me it is no place to spend a whole year unless you're constantly employed
or a devoted ruralist.

He says Henry V is being considered and wonders aloud what I feel
about playing him. He stresses that this is not part of the offer, hasn't
even been mooted at the directors' meetings. I reply that it's a part that
would be challenging rather than wildly attractive. We also talk briefly
about Othello (lago, obviously), Troilus (he mentions Thersites but, as he's
deformed, that seems too close to Richard III; I steer towards Pandarus
- does he have to be older?), As You Like It (Jaques? Yes please. Touchstone? No thanks), Merry Wives (Ford? Yes, absolutely).

We talk briefly about Richard. I feel he should be severely deformed,
not just politely crippled as he's often played. Bill says one should identify
with him: a man looki>ig in from the outside and thinking, `I'll have some
of that.'

I mention meeting Trevor in Joe Allen's and how I'm worried by the
immediate association of Tartuffe with Richard. He smiles. `I'm not asking
you to play Richard like Tartuffe, or because of Tartuffe.' But it's a happy
opportunity at last to discuss the inexplicable transformation that show
made from the unhappiest rehearsal period (a major cast change, a
mistaken lack of faith in the new translation, days of unremitting gloom)
to this highly popular success we have on our hands. Have we just had a
lucky escape? My own performance certainly feels like a survival kit rather
than bricks and mortar. Bill feels that, although by accident rather than
design, the mixture has turned out to be an exciting one - bourgeoisie
invaded by gargoyle. I'm still not sure.

Coming to the end of the meal he asks, `So how would you like me to
report back at the next directors' meeting?'

`Well, ideally I'd like to be in four shows, no less than three, the majority
to be Main-House Shakespeares, let's say two biggies and one supporting,
and then perhaps one new play at The Other Place.'

`And coffee to follow?' the waitress is saying at the next table.

We leave the restaurant and Bill jumps into a passing taxi. We've only
had one bottle of wine, but I'm left standing unsteadily on Islington Green,
my head spinning. All I can think of is Michael Gambon telling me about
driving up the Mi to Stratford to do a show last year: `There's all these
cars gliding past, Tone. Men in shirtsleeves, jackets hanging neatly from those little hooks in the back, eyes glazed, commuting back and forth like
zombies. And then this thought suddenly hits me, like for the first time,
and I say to myself, "Michael, you're driving up to Stratford-upon-Avon
to play King-Fucking-Lear!" '

MONTY BERMAN SESSION He's pleased by the Richard III news, but
as soon as I mention I would find Henry V more difficult to play he
pounces on this and won't let go. By the end of the session I am totally
convinced that unless I play that part my mental health will be in the
gravest danger; then I remember and say, `But Monty, that's not the one
that's been offered.'

Phone my agent, Sally Hope, who's very laid back indeed about the news.
I know she wants me to leave the R S C, feels I've been there long enough.

So I'm left to rejoice on my own. Buzzing around the house with the
text, doing the speeches. This is almost the best time with any part, when
it's on offer but you haven't said yes. You can have an unadulterated,
indulgent wallow in it.

An image of massive shoulders like a bull or ape. The head literally
trapped inside his deformity, peering out. Perhaps a whole false body
could be built, not just the hump, to avoid having to contort myself and
the strain or risk of injury that would entail.

Already dropped the Laughton image. Or maybe that's how he starts
- an unkempt mess. Then, after `a score or two of tailors / To study
fashions to adorn my body', his grossness is transformed into some very
impressive image - in the same way Nazi uniforms were so flattering that
all sorts of odd-looking men, the undersized, the obese and the clubfooted, all looked sensational in them.

My copy of the play is rather irritating for a wallow like today's. It's
full of scribblings and sketches. I've been in the play before, playing
Buckingham to Jonathan Pryce's brilliant Richard (a natural, born Richard)
in Alan Dossor's 1973 Liverpool Everyman production. Following hard
on Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream, it was set in a circus lions' cage,
everyone was in track suits (different colours for the different factions)
and had white faces. We all had to learn acrobatics, aiming for back-flips
and eventually settling for forward-rolls. In retrospect the production was
vintage Golden Age Everyman. Anarchy ruled. After Tyrrel reported the
successful murder of the princes, Jonathan used to slip in a `Nice one, Tyrrel' between some immortal couplet. In his tent at Bosworth he used
to bring the house down by referring a line about `soldiers' to the strips
of toast on his breakfast tray. Hastings' head was passed like a rugby ball,
each of us screaming as it landed and passing it on. In the hands of
brilliant, dangerous actors like Jonathan and Bernard Hill (who played a
succession of murderers and mayors) the clowning was inspired, departing
from the rehearsed scenes and taking cast and audience on a magical
mystery tour which, more often than not, proved to be the highlight of
that night's show. I had no such courage and remember feeling woefully
inadequate. I settled instead for a careful, detailed caricature - Buckingham as a smooth-talking, suave aristocrat with a copy of The Times, a
monocle and solidly sleeked-back hair which I relied on for my biggest
laugh: `My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses.'

Dickie [Richard Wilson, actor and director] phones from Bangalore where
he's filming Passage to India. So at last I can shout it halfway across the
world -'They've asked me to play Richard the Third!'

`Good,' comes the polite reply, brimming with sub-text. Of all my
friends Dickie has been the least reticent in suggesting that my work has
deteriorated with the R S C - particularly in Tartuffe - and the most
genuinely concerned that it shouldn't be allowed to continue.

Next, Mum phones from South Africa. But her response is muted as
well. After all, she's known since August.

M O L I E R E An alternative future presents itself. In the audience tonight
sit two film producers, one American, one British. They're going to make
a film about Albert Schweitzer and are looking for someone to play the
part. Tonight's performance was sold out, but I managed to have them
squeezed in by selling part of my soul. Could this be my Gandhi? My
Lawrence ofArabia? Sure it'll be tough spending two years filming in the
leper colonies of Central Africa, but then there are the premieres, the
Royal Command Performances, the Oscar ceremonies ...

I hurry to the stage door afterwards, a hue of mascara and stage blood
still glistening around my hopeful eyes. The American producer looks
exactly like an American producer, rather like Orson Welles. He steps
forward to greet me:

'Bravura performance, Mr Shw ... Sht ...'

`Sher.'

`Yup. But let me give it to you straight. You are not our Schweitzer.
The one thing that Schweitzer was, was tall!'

M O N TY SESSION He sits looking at me, all folded round himself, long
limbs so relaxed they seem to bend anywhere like elastic, a little cushion
sometimes held within the spiral. A red sweater is sometimes draped
round the shoulders. The face is long; it has great wisdom; the eyes are
tired, doctor's eyes - they've seen a lot of what there is to see. I le works
as a G P (at the age of sixty-one cycling daily from his Highgate home to
the Lewisham practice), an acupuncturist and psychotherapist, is on the
council of European Nuclear Disarmament, writes the occasional book,
goes mountain climbing in the Himalayas in his spare time.

His phrases: `Let me posit ...', `Let me share with you ...'; `I hear
you', to reassure; his favourite form of refutation - `Bullshit!' His toughest
rule: you are never allowed to answer, 'I don't know.' And you don't half
make some progress when you can't hide behind that one. At our first
meeting back in March he said, `You'll go through various attitudes
towards me. You'll mistrust me, then you'll love me like a father, then I'll
be a guru, then you'll hate me, and then with any luck you'll see me as
just another person.' I don't think I ever got past the guru stage.