Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (18 page)

He's extremely well read and points me towards two accounts of the
real Richard III: Robert Louis Stevenson's The BlackArrow and Josephine
Tey's The Daughter of Time. He tells me that next year is the 5ooth
anniversary of Richard's death. He loves words. `Plantagenet,' he says,
savouring it, `innit great he's called Plantagenet? It's a French flower and
yet he's this deformed grotesque.'

He is very taken with the bottled-spider sketch and says he could take
it further by designing long hanging sleeves which would make the creature
six legged. He doesn't like the thick, club feet in the drawing though, says
they could be twisted but must remain quite delicate. `You should have a sense of him being able to move very nimbly at great speed, straight up
the side of a wall if he wanted to.' I don't want the image to become too
exclusively spider-like. There must be something of the bull as well. Bill
A. points out that bulls have quite slender, delicate legs.

I say, `At the moment I see him moving quite slowly, heavily.'

Bill A. looks worried: `But with agility.'

`Well no. Cripples aren't agile. We went through all of this with the
Fool. Decided to make him crippled, yet he had to be very speedy with
it. It becomes an enormous strain and isn't strictly feasible. I spent a lot
of last week among the disabled and didn't see many of them whizzing
about. What is it you fear if Richard was quite static?'

`He'd lose the power to surprise.'

This matter is left unresolved as we pass on to the drawings of the
head. Bill Dudley is less keen on these, particularly dislikes the heavy
forehead on the Hermanus head - `Looks like Marion Brando on a bad
day.' And pointing to the Ronnie Kray drawing, `If you look like this,
would it suggest a fine and brilliant mind?'

`But isn't that a good thing?' I say. `He's got this battered boxer's face,
this warrior's face. He shouldn't look cunning.'

`You're making your job very hard.' He is keen to keep my face long
and sharp, to emphasise it with a long wig. This is also left unresolved.

Bill A. asks whether the hump could be made well enough to be shown
naked. He's keen to use the church setting to stage the coronation, and
in researching has found that Richard and Anne were stripped naked for
the anointing ceremony. This is a very exciting image: Richard's back
twisted and mountainous, Anne's perfect and beautiful. Beauty and the
Beast.

The nerves backstage for Maydays are almost worse than for the first
performance. It's the closest real-life version of the nightmare all actors
have: you're going on stage and the show is only vaguely familiar. But
an enthusiastic audience sweeps us along and most of the lines are
remembered.

I used herbal cigarettes in the show tonight and will do so from now
on. Maydays will no longer be able to pass as my excuse for remaining a
smoker.

In Bernard Levin's interview with Ralph Richardson on his eightieth
birthday, the great actor said: `A play always reminds me of an enormous roller at the top of some hill. Someone takes the blocks away and it begins
to roll inevitably down to its end. Maybe its end is destruction or maybe
it's brought to a halt by a beautiful finish, but it never stops moving and
you're on it all the time ... Playing with time, which is the most precious
yet the most mysterious element we know. Dear friendly water we know
a great deal about. It's so simple and domestic. But time ... we don't
know where it begins or where it ends. And to play with it is very thrilling.
When that curtain goes up, time starts for you, you're moving with that
roller and you cannot get off it ...'

Tonight in Maydays the roller is stopped. During the second interval a
power box explodes and the trucks, which carry the sets on and off, freeze
in their tracks. The audience are sent back to the bars and plied with free
drinks, while the stage staff desperately work to restore life to the machinery. People rushing around with torches trying to find the blown fuse. It
goes on for over half an hour, the audience reassemble in the auditorium,
but backstage they have to admit defeat. They can't find the right fuse.

It's the job of the front-of-house manager to break the news to the
audience, but he gets stage fright and refuses to go out and face them.
Then I am asked, but the thought of stepping out there as myself is
unthinkable. Finally the stage-manager volunteers to do the deed. The
audience is understandably furious. They have seen three quarters of the
play but will have to come back another night to find out what happens.

They have their money refunded. The cast flock to the pub. An odd
feeling - a cross between the joy of truancy and the frustration of coitus
interruptus.

Struggling into the car-park with the two pairs of crutches that Charlotte
has sent me, when Alison Steadman drives out. She stops in horror.

`Richard III,' I offer as an explanation.

She nods wisely. `Mike Leigh will be proud of you.'

Back at home I nervously experiment, fearing that they might instantly
prove impractical. The elbow crutches are much better than the armpit
variety, because you can let go and use your hands while they hang from
your forearms. Swinging along on them, stretching like an animal on four
legs, pawing the ground, rearing up on hind legs, I find they have a
marvellous range of possibilities.

Chris Benjamin is taking over as Orgon and is going to be wonderful, a big baby, a bear ready to chase its shadow. As Dorine says in the play,
`Tartuffe is a man who can spot a victim.' Chris is a .atural victim, Nigel
never was - his inherent sophistication and wit got in the way. He was a
hilarious Orgon, but it was always difficult to believe he could be so
thoroughly duped - at any rate, by my version of Tartuffe. People want
Tartuffe to be a subtle creature despite all the evidence in the text. The
blatancy of his villainy offends modern tastes. And we have actually
extended it - he's not just a villain but a demon.

During the chase scene I pull a muscle in my neck. After last year's
accident even the slightest injury fills me with terror. I try to ignore it and
head off for the gym. Exercising makes it feel a little better.

RIVERSIDE STUDIOS The Biko Trial. Strange to see this South African
atrocity performed by a group of English stars, lead by Albert Finney.
Rather like those Hollywood epics where you're constantly distracted from
the storyline by some superstar popping in to do their cameo. However
the story does come through and it's terribly, horribly, gruesomely funny.
A black man in the front row doesn't see the funny side at all; he winces
and glances round each time the audience bellows.

Back at home, a video treat - two episodes of David Attenborough's The
Living Planet. You can find any character by watching animals.

Insects rubbing their front legs together - could do that with the
crutches. Spiders move in a nimble dance, their legs going like fingers on
a keyboard, they rotate on the spot. Too lightweight for Richard, I think.

Beautiful winter days. Cold clear sunlight. Immobilised by my neck, I stay
indoors and watch the three parts of Henry VI made for the BBC
Shakespeare series. (Couldn't face reading them all; the boring homework
side of acting.) Am expecting to fast-forward through most of it and just
concentrate on the young Richard, but get hooked early on and end up
watching all nine hours of it. Bernard Hill's performance is brilliant as
York, Richard's father, glowing with anger, a formidable soldier whom the
young Richard worships. Fascinating having my character's background
fleshed out like this.

Depressing to see how much dashing around battlefields Richard has
to do; unlikely on crutches and no evidence that he's always relied on
a-horse-a-horse. But I suppose his condition could have got worse in later
life. Crutches suggest war veteran as well.

A heavy week ahead - five Tartuffe's, three Maydays, rehearsing the telly
Moliere at the Beeb during the days, and my neck getting worse.

BARBICAN Meet Derek Jacobi in the lift. Tonight is his first Cyrano in
twelve weeks and he's rather frightened. Says it doesn't help having won
all those awards, there will be an added expectancy from the audience. `I
feel like lining up all the statuettes on the front of the stage and letting
them get on with it.'

Lunch with Bill. Discuss the crutches in the light of what the young
Richard has to do in Henry VI. Is the problem relevant? Does an actor
playing Antony in Antony and Cleopatra have to cross-check his performance against the same character in Julius Caesar? But even if we justify it
ourselves, is an audience going to sit there worrying? Bill is not a lot of
help; his current worry is that he and the R S C musical director, Guy
Woolfenden, are having to change all their ideas for the music because
Merchant is using organ music and Henry V is using Gregorian chants.
Very annoying when our set is calling out for that kind of music. Still,
these constraints can sometimes lead to inventive solutions.

Even more annoying is the news that the Gobbos in Merchant are being
played as hunchbacks!

TARTUFFE Chris's first performance. He does wonders. What a joy to
do this show in the theatre again. The audience are completely hysterical
and inevitably the laughter seduces me away from any subtleties I discovered for the telly version. It's back to tail-wagging acting.

Anyway, as Cocteau said: `What others criticise you for, cultivate. It is
you.,

Wake hardly able to move my neck at all. Ring Charlotte and make an
appointment. A sense of defeat, having to admit I've injured myself again.

ACTON HILTON Moliere's first day in the studio. Bill talks about the
play as `a fairy tale going sour', taking the starting point from Bulgakov's
description of `the spectral fairy tale Paris of the seventeenth century'.
The new sets will evoke this - long corridors with false perspectives, the
dressing-rooms with rows and rows of masks like a constant audience.
Alice in Kafkaland.

CANTEEN I'm having my lunch when I hear a familiar hoarse shout, `Oy

- Tony!' I whip round, damaging my neck further, to see Michael Gambon
in the lunch queue ...

Alan Howard (a previous Richard III at the RSC) is standing in front
of him, puzzled as to who is being sent up.

Wonderful seeing Gambon again. He and Howard have been rehearsing
a play here. They've just heard it's been cancelled because of the sceneshifters' strike. Everyone assures us that it will be over by the time we go
into studio in four weeks.

Gambon tells me the story of Olivier auditioning him at the Old Vic in
1962. His audition speech was from Richard X. `See Tone, I was thick
as two short planks then and I didn't know he'd had a rather notable
success in the part. I was just shitting myself about meeting the Great
Man. He sussed how green I was and started farting around.'

As reported by Gambon, their conversation went like this:

Olivier: `What are you going to do for me?'

Gambon: `Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `Is that so. Which part?'

Gambon: `Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `Yes, but which part?'

Gambon: `Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `Yes, I understand that, but which part?'

Gambon: `Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `But which character? Catesby? Ratcliffe? Buckingham's a good
part ...'

Gambon: `Oh I see, beg your pardon, no, Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `What, the King? Richard?'

Gambon: `the Third, yeah.'

Olivier: `You've got a fucking cheek, haven't you?'

Gambon: `Beg your pardon?'

Olivier: `Never mind, which part are you going to do?'

Gambon: `Richard the Third.'

Olivier: `Don't start that again. Which speech?'

Gambon: `Oh I see, beg your pardon, "Was ever woman in this humour
woo'd." '

Olivier: `Right. Whenever you're ready.'

Gambon: ` "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd -" '

Olivier: `Wait. Stop. You're too close. Go further away. I need to see
the whole shape, get the full perspective.'

Gambon: `Oh I see, beg your pardon . . .' Gambon continues, `So I go
over to the far end of the room, Tone, thinking that I've already made an
almighty tit of myself, so how do I save the day? Well I see this pillar and
I decide to swing round it and start the speech with a sort of dramatic
punch. But as I do this my ring catches on a screw and half my sodding
hand gets left behind. I think to myself, "Now I mustn't let this throw me
since he's already got me down as a bit of an arsehole", so I plough on
... "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd -"'

Olivier: `Wait. Stop. What's the blood?'

Gambon: `Nothing, nothing, just a little gash, I do beg your
pardon ...'