Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  ‘You would listen to Alan for his opinion on design and a quasi-directorial feel for the overall, for what is going on.

  ‘It’s either a pain in the arse or a huge advantage. He was very sympathetic to the way things were being done, so he was a huge advantage. He was a marvellous company member, a terrific person to have in a group.

  ‘In The Summer Party, Alan played a pop promoter called Nigel. It was well ahead of its time, a play about how top policemen were becoming media figures. Brian Cox played the lead and Dexter Fletcher was a pop star with Uri Geller properties. It was set in the backstage area, and showed how a pop star and a policeman turn out to be very similar.

  ‘Hayley Mills and Alan were two city types who put on the concert. Hayley never got the chance to work in rep; she wasn’t offered the roles. It’s a shame.

  ‘One felt Alan was going places because of the intellectual vigour he was bringing to the part. He expected very high standards of others, but that didn’t manifest itself in impatience. There’s a graciousness there; he would assume you were mortified if you missed your cue, so he wouldn’t rub it in. There was no short-temperedness from him.’

  ‘I don’t remember having any audibility or clarity problems with Alan at all,’ adds Pete. ‘Sheffield and the Citz are smaller families than the RSC. They’re not so competitive and probably more easily open to his influence. One can’t imagine him pushing himself in any situation, but always having the same quiet modesty. The scenery in Glasgow was beginning to walk round the actors, he said; so he left.’

  Alan had been cast in a total of seven roles in Giles Havergal’s acclaimed Citz revival of the Bertolt Brecht play about the rise of Nazism, Fears And Miseries Of The Third Reich. Michael Coveney in the Financial Times noted how ‘layers of authoritarian corruption are laid bare with merciless economy and real glee’ by Rickman’s performance as a judge wrestling with his professional conscience.

  Prior to that, he had taken the role of Antonio in Peter Barnes’ conflation of two plays by the Elizabethan dramatist John Marston: Antonio And Mellida and its sequel, Antonio’s Revenge. That was the occasion when Alan designed the morbid poster of himself, half-naked in an almost crucified pose with a pronounced pout and an embarrassment of rich eye makeup. One of those collector’s items that comes back to haunt you.

  Marston wrote the two plays for a company of child-actors, Paul’s Boys. There was indeed something of the precocious choirboy – as most of the young players had been – about Alan’s melodramatic pose.

  ‘Antonio is the Hamlet story done in a totally different way by John Marston,’ explains Barnes. ‘Alan came in, swinging on a rope: inevitably something went wrong and he was clinging to the scenery, suspended in the air. So years later, in Die Hard, he was the one that suggested swinging in on a rope. He never forgets anything.’

  Rickman returned to work with Peter Barnes after The Summer Party at Sheffield, taking part in Peter’s version of Frank Wedekind’s The Devil Himself at the Lyric Studio in London’s Hammersmith. Here, the Rickman singing voice was first heard by the public, wooing audiences with bawdy songs for a little-known but extraordinarily erotic interlude in his patchwork career.

  Barnes recalls how another cast-member, Dilys Laye, ‘saw Alan looking ashen-grey in the wings. He said, “God, this isn’t easy, is it?”’ But it was to prove the most extraordinary liberation for him. This uninhibited musical revue was a collection of songs and sketches on the theme of sex; Wedekind wrote a great deal of experimental cabaret material before embarking on his plays. Rickman played a punter at a brothel in several pieces, with his RADA contemporary Tina Marian as the young tart he visited. Charles Keating also appeared in what was to become Peter’s very own repertory company for several of his radio plays.

  In a sequence called ‘The Sacrificial Lamb’, Rickman asked for Tina’s life story or ‘confession’. Addressing her as ‘My child’, her john clearly got considerable kicks from posing as her priest. ‘First I want you to uncover yourself completely, not only your clothes but your skin. Are you still in love with the man? The man you are going to tell me about?’ he asked unctuously.

  Then he launched into various ballads, sounding rather like a sonorous monk with a gloriously deep baritone that strays into the tenor range. This was Rickman letting his inhibitions down: one song carried a comic refrain about ‘frayed trousers’:

  I slaughtered my aunt last week

  but she was old and weak

  The blood began to spout

  as I shredded her like sauerkraut

  I tried burning her

  she wouldn’t ignite

  One song celebrated a boy/girl of indeterminate sex while Alan tap-danced around in the role of a happy drunk. In another liaison between Alan and Tina as a girl called Wanda, he breathed insinuatingly: ‘I know your whole being . . . your way of loving . . .’ He claimed to be able to tell what a woman is like from her walk, whether she’s ‘free or small-minded’. That languorous, highly suggestive voice was used to great effect on all these coded messages of love.

  Above all, humour was paramount when he played a frustrated client with a bad case of ballsache: ‘She almost kicked me out of bed . . . she won’t strip! My flame is once again lit, but then she starts pulling back instead of pulling IT,’ he added venomously.

  A tape of the production records the rest of the cast corpsing at Alan’s refrain, ‘Oooh-ahh, the bugs are back again.’ Nursing the mother of all hangovers, his voice slid over the notes of a Bessie Smith melody in a wonderfully liquid way. ‘I groan on my bed . . . I feel dead . . . Oh, Christ, what a picture, I grit my teeth and reach for Nietzsche,’ warbled Rickman, archly adding a ‘ha!’ at the end of the song.

  There was always a sarcastic, slightly facetious tone to his singing voice. Yet many of those flippant lyrics carried a deadly serious sting: of Europe’s war-mongering history, he declared: ‘It’s a pleasure every year to rearrange Europe’s frontier . . . politicians believe that human beings grow like weeds.’

  After that came the first of two formative stints at the tiny Bush Theatre above an Irish pub in west London’s scrubby Shepherd’s Bush, just down the road from where Alan and Rima had played in an amateur production of Night Must Fall fifteen years previously in 1965. The Bush must have felt like a homecoming. Its other great advantage was Richard Wilson, later to achieve national fame on British television as the comic grouch Victor Meldrew, among its roster of directors.

  ‘At that point my whole working life changed,’ Alan was later to declare of the move to the Bush for Dusty Hughes’ play Commitments, the story of vicious in-fighting on the Left during the ill-fated Edward Heath Government of the 1970s.

  The Rickman/Wilson association proved a break-through partnership, though they did have one disaster together. ‘Alan was my assistant director on the Robert Holman play Other Worlds at the Royal Court. It had terrible reviews and emptied the theatre. Yet, occasionally people say to me “What a great play that was” and I say “Which night did you go?”’ says Wilson drily.

  ‘When I first auditioned people for Commitments at the Bush, Alan struck me as very centred and easy. If you take Alan, you take his thoughts as well. He is never lost for a thought; he does speak his mind. But I found him very easy to work with; we are on the same wavelength.

  ‘Both of us are into openness, a word we use a lot. It’s working from the inside, non-demonstrative acting. Minimalism, anti-gestural. That’s one of the problems with the RSC, one I’m not so keen on. It’s because of the problems of the large Stratford stage, so I’m not surprised he had difficulties there. Alan is a minimalist, so his style of acting works particularly well on film and TV.

  ‘He’s metamorphic in the subtextual sense. His thinking is so accurate, his concentration is total. He concentrates on who he is. He has a great physical sense of where to put himself. That comes back to his artist’s eye.

  ‘Unfortunately I lost him to the role when I did the TV version of
Commitments; so I cast Kevin McNally instead. Alan had committed himself to The Seagull at the Royal Court Theatre. But he had become a member of the Board at the Bush by that stage.’

  Indeed, it was at the Bush that Rickman became a script-reader or ‘taster’ alongside Simon Callow and first discovered the playwright Sharman Macdonald when she sent in the play When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout under the pseudonym of Pearl Stewart. The congenitally shy Sharman, who still speaks in a whisper, was very diffident about her writing abilities.

  She renamed herself Pearl after a song by her heroine Janis Joplin, because the Bush’s then Artistic Director, Jenny Topper, already knew Sharman as an actress. Alan suspected the old-fashioned name was bogus, given the new-fashioned, explicitly gynaecological material, but shoved the script at Jenny Topper, saying: ‘I think you should read this. It has something.’ It was his ‘feminine’ sensibilities again that had recognised the originality of this rites-of-passage play. The result transferred to the West End for a year-long hit run, won an Evening Standard Drama award and launched Sharman on a writing career. Years later, in 1995, Alan was to commission and direct another play by Sharman in the hope of beginning a new career for himself.

  Dusty Hughes, former Time Out theatre critic turned director and writer, has been friends with Alan since that first meeting on Commitments. ‘I ran the Bush; then I decided to do what I’d always wanted to do and write plays.

  ‘The first play was fairly autobiographical. Alan came to the audition for the main part of Hugh in Commitments. He was far and away the best person we auditioned; no contest. We even saw Charlie Dance, who was unknown then. Alan’s lightness of touch impressed me most, combined with a necessary weight – which is a very rare thing.

  ‘I got the impression he had never done a huge naturalistic part in a modern play before. He got wonderful reviews and his career really took off. Hugh, the character he played, was me, really.

  ‘Alan was studying all my mannerisms, pushing the floppy hair back the way I do. I didn’t realise that he had been staring at me all through the run.

  ‘Hugh is a happy-go-lucky liberal intellectual who becomes transformed as a fire-breathing Trotskyist. It was typical of Alan’s sharpness that he spotted a weakness in the play, that we never actually got to see that transformation.

  ‘He came on as himself: dry, droll and sardonic. I think he is a very strong personality and identity. A very likeable one. You wouldn’t necessarily put money on either him or Richard Wilson being prominent one day. There’s something archetypal about such actors: they are universal.

  ‘It was a very quiet, ironic performance. He got on very well with Paola Dionisotti in Commitments; he’s very much an actor’s actor. He intensely dislikes actors who work on their own. He’s a very hard taskmaster with actors who don’t give you enough effort.

  ‘There’s a very clear seriousness about him; he’s high-minded. But he’s not remotely solemn. He’s a wonderful gossip, with a droll sense of humour. There’s a very funny, sly side to him.

  ‘He’s very unmaterialistic: he’s a genuine heart-and-soul socialist. He loves nice food and wine like we all do, but doesn’t make a big fuss of it. On a personal level, he’s terribly sweet. I trust him completely. We are not terribly intimate, but we are fond of each other.

  ‘There have been three phases to Alan. It took him a few years to come to terms with being a star; he’s now as easy and relaxed as when I first knew him. In the first stage, he was terrifically exciting to work with; in the second stage, he was trying to come to terms with fame; and in the third stage, he was learning how to deal with a lot of pressure. He always has a ceiling-high pile of scripts: I don’t know how you can possibly get through that lot.’

  Dusty clearly feels protective about him, and suspects that Alan’s socialism has put him beyond the pale in some showbusiness circles.

  ‘He’s not a member of the luvvie mafia; he and I don’t belong to the set that they want to invite to the Standard Awards. Alan is not a member of that inner circle, so he will always be vulnerable. There are lovely people in that inner circle, don’t get me wrong. But I think a lot of people have been sidelined. And being socialist or even mildly Labour is one of the reasons he’s excluded.’

  It is only fair to record that organisers of the London Evening Standard Drama Awards have reacted with incredulity – ‘Absolutely not true,’ snorts one of them derisively – to what seems like writer’s paranoia. They point out that Alan is regularly on the guest list of the Standard’s annual awards. But he’s away filming most of the time, hence the non-appearances. And six years after Dusty first made those remarks to me, Alan was a guest of honour at the Standard Drama Awards as one of the contenders for Best Actor for his performance in a sublime revival of Private Lives. So there was no dire conspiracy. Instead, because of a recurring stage fright that was to cast a shadow over his career in the late 90s after an unexpectedly disastrous production at the National, he had been a rare sighting on the London stage until that triumph with Private Lives broke the jinx and changed everything. And as for Alan’s membership of the Labour Party, its leader Tony Blair attended one Standard Drama Awards ceremony before his landslide election victory in 1997 that felt rather like a Shadow Cabinet dinner and dance. Fired up on behalf of the arts, it was full of anti-Tory Government rhetoric. Alan’s impresario friend, Thelma Holt, a lifelong banner-waving socialist, has a table every year at the event.

  Alan was to be reunited with Dusty for the latter’s university play Bad Language at Hampstead Theatre after stints at Oxford Playhouse and London’s Royal Court in 1981, with his move to the latter proving crucial in getting Rickman spotted by the right people. Max Stafford-Clark directed him in Thomas Kilroy’s Irish version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with Alan playing the Trigorin role under the new name of Aston. There he met another great friend, Harriet Walter, whose Nina became Lily in this transplantation to Galway.

  The reviews, however, were very mixed. B. A. Young in the Financial Times opined: ‘I couldn’t understand how anyone could fall in love with Aston as Alan Rickman plays him. He is as passionless as a fish, even when he is making love.’ The Guardian’s Michael Billington, on the other hand, thought that leading lady Anna Massey was ‘superbly backed by Alan Rickman’s Aston’, and the Listener’s John Elsom wrote that ‘Alan Rickman’s Aston was a fine performance, clarifying Trigorin’s fear of failure and his belief that the very nature of his art sucks life dry’.

  Fellow Old Latymerian Robert Cushman in the Observer was of the opinion that ‘Alan Rickman’s Trigorin is . . . uncompromising . . . the analysis of his writer’s disease is wonderfully lucid. Nina would have to be not only star-struck, but a bit deaf, to fall for him.’

  Nevertheless, the playwright Christopher Hampton was to catch that performance and see in Rickman the dread seducer of innocent women for a daring stage adaptation of a notoriously corrupting French novel.

  ‘Alan was enormously creative in The Seagull. As Aston, he had a self-loathing and obsession that was quite outstanding,’ says Max Stafford-Clark. ‘He has got a sexuality that is very particular. The role that created him was Valmont, a complete libertine, and Aston’s cynicism played a part in that.

  ‘You know where you are with Alan: if he’s in a bad mood, you know he’s in a bad mood. He used to be very candid about what he thought. The big companies do rather smother you, and he operates best outside big companies. In some senses he’s a bit over-careful about his career. He should tour with my company Out Of Joint. I offered him Plume in The Recruiting Officer, but he said he didn’t want to play any more parts with lace at the sleeves. It’s the Valmont syndrome.

  ‘The frustration of being an actor is that it’s sometimes a passive life, hence his involvement with directing. The problem is that he’s a brilliant actor, and everyone wants him to act. He’s very special; and he’s coped with power and comparative wealth with an elegance that eludes a lot of people.’

&
nbsp; Having also caught his Aston/Trigorin at the trendy Court address, Jonathan Powell wanted to build on Rickman’s impact in Thérèse Raquin and Smiley’s People. The part that was to make Rickman famous on the small screen carried a sexual innuendo far beyond the original characterisation by Anthony Trollope. Obadiah Slope became a byword for beguiling sleaze, thanks to Rickman’s insinuating performance.

  Dusty remembers: ‘Alan and I were having a drink at the bar in the Bush, while he was doing the Stephen Davis play The Last Elephant. Alan said to me, “I’ve just had the most extraordinary experience. An old man kept winking at me. I thought he was trying to get off with me. He came over and said he wanted to run this article on me as the wickedest man in Britain. I said no, thank you.”

  ‘Alan thought he was being kind to a tramp, that he was doing him a favour by speaking to him. It turned out to be a tabloid hack.’

  Jonathan Powell admits that the casting of Alan as the slimy Obadiah Slope was a second choice, albeit an inspired one: ‘Alan Plater scripted Barchester Chronicles from the two Trollope novels, The Warden and Barchester Towers. We had cast all the major characters with some starry names: Donald Pleasence, Geraldine McEwan, Nigel Hawthorne, etc.

  ‘I think we offered Slope to someone else who turned it down. We were up a gum tree. So I suggested this bloke . . . and the director, David Giles, said, “If you think he’s good, cast him.” I did think Alan would be brilliant. I also thought it would be nice, in this glittery cast, to have the interloper Slope played by someone who brought no baggage.

  ‘In one article, Alan was quoted as saying “How boring to do a classic serial” – until he picked up the scripts. This was the star part. He was sensational: he had an ability to deliver comedy without upsetting the balance of the piece, to play the part full tilt without being overbearing.