Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition (35 page)

With everything on for the first time, I rotate, feeling the new shape
from every angle. Suddenly I spy my shadow on the wall and get a shock.
As I tell Bill A. later: `Even though we've gone for a different shape, a
different costume, different hair, the crutches, twisted knees, I looked at
my shadow tonight and saw Laurence Olivier in the part.'

Bill says, `That shape, that famous outline - that's not great acting,
that's great writing.'

The titanium crutches arrive - they make jet engines out of this metal.
The weight is fine, lighter than the NHS ones, and they're beautifully
slim, which would mean we'd be able to cheat a tapering effect. But a few
bangs together and they start to dent.

We've run out of time. Can't experiment anymore. We are now faced
with a clear decision - whether to stick with the NHS crutches which I
have worked on for weeks but which we know can break, or do we go for
the horribly thick bicycle metal? Bill D. wants the former, says we can
have spares in the wings in case of breakages. I can't make up my mind.
Could I do each performance with that constant risk? What if one suddenly
broke on a fast exit or the leap down from the tomb? On the other hand,
the bicycle metal is so solid and ugly. Bill A. puts me out of my misery:
`Let's put safety before beauty.'

The bicycle-metal crutches are rushed away to the Prop Shop to be
disguised as best as possible.

S O L U S On stage. Exhaustion from the heavy week catching up with me
now.

Ciss is working on `Now is the winter', making me gesture on each of
the open vowels. I am getting muddled, can't separate the sounds from
the meaning anymore. Finally have to say, `Ciss, I can't do it. It's too late
for this kind of elementary work.'

`It's the perfect time for it,' she says, gently insistent, `you understand
the meaning, now rest on the sounds, let them do some of the work.'

`It's unnerving me.'

`It shouldn't. You mustn't worry, darling. It will happen gradually.'

`But that's what's unnerving to hear at this stage. I don't want to be
waiting for something to happen gradually. I've got to be there now.'

I feel awful rejecting her of all people, but it's touching on a big worry
- is my voice good enough for this part? The instrument itself. If it isn't,
I mustn't dwell on it at all.

Now I just have to go with yesterday's discovery. A kind of fuck-you-all
attitude: fuck off Shakespeare, fuck off the-proper-way-to-speak-verse,
fuck off snapping tendons and Laurence Olivier.

JULIA'S COTTAGE Night. Treat myself to a bottle of Mersault and write
up the week's events. It's useful this, helps me to get some perspective on
a period of my life that is increasingly dream-like.

Much later, go out to sit in the garden. Dark, rich country night. A
silhouette of dangling willowy branches. There were children playing in
the shadowy garden next door, but now they've gone to bed. I can hear a
stream, lambs bleating - a rather ghostly sound - and just once, heels on
the pavement.

This time next week I will be standing in front of one and a half
thousand people ...

Richard has his ghosts, his `babbling dreams', I my four a.m. gremlins.
Awake very edgy. Having to introduce two major new factors next week
- heavier crutches to get used to, and wearing the deformity for long
periods of time with whatever discomfort or heat exhaustion it causes.
How has this happened? Almost the first thing Bill and I agreed was to
have the deformity to wear throughout rehearsals, and to make the crutches
second nature.

Sundays are the hardest days to get through anyway. Time to stop and
think, which I don't really want to do. Refuge in the Gielgud book, The
Ages of Gielgud, only to come across John Mortimer's lament on modem
verse-speaking. I snap it shut as if killing a bug.

Mum rings from South Africa. Finally she asks, `And Richard the
Third?' like she's been doing ever since she decided Trevor Nunn really
meant it, back in Joe Allen's. But today the question is resoundingly
casual. She is trying to underplay her great anticipation and excitement.

Tine,' I answer.

`Good!' she instantly replies, before I can elaborate at all, `I've certainly
never heard you so calm before an opening.' She so wants this to be true,
so wants to send strength and courage through the telephone.

To the King's Arms Hotel for lunch, but I'm terribly restless. Keep
thinking back to a similar lunch here two years ago, with Gambon before
King Lear opened. We chatted and joked as always, but he wasn't quite
with me. A man with something else on his mind. I think the only people
who can know this feeling are those in the performing arts, sport,
bullrings and death row.

Jim senses my tension and suggests a long walk. It's baking hot again.
We set off along the side of Dovers Hill. A single path through waist-high
wheat fields, still an unripened green. We walk for miles like this. At last
a field of barley, light and silvery. The day changing. Shadows of clouds.
A breeze skimming across the field, flowing shapes, ghosts departing.

The set isn't ready for us to start the technical rehearsal, so a change of
plan: Guy and his orchestra move into the Conference Hall and we spend
a happy day working through all the music cues, fitting them to the play.
Acting to music again. I realise why it's so enjoyable - you feel like
you're in a film. In fact, Guy's music is very much from a thriller. Which
worries me slightly. I'm still not certain that the play will work on as
simplistic a level as that. But a lot of the music is quite breathtaking.
Richmond's theme, like Chris's performance, is a veritable gale of fresh
air. It makes you sit bolt upright, inspired to slay dragons by the herd.
And the coronation music, with orchestra and full (recorded) choir supplementing the cast, is a magnificent piece of ornate ritual. He has
unashamedly borrowed from Carmina Burana.

Today is also Richard's coming-out day. It's a chance to get used to
wearing the deformity as well as the new crutches. So I get dressed up in
it all - Tucker's creations and full costume - and, feeling about as foolish
as is possible, creep into the back of the Conference Hall. Everyone else,
of course, is in normal clothes and there's me looking like something from
the closing-down sale at Biba's. But all the comments are positive and
encouraging and my bizarre appearance is quickly absorbed into the day's
work.

Spending hours like this helps to make up for all the lost time. The
discomfort is minimal, but the heat factor is impossible to gauge without
performance energy and stage lights.

The bicycle-metal crutches have been covered in black leather (which
makes them sound surprisingly like wood) but still look solid and ugly and
disappointingly like modern crutches. I'm just going to have to learn to live with them. I fear we've passed the point where any further requests
from me to produce something better would be welcomed. However, the
new weight is quickly adjusted to.

For the Bosworth scenes the battle horses are brought into the Conference Hall for Chris and me to practise mounting and dismounting. They
are most impressive to look at - two awesome, huge skeletons in gold and
black. Mine isn't quite finished yet and has an ear missing. Mal says that's
why it didn't come when Richard called `A horse, a horse'.

Actors' nightmares tumbling over one another. In one, I am desperately
trying to learn the first speech before the first entrance. In another, Bill
and I are trying to select speeches for the end; new material has been
discovered about a Russian presence at Bosworth. I awake in a cold sweat
after making the immortal utterance, `I think Brezhnev's speech is rather
good and I just can't see why you won't let him keep it.'

THE TECHNICAL REHEARSAL Cue to cue, lights, music, sound effects.
I love techs - the show without acting - and I think I'm rather good at
keeping the atmosphere light. There's a great deal of laughter all day. Bill
remains patiently good humoured throughout, despite the pressure. The
atmosphere is buoyant: Leo and the lighting team at their control panel
in the stalls; Charles waving and calling `Coo-ee' from his perch in the
dress circle; Guy using the front of the stage to scribble a new fanfare
('The cue's coming up Bill, just as soon as the ink's dry').

There are a group of cleaners watching from the back of the upper
circle - the shows that they must have seen ...

The routine problem as props and furniture and bits of the set arrive,
failing to resemble what we were expecting or had requested. Much
bashing of square blocks into round holes.

Sometimes the enforced alteration can be an improvement. At the
beginning of the scene with Hastings' head, the front screen flies out and
was to reveal me sitting on one of the tombs - the moment in the play we
eventually found to climb up on them. But the screen proves to be too
close to the tomb to allow me to sit on the edge in safety. The compromise
is to stand on the tomb astride the carved figure, which everyone says
looks even more effective from out front.

The set has worked magnificently. The tracery walls are a lighting
designer's dream, and Leo is not missing a trick. Shafts of light smudged
with incense fall across the ghost-white tombs. But some of the costumes worry me slightly, rather like some of the music did yesterday. We're on
a dangerous tightrope. There's a very thin line between the imagery of
morality plays and that of picture-book Shakespeare and Hollywood
medieval epic. But many are splendid - Harold Innocent is looking
marvellous in acres of blue satin and white ermine out of which stick
rotting bandaged hands; Jim's Tyrrel costume is one of the best of all, in
that it looks like clothes that have been well lived-in, making him so seedy
he's unrecognisable. The Queen Margaret image has worked terrifically
as well. As Pat wanders by, wrapped in yards of Lancastrian Flag, Blessed
says, `I see Margaret's popped over from France for her holidays, pity her
parachute failed to open.'

Many problems with hats - something else we should have been
rehearsing with for a while and not at the last minute. Blessed has hidden
his ('I look enough like a 'kin sofa already'). My hat - a huge ornate Bosch
creation - has a life of its own. It's like wearing a live octopus. Also, it
tends to lodge on the hump so that when I turn my head it stays pointing
forwards.

A long day.

Jim waits to drive me home although he could have left hours ago. I
couldn't have done without his support over the last few weeks. Slump
gratefully into the car.

The countryside is lit by a brilliant full moon. In forty-eight hours I
will actually have done it in front of an audience. How like sexual exhibitionism that sounds - and how like it this business is. With that thought, a
peculiar mixture of fear and excitement begins its slow, spidery crawl up
my spine ...

A letter from Bob with this quotation from a letter that Chekhov wrote to
his wife: `Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk
without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days
and whole unsuccessful seasons, there will be great misunderstandings
and deep disappointments ... you must be prepared for all this, accept
it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way ...'

The strange way tension and exhaustion manifest themselves - reading
it makes me cry uncontrollably for about five minutes. Because, of course,
it's about the possibility of failure ...

THE TECHNICAL CONTINUES Today more jagged and tense. Partly because Hastings is dead and thus no Blessed filling the theatre with that
warm generous spirit.

But there's always Black Mac, swearing and cursing, but gentle as a
lamb. Strapping me into the false back: `This is an evil contraption, Animil.
You've gotta be a martyr to be a Mark One, either that or fokkin daft!
Mark One spastic more like.' Never has my nickname, Animil, been more
apt than it is for me as Richard. He goes through some of the other names
he's coined over the twenty-one years he's worked here: Peter Hall was
Chief Sitting Bull; Ian flolm was the Dwarf; Norman Rodway was the
Bog Hopper; Patrick Stewart was Bald Eagle; Richard Griffiths was
Hippo; John Wood was Two-b'One ('If he stood sideways he'd be marked
absent'); Blessed the Gorilla; and Nureyev, whom he dressed one year (a
mind-boggling thought) when the Ballet was up here, was Big Balls. `Vy
you callst me Beeg Ballet?' Rudi had asked. ' 'Cause that's a canny set of
tackle you've got there,' came the answer, causing the great dancer to
send out immediately for a dictionary of Newcastle slang.

The throne - bearers are all developing back trouble. I've been saying
for weeks they need some professional advice, from a weight lifter and/
or a theatre physio like Charlotte. Now, with the constant repetition of
sequences that inevitably occur at a tech, their backs are starting to give
under the weight. A local osteopath is coming in to see what they have to
do and advise whether it's feasible and safe. If we have to lose the image
of Richard being born aloft it will be tragic.

It's my bugbear, born of my own accident, but when it comes to matters
like these, theatre in this country is totally amateur. Actors busk their way
through the fights, dances, pratfalls and crippled distortions asked of
them, without knowing half the time what they're risking.

After much haggling the R S C have finally agreed to pay for me to have
a massage before each performance - something else that Charlotte
recommended as a precaution to avoid injury. These are proving to be
wonderful rest breaks in these hectic days. The masseuse is a small, sweet
lady called jenny who looks about seventeen, but has fingers that could
split bricks apart.