Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (27 page)

I think it's important for the head to be better made than stage heads
normally are; the one we're using in rehearsals is a featherweight papier
mache thing with a perfect lacquered smoothness to the neck wound.
Hastings's head is fresh so it would have a certain floppiness - Richard
could put his finger in the cheek or mouth if he felt so inclined - and the
windpipe and neck muscles would be sagging through the hole. Also the human head is one of the heaviest parts of the body.

I argue that if it's made well enough we could do anything with it and
it will still be horrific. Bill dispatches a shrieking Charles to go and weigh
his head (by lying on his stomach, propping his chin on the bathroom
scales and squinting at the gauge) and to see if the budget will stretch to
another Tucker commission.

I want Richard to have a moment alone with the head at the end of the
scene. Not sure what for yet. I offer Bill an image of Richard laying the
head on the floor and lifting both crutches high to smash down on it -
blackout!

`I don't understand what that means,' Bill says, `Richard wanted Hastings dead. That's all.'

`I think he's kinkier than that.' (Dennis Nilsen; Hitler watching film of
the executions.)

I hold the head wondering what else I could do with it and immediately
Bill cries, `That's it! That's disturbing. Just looking at it and thinking,
"This was a person." ' A chorus of `Mmmmmm's from the others
watching.

Perhaps sniffing it, scenting it like an animal finding another dead? A
parody of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull?

SOLUS Who is Richard actually talking to in his early soliloquies? Bill's
idea is rather brilliant: `He talks as if to an equal. Or perhaps just slightly
down - he does have to explain things a bit, recap now and then. Think
of the audience as a convention of trainee Richard the Thirds. An EST
session.'

ARDEN HOTEL BAR Jo Scanlon, our historical researcher, is bringing
in reams about the coronation ceremonies of the time. She has also done
historical biographies of all the characters to distribute to the cast. But
Shakespeare's play departs so drastically from history that these will be
of curiosity value rather than of any real use.

Bill and I discuss how to end the coronation (and the first half). He
suggests ending with Richard and Lady Anne's naked backs to the
audience; Richard reaches for her face and kisses her. I suggest adding
to that, the throne arriving down the aisle, Richard kisses Anne, crawls
towards the throne, clambers into it and, leaving her far behind, is hoisted
into the air.

Bill wants to have a grotesque dancing figure on one of the tombs
during the coronation ceremony, `a dwarf or a jester or something. A gargoyle come to life.' I suggest this person could then become Richard's
Fool. Another hunchback perhaps? Now that one of them is King they'll
all be flocking out of the closets. Dive into the text. `Look!' I yell, `In the
nightmare speech at Bosworth, Richard says, "Fool, of thyself speak well.
Fool, do not flatter." '

Bill winces and shuts the book. `The whole point of that speech is that
he's alone.'

`Yes, but the Fool is a kind of mirror-image -'

`Shut up and go and buy us a round.'

A long day ends with the other R S C driver, Bill Kerr, taking me home.
Larry, this morning, drove silently; his car smelt of after-shave. Bill Kerr
smokes a lot, is loquacious and tonight is in a ghoulish mood. As we pass
a dark humped shape on our left he asks, `Anyone told you about Meon
Hill?' There was an infamous murder there some thirty years ago, thought
to be a ritual black magic killing. A quiet Stratford street sweeper was
found on the hill with a pitchfork through him ('Quite dead of course,'
remarks Bill Kerr) and his constant companion, a mongrel dog, was
hanging from a nearby tree, its throat slit.

A fox suddenly appears in our headlights. This prompts Bill Kerr to
relate the story of how his neighbour had all his chickens massacred by a
fox. Apparently they don't eat them, just kill them for sport and pleasure.
The next morning there were only three survivors among the carnage.
These three had not been touched, yet sat on their roosts stock-still staring
without blinking. They had gone mad with shock. Nothing could be done
to revive them - eventually their necks had to be wrung so they could join
their murdered brood.

I dream a clear image of one of the crutches catching between paving
stones and myself crashing forward on to my face. Blood and smashed
bones. Hurry into rehearsals to find out what the stage floor is like.
Stage-managers are dispatched to fetch samples. The simulated paving
stones prove to have almost no gaps between them. And so, alert over,
the day can begin.

BAYNARD'S CASTLE SCENE (Act III, Scene vii) Whenever we come to
this difficult scene we usually just stand and stare at the text dumbly. But
today this yields results. In Shakespeare's stage directions it says, `Enter
the Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens'. And Catesby asks why `such troops of citizens' have been assembled. Clearly they've got a large audience;
Richard and Buckingham are performing here for the citizens, not the
Mayor or Aldermen. We can't have crowds of course, but we could play
it out front and use the theatre audience. Bill wonders how to suggest the
large crowd. A tape is the answer, but what do we hear? Shakespearian
rhubarb would be fatal - `Zounds, alack, and by my troth!'

We try the scene out front. Immediately much better.

I'm playing Richard very holy and wet. Bill says, `Richard is going to
have to act a lot better than that. He can't just suddenly change character
completely. He's a famous man. These citizens know him. They see him
every evening on the nine o'clock news launching ships and visiting
armament factories. Everyone knows he's an angry, volatile character. His
religiousness can't be soppy. He can't offer them another Henry VI. His
must be a stern, chastising piety. He's right wing, he's Moral Majority.'

This solves a contradiction in Richard's public persona (violence and
piety) which I hadn't been able to reconcile, and is a perfect example of
those moments in rehearsal when the whole character suddenly comes
into sharper focus. But building a character also involves leaving some ends
untied, embracing the complexities of human nature.

Tye o T Ft E R PLACE Camille. It's increasingly difficult to concentrate on
anything else other than Richard these days. As I sit reading the programme waiting for the lights to go down, my mind keeps drifting away
to him and my face slouches into his. I glance up to find several people
staring. I pretend to have something stuck in my teeth.

Ron's production is brilliant. It moves from salons to pastures as
effortlessly as a film. Frances Barber is astonishing. Her cough is not a
stage cough. You haven't heard it before - except in real life. You don't
sit there thinking, `Gosh, that's a good cough, wonder how the actress is
doing that.' You fear for Camille's throat and lungs.

Meet her in The Duck afterwards. She's great fun, says, `You and
Branagh only have Laurence Olivier to follow. What about me? I've got
Greta Garbo.'

I have fallen in love with this eighteenth-century cottage Jim and I have
in Chipping Campden. Julia's Cottage. I particularly love the view of her
from the banked garden. The line of the tiled roof - it's grown soft from
age and wear. Like driftwood.

At the other end of the garden there is a little raised stone patio with a
tree which is still bare. This area looks like a set for Waiting for Godot in
a rather twee production.

This is where I spend the day pacing up and down learning lines, being
rather brilliant to the empty sunny garden, in the same way that in the
bath I often sing like Pavarotti.

The Sunday Times magazine carries an extract from a new book about
the Yorkshire Ripper, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, by Gordon
Burn. Fascinating. If an author was inventing this mass-murderer, writing
a novel, would he dare make him work in a graveyard?

Plenty of fodder for Richard. The way Sutcliffe is ashamed of his body
as a youth, and this description of him opening a coffin: `He'd slide the
lid back slowly until you could just see the face. Very carefully, he'd lift
away the square of lace they used to cover it, and stare hard for about
thirty seconds, concentrated, intent, like he was waiting for something
to move.'

Jim takes me through the lines. They still haven't stuck. The fear. This
isn't like me. Lines have never been a problem before. But Shakespeare's
interweaving grammar is confounding me. And I can find no logic to why
he sometimes uses a `hath' instead of a `have', a `thee' instead of `you', or
vice versa. These little dents in the road trip me up constantly, making
the journey rather nerve-racking. Part of the problem is having to learn
the lines too quickly, so as to free my hands to practise with those fucking
crutches.

Drive in, feeling very edgy again. I do a Monty session on myself in the
car:

`What do you fear?' he would ask.

`I can't learn the lines,' I would answer.

Monty's face - gently mocking. No, not mocking, he would refute that.
Gently amused. No, not gently. A strict amusement, a challenging smile
to jolt me out of my indulgence. He would say, `Do you really believe
you've lost the ability to learn lines?'

`No, of course not.'

It's Bank Holiday and Stratford is wild, drunk and ugly. I had forgotten
how this place can change character. Skinheads and punks day-tripping
from Coventry and Birmingham, here for the river - to sail on, fall into and puke all over. Blaring portable stereos, the smell of beer, cider and
cheap wine.

On the lawns outside the theatre, a group of punks all in ash-black.
They look like charred people, survivors of some terrible explosion that
has torn and frayed their clothes and has left their hair tinged with blue,
red and green.

The theatre stands in the middle of this wild funfair looking totally
incongruous.

VOICE CALL Ciss Berry, the R S C voice coach, is on holiday at the
moment so I have a session with her assistant, David Carey. We look at
the first speech. It's a shock to realise that I don't understand the first two
lines. They are so famous you assume you understand them. Or rather,
the first line is so famous you think it's a statement in itself: `Now is the
winter of our discontent'. But there is no full stop there. The sense is,
`Now is the winter ... made glorious summer.' It immediately becomes
easier to say now that it means something.

A disturbing talk with Mal. He has been increasingly distant and aggressively silent. It turns out that he's so excited about playing his first major
part in verse that he wants us to stop imposing so much on the text. Now
I understand why most of my suggestions have been greeted by `It's not
in the text.' This is a tricky area. It's my first big verse part as well
and, God knows, I could profitably spend the next five weeks working
exclusively on that, but I instinctively know that that wouldn't fully serve
this play. A good production of Richard III (the Rustavelli for example) is
going to thrill by being theatrical in the best sense of the word. Maybe
I'm not being honest. Maybe it's more to do with the fact that, as a
member of an audience, I find the classics difficult to watch and to
understand. So I like them done by Brook or Adrian or the Rustavelli Company; I need them to be made vivid, illustrated to some extent. If Mal wants
Richard III to be a purist's production we are going to fall out over this; it's
really quite upsetting.

An oil slick on the river today, from the long weekend's abuse. In the
morning sunshine it's as if a rainbow has fallen into the water and is being
gently rubbed against the bank, washed and cleaned until it's transparent
again.

Mal says, `Take no notice of me yesterday. I was just in an argumentative
mood. I've got a lot on my mind.'

He's moving house at the moment. A relief to know it's that and not
more personal.

A bitty day. A pleasure to be watching for a change (scenes which don't
involve Richard).

Pat Routledge's working method is fascinating. She keeps up a running
commentary, as if she's cooking: `I don't know, don't know yet ... never
mind, we'll find it, we'll find it ... so I go over to them and say Ta-ra ...' GHOSTS SCENE (Act V, Scene iii) Bill gathers the actors concerned into
a circle and encounters an immediate problem - the ghosts can't read it
without corpsing.

Bill: `Why is this scene so notoriously difficult?'

Roger: `Could it be that the ghosts are usually drunk by this stage in
the performance? I mean, Clarence has been dead for over two and a half
hours.'

Bill attempts a rough staging and things get worse. The ghosts have
slowly to gather in the middle of the stage and then swivel their prophecies
from Richard at one side to Richmond at the other.