Alan Rickman (14 page)

Alan was to be reunited with Dusty for the latter's university play
Bad Language
at Hampstead Theatre after stints at Oxford Playhouse and London's Royal Court in 1981, with his move to the latter proving crucial in getting Rickman spotted by the right people. Max Stafford-Clark directed him in Thomas Kilroy's Irish version of Chekhov's
The Seagull
, with Alan playing the Trigorin role under the new name of Aston. There he met another great friend, Harriet Walter, whose Nina became Lily in this transplantation to Galway.

The reviews, however, were very mixed. B. A. Young in the
Financial Times
opined: ‘I couldn't understand how anyone could fall in love with Aston as Alan Rickman plays him. He is as passionless as a fish, even when he is making love.' The
Guardian
's Michael Billington, on the other hand, thought that leading lady Anna Massey was ‘superbly backed by Alan Rickman's Aston', and the
Listener
's John Elsom wrote that ‘Alan Rickman's Aston was a fine performance, clarifying Trigorin's fear of failure and his belief that the very nature of his art sucks life dry'.

Fellow Old Latymerian Robert Cushman in the
Observer
was of the opinion that ‘Alan Rickman's Trigorin is . . . uncompromising . . . the analysis of his writer's disease is wonderfully lucid. Nina would have to be not only star-struck, but a bit deaf, to fall for him.'

Nevertheless, the playwright Christopher Hampton was to catch that performance and see in Rickman the dread seducer of innocent women for a daring stage adaptation of a notoriously corrupting French novel.

‘Alan was enormously creative in
The Seagull
. As Aston, he had a self-loathing and obsession that was quite outstanding,' says Max Stafford-Clark. ‘He has got a sexuality that is very particular. The role that created him was Valmont, a complete libertine, and Aston's cynicism played a part in that.

‘You know where you are with Alan: if he's in a bad mood, you know he's in a bad mood. He used to be very candid about what he thought. The big companies do rather smother you, and he operates best outside big companies. In some senses he's a bit over-careful about his career. He should tour with my company Out Of Joint. I offered him Plume in
The Recruiting Officer
, but he said he didn't want to play any more parts with lace at the sleeves. It's the Valmont syndrome.

‘The frustration of being an actor is that it's sometimes a passive life, hence his involvement with directing. The problem is that he's a brilliant actor, and everyone wants him to act. He's very special; and he's coped with power and comparative wealth with an elegance that eludes a lot of people.'

Having also caught his Aston/Trigorin at the trendy Court address, Jonathan Powell wanted to build on Rickman's impact in
Thérèse Raquin
and
Smiley's People.
The part that was to make Rickman famous on the small screen carried a sexual innuendo far beyond the original characterisation by Anthony Trollope. Obadiah Slope became a byword for beguiling sleaze, thanks to Rickman's insinuating performance.

Dusty remembers: ‘Alan and I were having a drink at the bar in the Bush, while he was doing the Stephen Davis play
The Last Elephant
. Alan said to me, “I've just had the most extraordinary experience. An old man kept winking at me. I thought he was trying to get off with me. He came over and said he wanted to run this article on me as the wickedest man in Britain. I said no, thank you.”

‘Alan thought he was being kind to a tramp, that he was doing him a favour by speaking to him. It turned out to be a tabloid hack.'

Jonathan Powell admits that the casting of Alan as the slimy Obadiah Slope was a second choice, albeit an inspired one: ‘Alan
Plater scripted
Barchester Chronicles
from the two Trollope novels,
The Warden
and
Barchester Towers
. We had cast all the major characters with some starry names: Donald Pleasence, Geraldine McEwan, Nigel Hawthorne, etc.

‘I think we offered Slope to someone else who turned it down. We were up a gum tree. So I suggested this bloke . . . and the director, David Giles, said, “If you think he's good, cast him.” I did think Alan would be brilliant. I also thought it would be nice, in this glittery cast, to have the interloper Slope played by someone who brought no baggage.

‘In one article, Alan was quoted as saying “How boring to do a classic serial” – until he picked up the scripts. This was the star part. He was sensational: he had an ability to deliver comedy without upsetting the balance of the piece, to play the part full tilt without being overbearing.

‘Of course he was virtually unknown to television audiences. He brought that repressed ambition to the role . . . but it was perfectly judged. It did reveal that he had the makings of a very great actor. It was very clever and perceptive of him to fear being typecast as a Uriah Heep thereafter.

‘He's very parsimonious with what he will do, which is a pity for all of us. He says he won't do television now. He's a particularly special, very unique talent.'

Initially Nigel Hawthorne looked set to be the star of
The Barchester Chronicles
with the showy role of the harumphing, irascible Archdeacon Grantly, a part he played with a whirligig impatience. Everything changed, however, when Rickman made his entrance and caught the imagination.

‘He has a lovely sardonic warm personality; ladies find him very sexy. He's a very straight guy, very unpretentious. I'm also a socialist, though I don't put myself on the line like he does,' Hawthorne told me.

‘He's a dreadful giggler, which is a very endearing side to him. He's very warm, nice and enormously generous, a trait that's not always considered to be very common in theatrical circles. But theatre people are very supportive of one another. He's much more a theatre person than I am: you are constantly under scrutiny.

‘He had an extraordinary presence as Slope. I didn't, however, agree with the way he said Slope's last line as if he were cursing like Malvolio: “May you both live for ever!” I always thought it would have been better if he had said it simply.

‘Something like Slope sets up a situation you have wanted for a long time; and when it comes, it's not as easy as you think it is,' added Nigel, who found himself in the same position after becoming a great success on both sides of the Atlantic in the role of George III.

‘You have to be very wary. You have suddenly been elevated into a commercial position. You have to ask yourself whether this is the right move. Alan wanted to stick out for better . . . he's got that integrity, a very sophisticated attitude that doesn't succumb to flattery. He's able to be aloof.

‘But I couldn't believe at first that he would turn down so many roles some of us would give our eye-teeth for,' adds Nigel. ‘I understand it now, though: you have to act with conviction.'

Our first glimpse of Slope is of the back of Alan's head: his greased-back hair, worn slightly longer over the collar than the allowable vanity of a bishop's chaplain strictly permits. When he treats us to a full-frontal of his face, Alan is frowning as usual.

Slope's first bid for power comes when he usurps the canon-in-residence's sermon in the cathedral by telling the bishop and his wife – Slope's patroness, Mrs Proudie – that the canon has been frivolously residing on the banks of Lake Como for the last twelve years instead of attending to his duties.

What gives Slope a unique advantage with the ladies is that he is the youngest man in the episcopal circle. His contempt for the bishop, Dr Proudie, is thinly veiled. A serpent in a provincial Eden, he hisses slightly during his maiden sermon at Barchester as he lifts his eyes up in false piety.

Alan's portrayal of Slope is infinitely smoother than Trollope's description, which is pretty damning. The original Slope's lank hair was ‘of a dull pale reddish hue . . . formed into three straight lumpy masses . . . and cemented with much grease . . . his face . . . is not unlike beef . . . of a bad quality. His forehead . . . is unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless . . . big, prominent, pale brown eyes . . . his nose . . . possess(es) a spongy, porous appearance . . . formed out of a red coloured cork. A cold clammy perspiration always exudes from him.'

That is the description of a Dickensian grotesque without any real appeal to women, for all his appalling pretensions. Alan's Slope is a consummate ladies' man, pursuing a protracted and very
believable flirtation with Susan Hampshire's Signora Neroni. She, however, is sharp enough to see through him and plays an elaborate game with him as he ‘slobbers' (in Trollope's words) over her hand. Alan even manages to make the kissing of her fingers an unusually bold and intimate gesture.

The audience is left to wonder about the exact nature of the intense relationship between Slope and the apparently invalid Signora. He bestows a lot of lingering looks upon her as she reclines on her couch, and she jousts with Mrs Proudie for his attention. He also infuriates the short-fused Archdeacon Grantly, who vows to his wife: ‘I shall destroy him.'

‘What were you doing with that painted Jezebel?' demands Geraldine McEwan's grande dame of a Mrs Proudie, all organ-stop eyes and shuddering consonants. For Slope has more effect on women than on men. That's his weakness, as Trollope points out: he should have cultivated the men for greater advancement. But he has a vanity, cleverly suggested by Alan's feline performance, that instinctively gravitates towards the distaff side.

He is, in fact, horribly attractive, with his boyish, sensual lips, almond-shaped eyes and sly, sideways glances. The bishop is weak and dithery, easily manipulated by the infernal alliance of his wife and Slope. Of course, Slope turns out to be a brandy snob – a sure sign of his great aspirations – when he declines an impoverished man's offer of some Marsala. Those piously downcast eyelids shoot up as if yanked by a hoist when told that the young widow he has been sniffing round is a woman of wealthy means. Slope slithers from one (im)moral position to another, forever changing his allegiance.

It is a delight to see how the fickle, flirtatious Slope has aroused even Mrs Proudie. ‘Your behaviour with women . . .' she enunciates with awful majesty, almost unable to utter the unspeakable. ‘At my party, your conduct with that Italian woman was inexcusable.'

In another telling piece of body language that Rickman has patented, Slope puts his face very close to other people's when he wishes to be intimidating. It's rather like one animal facing down another. He's a surprisingly physical performer, but elegantly controlled and tremendously instinctual.

In his serpentine way, Slope becomes the viper nestling at the bishop's bosom. He makes ‘love' to Signora Neroni, declaring his passion. Slope bares his teeth amorously at her, another animalistic
gesture, but he's a moral coward and she calls his bluff in a scene of unusual sexual intensity. Poor Slope looks vexed and pouts sulkily, with Rickman finding the vulnerabilities in even this slimy creature.

The ghastly man schemes to become the Dean of Barchester, but the bishop outmanoeuvres him. His only hope, thereafter, is the rich young widow, whom he treats with very unclerical passion. ‘Beautiful woman, you cannot pretend to be ignorant that I adore you,' is his declaration. She slaps him hard for his presumption and he falls backwards upon the lawn with a look of such genuine surprise that, for a moment, one feels a pang of pity for Slope.

Not that Rickman sentimentalises him one jot; but, absorbed by his ambitions, he has no idea what other people really feel about him. For all his scheming, he's a hopeless innocent.

Signora Neroni, tiring of his machinations, finally humiliates Slope in public. ‘I find your behaviour abominable!' he snaps and bangs the door behind him. ‘Ambition is so tedious,' she says to her tittering friends by way of explanation.

Slope, now really nettled, is finally carpeted by the Proudies. The bishop makes it clear that he should seek some other preferment. There is an exchange of unseemly insults between Slope and Mrs Proudie; he has lost all caution and becomes a snarling animal. She suggests he become the curate at Puddingdale. ‘PUDD-ingdale?' growls Slope, with Alan disdainfully emphasising the ludicrous sound of the first syllable. Obviously not an option for someone like him.

‘May you both live for ever!' he snaps, after putting his shark-like face close to the bishop's in his usual intimidatory way. This is, in fact, the voice of the author's own ending, put into Slope's mouth instead by the adaptor Alan Plater.

It was a bravura performance of great subtlety and detail. And yet, as he defiantly told the London
Evening Standard
in 1983, Rickman crudely based the character on his favourite political hate-figures.

‘You look in vain for any redeeming qualities in Slope,' said Rickman. ‘Trollope himself grudgingly admits that the man has courage. And that's about it, really. He doesn't know fear at all.

‘Although Trollope was ostensibly writing about the Church, I think he was actually talking about politicians. My performance as Slope was modelled on various members of the Government.

‘If you just glanced at Norman Tebbit via Michael Heseltine and wiped a bit of Mrs Thatcher over the two of them, I think you might end up with something resembling Slope.'

This was the first political gauntlet that Rickman had thrown down; and there were to be more. Though he gives few interviews and guards the sanctity of his private life as if he were the custodian of the Crown Jewels, he does at least seize the opportunity to make his left-wing politics abundantly clear to the meanest intellect. But he's too imaginative a performer not to have revelled in the excesses of the character. Slope was a monster, and certainly a wicked Tory one, but he was scandalously enjoyable company. ‘Playing Slope was like a wonderful holiday,' he admitted. ‘It was such a rich character that you could just take a great big dive into it.