Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (25 page)

L o N D o N Haven't seen a newspaper all week, and didn't know Animal
Farm had opened at the National. Or how it was being done. So reading
the Observer theatre review, this phrase reaches up off the page to deliver
a hammer blow between the eyes: `Ingenious short crutches in order that
they can walk on four legs'.

My imaginary reviews now read, `Mister Sher takes his starting point
for Richard the Third from Animal Farm ...' Something in the air is
warning me against the crutches. Jim urges me to be patient, not to ditch
them yet.

To the Body Control Studio to distract myself with some physical pain.

Dinner with Max [Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director, Royal Court
Theatre]. He's full of stories about the battle to stop Rees-Mogg closing
down the Royal Court - which, thank God, is finally won.

Every possible avenue was explored. It was discovered that an influential
Arts Council personage was landed gentry near Lyme Regis, where the
playwright Anne Jellicoe is based these days. Max asked her to go to Lady
X on bended knee. Jellicoe replied, `It's no good me asking, darling. I
know you all think I'm terribly S D P, but down here I'm thought of as a
communist plot.'

STRATFORD Bill D. has seen Animal Farm. He says the crutches are much shorter than ours and doubts whether comparisons will be made.

QUEEN MARGARET SCENE (Act i, Scene iii) Pat Routledge (Queen
Margaret) arrives, a small fresh figure in a blue and white cotton dress.

The scene is Queen Elizabeth and her faction, the Woodvilles, arguing
with Richard and his faction. Queen Margaret turns up (she's been in
exile in France) and curses everyone in sight.

Bill wants to try a different way of playing the scene. Instead of speaking
her asides in a corner, he wants to have her wandering around us
muttering. As if she hasn't just returned from exile but is always around
and we've learnt to put up with it. `Oh I see,' says Pat, `it's the mother-inlaw that won't go away.'

WARDROBE The buildings are set behind the Waterside cottages. You
go up an alleyway, there's a little courtyard and then the wardrobe stretches
beyond. The smell of hot irons, washing powders, dyes.

I try on the rehearsal 'rough'- it lives up to its name. Rather balloon-like,
pantomimic, a black diving-suit, it does little to convince me that this
shape is still a good idea.

Tony, the armourer, is present. He and Bill D. discuss ideas for
Richard's armour. Sounds very exciting - layered plates like an armadillo,
or the scales on a beetle.

Now Tony steps forward to start measuring me up. `Hang on,' I say,
`you realise we haven't settled on this shape yet?'

A horrible pause. People take refuge in hierarchy in times like these:
the armourer steps back with his measuring tape and looks to the Head
of Wardrobe who smiles politely and looks to the Designer who, finding
no one left but me to look at, goes `Uhhh -?'

`I thought you all knew,' I say. `Bill and I are having a session tonight
with this body stocking and the crutches. I've learned a speech and we're
going to try it all in action.'

Everyone looks uneasy and displeased.

Afterwards, I ask Bill D. what the panic is about, as we've got six weeks
to go. He explains that it's traditional to start with the leading actor's
costumes. The prospect of leaving them to last has filled the wardrobe
staff with horror.

CONFERENCE HALL Climbing into the diving-suit for the test session,
the overriding feeling is one of foolishness. The Bills and Alison chat
among themselves, pretending not to watch as I begin my first cautious movements around the room. There is a large mirror at one end in which
I can observe as well.

The feeling quickly turns from silliness to excitement. Charging head
on, the massive back rolling heavily like a galloping bison. Spreading the
crutches sideways, I look like some weird bird or giant insect. The
wing-span - Richard's reach - is enormous and threatening. The range
of movement is endless: backward dancing movements like a spider,
sideways like a crab. And you can cover distances very swiftly with that
sweeping, scooping action, almost like rowing, the polio-afflicted legs
being carried along underneath.

We try `Now is the winter'. For the section about his deformity I
deliberately, slowly, exhibit it. Bill A. likes this, says, `It's like a poem of
self-hatred. A mannequin parade of the latest deformities.'

At the end of the session everyone is smiling. `Looks promising,' we all
say to one another cautiously, but excited. It certainly does seem to
contribute to, not hinder, our early work on the text.

Bill: `But if we stick with the crutches we're going to have to wring
every possible change out of them. And have long periods when he's not
on them at all. We must make it clear that he can function without them,
although not half as well.'

Drive home to Chipping Campden. It has just gone dark. The sky is
still glowing blue, the countryside weird grey cut-outs in the swinging
headlamps as the car twists and turns down the narrow lanes. It makes a
crazy theatrical effect. I'm trying to contain the excitement, the jubilation.
Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is playing. Glorious slush.

Yesterday all was lost. Today it is a triumph. I must steady myself.

The freak sunny weather is finally over. This morning the fields are in a
soft wash of mist.

LADY ANNE SCENE I wear the diving-suit. The first time with another
member of the cast. Again I have to muster my courage and again feel
immensely silly. Actually it does look silly today because I have to wear my
specs and am trying to hold the script and crutches at the same time. But
Penny is very encouraging, thinks it's going to work.

I like her enormously. Her enthusiasm, her appetite for work, that
Australian directness. Bill D. has designed a conventional Lady Anne
costume with tall pointed medieval hat. Penny says, `But the bird's been up all night, carting this stiff around. She's tired, dirty, her hair's wild.
It's Cassandra, not Mary Poppins.'

After lunch, another procession of newcomers to read their scenes.

Harold Innocent (King Edward) with that magnificent Hogarth head,
beetroot coloured, and clear blue eyes; the aspect of a furious newborn
infant thinking, `Call that a delivery?'

Now Yvonne Coulette. She is playing the Duchess of York, Richard's
mother (Monty's main culprit). I look up as she comes in and my heart
misses a beat. She is the spitting image of my own mother - the same
grey bubble curls, strong cheekbones, small deep-set eyes. I try not to
keep staring at her, but it's difficult to concentrate.

At the party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Other Place, Trevor
Nunn comes over to Bill and me and talks about Richard III. He feels
there is a problem in the middle section of the play. `Don't play it uncut
like your Volpone,' he says to Bill.

Next Terry comes over and also advises Bill to wield the knife freely.

`Tell him, tell him!' I urge from the sidelines, hopping up and down.
Bill's face grows heavy as he wonders whether it's too late to recast.

Terry says to me, `You are wrong about Nicky Wright's play, you know.
We must talk about it sometime.'

Now David Edgar, unrecognisably aggressive, in defence of Nicky's
play: `What is the matter with you? The play's fine!'

`Let's talk about it,' I say. `This isn't like you.'

`I can't play the nice guy all the time,' he says and strides off.

I'm rather shaken by this. Clearly Adrian has reported our conversation
and it has not made me popular.

It's the full company read-through today. Driving in, I am so nervous I
have to stop the car to write this down: `There must be no further
hesitation or doubt. There must be no further fear. Richard must be
played by a confident actor. Manufacture it. Like with The History Man.'

THE READ-THROUGH The cast gather in the Conference Hall in a
huge horse-shoe shape, about thirty-five strong. Bill A. takes the centre.

He talks about how Shakespeare wrote the play drawing from two
traditions - Greek tragedy (the choric mourning scenes) and medieval
morality plays (Richard is drawn from the figure of Vice). The death of
the real Richard III in 1485 marked the end of the medieval world and
the beginning of the Tudors and Modern English History. Up until then
there had been an unshakable belief in the control of God; now was the
beginning of Humanism, of doubt, curiosity.

He says we can see Richard either as an Antichrist figure or, in Jung's
words, as `modern man in search of a soul'.

Now comes the moment of revealing the set (or `wedding cake' as he
calls it). The model has been covered with a cloth until now. He whips
this off to reveal the cathedral - gasps of approval from the cast. Some
creep into the centre to see better and crouch there like a tribe of
hunchbacks. Bill says, `As you can see, we resisted the worst idea we came
up with - setting the play in Orwell's 1984 with high grey walls and giant
portraits of Tony Sher everywhere.'

Bill D. takes over, grinning like a magician at a children's party. He
says the set is an almost exact replica of Worcester Cathedral but suggests
we should also think of it as a city in miniature, a political anthill. He has
been inspired by Queen Elizabeth's line, `Pitchers have ears'. The tents
on either side of the stage for the camps of Richard and Richmond will
be like the mouths of Heaven and Hell in morality plays.

The dreaded moment has come: Bill says, `Right, let's read it. Tony,
"Now is the winter" please ...'

` "Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York ..." '

I charge at it and swiftly stumble and fall. Despite my resolutions in
the car this morning, I am shaking so much I have to hold the book with
both hands. I read badly in that I act it far too much, shouting and
demonstrating. Not surprisingly there is no laughter, but an uneasy
tension. Luckily Blessed lightens the atmosphere by getting up out of his
seat and being deliberately bad and reppy. He does bits of the blocking
we have worked out, whistles, burps and farts.

Richard is such a huge part. You climb up and up. You do `Now is the
winter', you do the first Clarence and Hasting scenes, you do the whole
of the Lady Anne wooing, you do `Was ever woman', you do that long
Queen Margaret scene, and you're still only in Act One - with four more
to go.

Am pleased that my voice holds out well (another perk from not
smoking), but I must devise a way of saving some really big guns for the
final oration.

In the last section of the reading everyone gets very giggly. When the
two armies are camped at Bosworth, Ratcliffe's line finally does it -

`Thomas the Earl of Surrey and himself,

Much about cockshut time, from troop to troop

Went through the army cheering up the soldiers.'

- an image that conjures up both a rather naff ENSA concert party, and
a gay porno movie: Boys at Bosworth?

WARDROBE Chris Tucker arrives. He is the country's top expert in movie
prosthetics (his masterpiece was John Hurt's Elephant Man) and has been
hired to build the deformity so that we can reveal it naked at the coronation.
He has a sculptured mane of silver-grey hair. Stands looking down at me
in the silly diving-suit. One gets the impression that working for the
R S C is his idea of slumming it.

He says, `You've got it all wrong. Humps are not central, they go over
to one side.'

`Oh, but we're not going for scoliosis,' I say, `we're going for kyphosis,'
hoping to dazzle him with the little science that I possess.

He simply ignores me and looks to Bill D. for an explanation, expert
to expert. Bill employs charm: `The sight of the back, of the vertebrae, should make the audience arch in their seats and feel it down their own
spines. Like when the radio announcer has a frog in his throat, the whole
nation clears theirs.'