Alan Rickman (18 page)

On the
Saturday Review
panel, Clive James rightly predicted: ‘It's going to be an enormous world-wide hit.' That professional gainsayer A.N. Wilson was, as per usual, the only dissenting voice: ‘Alan Rickman has not varied his acting technique one jot since Obadiah Slope.' But writer Paula Milne strongly disagreed: ‘I can't see anyone else in the part.'

‘He's very conscious of what critics say; I often tease him about it,' says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘He was very upset by some review during his second RSC stint. It was just before
Les Liaisons
, when he was in
As You Like It
. I remember him saying to me that he read a review with his fingers spread across the page. Michael Ratcliffe in the
Observer
didn't like him.

‘So his eventual success was sweet: it was almost a form of revenge for those of us who thought he deserved better. A revenge on circumstances, not on one person,' adds Poliakoff circumspectly.

‘His Jaques was unfairly attacked by the critics; they didn't forgive him for that,' says Adrian Noble, his director for
As You Like It
in 1985 and
Mephisto
the following year.

‘They attacked his voice; he was terribly upset by it. He is easily upset by bad reviews, although he won't admit it. They did the same with his
Hamlet
in 1992 – they objected to his voice.

‘His Jaques was a deeply passionate character who lived on the fringes of society and was sought out by the great policy-makers and thinkers. That sums up Alan,' says Adrian with a giggle. ‘He does court being a guru to a certain extent (is the Pope a Catholic?) It's a role that sits comfortably on him. He has always lived his career by his own lights, and it's difficult for theatre folk to do that. He's quite selective about things, mostly successfully.

‘He can be railing against the world one minute and be at Neil Kinnock's supper-table the next. Well, most of us were,' admits
Adrian with another giggle. ‘Alan does have a wonderful line in disdain. He doesn't corpse, but he's very funny. He retreats into his cave, as Jaques did, but he's sought after there. Young actors need people like that who say “You're going on the right path”.'

Rickman's second attempt at that quixotic philosopher Jaques was unveiled on 23 April – the date generally assumed to be Shakespeare's birthday.

It was followed by that epic sulker Achilles in
Troilus And Cressida
on 25 June.
Les Liaisons
was the late summer ‘sleeper', in Hollywood parlance, that finished the year's Stratford season with an opening night on 25 September.

In Howard Davies' production of
Troilus
, Alan was judged by some to have made Achilles even more of a heel than usual. He did not meet with Irving Wardle's approval in
The Times
: ‘. . . an unshaven Alan Rickman overplays the hysterical tantrums even for Achilles.' Similarly, Ros Asquith in the
Observer
wrote ambivalently of ‘Alan Rickman's over-the-top but disarmingly rakish Achilles'. Significantly, Asquith had seen the sexual potential in Rickman's portrayal.

But the quills were sharpened for his Jaques in
As You Like It
: Michael Ratcliffe wrote in the
Observer
about how Rickman would ‘talk through [his] teeth in a funny manner' and how he ‘leaves the field of history standing for the outrageous contrivance of his Seven Ages of Man'.

Of course such a staunch socialist as Alan would always get upset about a bad notice in the
Observer
, though Michael Coveney in the
Financial Times
praised his ‘languorous Jaques – now the sensational performance it threatened to become'.

Jack Tinker in the
Daily Mail
wrote of ‘Alan Rickman's all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wearied Jaques'. Eric Shorter in the
Daily Telegraph
admired ‘Alan Rickman's philosophical Jaques in a shabby dinner jacket who rules the entertainment with a refreshing relish'.

As if to confound the critics, Alan had set forth his views on playing Jaques in his only published work to date: one of a collection of essays by Shakespearean actors under the title of
Players Of Shakespeare
, published by the Cambridge University Press.

Jaques is all about attitude, which makes Rickman a natural for the role. He wrote of a Jaques ‘who is perceptive but passionate, vulnerable but anarchic . . . He's very sure of himself and a bit of a mess.'

He admits in print that he made a meal of things in rehearsal: ‘The other actors must have tired of wondering where I was going to enter from next, or if there would ever be a recognisable shape to the scene.' And there was an air of the dilettante about the character's self-conscious pose: ‘Jaques seeks, frets, prods and interferes but he doesn't DO . . . he definitely needs the other lords to cook his food.'

Rickman saw him as an ‘extremist . . . he might be in real danger of losing control. He's condemned to wander forever, endlessly trying to relocate some innocence, endlessly disappointed. Therein lie both his vulnerability and his arrogance . . . you are left with an image of complete aloneness . . .

‘In some ways, it is a lonely part to play,' he concluded, recalling how he and Ruby Wax as Audrey had jazzed things up at Peter James' suggestion eight years previously at the Sheffield Crucible.

In a modern-dress production, they had sung ‘Shake it up, Shakespeare baby' while eleven hundred people rocked with laughter. So much for the critics.

Light relief from Jaques' intensity came with another Peter Barnes radio play, an adaptation of Thomas Middleton's satire
A Trick To Catch The Old One
. Rickman played another shameless scamp, a Leicestershire gentleman called Theodorus Witgood who is constantly strapped for cash. Since his estate is under the control of his penny-pinching uncle Pecunius Lucre, he hatches a plot to gull him.

Rickman is a wonderfully Gothic combination of silken hypocrisy and pantomime villainy in the role. ‘INN-keeperrr . . . ! I have been searching town for you,' he utters shudderingly, fastidiously attacking each consonant as if spitting out cherry stones. Though the late Sid James need not stir uneasily in his grave at the thought of the competition, Rickman also unleashes one of his hearty and dirty belly-laughs again. So much for his laid-back image; once again, radio released him.

Alan has a working-class insecurity that has never left him, compounded by the usual doubts and fears that always assail the late starter. He's a great one for endless agonising in long, dark nights of the soul.

‘In fact, he's a bit too concerned with what the world will perceive,' says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘That's a drawback for actors even more than writers. He's very concerned with whether something is the right step.

‘Nevertheless,
Les Liaisons
was pure luck for Alan,' he adds.

Poliakoff had lunched the year before with Daniel Massey, who told him that Christopher Hampton was dramatising the book for the RSC. Was Massey ever considered for the role? Howard Davies swears until his fax machine is puce in the face that Alan was his first and only choice; but it's tempting to speculate on Massey playing Valmont as a macaroni dandy in powder and high heels, in which case we would have lost one of the great sexual animals of theatrical history.

Christopher Hampton, however, insists: ‘It was my idea to cast Alan. In fact, it was my wife's idea. She has a very good eye for casting. She had seen Alan in
Barchester Chronicles
and Snoo Wilson's play, then I saw him in
The Seagull
at the Royal Court. I suggested him to Howard Davies. The RSC was thinking of asking him to play Jaques anyway.

‘It was a great boost to all our careers – Alan, Howard Davies and myself. All of us were at the same stage, same level and about the same age.'

The way Hampton tells it,
Les Liaisons
was the dark horse that crept up on the RSC and took it completely by surprise.

‘Something remarkable was brewing. Howard and I felt like a subversive cell and the actors did, too. We were opening against Terry Hands' main-stage production of
Othello
with Ben Kingsley. The RSC thought of
Les Liaisons
as filling up its quota: it was the last play of the 1985 season in The Other Place. We were left on our own quite a lot.

‘I can't tell you how dubious everyone was. Even Howard was dubious about directing it. It was a project we cooked up; I got him to commission me. The RSC had dramatised
Les Liaisons
in the 60s and called it
The Art Of Love.
It was a complete flop then. John Barton directed it, and Judi Dench and Alan Howard were the stars. It was a black polo-neck job, reading from the script.

‘I suggested Juliet Stevenson as La Presidente de Tourvel for our version, and Howard suggested Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise de Merteuil.

‘I first met Alan in rehearsals for
Les Liaisons.
I knew of him because we had various mutual friends, like Anna Massey. He comes from an unusual background, with very clear ideas and images – he's an artist like Tony Sher. Some actors are clotheshorses.

‘Alan's voice suggests darkness; and it's expressive, not all on one note. There's a lot of variation. When he played the Trigorin role in
The Seagull
, it was the voice of a much older, more experienced man.'

Of Rickman's notoriously pernickety approach, Hampton admits: ‘Alan was interventionist about costume. He was adamant that he wouldn't shave his beard, though an eighteenth-century aristocrat with a beard was of course unheard of. He wouldn't wear a wig either, so he had to sit in his curlers every night to get enough – what do hairdressers call it? – body in his hair.'

A backstage Valmont in curlers was quite a sacrifice to his dignity, yet Rickman's artistic instinct was impeccable. The result of all this carefully created ‘naturalism' was a primitive, satyric, rough-trade Valmont, with the stubble and the long frock-coat of a (sexual) highwayman.

For all his elegance, there was something of the wolfish Captain Macheath from
The Beggar's Opera
about him. He even wore his boots on the bed in one scene as he discusses tactics with Merteuil. Rickman refused to play Valmont in the tights and high heels of the period, partly because he didn't want to make him a fop, and partly because Rickman has large, slightly bandy calves.

It was that sense of a werewolf in aristocrat's clothing that John Malkovich also picked up on for his performance as Valmont in Stephen Frears' film version of Hampton's play, although I also felt that Malkovich modelled himself on Mick Jagger . . . with a touch of the Japanese percussionist, Stomu Yamashta.

Alan later told Jane Edwardes from
Time Out
magazine: ‘I always wanted the play to have the same effect as the book, and I knew I had to seduce 200 people in the audience as well as the women in the play. The quality of stillness and silence was a measure of how far we had succeeded.'

‘There was an electric atmosphere at the first night at The Other Place,' remembers Hampton. ‘The audience were on three sides: it was like being in the same room as the actors. The RSC have been touring it ever since. I said to them in 1995, please don't do it any more. Adrian Noble acknowledged that. It's been done all over the world. It's only last year that it's been released to the repertory theatres.

‘Valmont's one moral act brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. He's in love with this Tourvel woman, the one decent instinct that destroys the whole business.

‘I don't think you could play that part and be unaffected by it; but you never know with actors.

‘Alan really conveyed Baudelaire's burning-ice description: he was very, very cold in the part, but also very disturbed. He was oiling that subterranean energy; it was palpable. I was tremendously impressed by the simmering violence.

‘He was absolutely besieged by fan-letters. A typical letter would be from a grown woman, not a schoolgirl, and it would read: “I'm a feminist but I don't understand how you can have this effect on me.”

‘I'm not very good at answering those sorts of letter myself . . . though I didn't get nearly so many as he did,' adds Christopher modestly.

‘Pressures had to be applied on the RSC, or it would have disappeared from the repertoire. You never saw Trevor Nunn or Terry Hands: they were so remote. It was just the pressures of running this huge company. They were certainly quite distant figures. At least we were left on our own and not interfered with, but I felt we were an unscheduled success and inconvenient for them. Most of my dealings were with Genista Mackintosh: I remember screaming at her, saying “You must do this or that”.

‘We were never really acknowledged by the RSC as a success,' Hampton feels. ‘It was a terrific hit, yet to keep it alive in the repertoire, an inordinate amount of hustling went on. Alan was very active in all that, fiercely loyal.

‘There were 23 performances in Stratford, 22 in London and then it was withdrawn from the repertoire. It was out of the repertory for three months, and there was a battle to get it on again. The RSC was opposed to a West End transfer, I believe. And I always felt they refused to approve the selling of the film rights. All we could think of was that there was this rage, because the RSC's
Camille
had been a flop. Frank Gero was finally allowed to do it in the West End. Alan was worried about the space in the West End and had a wheeze about the Almeida. He had a lot to do with the final choice of the Ambassadors.

‘Then there were problems with the Broadway transfer. There was a lot of pressure from America to get an American company. Howard and I had a tremendous lot of argument about that. Jimmy Nederlander finally agreed to let the original RSC company go over. They were allowed 20 weeks by American Equity rules, and the play wasn't allowed to continue after that.