Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (30 page)

The scene is taking shape at last. The cackling, sinewy excess of that
dreadful rehearsal has been quietly forgotten. No one has mentioned it
since.

QUEEN ELIZABETH SCENE Bill says we must be aware of reducing
this scene by resorting to modern English behaviour - reticence, impatience, and so on. `This confrontation has no equivalent in contemporary
England. Maybe in Amin's Uganda. The meeting between a mother and
a man who's killed her children. A special intimacy, even beyond hatred.
A dreadful intimacy. Maternalism versus Power.'

He says that Richard wins her round because he has a brilliant instinctive
understanding of psychology. Queen Margaret, a few pages earlier, had
been urging Elizabeth to bottle up her pain until it drives her mad. But
Richard knows how to bleed her, to let her poisons out.

Also, Richard understands her fundamental materialism. Bill says that
I'm doing the bargaining section ('The liquid drops of tears that you have
shed shall come again, transformed to orient pearl') too prettily: `Richard
is saying to her, "Look love, I can turn your tears into jewellery."'

This gives the scene a much more disturbing quality.

V o t C E CALL I wish I could remember exactly how Ciss put it: the ideas
rest on the breath, both come out open and free. (She said it much better
than that.) How the humour will be spontaneous that way, not planned
or arch.

She makes me do the speeches sitting on the floor rocking. Says the
voice instinctively goes to its proper centre that way, the breath coming
from the diaphragm.

She makes Roger and me sing our duologue as an operatic duet.

Freeing, freeing all the time.

Ciss: `In the last two or three years the R S C has started to underestimate
audiences. Shakespeare is easier to understand spoken at speed rather
than slowly spelt out.'

I'm developing a stiffness in the left hip. Is this from adjusting to the rake,
or is it the deformed position itself? Will have to keep a careful check on
this.

SOLUS `Now is the winter' with Bill and Ciss. The main problem is the
first section of the speech. Bill suggests doing it as if Richard is having to
address a public function on behalf of his brother, the King, having to
disguise his own feelings about peace. Then we try taking that one stage
further, a kind ofJackanory treatment, `Once upon a time . . .' I like this.
At last something to grasp on to. And it has a kind of anarchic defiance:
saying to the audience, `I know you've all heard this speech before, so
here we go.' But Bill thinks that is too dangerous to play, wants it to
remain more enigmatic.

I do the deformity section full of aggression and self-hatred. Again Ciss
says, `You're telling us too much.'

I try the whole speech internalising the feelings, making the sections
less distinct; in other words, acting less. Immediately feel the character
coming through the lines unexpectedly, freshly, not being illustrated on
top of them. `That's more like it!' cry Bill and Ciss in unison.

This has been a breakthrough. We work on through all the speeches,
everything now that much easier. For the first time tonight I didn't feel
frightened by the soliloquies; more than that, I actually felt comfortable
in them. What's happening is that I am surrendering to Shakespeare's
Richard. He is funny.

A letter from Bob today with a well-timed quotation from Shaw about
good Shakespearian acting. He's writing about Forbes Robertson as
Hamlet: `He does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on with
another half line; and then stop to act again, with the clock running away
with Shakespeare's chances all the time. He plays as Shakespeare should
be played, on the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting
simultaneous, inseparable, and in fact identical. Not for a moment is he
solemnly conscious of Shakespeare's reputation or of Hamlet's momentousness in literary history; on the contrary, he delivers us from all these
boredoms instead of heaping them on us.'

DIRTY DUCK I ask Bill D. when we're going to have a session in the
make-up department to work out the facial prosthetics. He says, `I'm not
sure it's necessary any more.'

`What, you mean, no nose?'

`No nose.'

`Oh well, I suppose I was going off the idea too. Just the cauliflower
ears then?'

`No.'

`What, you mean, no ears?'

`No ears.'

`All right, tell you what, how about eyebrows? Huge eyebrows meeting
in the middle. Like yours.'

`No.'

`No eyebrows?'

`No eyebrows.'

`He's going to look like me at this rate.'

`Why not? Your image of the brute is for another actor. Anyway, isn't
that how the Russians played him?'

It's a shock to realise that, in pulling away from Olivier, I was simply
backing into the arms of Chkhivadze.

So we have agreed to use my own face. Richard is coming up from
within now, not painted on top.

Thursdays at the R S C are a write-off. Matinee day, so most of the cast
have to break at 11.3o a.m. to have their two-hour Equity break. Which
means me doing more solus calls, or busking through scenes with perhaps
one other actor, and Bill running round being everyone else.

But a chance to get to the gym again. The ache in the hip is less today.
I'm sure it was having to adjust to the rake. However, it has been a
warning. I must increase my fitness programme again. I've been neglecting
it to give more time to learning lines.

CANTEEN Lunchtime. When you order your food they write it next to
your name, then call you when it's ready.

Sebastian Shaw is in front of me in the queue. He gives his order to
the girl and is about to go when she says, `Sorry, what's your name?'

He stops in his tracks. Looks at her. Turns to us in the queue, says,
`She doesn't know who I am.'

The girl blushes. `Sorry, I'm new here.'

`Sebastian Shaw,' he says, almost apologetically.

An odd, sad incident. He wasn't being arrogant. He's nearly eighty, has
been with the Company longer than anyone in the building, and they
don't know his name.

He's full of the most thrilling stories. At school, W. H. Auden played
Katherina to his Petruchio. When he first arrived in Stratford for the
1926 season (he was playing Romeo, Hal and Ferdinand) he found the
theatre had just burnt down. They had to play in a cinema. George
Bernard Shaw used to sit in the front row making comments and causing the audience around him to giggle. Sebastian says, `As far as my namesake
was concerned, the world had only known two great playwrights. Shakespeare and Shaw. And he did not put them in that order either.'

As for Shakespeare, Sebastian says, `Whenever I come up here for a
season I like to go into Trinity Church, usually when there's no one else
about, and stand in front of his tomb. Just stay there for a while. You
know, in astonishment.'

MOTHER SCENE I come into the Conference Hall to find Bill and
Yvonne Coulette cutting her long speech about Richard's birth and youth.
I implore them to leave it intact.

Bill, grinning: `And this is the man who sits me down in the pub every
night and begs me to cut, cut, cut.'

`But not Richard's mother!' I say. `The man's entire psyche is explained
in this scene. Cut "Now is the winter" if you like, but not a comma from
this scene.' I argue how brilliant Shakespeare was to reduce the scale to
the domestic at this point.

Bill puts it better: `It reminds us that Hitler was a baby in someone's
arms, a little boy on a school playground.'

The speech goes back intact.

Yvonne's instinct, quite naturally given the lines, is to play the scene
vehemently, aggressively. I feel it has to be odder than that. All the women
in the play curse Richard. Water off a duck's back; the mother has
somehow to turn him inside out. Bill agrees, and encourages Yvonne to
be gentler, more maternal: `Let him hear something in her tone that takes
him right back into the nursery, a woman's voice singing gently, rocking
him. That's the cruellest thing she can do to him now. Let her entice him
into the curse. She's the spider now, he's the fly for a change.'

Building on this idea, Bill suggests that, once she has persuaded him
to have the throne lowered to the ground, she should offer a hand and
lead him gently on to the floor, to kneel together in prayer. He wasn't
expecting to be moving about, so is without his crutches. Vulnerable. Now
she can let rip.

Yvonne tries this version, but it's difficult - it means playing against the
lines with all she's got. At the end of the curse her instinct is still to throw
Richard's hand aside, or to go to strike him.

I beg her to try a kiss, a kiss implanted with the most maternal intimacy
(I'm in fulsome Freudian mood now).

She looks to Bill imploringly, says, `I feel she might want to, but she
can't.'

Bill: `What if she wants to, and can?'

Yvonne tries it. It is electric.

Monty was directing this scene.

Bill D. has been to Chris Tucker's today. He returns with polaroids of the
enlarged arms, which look magnificent. He's given Tucker the go-ahead to
cast it all into latex, without building up the back at all. He says, `Following
our conversation last night about normalising Richard, I think Tucker
may have got it right.'

I have the evening off to pace my little Godot set and learn the last of
the lines: the nightmare speech and `A horse, a horse'. About the latter
we made these two fascinating and irrelevant observations the other day:
one, that it's the only bit of the play we haven't yet staged; two, that it's
probably the second most famous line in the whole of Shakespeare ('To
be or not to be' is probably in first place).

So now all the lines are learned. Roughly.

RICHARD AND BUCKINGHAM Bill, Mal and I spend the evening on
the various sequences that make up this relationship. A marvellous relaxed
evening, like old times with old friends.

All three of us have, I think, been behaving rather untypically in front
of the new Company. Tension, I suppose. Bill and I have been sniping at
one another, increasingly irritated by one another's weaknesses which we
know all too well; Mal still tends to go into his aggressive silences.

But left on our own tonight, all of that disappears. Bill rushes around
peering through an imaginary viewfinder and getting it wrong - holding
it up to the closed eye - like he did in the telly rehearsals at Acton. Mal
plays Buckingham very camp, flouncing around with hands propped high
on his rib cage. It is an awesome sight - a camp Viking. I just stand there
and laugh.

Good discovery for the Baynard's Castle scene: with the gentlest
re-arranging of lines we contrive to bring Richard down from that upper
window and hence break up the static nature of the scene. That's been
one of the most cumbersome factors - Buckingham having to deliver his
long speeches to a man behind and above him. Now Richard can be on
stage level with the mayor and aldermen. This would also seem an ideal
opportunity for him to function without his crutches for a while - increase
his impression of harmlessness, vulnerability.

A R D E N HOTEL BAR Mal relates an interesting historical fact dug up in
Henry V rehearsals: the two-fingered sod-off sign comes from Agincourt.
The French, certain of victory, had threatened to cut off the bow-fingers
of all the English archers. When the English were victorious, the archers
held up their fingers in defiance.

This could be useful. The other day, rehearsing the `Was ever woman'
speech, Alison Sutcliffe suggested I count the pros and cons on my fingers
to emphasise the audacity of what Richard has managed to pull off. He
only had two things going for him and they're ironic ('And I no friends
to back my suit at all but the plain devil and dissembling looks') so the
idea was for him to use two fingers in a V-sign. Until tonight, I had
dismissed the idea as being too modern.

My favourite part of the day is the drive into Stratford. As you come up
out of Chipping Campden you go over the brow of a hill. It's so beautiful
I always risk crashing at this point, particularly as I try to time putting in
the cassette at this moment. Today it is Delius. The world below is
particularly spectacular this morning. The fields of rape - I will never tire
of trying to describe them - are the gold at the end of the rainbow. The
car roof open, a warm breeze blowing, a taste of summer, the magnificent
copper beeches, white and red fruit blossoms.

PRINCES SCENE Richard and Buckingham's double-act at its most
sublime. Richard sits back and lets Buckingham deal with each problem
as it comes up - the Queen taking sanctuary, the boys' questions about
Caesar, the interrogation of Catesby. Mal says, `You keep passing the
Buck and I'll supply the Ham.'