Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (34 page)

The second half feels much better. I've always been more comfortable
with the neurotic Richard rather than the supremely confident one.

It runs about three and a quarter hours. With an interval, that will be
three and a half. At the end, Bill says there are only three people who
can't go any faster - Mal, Frances and self - everyone else can and must.
Yvonne Coulette gets very upset. She feels she can't go any faster and
has been constantly volunteering cuts.

In the pub I am supported by Mal, Roger and Penny in begging Bill to
cut. He stares at the carpet. The problem gets more serious with each
day. Already people will be heartbroken to lose their favourite bits. Which
is why it would have been better to cut before rehearsals began.

Bump into Harold Innocent who says, `Too long, too long. There are
scenes in our production never witnessed before on the English stage.
I've only ever seen the Queen Elizabeth scene once before and has anyone
ever seen the Clarence children before?'

SECOND RUN-THROUGH Bill's brief is, `Go for the humour, the
lightness.' He has done a few little snips and everyone does take it faster.
In all, we cut about eight minutes off the first half.

I take a plunge at the part, well a gentle plunge, and the first half does
feel better. But the humour of the character is still a mystery and one
which only a live audience can solve.

Something happens early in the run to help me get closer to the
character. For the Woodville dinner, stage-management have - unbelievably - set oranges and apples in the bowls again, and inevitably they start
rolling around again. In the middle of some immortal couplet I break off
and say, `Fucking hell, right, excuse me a moment', carry the bowls with
the remaining fruit to the front of the rake, throw them off, and return to continue with the scene. I'm not really that angry but everyone thinks I've
had a `turn', and the room has gone very quiet. For the first time I get
some sense of the danger Richard should engender among those around
him. It is very liberating for me, and the rest of my performance has an
unpredictable edge as a result.

Bill has picked up one of the apples that I threw out, and sits munching
it. At the notes session afterwards he says, `You won't be seeing fruit in
that scene again. Something today convinced me that the Woodville family
are exclusively meat-eaters.'

I am pleasantly surprised by the strength of my voice throughout the
first half; then, on the big `If?' in the strawberries scene, I stupidly
over-strain it and live to regret that piece of overacting - there's the whole
of the second half to get through. But my voice holds. Just. A tin of
Nigroid voice tablets is carried with me throughout.

Without my noticing too much, I sail through the lines with only one
or two stumbles and generally the whole affair passes off without too much
effort. A step forward. The part at least felt within reach today.

WARDROBE FITTING-ROOM Again the atmosphere is bright and
good-humoured in the face of impossible odds. Today is the fortieth
anniversary of D-Day after all.

A new rough has been stitched together to try over the enlarged back
and arms. I could weep for joy - we're there at last. An image that goes
back to the early sketches. The beast, the bull. And the massive upper
bulk again creating that optical illusion of wasted legs and tiny feet.

The new weight of the enlarged deformity raises the problem of how
to support it. The obvious way is attaching it like a parachute with the
crotch as anchor, but I went through all this with the harness for the Fool
and my manhood almost never recovered. They will try cross-fastenings
on the chest.

THE DIRTY DUCK A thrilling discussion about Shakespeare, with the
Avon drifting by at our elbows and the evening turning pink, blue, mixing
to purple. Bill, Penny and I vow to do a production of Merchant in the
future. Bill wants to try cutting the whole last Act. Who cares about those
sodding rings after the trial scene? I'm delighted - imagine having no
rows with Bill over the length of the play!

NOTES SESSION On yesterday's run. Bill very skilfully finds a word of
individual praise for everyone. He says the run was more thrilling than he
thought possible with a play he knows to the point of boredom.

The new crutches arrive, made of the metal they use for racing bikes and
circus trapezes. The weight is comparable to the N H S crutches. We bash
them together and they appear to be indestructible, not even denting
slightly. But in appearance they are exceptionally ugly. Dead straight and
rather thick. The shape has no movement or grace at all. I shall think of
them as a last resort. Waiting now for the titanium crutches.

Doing bits with Ciss on stage. I love working in this huge space without
an audience or the need to perform. The holy magic this place has in
repose. A few working lights throwing shafts across the heavy red folds
of the Merchant set, but mainly a feeling of darkness, of coolness.

We do some voice tests and then Ciss makes Penny and me do the
Lady Anne scene running around the auditorium between the seats, me
trying to catch her. Whenever Ciss does voice workshops in here she loves
getting the actors off the stage and into the auditorium.

She says, `We have to give words space, let them float out. The words
and ideas are more important than what anyone can do with them. They
have to be allowed to live in the air.'

Back in her little office a solus voice call. I sense she is worried by my
voice from the two run-throughs. Not its staying power, but my inexperience with the verse. But I also know she wouldn't be driving me so hard
at this stage if she wasn't quite confident in my basic grasp of the role.

She talks about freeing the vowels. `Vowels are what we spoke first.'

`You mean as babies?'

`And as we evolved as human beings. Vowels carry the shape, the
weight, the meaning of the words.'

She asks me to remember the first poem or rhyme I learned as a child,
to recapture my first joy of musical language. My brain aches with the
effort of going back that far. `Jack and Jill' is all I can think of. She makes
me recite it on the floor, rocking. Then `Now is the winter' in the same
way. She is sitting on the floor as well, cross legged, her head cocked,
eyes alert, as if the sounds may actually be seen or scented in the air. She
says, `We're on to something. Can you feel it?'

`Yes ... sort of.'

It sounds mystical as I write it down like this, but as Alison Sutcliffe
says later, `Ciss is teaching something profound, not handing over some glib method.' If it is sometimes confusing it is because you are reaching
inside for a new sensation. Try and define it and it remains elusive. Allow
yourself to feel it and it will come. Not immediately, but suddenly without
trying in a few days time. In a run-through or rehearsal, you are suddenly
aware of the words coming out freely, `living in the air'.

It's happened in the past, will happen this time.

S O L U s Nightmare speech. Bill makes me do it very slowly, exploring
each thought: `Let Richard think for the first time like an ordinary man,
not like an express train. Like any of us asking "What do I fear?" ' He
says if we can get sympathy for Richard at this stage it will be a considerable
achievement, but it's a sympathy which should make the audience want
him killed quickly. Not out of revenge for what he's done, but to have
him put out of his misery. Bill says, `We enjoy the early Richard because,
for most of us who aren't like him, it is such a strain being good!'

LONG LARTIN MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON Ciss does regular
workshops here. I've asked if I could do one, hoping it might throw some
new light on Richard. We've decided to do it on the Lady Anne scene.
When we met this evening to drive out to the prison, Penny said, `You do
realise that everyone in that room will have murdered or raped at least
one person.' She is wearing very tight jeans which can only be removed,
she assures me, with the latest laser equipment.

We are led through the prison grounds which look quite friendly in the
sunny evening light, rather like a university campus. But eerily deserted.
And yet the gates buzz and spring open just as you reach them. Big
Brother is watching.

In the classroom the sunlight streams through the bars on the window
as the prisoners file in, smiling and nodding at us, a bit awkward.

Ciss seems unusually nervous as she begins the session. She gets them
on their feet. `All hum,' she instructs them. `Mmmmmm' go the hefty
cons, `Mmmaaa ... Mmmooo ...' Ciss yells over the din, `Pat one
another's backs!' Penny joins in gamely, bounding into the throng. `And
chests!' calls Ciss. Penny disappears momentarily in the rush.

We read the scene. They are a wonderful audience. Our visit seems to
be a form of nourishment to them. They listen with rapt attention, almost
like blind people do, hearing each and every syllable.

Afterwards, a discussion rages. I find the arguments difficult to follow
because they're all studying sociology, psychology or philosophy. One of them is particularly witty and charming. He is doing English Literature
and talks about Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream.

The usual dilemma crops up: why does Lady Anne give in to Richard?
`Easy,' says a quiet and rather beautiful young man. `Evil is erotic.'

Another says, `Shit, Richard the Third would have made a good crook,
wouldn't he?'

As they're leaving, they each come up to shake hands. The charming
man who talked about Brook's Dream asks Penny if she would do him a
special favour. He wants her to send him a photo. Just of her hands.

He's the only one accompanied back to his cell by a special warder,
who has been standing just outside the door throughout. The rest troop
away noisily in a group.

I feel rather like I did after those visits to the spastics' work centre and
disabled games evening. Uplifted by the courage on display.

Evil might be erotic, but, from the evidence of this evening, it's also
quite invisible.

VOICE CALL Ciss is inspiring as always, but her worry about my voice
is beginning to communicate to me. I'm starting to listen to myself
speak. Fatal.

THIRD AND FINAL RUN-THROUGH We won't be doing the whole
play again until next Wednesday's dress rehearsal. Today's run is, in a
way, the summation of the seven weeks' work in the Conference Hall.
Next week we move into the theatre and a new phase begins.

Bill and I are alone, waiting for the others to come in. He says, `What
should you go for in this run?'

`Can't think of anything. To tell you the truth, I don't really feel like
doing it at all.'

`Good. We said you should get bored with it.'

And precisely because I am a little bored, we have the most extraordinary
run-through.

Malcolm Ranson, the fight director, is watching for the first time.
Perhaps because his job entails devising ways of maiming and killing, he
has a rather dark sense of humour and starts giggling early on. This
communicates first to Bill, who also starts, then to me and finally to the
whole cast. I play the whole of the first half on the crest of a corpse.
Sometimes I am able to control and use it - with this much hysteria in the room waiting to explode, one can achieve electrifying effects by holding
it down or throwing it back in their faces.

But at other times the hysteria claims me as the most helpless victim
and things get steadily worse until, half way through the Baynard's Castle
scene, I'm unable to continue. The whole room is full of shrieking people,
like an asylum.

The atmosphere is so dangerous. On many levels. Another director or
one of the older, more `professional' members of the cast, could at any
moment jump up and scream, `Will you stop it!' But the discovery is rich.
The anarchy, the disrespect for the final run-through unleashes my
performance from the caution of seven weeks' rehearsal and sets loose
the character at last. Although I didn't realise it, or plan this to happen, I
needed to behave this disrespectfully as an actor to make the final leap
into Richard's amorality and discover the true nature of his humour -
Stopford A. Brooke's `chuckling pleasure' and Peter Sutcliffe's highpitched giggle.

The consequences for the second half are valuable too. Gone are the
soliloquies, the asides, the manipulations, the plottings, and Richard's
delight in all this. As King, the man becomes serious, paranoid, starts to
disintegrate. Our run-through audience are dying to enjoy themselves like
they did in Part One, but there are few opportunities. Their regret that
it's not as much fun as before is directly linked to Richard's own sense of
frustration and nostalgia for those joyous days. Events move nervously
and horribly towards the inevitable end.

I have understood something about the whole part today. At the end I
am not too drenched, the voice tired but still there. Inside, I'm deeply,
deeply happy.

Bill says to the assembled cast, `Well, we've done three good ones now.
Don't know what to say ... I'm terribly excited really ... You're working
together as a Company in a very generous way ... Christ, I'm not going
to make a ra-ra speech. You can all feel the potential of what we've got
on our hands. Have a good weekend, and thank you.'

The word spreads like wildfire and it's encouraging the way people from
all around the theatre keep coming up to say, `I hear it went terribly well.'
Jim says, `You're getting better and better each time. I think you might
be on to something a bit special.' His eyes bright.

WARDROBE FITTING-ROOM The first costume is finished. A queue
of people waiting to try their creations on me. Debbie with the crowns and hat, Julian with the gloves and shoes, and finally Pam with the
hair-piece. This has been made to match my own curly hair and perfectly
fills the gap between my head and the hump. It's rather flattering - light
years away from the Hermanus head - but looks so natural we decide to
leave it as it is and ditch the spiked, punky look.