Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (11 page)

A warm, pink African evening. We sit around on the stoep of our holiday
bungalow, moths fluttering round the overhead light. Everyone tired after
the long drive, all the packing and unpacking. Randall has brought along
a record player and a collection of nostalgia records, Bing Crosby, Jimmy
Durante, Louis Armstrong. He and Mum start to dance rather beautifully. Dad dances on his own, dressed in his short summer pyjamas, skinny
white legs sticking out.

I do hope my face turns into his as I age. It's a marvellous face for an
actor; a cross between Anthony Quinn, Jose Ferrer and Onassis.

He tells the story he's told a hundred times before and which we never
tire of. His mother and aunt sitting on the porch at Marlborough Mansions,
both very old, both afflicted - his mother with arthritis, which makes her
constantly flick her wrists up and down; his aunt with Parkinson's disease,
which makes her head shake from side to side. A hawker arrives selling
fruit and vegetables, calls up to them. One appears to be shaking her
head, the other beckoning with her hands. The hawker is nonplussed.
Dad acts this last bit out and then starts to cry with laughter, tries to carry
on speaking but his voice is a helpless falsetto. The more he tries the
more we laugh. He takes off his heavy black glasses - his face is softer,
gentler - and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand. It is an image
of him I will always remember.

Hermanus grew up a resort for the British officials when South Africa
was still a colony. Hence it's like Frinton-on-Sea; hence Mum loves it
and I hate it. It's hardly like being in South Africa at all. Cute bungalows
with trimmed lawns. Little gift shops selling sachets of pot pourri.

Even the weather is English - grey and windy. I sit on the lawn in
swimming trunks, clutching a bottle of sun oil, grimly waiting for snatches
of sunlight, sulking that we've come here.

Refuge in Peter Hall's Diaries. Why have people been so rude about
this book? It seems to me full of honesty and wit. Makes me warm to the
man whom I never saw once (never mind met) in my seven months at the
National. The portrait of Ralph Richardson is beautiful.

Another entry (5 October 1979) about John Wood's Richard III: `He's
the first actor since 1944 to have challenged Olivier in the part on his
own ground. He hasn't unseated him yet, but he might next time.' Wood
tells Hall he feels a complete failure and later Hall confides to his tape
recorder, `The trouble with John is that he has a too acutely developed
sense of history. He looks forward a hundred years and wants to see his
Richard III written there.'

Have to stop reading. Too close for comfort.

In the late afternoon the sun finally comes out and we go for a swim in
Fick's Pool. You climb down steeply into a gorge. Descending shelves of
rock and sand with cascading plants giving it a Babylonian feel. People
stand along the top among trees looking down as if into an arena. At the
bottom there is a tidal pool flushed by waves breaking over the sea wall.

Randall, Joel and I swim over to a patch of sunlight on the water - the
only part the late afternoon sun can reach. This is one of the happiest
times of the holiday. A feeling of warmth and pride in our brotherhood.
We must look rather handsome, us three, with dark wet hair, glowing with
suntans, gleaming in the water.

Mum and Dad sit high on the steep bank, perched like two old birds
looking down on their young - Dad no doubt wondering, `Which one is
that?'

Car-loads of family arrive from Cape Town. The adults slip effortlessly
into their roles and relationships. Dad and Joel are best at making the
braai, Randall best at mixing the drinks, Mum best at nagging the men
about drinking too much, Verne and Yvette make salads, Ashley sprawls and chats to anyone passing. It's like they've played the scene a million
times in a long running comedy. The jokes are delightful, the timing
second nature, the rapport effortless, but complacency threatens to settle.

The children don't enjoy it half so much. They lounge around under
a tree, bored, limbs just sprawled any old how, like puppets tipped out of
a toy box.

In the middle of all this a little old Coloured man arrives. The gardener
come to water the plants despite the fact that it rained heavily during the
night. Actually, he's come for his Christmas box. He is very drunk, and
stands with the hose drooping, watering his shoes. Everyone ignores him;
no Christmas box offered, he staggers away.

In the evening we drive into town. In the dark this place loses its
Englishness and looks like something out of Mid-West America in the
Fifties (I'm thinking of Last Picture Show). There is only one shop open,
Princess Cafe, a little oasis of glaring neon on the main street, selling
everything from vegetables to videos and doing a roaring trade in computer
games as well. Open-roofed cars draw up with blonde teenagers, bottles
of pop, a wild night out. They tumble into the shop, reappear a moment
later restocked, drive off. A group of drunk Coloureds shout after them
from the pavement. A Coloured policeman strolls into the light and stands
there, looking very relaxed.

We're going for a walk after dinner. Gather outside in the garden in the
night air. I feel my senses coming back to me after another long noisy
meal, eating myself silly, drinking, drinking; the day's suntan bums on my
body, making it ache.

There is a fresh sea breeze blowing. We stand looking up at the sky
which is bright with stars. Dad says that in the Karroo on a clear summer's
night you can drive without headlamps. Someone runs into the house to
switch off the lights and the sky is even clearer. Yvette points out Orion's
Belt, Scorpio, the Southern Cross. `How do you know?' I ask her. `My
late Pa taught me,' she says. We stand quietly, almost religiously, in the
dark garden, crickets ringing softly around us. It's so magical that when
a strange formation flies into view overhead, glowing shapes in a perfect
pattern, some of the children gasp. `They're just birds,' an adult says and
everyone giggles with relief. A child says sadly, 'I thought he'd come.' An
adult says, `Tsk, ever since they saw E.T....'

Awake these mornings increasingly depressed. Only a matter of days
before I have to go back. Mouth a few of Tartuffe's lines as I lie in bed,
and instantly feel nauseous.

A wonderful morning. Baking sunshine. We go to the main beach. White
sand stretching for miles and miles until it disappears into a bluish haze
of heat and sea-spray. Distant transparent mountains. This vast beach
landscape is inappropriately called The Grotto - named by some colonial
official, I would imagine, whose mind was elsewhere at the moment of
christening.

This morning it is inhabited mainly by holidaying Afrikaners - which
also has an inappropriate ring to it. With their reputation you can imagine
Afrikaners doing everything else but holidaying. Afrikaners. The word
itself conjures up images of ox-wagons climbing up sheer cliff faces;
fearsome bearded men and lantern-jawed women standing back to back,
armed only with one rusty rifle and The Gospel According to Themselves,
holding their own against whatever opposition has come their way: hordes
of Zulu warriors, the full might of Imperial Britain, current world opinion.

In a different way these people intimidate me as much as those drunk
Coloureds on street corners because, I suppose, I spent nine months in
National Service where the Afrikaner officers regarded me very much as
a third-class citizen: English-speaking and Jewish.

I get pleasantly pissed on a bottle of excellent white wine, put on the
Sony Walkman and listen to that favourite tape of opera choruses. With
the flick of a switch, full orchestras and choruses materialise on this beach
for some exquisite brain-washing. Literally. My brain is washed with
music. How is it that nobody else can hear? All around is my wonderful
noisy family, arguing, wise-cracking, child-battering, parent-bashing, all
in dumb show, carrying on as if everything was normal and the beach
wasn't awash with these tremendous sounds.

The chorus from Boris Godunov. This is my Richard III music - instant
delusions of grandeur. Brass and percussion, bells and chimes and Russian
choirs. Unbelievably, I'm soon going back overseas, probably to do a play
called King Richard III. Overseas. When I lived here that mythical place
sounded so far away, so difficult to get to. Over seas. How many and how
wide? I could never reach there. Now the thought of me going to play
Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company seems as improbable.
It's something to be dreamed about, half pissed on a beach.

Breakfast is accompanied by Randall's record collection of old favourites: `Yellow Bird', `Chanson d'Amour', `Moonlight and Roses', `Let Me
Call You Sweetheart'. People soft-shoe shuffle to the table, sit swaying in
their seats, sing along between mouthfuls of steak and eggs.

I feel very energetic and dance around the room, Richard ideas tumbling
out. It seems to me his face should look quite monstrous. Build a massive
forehead and flat broken nose. To look at him should fill you with pity
and horror. Karloff's monster in Frankenstein. Is there a way of making
his head appear too big for his body? Also, Margaret calls him a `bottled
spider' - a striking image, whatever it means (I'm not bothering to look
up the editor's notes yet). The crutches could help to create the spider
image.

Long walk with Mum across the cliff tops. Wonderful criss-cross rock
formations, stacks and pillars; plateaus so cross-hatched it's like taking a
stroll in a Hogarth etching.

We have one of our talks. A familiar pattern. She begins by interrogating
me very thoroughly about life in England and in the theatre, savouring
every detail. It's so clearly what she would have wanted for herself, had
the choices been available. So she listens in wonderment - a curious
reversal of roles - like a child hearing of the joys and thrills promised in
adult life. But then she'll catch herself and her maternal instincts will
return in force. She'll advise and criticise: this could be better, that could
be worse. And bombarding me with choice pickings from her varied and
sometimes off-beat philosophies - : he Power of Positive Thinking,
Spiritualism, et al.

We sit on a bench high above the sea, thick pea soup bashing itself
senseless on the rocks below. She says nobody believes there is a future
for their children in South Africa any more. Her friends and relations are
leaving in droves, many going to Israel, which seems like jumping from
the frying pan ...

She talks about Granny and her late father escaping from Russia at the
turn of the century. Only two generations later and everyone's on the
move again.

The odd thing is that nobody here seems to make any connection
between escaping persecution in Russia or Germany and supporting
apartheid.

I sketch Richard's head from this morning's thoughts. Interesting how
the melting-pot works - the drawing has the bulk of Lion's Head; Klaus
Kinski's eye; and a harelip from the Coetzee book I've been reading here,
Michael K Of course there's no way I could look like this. It would be
very limiting to glue down so many of my features and wear so much
prosthesis, for a part that long. But I love the thickness of this face; in a
way, going back to the original Laughton image. With Brando's Godfather
thrown in.

Driving back into Sea Point late this afternoon, the scene looks so familiar.
The end of a hot day: people trudging up from the beaches in flip-flops,
towels draped over their shoulders. The joggers are out everywhere, heads
bobbing up and down.

I stroll down to Queen's Beach, trying to store this feeling, this hot sea
air, to take back to London. A black man is struggling to take off his shirt
but is so drunk he cannot undo the last button. He leans back against the
wall, his head thrown hack, mouth open, eyes sightless towards the sea,
his fingers fumbling with that last button. Again and again he tries. He
lets out a terrible moan.