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Stories abound. One of the exercises in rehearsal required each member of the cast to come down to the front of the stage and shout out at the top of his voice the worst thing he could think of. ‘We open in three days!’ bellowed one bold spirit. But such jokes were not encouraged, and Gielgud was systematically battered down to his lowest ebb, shorn of experience and expertise. ‘You can’t do that,’ Brook would tell him. ‘It’s awfully false and theatrical.’ But though Brook might strangle his voice and strip him of his manner, he could not eradicate the iron streak of tinsel that runs through Gielgud’s character. This, after all, was a man who first saw his name in lights in 1928, in a farce called
Holding Out the Apple
. He had one immortal line:
‘You’ve got a way of holding out the apple that positively gives me the pip.’ Dissolve to
Oedipus
forty years later. Irene Worth, playing Jocasta, has to impale herself on a small portable projection that was brought on to the stage. ‘I can’t find my plinth,’ she moaned at one rehearsal. ‘Really,’ said the veteran of
Holding Out the Apple
: ‘Do you mean Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?’

But I would guess now that it was
Oedipus
, though rated a failure, with Gielgud somewhat out of place in it, that gave him a new lease of life. He has always been a self-conscious man, his shyness masked by a bubbling stream of anecdote. Brook had somehow inoculated him against embarrassment, and in his subsequent career, at a time of life when most men would be standing on their dignity, he threw his away entirely and to splendid effect.

There were plenty of terrible jokes in
Forty Years On
, and maybe it was those which commended it to him. It still surprises me that he agreed to do it, and I’m sure there were times, particularly on tour in Manchester, when he thought he had backed the wrong horse. If so, he never showed it, even though there were nights in Manchester when we played to only thirty people. The performances seemed like rehearsals, the more so since Gielgud still had only a shaky hold on the text and, as always when he is nervous, kept coming up with suggestions for radical alterations, even suggesting at one point that he deliver the opening speech with his back to the auditorium. This was because he was reluctant to address an audience directly, thinking it vulgar and against all his training. When he eventually plucked up courage to do it and found that it worked, there was no stopping him. He has always been a great counter of the house, able to tell you within five minutes of curtain-up exactly who is in the stalls. Now he could do it legitimately: he would lean far out over the footlights, shading his eyes with his
mortarboard, supposedly trying to catch the eye of his sister, Nancy, a woman of easily outraged sensibilities. In reality he was spotting friends, sometimes even waving. His dressing-room was always crammed with visitors, including a fair quota of the great and famous. I would be summoned in to meet them while Mac, his eighty-year-old dresser, who had dressed Martin-Harvey and Fred Terry before him, would be struggling to put on the knightly trousers, something old-fashioned dressers take pride in doing. We had been so close to disaster on tour that it took time for him to register that audiences actually loved him: that the ovation he received at every performance was not only respect, which he was used to, but affection.

How narrow an escape we had had with
Forty Years On
I only appreciated when I saw what happened to Charles Wood’s play
Veterans
in 1972. This was a play about the making of a film, loosely based on
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, so that Gielgud virtually played himself playing Lord Raglan. It was a very funny piece, with a memorable image of Gielgud hoisted in the air astride a headless wooden horse, doing simulated riding. It was also mildly scatological. Due to go on at the Royal Court after a short provincial tour, it suffered a rough passage. At Nottingham pennies were thrown on to the stage and Gielgud was bombarded with abusive letters saying, ‘You have been sold a pup.’ When the play reached Brighton the audience left in droves, something audiences in Brighton are very prone to do. Indeed, having toured there several times myself, I am convinced that one of the chief pleasures of going to the theatre in Brighton is leaving it. The sleek Sussex matrons sit poised in the stalls like greyhounds in the slips. The first ‘fuck’ and they’re a mile down the front, streaking for Hove. Once
Veterans
got to the Court, where the occasional oath is part of the house style, it was a great success and would have transferred to the West End. But the reception on tour had so convinced Gielgud
of its ultimate failure that he had meanwhile signed to do a Hollywood remake of
Lost Horizon.

The public is a problem. Actors of Gielgud’s generation had a strong sense of what an audience expected and what it should be given. In the fifties and sixties it was this sense of ‘my public’, as much as shortage of opportunities, that kept him trundling out
Ages of Man
. In the last ten years he has shed his public and found another. But then so has everybody else, though not as painfully. Few actors now have this sense of ‘my public’; one or two actresses perhaps, but that’s all. It is not hard to see why. There is no such thing in the West End now as ‘the public’. It survived until quite recently; it was there as late as five years ago, surviving, even strengthened by, the tidal wave of Americans that swept up Shaftesbury Avenue every summer. The Americans were at any rate English-speaking even if they were not always English-joking. Now they too have been submerged. In season and out of season, audiences are now so polyglot they no longer constitute an entity, and even playing of the highest quality does not weld them into one. The sense does not carry. The actor is a spectacle, and someone from Taiwan goes to see Gielgud or Guinness in the same spirit as he takes in the Changing of the Guard − which he marginally prefers, if only because he is allowed to film it.

The public which goes to the theatre to see Gielgud goes to see great acting. These days what the public calls Great Acting is often not even good acting. It’s acting with a line around it, acting in inverted commas, acting which shows. The popular idea of Great Acting is a rhetorical performance (award-winning for choice) at the extremes, preferably the extremes of degradation and despair. Such a performance seems to the public to require all an actor has got. Actors know that this is a false assessment. The limit of an actor’s ability is a spacious and fairly comfortable place to be: such parts require energy rather
than judgement. Anything goes. Gielgud’s farting, swearing role in
Providence
, while it was riveting to watch, was a feat of courage, not great acting. It’s much harder in artistic terms to keep a delicate balance, as he did with Spooner in Pinter’s
No
Man’s
Land
. And even more so as Harry in David Storey’s
Home
, an understated part of immense technical difficulty. Extremes are not edges, and the edge is where he excels: the edge of comedy, the edge of respectability, the edge of despair. If he continues to amaze and delight, his powers not to stale, it is because at his best nowadays he does not seem to be acting at all. The skill lies in letting it seem that there is no skill. He has broken his staff, but he has kept his magic.

I am meeting my father at the station. I stand at the barrier as the train draws in and see him get off. As he walks along the platform he catches sight of me and waves. I wave back, and we both smile. However, he still has some considerable distance to cover before reaching the barrier. Do I keep a continuous smile in my face during that period, do I flash him an occasional smile, or do I look away?

I am waiting in an office for an appointment. A secretary sits at the desk. I shift in my seat and the leather upholstery makes a sound that could be mistaken for a fart. I therefore shift in my seat again, two or three times, making the same sound deliberately in order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just be thinking I am uncomfortable. She may, on the other hand, be thinking I have farted, and not once but three times.

I am attending a funeral. It is crowded with mourners, many of them friends and acquaintances. I do not greet any of them but put on a grave face and avoid meeting their eyes. I am just taking my seat when a woman in the row behind leans forward to say an effusive hello.

Common predicaments and awkward moments with a particular appeal to any reader of the works of Erving Goffman. There was a time when I imagined those readers were few. As with all the best books, I took Goffman’s work to be somehow a secret between me and the author, and incidents such as I have detailed above our private joke. Individuals knew they behaved this way, but Goffman knew
everybody
behaved like this, and so did I. Only we were both keeping it quiet. I wasn’t even sure Tolstoy or Proust quite knew what they were about, though Tolstoy was instancing ‘body gloss’ and Proust (I think) ‘impression management’. These days any first-year student of sociology would know, and the books I once thought so private are piled promiscuously on any campus counter at the start of every term.

Goffman is now Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, a far cry from that hotel in the Shetlands where, back in the days of rationing, he did his first fieldwork. Actually, anywhere would be a far cry from
that
hotel, and not just geographically. It still crops up from time to time in Gofman’s books, furnishing him with the stuff of sober insights into region behaviour, say, or impression management, but without his ever acknowledging that, as a catering establishment, it was straight out of Will Hay. In the kitchen, mould would sometimes form on the soup; wet socks dried on the steaming kettle; and, while the manager
habitually kept his cap on, the women sat with their feet on the table and the scullery boys spat in the coal bucket. Only the passage of a rich pudding galvanized this Dostoevskian crew, all sampling it by the aggressive fingerful before it was borne through the doors and across the great divide into the front area of the hotel. Which side of those contentious doors did the wee student eat, one wonders. And
what
? ‘That puir Mr Goffman hasna eaten his trifle. And he didna touch his soup. At this rate he’ll niver mak a dominie.’ But he did, and a doctoral thesis, ‘Communication Conduct in an Island Community’, was what he made of
them
. But what can they have made of him, those gobbing scullery boys, that manager with his cap on, who can never have seen a sociology student before in their lives? They weren’t that common in 1950. It was a novel beginning. And a novel.

Sociology begins in the dustbin, and sociologists have always been licensed rag-and-bone men trundling their carts round the backyards of the posher academic establishments. The Benjamin Franklin Professor has done the rounds of more backyards than most, scavenging in anthropology, psychology and social administration, besides picking up a lot of useful jumble On the knocker’: his books are larded with strips of personal experience and enlivened with items from newspapers, the annals of crime and the dustbins of showbiz. It’s this (and the look of so many quotations on the page) that makes his work initially inviting and accessible to a general reader like me. He writes with grace and wit and raises the odd eyebrow at those in his profession who don’t, though he can’t be too censorious of jargon, having invented a lot himself. He coins new usages and retools terms, giving them a fresh thread for the job in hand:’ fiooding-out’, ‘cooling’, ‘keying’, ‘face’ and ‘frame’ are all terms he has made his own − it was hearing ‘interaction’ in common use that woke me up to the fact that the word (about Goffman) had got round.

Having coined a phrase, Goffinan doesn’t wait to see it debased but tackles a new problem and tools a new terminology to go with it. The vocabulary is custom-made. Those who follow in his footsteps do not do it quite as well. In
Forms of Talk
, he quotes (and not disparagingly) a

It could be David Coleman warming up for a commentary on slalom surfing. (Coleman, incidentally, puts his foot into a footnote in
Forms of Talk
.)

Systematic Goffinan is not. He writes in a vivid, impressionistic way which he concedes is often, as in much of
Forms of
Talk
, tentative and exploratory. This (and his charm) makes more orthodox colleagues uneasy, and some attempt has been made to show that, stripped of his style and wit, in his conceptual nakedness, he is but a sociologist like the rest.
*
Maybe. But no other writer in this field so regularly startles one into self-recognition. We skitter anxiously from cradle to grave like a tart between lamp-posts. ‘I won’t make you feel bad as long as you don’t make me feel bad.’ That is the social contract. And there is nothing much to be done about it. Goffman’s work, as he admits in
Frame Analysis
, ‘does not catch at the differences between the advantaged and the disadvantaged classes’ (he loses points there in British common-rooms, I’ll bet), adding, ‘I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because
the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people snore.’

I go to sociology not for analysis or explications but for access to experience I do not have and often do not want (prison, mental illness, birthmarks). Goffman treats these closed areas as lying alongside normal experience (or the experience of ‘normals’) in a way that makes them familiar and accessible. The approach is robust, humane and, despite his disclaimer, moral. ‘The normal and the stigmatized are not persons but perspectives,’ he writes in
Stigma
, ‘and it should come as no surprise that in many cases he who is stigmatized in one regard nicely exhibits all the normal prejudices held toward those who are stigmatized in another regard.’ And again:

Goffman may claim to be just watching people snore, but now and again they get a good dig in the ribs for it.

Whole novels take place in footnotes. This is a note about the strengths and weaknesses of the lover’s position in an adulterous relationship:

A note on the candidness of cameras:

Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone:

Forms of Talk
is a collection of papers, the longest of which, ‘Radio Talk, a Study of the Ways of Our Errors’, takes as its subject ‘bloopers’, the verbal slips of radio announcers and their routines of recovery. The veteran of mouldy soup and dogeared trifle is taking it a bit easier these days. He hasn’t sat glued to his set gleaning gaffes: the bloopers are taken from records
and books produced by Kermit Schafer (another backyard there). It’s maybe just as well. To maintain the flow while addressing a vast, unseen audience is terror enough. To suspect that somewhere there is Erving Goffman waiting for one to fall down (if only to see how one picks oneself up) would be to risk multiplying the occasions on which one would be likely to do so − thereby playing into the hands of any passing ethnomethodol-ogist.

Goffman shows that the special pressure upon a radio announcer to maintain the flow furnishes insights into forms of face-to-face talk where no similar pressure exists. I suspect that he already knew what he was out to demonstrate before he embarked on the study, and he doesn’t in the end tell us much more than we know already − though what we know is what he has already told us. Still, he manages to have a lot of fun on the way. Words with sexual or scatological double meanings he terms ‘leaky’. Example: ‘balls’, ‘can’, ‘behind’, ‘big ones’, ‘parts’, ‘fanny’; this last footnoted ‘Does not leak in Britain.’ Actually ‘can’ does not leak in Britain, but no sweat. An instance of a leaky utterance (in an appropriately watery context) − BBC announcer at the launching of the
Queen Mary
: ‘From where I am standing I can see the Queen’s bottom sticking out just over her water line.’

One of the pleasures of reading Goffman is in taxonomy: items that one has had lying around in one’s mind for ages can be filed neatly away. Like a caption I saw years ago and am delighted now to dignify as a leaky utterance: a newspaper picture of a drama group headed ‘Blackburn Amateurs examine each other’s parts.’ And another (which ought to be in Goffinan’s book if only because the reasoning behind the remedial work is so complex and ultimately futile): Dorothy Killgallan, an American columnist, began a radio talk, ‘Tonight I am going to consider the films of Alfred Hitchcack …
cock
!
… CACK!’ I wouldn’t like to see Mr Schegloff et al. let loose on that one.

Goffman remarks that there is often a possibility after a verbal slip ‘that hearers will be left with ambiguity as to actual or feigned obliviousness, as I was on hearing an announcer unfalteringly say, “She’ll be performing selections from the Bach Well-Tempered Caviar, Book Two, and also from Beethoven, Sonata in G Minor.”’ There was once a performance of
The Seagull
at the Old Vic in which Dorn, delivering the final line, ‘Konstantin has shot himself,’ instead came out with ‘Konstantin has shat himself.’ The audience looked at each other in wild surmise, then, deciding they had better not believe their ears, began to applaud − and more vociferously than if no mistake had been made.

Fruitful are the ways of our errors, and frightful too: we spend our lives in a twitter of anxiety and potential embarrassment, and there is no such thing as idle conversation. In the first essay in
Forms of Talk
, entitled ‘Replies and Responses’, Goffman analyses this seemingly simple exchange: