Maggie Smith: A Biography (19 page)

In Guthrie’s first company, Douglas Campbell was generally recognised as the leading native member. But nationalist malcontents could sourly note the fact that, in Maggie’s first season, her two leading men were both British: Jeremy Brett was Mirabell and Keith Baxter, Antony (although the latter was, admittedly, a last-minute replacement for John Colicos). The paying customers, of course, did not worry too much about these niceties. And Maggie herself was both immune to the wrangling, almost impervious to it, and wildly popular within the acting company. As far as they were concerned, she brought them full houses to play to; she was demonstrably a great performer; and she worked as hard as, and probably harder than, anyone else. Richard Monette, a native Canadian actor who had lately returned from working abroad (he was in the London production of
Oh! Calcutta!
), says that this combination of box-office success, magic and technical discipline was ‘very important in sustaining a classical company for that long’. Monette, who later returned as a director and then artistic director of the theatre, voiced the general consensus of opinion about that ‘golden era’: ‘Everybody adored Robin and Maggie. Maggie paid the ticket for all the young Canadian actors, and everyone got a piece of the pie.’

Another key witness to this period was Ronald Bryden, who, after serving his stint on the
Observer
, had joined the RSC as a play adviser to Trevor Nunn. Bryden had been educated in Toronto (before going on to Cambridge University) and had returned in the mid-1970s, after his RSC attachment, as head of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama in the University. He says that while it is obviously not true that Robin ‘turned Maggie into a great actress by bullying her out of her mannerisms’, he certainly removed what Phillips himself calls ‘that nasal thing’ from her voice and all superfluous flutterings from her wrists. Bryden had been instrumental in Phillips’s appointment. ‘We think of those years as a Camelot. Nothing as good, certainly, has happened there since.’ Even so, Bryden sounds a convincing note of dispassionate objectivity when he looks back and tries to sum up Robin Phillips’s work:

London critics were flown over by the Canadian authorities to report back on the new regime and their encomiums would have looked slightly more suspect, perhaps, had they not chimed with what most of the Canadian and New York critics thought as well. There was a concerted campaign to restore Maggie to her pinnacle. Also, as Bryden shrewdly remarks, the London critics had become more accustomed in the mid-1970s to the prevalent austerity of most British classical productions, certainly at the RSC. The Stratford lushness came as a surprise, and possibly a relief.

The Way of the World
and
Antony and Cleopatra
opened within two days of each other at the start of June. The hidden eddies of insecurity in the Congreve comedy were spotted by Walter Kerr, whose account in the
New York Times
suggested that Millamant’s prattling was a defensive measure and that she was the most vulnerable character on the stage. The tone of her proviso in the marriage-contract scene with Mirabell was altered utterly, said Kerr, with not a flick of her heavy-lidded eyes and an insistence on ‘one small, ordinary, unmistakably human need: the barest minimum of privacy’. She brought the scene to a heart-stopping standstill, says Phillips, just as she would once again in the Chichester revival directed by William Gaskill in 1984. Maggie’s Cleopatra was one of her more unexpected performances, though Bryden reckoned that Phillips was wrong to batten onto a suggestion of Keith Baxter that the two protagonists, rather like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, were no longer in love with each other but keen to sustain their public image. There was no direct physical comparison with Taylor: Maggie wore a long red wig and a succession of simple kaftans. B. A. Young reported in the
Financial Times
that she was ‘not visually voluptuous, but wiry and active’ and that there was not an inflexion or gesture that was not fresh and personal. Caryl Brahms opined in the
Guardian
that Maggie’s Cleopatra was placed at that stage ‘where incandescence flowers into a steadier flame’ and that she was particularly touching when, reconciled with the stricken warrior, she ‘like some compassionate dragonfly, drooped her azure wings to cradle her dying mate’.

Many of the Stratford productions were preserved on video for archival purposes. These records of actual performances, shot in black and white on a still camera at the back of the auditorium, are by no means fully reliable guides to the shows themselves, least of all to the detailed physical and facial work of the actors. However, in studying them, one can breathe the atmosphere of a production and, especially, sample its vocal qualities. The
Antony
video, one of the earliest in the archive, is a bit of a blizzard to inspect. But you do hear the general unaffected purity of Maggie’s delivery and, having learned of the demise of Antony’s paragon of a wife, the wonderful laugh she wins on ‘Can Fulvia die?’ There is sob-bolstered anguish on ‘Oh, withered is the garland of the war.’ In calling for her crown and owning up to those immortal longings, Maggie, now ‘fire and air’, picks up the slack and consigns her other elements to baser life. Her embrace of death is lightly, almost ecstatically, phrased and is the more moving for being so.

Richard Monette, playing Lucio in
Measure for Measure
, used to walk off the stage as she went on as Mistress Overdone.

And in
Three Sisters
, directed by John Hirsch, Maggie recycled her beloved Masha in a company at least the equal of the National’s: Martha Henry was Olga and Marti Maraden, Irina, with Keith Baxter as Vershinin. Nicholas Pennell, an English actor who had made his name in the definitive BBC television version of
The Forsyte Saga
alongside Eric Porter, Kenneth More and Nyree Dawn Porter, had been a Stratford Festival regular since 1972. He rated this
Three Sisters
the best he had ever seen, and Maggie herself wanted to know where John Hirsch had been all her life.

So greatly did Maggie enjoy this Stratford season that some observers sensed that she might emigrate to Canada entirely. She turned down a West End opportunity to star in Neil Simon’s
Plaza Suite
(she made the film, titled
California Suite
, two years later) because of the commitment she had already made to a second Stratford season, where Phillips had promised her Rosalind and Judith Bliss in
Hay Fever
. She had already become a founding member of Canadian Actors’ Equity, which had declared its independence from the American organisation. She watched some of the archival videos of Brian Bedford’s work in the 1975 season, when he had played Angelo in
Measure for Measure
and Malvolio. Bedford was returning to Stratford to play Richard III, Jaques in
As You Like It
and, Maggie willing, her opposite number in Molnár’s
The Guardsman
, which was scheduled for a December opening at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles before joining the Stratford season in the Avon Theatre at the beginning of June. Maggie was willing. Little Toby asked her what was she going to play in
The Guardsman
. She said, ‘The Actress,’ to which he replied, ‘But I thought you were one of those already.’

Trying to arrive at the heart of what Maggie achieved in Stratford, Phillips states categorically that she has two talents, as a clown and as an actress in both comedy and tragedy. ‘The first talent is beyond imagining in its skill and technique; I don’t know about it, but I can watch and admire it. The other persona, the actress, is the one I’ve always worked with.’ Phillips had seen the clown element starting to play in the Toronto
Private Lives
and did not like the crossover of the two talents. Personal taste comes into all this. Gielgud felt the Toronto performance to be almost perfect. And it would be impossible to pretend that Maggie’s work in Canada was instantly, or ever totally, purified of those inflexional idiosyncrasies and gestural extravagances that are part of her registered weaponry and comic personality. But the tendency was for Maggie to work through her technique to the outer limit of her potential, and not be satisfied with what came easiest to her, the automatic vaudeville of the clown side of her talent. In the high-style, high-tension comedies of Molnár and Coward (
Hay Fever
in 1977,
Private Lives
for the last time, with feeling, in 1978), Maggie put her new resolutions to their severest test.

Maggie and Brian Bedford assumed the Lunt roles in
The Guardsman
, a basically silly play in which the Actor, cognisant of the Actress’s energetic cultivation of lovers before their wedding, investigates his new wife’s fidelity after six months of marriage by disguising himself as the supposed man of her dreams, a romantically impetuous Russian officer in full military regalia. The ruse is finally exposed, but not before the audience has to decide at what point the Actress, like Falstaff in the Gadshill escapade, recognises her sparring partner and justifies her protest that she knew it was him all along. By all accounts, the comedy rattled rather noisily around the Ahmanson. Phillips was not impressed. Peter Wood, who watched from the stalls, was horrified to find that Maggie and Bedford were flashing their considerable techniques at the audience like knives. On her fifth outing to the Ahmanson, Maggie still found the big theatre hard work.

Maggie’s Judith Bliss finally emerged from its impatient chrysalis in September. She entered through the French windows and went straight behind a sofa, where she stood like a restless heron, arranging some flowers and putting them on a piano. When she finally moved round in front of the sofa, the audience noticed for the first time that she was wearing her garden wellies. This speed and constant element of physical surprise galvanised the production. At the first hint of her husband’s philandering, she seems to swoop down the staircase in a single motion. And, on the video, something very peculiar but extraordinary is going on in the tea scene. Maggie is downstage in her floppy hat, checking through the contents of every single sandwich on the silver stand. The audience is convulsed with laughter for minutes on end. Where Edith Evans was dotty and vague, Maggie was distracted, yes, but acid and sharp. She was a portrait not of woolly vagueness but of rampant vanity, and also a credible object of young Sandy’s sexual desire, however casual. There’s a way in which she delivers the line ‘I’ve been pruning the calceolarias’ that is almost the final explanation for everything. Myra Arundel raises hardly a titter on ‘This haddock is disgusting.’ The central, manipulative consciousness of the comedy is indisputably Maggie’s Judith, with her menacing control of the charades and her string of bitchy prophecies thinly disguised as helpful advice (‘Men don’t grow old like women, as you’ll find out to your cost in a year or two, Myra’).

The following summer, Maggie was ready for her third and final assault on Amanda Prynne, having fine-tuned her working relationship and personal friendship with Bedford. ‘By the time we got there, we really did love and hate each other, which was just right,’ her partner confessed. Bedford had played Elyot as a RADA student directed by his contemporary Albert Finney, and again on Broadway opposite Tammy Grimes in 1969. This time, Bedford says, ‘we did it very seriously, less of a comedy of manners and more like Chekhov. It seemed very real to us.’

The tart exchange implying a random and inappropriate choice of escape route was extremely funny, especially in self-conscious Canada. Maggie told the
Toronto Sunday Sun
that there would be no more triple takes, as there had been when she played it with Robert Stephens:

Instead of bounding across the stage like a headless chicken when Elyot appeared on the adjacent balcony, Maggie merely executed a svelte double take and leaned back on her chair. Her gestures, as Bryden had noted in
The Guardsman
, had acquired the refinement and perfect elegance of a Japanese print. One hand is forever fluttering to her forehead or the nape of her neck. The effect is beautiful and not irritating. When she tells Victor that ‘Men are transparent, like glass’, her right arm shoots straight up in the air, slightly crooked, and shoots straight down again, as if rapidly closing a blind. The gesture punctuates the line itself and conveys, in the quickest of flashes, an extraordinary complexity of descriptive thought: contempt, spelling out the obvious for a backward listener (Victor), the sheet of glass, a literally penetrating observation, a joke, an assertion of superiority.