Talking Theatre

Interviews with Theatre People

Richard Eyre

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780011967
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

A superlative account of how theatre is made, in the words of the very people who make it.

In Talking Theatre, Richard Eyre uses his unrivalled access to leading theatre people to allow us to eavesdrop on the stories behind many of the most important productions and performances in the theatre of recent times:

• John Gielgud
  
• Peter Brook
  
• Margaret 'Percy' Harris
  
• Peter Hall
  
• Ian McKellen
  
• Judi Dench
  
• Trevor Nunn
  
• Vanessa Redgrave
  
• Fiona Shaw
  
• Liam Neeson
  
• Stephen Rea
  
• Stephen Sondheim
  
• Arthur Laurents
  
• Arthur Miller
  
• August Wilson
  
• Jason Robards
  
• Kim Hunter
  
• Tony Kushner
  
• Luise Rainer
  
• Alan Bennett
  
• Harold Pinter
  
• Tom Stoppard
  
• David Hare
  
• Jocelyn Herbert
  
• William Gaskill
  
• Arnold Wesker
  
• Peter Gill
  
• Christopher Hampton
  
• Peter Shaffer
  
• Frith Banbury
  
• Alan Ayckbourn
  
• John Bury
  
• Victor Spinetti
  
• John McGrath
  
• Cameron Mackintosh
  
• Patrick Marber
  
• Steven Berkoff
  
• Deborah Warner
  
• Willem Dafoe
  
• Simon McBurney
  
• Robert Lepage
  
• John Johnston (Britain's last Theatre Censor)
  

  'A mine of first-hand theatrical information and insight and, better still, a wonderful compendium of high-grade gossip' -- Telegraph
  
  

  'Truly various and never less than fierce critical thinking condensed into one endlessly entertaining volume' -- Sunday Times Theatre Book of the Year
  
  

John Gielgud

1904—2000

Actor and director. John Gielgud performed all the major Shakespeare roles, and was instrumental in introducing Chekhov to English audiences. In later life he acted in plays by Alan Bennett, Charles Wood, David Storey and Harold Pinter. I interviewed him on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, well before the start of filming the rest of the interviews—‘in case I drop off the twig,’ as he put it. He seemed then—the summer of 1998—to be eternal. He warned me that he was ‘just an actor’ who’d never had an idea in his head, which was typically self-deprecating. No one could have mistaken Gielgud for an intellectual, but although his conversation was showered with actorly anecdotes, it was impossible to discount his mercurial intelligence and his extraordinary recall of theatre history, even if life outside the theatre had passed him by.

When he died, there was a move by well-meaning friends to organise a gala and memorial service. He hated all such occasions and, modest to the last, his will expressly forbade staging one. If there had been a celebration of his life it should have taken the form of a mass gathering of actors vying with each other to tell anecdotes about him in his all-too-imitable voice. This—from Judi Dench—is a favourite of mine. She was in the canteen of the BBC rehearsal room at Acton with the cast of her sitcom. She waved to Gielgud, who was rehearsing for another show, to join their table. He came over and sat down. The group became silent, awed by his presence. The silence was broken by Gielgud: ‘Has anyone had any obscene phone calls recently?’

What was the theatre like that you encountered as a child?

Well, it was very much a theatre of stars. Actor-managers were beginning to die out, but I looked for the big names on the marquee, so I got to know the theatre very well because I stood in the pit and gallery and went whenever I could; my parents were very long suffering. They both went to the theatre quite a lot, but they were never in the theatre, although my mother had strong links with all her Terry relations. I was fearfully lucky because from the very beginning I got my first jobs through personal introductions and so I never had to sort of stand in the queue to get work. I was earning seven or eight pounds a week from quite early times, and I got scholarships at two dramatic schools, so I didn’t have to pay fees, I didn’t cost my parents anything, and I lived at home. I really had a very easy time those first ten or twelve years, and I learned a bit of hard work.

What did you think of what you saw in the theatre in those days?

I didn’t think then what acting really was like. I loved spectacle and I was immediately taken in by colour and groupings, and the childhood drama of the curtain going up and the lights going down, which would vanish from the scene in years to come. I think that it was spectacle and romance and love scenes and people waving capes and looking out over balconies and things that appealed to me so much.

And the stars.

Oh yes. I didn’t see Forbes-Robertson as he’d already retired, but I saw Irene Vanbrugh, whom I admired very much, and her sister Violet. They were big stars. And there was Gerald du Maurier, who I saw in a good many plays: he was wonderful. But when I came to meet him I was very disappointed because he rather snubbed me. I think he felt that we were trying to destroy him.

He was regarded as something of a revolutionary in his day.

Well, he was terribly modern; he invented the throwaway technique, which Noël Coward, afterwards of course, developed tremendously.

So before that, people just plonked lines, did they? Was it a rather histrionic style?

It was. There was a great deal of romantic acting still going on.

When you say romantic, do you mean extravagant gestures?

Yes, and costumes and heavy make-up, and knowing how to take the stage, and entrances and exits, and big rounds of applause when the actors came on and when they went off. And very romantic lighting.

Would the star always be at the centre of the stage?

Pretty well. But I didn’t feel that actors did anything technically clever. They said the lines, and I knew exactly the ones I admired and the ones I didn’t admire.

And you admired them because they were natural?

Well, they seemed to hold your attention the moment they got on the stage, and they lived up to their reputations. But very often they were disappointing too.

What about Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse?

I saw Bernhardt when she was an old lady in the Coliseum. My father took me. I was terribly impressed by her vocal power, and the fact that she still looked quite young, although she had only one leg. I was impressed by that. And Duse also I saw, standing at the back of the circle. I didn’t understand because it was in Italian, but her presence was tremendous. The public were worked up even before she made her entrance. And she knew to a T exactly how to hold a big house.

And did they act in an operatic style?

I don’t think Duse did. She was very repressed, she wore no make-up and she was very quiet. But she had an extraordinary power.

Wilde thought that Duse was a great actress.

Yes and Bernard Shaw did too.

Were Wilde’s plays performed then?

I saw a very bad revival of The Importance [of Being Earnest]. And I did see An Ideal Husband, but that was with Robert Donat right at the beginning of the Second War. I don’t know whether there were any more revivals in between.

When you were growing up did you have any sense of Wilde as a great revolutionary?

Oh, I was mad about the fairy tales, and Salomé I read, of course, and thought it was very improper and exciting. And all the erotic side of the theatre was very much suppressed, of course, with the censor.

What was the social mix in the audience?

It was very much divided.

Upper-middle-class?

Very much. I mean, the stalls and dress circle were the middle-class and aristocratic public, and then there was the upper circle and the pit and gallery, which were the cheap parts, which hissed and booed or applauded on the first night and were very important for the commercial success. And there were enormous commercial successes: plays that ran a year. And things like Chu Chin Chow that ran three and four years.

Did you see Chu Chin Chow?

Yes, I never stopped seeing it.

The theatre at that time wasn’t was all light comedy, was it? It was also the age of Ibsen and Shaw.

Yes. I was in great difficulty because all my life I’ve been so stupid and flippant. I never cared to think of what was going on in the world or in the two wars, which I in a way lived through. But I had such a childlike adoration of the theatre and of actors and actresses and the ones I met in my parents’ house. My own relations were all very exciting to me and they lived this make-believe world. But when it came to Ibsen and Shaw I rather jibbed; I hadn’t got the appetite for dialogue and I found them very talky. I never got over that. I never have got over it. I’ve never really liked plays that are entirely talk.

I think the unsung genius of twentieth-century British theatre is—

Barker.

—Granville Barker, yes. You knew him very well.

Well, I knew him—I have a whole bunch of wonderful letters he wrote me having seen various productions I did. The two times I worked for him he came for a few days only and then retreated into his Paris grandeur where he gave lectures and things. And his second wife who loathed the theatre: she would drag him away the moment he got very interested. The few hours he was on the stage with me I was so impressed by him, but I never got to know him intimately at all. When I did Lear at the Old Vic [which Barker helped direct, though it was never publicly announced] at the beginning of the war, the Second War, he never took me out to lunch; but he came once to my house, on the night that peace was declared, and was already not well and tired and dejected somehow. But he made an extraordinary impression on me. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted and how much to give and how much not to give.

What was he like?

He was like a surgeon.

Very reticent?

Very, and very, very terrified of getting involved again in anything to do with the theatre. But a number of actors who had been with him earlier—when he had a company and had three Shakespearean productions at the Savoy—said he was a sort of young genius and wore sandals and ate nuts.

But you didn’t meet him until probably ten years later?

No, we did some Spanish plays which his wife had translated. She would pop in and drag him off to lunch the moment he started working. I thought the moment he stepped onto the stage he was an absolute genius to me; he was like a wonderful conductor of an orchestra; he knew exactly what not to bother with. When we did Hamlet just before the Second War he was in London and came to a rehearsal which I arranged specially for him to see. I went the next morning to the Ritz, where he was staying, and he kept Mrs Barker out of the room for about two hours while he gave me notes. I wrote and wrote and wrote and rushed off to rehearsal and put all the things in that he told me. He would say such cogent, simple things, you know: ‘The King is a cat and you play him like a dog,’ or words like that.

Is it apocryphal, the story that he told you after a run-through of Lear, that you were an ash and what was required was an oak?

He did. He did. He wrote me these wonderful letters about what I should do if I went into management during the war and whether I should join up or whether I shouldn’t and all that. He was marvellously helpful. But this lady was always in the background egging him on, and she didn’t want any talk about the theatre at all. When I tried to arrange a memorial service in London she forbade it, wouldn’t allow any notice to be taken.

Were you aware of him as a writer?

No, I wasn’t. I never saw The Voysey Inheritance. I saw The Madras House in a production he did himself at the Ambassadors, which was very good. I remember the first act, which has the whole family on the stage together, and the way he moved the people and the grouping and the placing on the stage were so marvellously good. I think Peter Brook has the same extraordinary quality: he knows where to put the actors. When I became a so-called stage director, I was always worrying how the groupings should be and where people should cross, and the blocking. It worried me always the night before, so I would make plans and plottings and use models and things.

Granville Barker is alleged to have written on an actor’s dressing-room mirror: ‘Be swift, be swift, be not poetical.’ Do you think that’s good advice?

Yes, I’m sure it is. I suffered so dreadfully for many years from being told I had a beautiful voice, so I imagined that I had and rather made use of it as much as I could. It wasn’t until after I worked with Olivier, who was very scathing about my voice—very resentful that the public and the critics didn’t like him better when he played Romeo—he thought I sang all my parts, and I’m sure he was quite right.

You and Olivier must have been fiercely competitive at that age.

I was by then just becoming a leading man; my name was bigger than his, and without knowing it—we were very friendly, always, we got on extremely well—I had a feeling that he rather thought I was showing off, which indeed I was.

Well, he probably was as well.

Yes, but his showing-off was always so dazzling. [chuckles] My showing off was more technical and was more soft and, oh... effeminate, I suppose.

I’m surprised you say that because I would have characterised it the other way round, that his showing-off always seemed to me to be ahead of his interest in playing the truth of a character.

Well, I think his great performances were mostly comedy. I was never so impressed by his Oedipus or the Othello, which were two of his greatest successes. But I was enormously impressed by The Dance of Death and by Hotspur and Shallow and Puff [in Sheridan’s The Critic], and Richard III of course. And I loved working with him, the little that I did. But I always thought he went behind my back and directed the actors his way. When he...