Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  ‘Though a virtuous woman may be priced above rubies,’ quipped Evening Standard reviewer Michael Arditti, ‘an outrageous Ruby produces a jewel of a show.’

  She did have her detractors. ‘I ended the evening pummelled rather than entertained,’ moaned Tony Patrick of The Times. And Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail was coolish, wondering if Ruby’s well-developed self-esteem needed any support from him. ‘Why do I not fall down and adore her like the rest of her fans?’ he asked rhetorically. They were very much in a minority.

  Lucky Ruby, unlucky Rima. Nicholas Scott was returned with an overwhelming majority of more than 13,000.

  The Kensington News reported that Labour candidate Rima Horton, accompanied by her actor friend Alan Rickman, was defiant. She proclaimed that Labour would fight ‘again and again’ to change the future, echoing a famous speech by Hugh Gaitskell. Labour blamed a hostile Press and ‘lies’ over its tax plans, and ten days later Rima was still fighting, urging a policy of non-cooperation with the hated Red Routes parking restrictions on main roads.

  Rima subsequently made it onto a women-only Labour shortlist for the new seat of Regent’s Park and Kensington North, but she lost out to Karen Buck, described rather graphically by the Kensington News’ chief reporter Jonathan Donald as ‘a mighty political machine who fires off press releases’.

  In early 1996, Robert Atkinson – Rima’s fellow councillor from St Charles Ward – was selected as the Labour Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the newly named Kensington & Chelsea seat from a shortlist of men and women that did not include Rima.

  Rima simply didn’t relish facing certain defeat for a second time in a General Election. Sir Nicholas Scott had been reselected for the Tories, only to be followed by the equally controversial Alan Clark on January 25, 1997. Kensington & Chelsea remains staunchly Tory, even after Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 General Election that prompted Alan to growl ‘About bloody time too.’ Yet Rima won something of a consolation prize in 1995 when she became one of several councillors to write a monthly column on local issues for the Kensington News for a few years. ‘It’s typical of her that she didn’t approach us to write it,’ said Ian Francis. ‘We approached her.’

  Alan was profoundly depressed by Labour’s 1992 election defeat in general and Rima’s in particular, moaning about how unbearable it was, but he was too much in demand to mope around in this country as his Hollywood film career continued apace. Bob Roberts, which marked Tim Robbins’ directorial debut, was a political satire on the rise of a right-wing politician with the unearthly, sanctimonious aura of a religious evangelist (as, indeed, so many right-wing American politicians are).

  Robbins played the title role of this smooth paragon and Rickman was his sinister campaign manager, wearing pornographer’s brown-tinted glasses that would make even Snow White seem seedy. The movie was a very effective satire on the Svengali-like spin doctors, the sound-bites, the campaign-bus briefings and all the paraphernalia of a modern politician on the move. So true-to-life were these acute observations that Bob Roberts seemed more like a documentary than a drama, with the inevitable distancing effect. Never was the audience drawn into Bob Roberts’ heart or mind (we assume he had no soul); as for Rickman’s character, he was a clever amalgam of all the shifty fixers in the world. So much so that you could swear you’d seen him somewhere before.

  Barry Norman’s Film 92 reported on the making of Bob Roberts. Its screenwriter Gore Vidal was interviewed, claiming rather shakily, ‘It’s a bit like Dr Strangelove.’

  Alan himself said defiantly: ‘I hope it will resonate loudly as the scramble for power goes on.’ When asked, rather superfluously, if people would say it was a film put together by a bunch of left-wing liberals, he replied with a slight snort of laughter, ‘They would be right. That’s the kind of mud that will be slung, of course it is.’ Robbins and his partner Susan Sarandon, with whom Rickman had become buddies while working on The January Man, have long been the most politically active liberal couple in Hollywood. Given Alan’s own political leanings, it was only a matter of time before he worked with Robbins as well.

  The same mud was slung on what one journalist called the Brown Rice Tour, when Alan joined up with Thelma Holt and the Russian director Robert Sturua to play Hamlet at the Riverside Studios in the autumn of 1992 before taking it around the country.

  ‘I’m too old, but what the hell,’ shrugged a 46-year-old Alan disarmingly, trying to forestall the critics. He was hardly the oldest Hamlet in history, of course. But Alan still hadn’t told the Press his exact age; he let them guess (wrongly). Couples who do not have any children can play Peter Pan indefinitely; there’s no hulking teenaged offspring hanging around to betray the years.

  Rarely does a Hamlet amount to the sum of his parts, of course; it’s such a massive challenge to make the character credible on stage, as opposed to page. Thelma told Valerie Grove in the July 1995 issue of Harpers & Queen: ‘Darling, I’ve seen more Hamlets than I’ve had hot dinners; I spent eighteen months of my life playing Gertrude. I know that play better than any other, and with no disrespect to any of my other Hamlets, Alan Rickman was the Hamlet of my life. He did something rare: he told a story, and it was as if it was a new play.

  ‘People always wonder what will he do with “To be” and “Rogue and peasant slave”; yet I could not have predicted how he would say them. Everything was new.’ Well, the producer would say that, wouldn’t she?

  In the event, she was right. I felt he brought his own unique and angry world-weariness to the role, with the controversial voice the ideal vehicle for delivering that message. His Hamlet looked like the eternal middle-aged student, still studying the meaninglessness of life after all these years. There was a sense of self-disgust that gave the production real tension.

  ‘Inevitably he stresses the dangerous appeal of amorality in Shakespeare’s great revenge tragedy. This is a sarcastically amusing Hamlet who can smile and smile and be a villain, taking a lesson from his wicked stepfather Claudius,’ I wrote in the Daily Express on 16 September.

  ‘There is a harsh erotic energy in his encounters with Julia Ford’s sexually repressed Ophelia, who is horizontal within minutes of meeting him. And yet he plays Hamlet as a world-weary, existentialist bookworm, too dangerously fond of Geraldine McEwan’s Gertrude and forced to be a hero against his will. It is a fastidiously intelligent reading of the role that confirms Rickman as a leading talent with the power to pull in the crowds.’

  I hated the slow production, however, which seemed to have been dressed by an Oxfam shop and made the court of Elsinore look like a refugee centre.

  The reviews were decidedly mixed: his performance divided the critics. Alan maintained his usual scornful mien, but was deeply miffed by some of the comments.

  ‘O! What a noble play is here o’erthrown!’ declared Clive Hirshhorn in the Sunday Express, calling Rickman’s ‘not-so-great Dane . . . a posturing, sulky, overgrown schoolboy.’

  Clive even picked up on Rickman’s speech defect, which can usually be turned to Alan’s advantage: ‘He swallows some of Shakespeare’s most exquisite poetry as though he was ashamed of it. If it is humourless brooding introspection and a total denial of the voice beautiful you want, Rickman delivers in spades.’

  If you are forced to conclude that Clive and I saw different shows . . . well, we did. I attended the final preview and he the first night. Perhaps Rickman’s stage fright was manifesting itself again. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph wrote of Rickman’s ‘bad attack of the clinical depression . . . this is a Hamlet who seems to have just returned from Elsinore’s psychiatric day centre . . . There is hardly a trace of Hamlet’s wit and vitality . . . you feel like giving him a good shake. This is a modishly perverse Hamlet that almost entirely fails to touch the heart.’

  Michael Coveney in the Observer, however, found his ‘sly and secretive mature student’ thrilling in his ‘rampant morbidity . . . This sense of standing apart from himself
is a quality unique to Rickman’s acting.’

  On the other hand, Michael Arditti in the Evening Standard thought ‘he totally lacks passion’ and also talked of Rickman ‘swallowing the words . . . he lacks the nobility and pathos of a romantic Hamlet; but he fails to recreate him in his own image’.

  Even Michael Billington in the Guardian found himself regretting having urged someone to cast Alan as Hamlet. He hated the way that Elsinore had become a metaphor for the political prisons of the Georgian Sturua’s native land, because it imprisoned Rickman within too confining a concept for this most universal of plays. Billington liked Rickman’s ‘voice, presence and air of ironic melancholy . . . what I miss is any internal tension’.

  Likewise, Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail was impressed by Rickman but not the rest of the production. ‘He seeks refuge in the laconic insolence of a superior intellect . . . the verse superbly spoken with the most extraordinary ability to spring surprises from the most familiar passages . . . However . . . here we must lament a Prince with hardly a hint of Denmark.’

  ‘Rickman’s Hamlet is not really Shakespearian. He is too utterly pole-axed by grief,’ wrote John Peter in the Sunday Times. ‘He haunts the stage like the undead . . . Elsinore does not feel like a court, but more like a derelict, urban underpass.’ He clearly feels that Rickman’s Hamlet is too much of a victim, as opposed to a tragic hero with choices to make and the power to make them. The fashionable phrase would be a disempowered Hamlet, and the Hungarian-born Peter saw his own East European background in the political metaphor about an oppressive state.

  Rickman, generous to a fault, will not upstage anyone within an ensemble piece. There seemed an almost inverted snobbery at work here; Hamlet is supposed to be the star of the damn thing, after all. I found Rickman’s introspective gloom mesmerising, but there were clearly others who wanted more fireworks . . . or perhaps the Sheriff of Nottingham. Indeed, one critic cruelly remarked that Alan was a natural Claudius.

  Still, Rickman should care: the production was critic-proof, selling out for the entire run. Everyone from Rickman to the wardrobe assistant was paid a flat rate of £200 a week as they toured to unusual venues in Bradford, Nottingham, Liverpool and Barrow-in-Furness. It was the old idea of bringing theatre to the people in an unpatronising way.

  Barrow’s ‘stage’ was a giant haulage warehouse normally used for storing piles of loo-paper, opposite slag heaps that were known as the Alps of Barrow.

  Just as with Ralph Fiennes’ glamorous Hamlet at the Hackney Empire in February 1995, the AA signs were out to show theatre-goers the way – such was the attraction of Alan Rickman’s name on the billboards.

  He evinced a certain pride in taking a low wage with the rest of them. ‘Little? Compared to whom?’ he haughtily asked Catherine O’Brien in the Daily Mirror, challenging her assumptions. ‘Compared to Bruce Willis, yes. But compared to people in Barrow who have no job, it’s not a pittance. It is pointless comparing it with what I could earn in a film. It is also tasteless. Most actors are subsidising British theatre most of the time. Unless you are working in the West End, the money just isn’t there.

  ‘But there is a lot of fun, and that is what counts. I am always wary of actors talking about how difficult their job is. It is mostly a great deal of fun.’

  He was thinking of his own father at that point and his mother, who had slaved away in the Post Office to bring up four children on her own. Although he can sometimes sound pompous, at least Rickman avoids luvvie-like preciousness. It helps to have a working-class background. Later, after the director Jude Kelly gushed that he was the best Hamlet she had ever seen, he was to admit that he was ‘just relieved to get from one end of the play to another. It is ludicrous in having four soliloquies coming one after another.’

  He was talking to the Press in Barrow in order to put the place on the map: with the end of Trident nuclear submarines in sight, thousands of jobs would go with very little local industry to replace them.

  Rickman, a past contributor to CND, added: ‘I can’t say anything but good riddance to Trident. What there must be is fresh investment to stop the community from dying. My political views are pretty well known. We are living in a rotting society, just like Hamlet was 400 years ago.

  ‘Anyone who attempts to play Hamlet has to be a lunatic. I’m too old for it, I’ve found it completely impossible and it has driven me barmy.’ What kept him going was the thought that people who had never seen Shakespeare before might become converts; certainly there were long queues for autographs at every venue. ‘That’s what it’s all about. And it is why I will be back.’ In the end Rickman et al emerged smelling of roses from the Andrex factory, with people marvelling as they left that such ‘great actors’ could come to windy Barrow. ‘The cultural epicentre of the Furness peninsula’, as Sue Crewe affectionately called its transformation in a Times piece on 14 November.

  Rickman explained to Michael Owen in the London Evening Standard on 22 October 1993: ‘By the time we finished, that show had grown into a very different animal and we became an immensely close company. There were problems. We were working with a director who was used to four or five months of rehearsals and we had five weeks.’

  Alan found himself having to crack the whip a bit: ‘At the end of the first week, we were still on Act 1 Scene 1. That’s when I had to say we have to go a bit faster or we’ll never finish.’

  They took theatre to the people, but it was obvious by now that the people would always take themselves to see Rickman. Thanks to his film profile, he had become a major box-office draw, so much so that in 1993 he was asked to supply the voice-over that introduces all the individual instruments on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells II. Which was why, when Thelma Holt began thinking of Riverside Studios as a permanent home for her international theatre shows, Alan was an obvious ally in her bid to run it.

  West London’s Riverside Studios arts centre in Crisp Road, Hammersmith, had just removed its Artistic Director and was advertising in June 1993 for a replacement. The deficit stood at £250,000 and its future was uncertain. This large but tatty white studio space, with its brown-rice food bar, had played host to all kinds of acts from rock bands to theatre groups. It was full of potential . . . as everyone kept saying. Once the dead hippies were scraped off the floor, of course.

  Thelma, the ageless godmother of British theatre, saw it as the Roundhouse revisited. Kenneth Branagh had launched his Renaissance Theatre Company at Riverside with his masterly Victorian production of Twelfth Night, in which Richard Briers’ latent neurosis produced the best, most painfully funny/sad Malvolio seen in years. There was a creative buzz about Riverside once again.

  If one felt facetious, one could emblazon ‘Ich bin ein West Londoner’ upon the Rickman coat of arms. Alan has always felt umbilically tied to the area, despite his peripatetic lifestyle as a movie actor. Thelma lives a few streets away from him in Westbourne Grove, with her loyal right-hand woman Sweetpea nearby. Thelma, whose international productions are backed by some of the biggest names in British theatre, is a vocation and a noble cause for many people. Even the massive black winter cloak she winds round her was a gift from a top Japanese designer. The scene would be a lot less colourful without this influential figure. Small, sandy-haired and forthright, she knows everyone and has a fund of outrageous stories. There was the time when a well-known lesbian tried to seduce her . . . Nothing shocks Thelma.

  She and Alan are like-minded free spirits in socialism, as it were. Thelma Mary Bernadette Holt CBE trained at RADA as an actress before founding the Open Space Theatre with Charles Marowitz and playing Shakespearian heroines in the nude. (This was particularly heroic, given the dodgy heating situation.) From 1977 to 1983 she became the Artistic Director of the Roundhouse in North London’s Chalk Farm, inheriting that fork-tongued old fraud, Robert Maxwell, as the treasurer.

  The circular nineteenth-century engine shed had been converted into a theatre in 1968, becoming associated with such experimental na
mes as the director Peter Brook. Kenneth Tynan’s nude revue Oh! Calcutta! was staged there. By the late 70s, the unconventional space made a wonderfully atmospheric rock venue, the equivalent of Amsterdam’s Milky Way. The Doors made their only British appearance there, with my friend Bob hitching all the way from Wigan to see Jim Morrison before The Lizard King died of an overdose in a Paris bath.

  Under Thelma, the Roundhouse really got its theatrical act together for a few brief shining years with such legendary performances as Vanessa Redgrave’s Lady From The Sea and Helen Mirren’s Duchess Of Malfi. Reconstructed in 1979, the Roundhouse was forced to call in the receivers four years later. Yet, somehow it staggers on with a mythic reputation and a wonderfully cavernous space that began playing host to the RSC from 2002, when the latter gave up its London home at the Barbican in what many saw as an act of artistic hara-kiri.

  Thelma went on to the National Theatre and then became an independent producer. Decorated for her ambassadorial services to theatre, she became a canny chair of the Arts Council’s drama panel for several years before resigning on an important point of principle. But there’s nothing like your own theatre to immortalise yourself. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Alan and Thelma had immortal longings . . . And the idea of running Riverside vastly appealed to someone as fiendishly organised as he was, even though he intended to be only a creative – as opposed to administrative – force.

  He insisted to Michael Owen in the London Evening Standard that he had never been the languid dilettante of legend. ‘I’ve always got stuck in. It begins the first time you set foot on a stage and have to start making choices. A lot of other actors are out there doing the same.’

  Yet he added revealingly: ‘I never saw myself running the place, spending 52 weeks a year there. I thought of it more as a Steppenwolf operation, like the theatre in Chicago where people come and go.’ Which sounded suspiciously like wash-’n’-go theatre. But they were on their way.