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

by Antony Sher

  Ashley has invited me to his firm's Christmas party. He is a champion of workers' rights and of breaking down colour barriers. Thus the party tonight is to be held in one of the Coloured townships and he has said it will be `an education' for me to come along.

  Dad is very amused as he sees me to the car. `Well, my boy, you can't tell me things aren't changing in this country. There was a time when one wouldn't shake a black by the hand, scared some of the colour might rub off; now one's doing the foxtrot with them. Anyhow, I'm sure you'll have a good time once you get used to the smell.' Yvette giggles, daring me.

  The dance hall turns out to be a mixture of Spanish restaurant and Country-and-Western folk club. We walk in past a group of Coloured youths. One says to another `Lotta white faces here tonight, of pallie.' I feel quite nervous. Going into this `non-white, non-European' place breaks every rule that I was taught. Those taboos tacked round our edges as children, sealing us in.

  I am put on a table with Ralph, Ashley's Coloured manager and his girlfriend Patti, so I can `talk' to them. Bottles of wine and whisky are plonked down.

  At first Ralph is rather guarded on the subject of the referendum and apartheid, which fuels my interest. A few whiskies later, I steer him towards these topics again and now it all comes pouring out, but again not what I expected. Perhaps this is the `education' that Ashley meant. Ralph talks like a white: how you can't change overnight; how if you did he'd be blown away in the crossfire between the races; how lazy, stupid and dishonest the blacks are. Doing a passable impression of Monty I smile wisely and ask him to think why the blacks are like that. `Look,' he says, `don't tell me about their backgrounds. I also come from a poor background, I also been thrown out of places that I go to with my white friends. But I don't steal. Maybe if you lived here you'd understand. Things are changing, but slowly. We don't want another Rhodesia. Or look at the rest of black Africa. Or at your own country - what about that bomb the other day in Harrods? Look, I'm selfish. I gotta think of me first, get me sorted out first then I can start worrying about my neighbour. But please don't get me wrong - I am against apartheid.'

  The band strikes up. Ashley crosses the room and asks a large black lady for the first dance. A ripple of applause as they glide on to the floor. She looks rather embarrassed.

  'Look!' Esther almost shouts, snatching my arm. `Look - my son is dancing with the tea lady! Will you look at my marvellous, wonderful boy. lie could have chosen anyone for the first dance, instead he chooses to dance with the lowest paid member of the firm, will you look!'

  I say to Ralph, 'I low old are you:

  '"Thirty-five.'

  'Really? We're the same age. Strange to think that we both grew up in this city in very different ways. I)id you ever come out to Sea Point','

  `Oh vah man, Sea Point is where all the action was, still is.'

  'Really', Where

  'You know those tall blocks of flats on the beach front, Well, in the maids' rooms, at the top and at the bottom of those blocks. You know what they say: "Life's full of spice at the top and at the bottom." '

  Later, as we leave, I give Ralph and Patti my address in London. He says rather furtively, 'Maybe I'd see things differently over there.'

  Driving back we pass the black township Langa. Yvette tells how she worked in a hospital there until the '76 riots. Afterwards, her black assistant rang her to ask when she was coming back. Yvette said never, she wasn't allowed to anymore, and they cried together on the phone.

  1 f ednesda)' 21 December

  Wake inexplicably depressed about Richard III. Why bother playing the party Olivier's interpretation is definitive and so famous that all round the world people can get up and do impersonations of it. At parties in New York, in bars in Naples, on remote Australian farms and forgotten South Sea Islands, people get to their feet, hoist one shoulder up, shrivel an arm and limp across the room declaring, `Now is the winter', or its relevant linguistic equivalent. Why these thoughts suddenly', It's this fucking mountain I keep circling!

  We've just finished supper when Howard Davies rings. He says their plans have changed again. I le's no longer doing the Nicky Wright play, Adrian is. The Peter Barnes play is postponed to the Barbican '85 season. They're bending the rules slightly for the new season at The Other Place (which was to be exclusively brand new plays) and now in Slot Four is a revival of Trevor Griffiths's The Party which Howard is directing with David Edgar. I know the play only by reputation. He wants me to play the part originally played by Ronald Pickup. The Olivier part is being offered to McDiarmid, the Frank Finlay part to Mal. I promise to try and find a copy in Cape Town, but it might be banned either by the South Africans or Trevor Griffiths himself. Ask him about the rest of the season's casting. Rees and Branagh are definite, McDiarmid eighty-five per cent but should be one hundred per cent after The Party offer. `We regard you as sixty-five per cent,' says Howard.

  We watch an old home movie from 1957. It's been transposed on to video so the quality is appalling, but it's still quite compulsive viewing. If you had to recreate what memory looks like it could be this. The amateur cameraman can never settle on anything properly so you have these restless, tantalising glimpses of people and places and days from long ago. You ache for close-ups to be held longer but they never are. Sequences flit by in bleached colours and hazy outlines confirming the popular belief that the past was one long summer's day. Surprising how exhibitionist I am at the age of eight: a smiling little boy always in the foreground trying to hop into shot. At one time I appear in hat and moustache apparently doing a Charlie Chaplin impersonation. Where is the shy, frightened recluse Monty and I have spent so long digging out?

  `That came later,' says Mum firmly.

  Next to her on the sofa Dad sleeps soundly. For as long as I can remember, as soon as any form of entertainment commences - play, film, television or even a home movie - he falls instantly into a deep and contented slumber. Dad lives for his business, lives in a practical commercial world. Perhaps the world of the imagination really has no appeal whatsoever. When he finds himself in the kind of place where lights will dim in one area so that a fantasy world can begin to glow in another, he chooses the darkness.

  Now his head jerks up briefly with a sharp snort from the throat, startling us all except Mum who has learned to ignore these abrupt comings and goings of her husband. On the screen in our home movies, a child looms into close-up with large ears and hair carefully brushed for some ancient birthday party.

  `Which one?' he asks, only fractionally awake.

  Joel,' Mum says briskly, without altering her concentration.

  Juhhh . . .' we hear, as his head falls forward again.

  He's always had some difficulty recognising one son from another. Often when he addresses me, he starts with a little roll-call: `Randall ... tsk! Joel ... tsk! Antony!'

  The highlight of the film is a sequence where Mum and Dad are dressed as Twenties flappers for a fancy-dress party. Bathed in this film's eternal sunshine, they dance the Charleston in the back yard of the old house in Marais Road. He has on an enormous false Groucho moustache which, with his own big nose and heavy glasses, makes it look like he's wearing one of those joke-shop faces. We all cry with laughter while he sleeps on soundly.

  Thursday 22 December

  Find a copy of The Party. Difficult to read - so was Maydays - but that same sense of potential theatrical vibrancy once you've understood the arguments. But I am worried by Shawcross, the part on offer; Iioward said that he's the one through whose eyes the audience see the action, but all this means is that he's the straight man to the fun parts, Tagg and especially Sloman, a wonderful part.

  Adrian rings. Puffing deeply on a cigarette between phrases, he reads me the synopsis of Nicky's play set in Cairo in the Second World War. It's based on a true story and sounds fascinating, although the character is too close to Richard III for comfort - trampling over all obstacles to get promotion. I'm not sure how to react to a synopsis. Adrian makes a littl
e speech about how they're all desperate to make next year work out for me, how I must have `two whopping great leads' and how much he wants to work with me again after King Lear.

  I make a return speech on how keen I am to make next year work, that I am not playing silly buggers and if they could show me the second part in script form I'd sign on the dotted line tomorrow. But Shawcross isn't it.

  Adrian says, `Yes, but that's not meant to be your big second part. Nicky's play will be that. No, that's just an extra.'

  We agree there's nothing further to be said until I've read something. A first draft might be ready by early January. Wishing one another Merry Christmas the call ends.

  Juices start to flow for Nicky's army play. Harry Andrews from The Hi!! (and countless childhood improvisations) with ramrod back, lifting his chin to stretch the neck from a perfectly starched collar; an animal scenting prey ... promotion.

  Another restaurant, mother family meal. An argument rages about maids and how to treat them. Verne's husband Ronnie is furious because their maid is using so much gas and electricity in her room. He suspects she has boyfriends staying over.

  Joel says, `Well if you want to keep a maid you'll have to put up with her human needs.'

  `Not necessarily,' says Ronnie crossly, `not given her I Q'

  No one will come clean over how much they actually pay these maids, least of all Mum about Katie. Joel says that if Katie earned what she deserved after all these years of service she'd be richer than all of us put together.

  I finally get trapped into a furious row about apartheid, the one that Yvette has been spoiling for ever since I arrived. She says that I've no right to come here and criticise as I'm doing nothing to help the situation either here or back in England.

  I'm somewhat floored by this. She's absolutely right; here I am having a wonderful holiday and, like most liberal white South Africans, making sure that my conscience doesn't intrude too much on my comforts. This country is so seductive.

  Friday 23 December

  Drive to flermanus on the east coast. We've taken a house there for Christmas week. Mum says that Sea Point is unbearable during the festivities: `An influx of blacks and Coloureds camping all over the beaches, the worst element, drunks and skollies!' She says this deterioration of her beloved Sea Point has converted her from middle-of-the-road liberal views to a stauncher, harsher belief in apartheid.

  After a couple of hours we stop at a fruit and vegetable shop in the mountains. Dad gulps down a fruit juice and says, `What a waste of a good thirst, hey?'

  An Afrikaner father and son come into the shop. Both are dressed typically; khaki shirts, khaki shorts, long khaki socks. When Civil War starts here these people won't even have to change into uniform.

  A warm, pink African evening. We sit around on the stoep of our holiday bungalow, moths fluttering round the overhead light. Everyone tired after the long drive, all the packing and unpacking. Randall has brought along a record player and a collection of nostalgia records, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong. He and Mum start to dance rather beautifully. Dad dances on his own, dressed in his short summer pyjamas, skinny white legs sticking out.

  I do hope my face turns into his as I age. It's a marvellous face for an actor; a cross between Anthony Quinn, Jose Ferrer and Onassis.

  He tells the story he's told a hundred times before and which we never tire of. His mother and aunt sitting on the porch at Marlborough Mansions, both very old, both afflicted - his mother with arthritis, which makes her constantly flick her wrists up and down; his aunt with Parkinson's disease, which makes her head shake from side to side. A hawker arrives selling fruit and vegetables, calls up to them. One appears to be shaking her head, the other beckoning with her hands. The hawker is nonplussed. Dad acts this last bit out and then starts to cry with laughter, tries to carry on speaking but his voice is a helpless falsetto. The more he tries the more we laugh. He takes off his heavy black glasses - his face is softer, gentler - and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand. It is an image of him I will always remember.

  Saturday 24 December

  Hermanus grew up a resort for the British officials when South Africa was still a colony. Hence it's like Frinton-on-Sea; hence Mum loves it and I hate it. It's hardly like being in South Africa at all. Cute bungalows with trimmed lawns. Little gift shops selling sachets of pot pourri.

  Even the weather is English - grey and windy. I sit on the lawn in swimming trunks, clutching a bottle of sun oil, grimly waiting for snatches of sunlight, sulking that we've come here.

  Refuge in Peter Hall's Diaries. Why have people been so rude about this book? It seems to me full of honesty and wit. Makes me warm to the man whom I never saw once (never mind met) in my seven months at the National. The portrait of Ralph Richardson is beautiful.

  Another entry (5 October 1979) about John Wood's Richard III: `He's the first actor since 1944 to have challenged Olivier in the part on his own ground. He hasn't unseated him yet, but he might next time.' Wood tells Hall he feels a complete failure and later Hall confides to his tape recorder, `The trouble with John is that he has a too acutely developed sense of history. He looks forward a hundred years and wants to see his Richard III written there.'

  Have to stop reading. Too close for comfort.

  In the late afternoon the sun finally comes out and we go for a swim in Fick's Pool. You climb down steeply into a gorge. Descending shelves of rock and sand with cascading plants giving it a Babylonian feel. People stand along the top among trees looking down as if into an arena. At the bottom there is a tidal pool flushed by waves breaking over the sea wall.

  Randall, Joel and I swim over to a patch of sunlight on the water - the only part the late afternoon sun can reach. This is one of the happiest times of the holiday. A feeling of warmth and pride in our brotherhood. We must look rather handsome, us three, with dark wet hair, glowing with suntans, gleaming in the water.

  Mum and Dad sit high on the steep bank, perched like two old birds looking down on their young - Dad no doubt wondering, `Which one is that?'

  Christmas Day

  Car-loads of family arrive from Cape Town. The adults slip effortlessly into their roles and relationships. Dad and Joel are best at making the braai, Randall best at mixing the drinks, Mum best at nagging the men about drinking too much, Verne and Yvette make salads, Ashley sprawls and chats to anyone passing. It's like they've played the scene a million times in a long running comedy. The jokes are delightful, the timing second nature, the rapport effortless, but complacency threatens to settle.

  The children don't enjoy it half so much. They lounge around under a tree, bored, limbs just sprawled any old how, like puppets tipped out of a toy box.

  In the middle of all this a little old Coloured man arrives. The gardener come to water the plants despite the fact that it rained heavily during the night. Actually, he's come for his Christmas box. He is very drunk, and stands with the hose drooping, watering his shoes. Everyone ignores him; no Christmas box offered, he staggers away.

  In the evening we drive into town. In the dark this place loses its Englishness and looks like something out of Mid-West America in the Fifties (I'm thinking of Last Picture Show). There is only one shop open, Princess Cafe, a little oasis of glaring neon on the main street, selling everything from vegetables to videos and doing a roaring trade in computer games as well. Open-roofed cars draw up with blonde teenagers, bottles of pop, a wild night out. They tumble into the shop, reappear a moment later restocked, drive off. A group of drunk Coloureds shout after them from the pavement. A Coloured policeman strolls into the light and stands there, looking very relaxed.

  Boxing Day

  We're going for a walk after dinner. Gather outside in the garden in the night air. I feel my senses coming back to me after another long noisy meal, eating myself silly, drinking, drinking; the day's suntan bums on my body, making it ache.

  There is a fresh sea breeze blowing. We stand looking up at the sky which is brigh
t with stars. Dad says that in the Karroo on a clear summer's night you can drive without headlamps. Someone runs into the house to switch off the lights and the sky is even clearer. Yvette points out Orion's Belt, Scorpio, the Southern Cross. `How do you know?' I ask her. `My late Pa taught me,' she says. We stand quietly, almost religiously, in the dark garden, crickets ringing softly around us. It's so magical that when a strange formation flies into view overhead, glowing shapes in a perfect pattern, some of the children gasp. `They're just birds,' an adult says and everyone giggles with relief. A child says sadly, 'I thought he'd come.' An adult says, `Tsk, ever since they saw E.T....'

  Tuesday 27 December

  Awake these mornings increasingly depressed. Only a matter of days before I have to go back. Mouth a few of Tartuffe's lines as I lie in bed, and instantly feel nauseous.

  A wonderful morning. Baking sunshine. We go to the main beach. White sand stretching for miles and miles until it disappears into a bluish haze of heat and sea-spray. Distant transparent mountains. This vast beach landscape is inappropriately called The Grotto - named by some colonial official, I would imagine, whose mind was elsewhere at the moment of christening.

  This morning it is inhabited mainly by holidaying Afrikaners - which also has an inappropriate ring to it. With their reputation you can imagine Afrikaners doing everything else but holidaying. Afrikaners. The word itself conjures up images of ox-wagons climbing up sheer cliff faces; fearsome bearded men and lantern-jawed women standing back to back, armed only with one rusty rifle and The Gospel According to Themselves, holding their own against whatever opposition has come their way: hordes of Zulu warriors, the full might of Imperial Britain, current world opinion.

  In a different way these people intimidate me as much as those drunk Coloureds on street corners because, I suppose, I spent nine months in National Service where the Afrikaner officers regarded me very much as a third-class citizen: English-speaking and Jewish.