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

by Antony Sher

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

  Saturday 9 June

  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 ...

  Sunday io june

  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.

  Monday i i June

  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'.

  Tuesday 12 June

  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 ...

  Wednesday 13 June

  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.

  We get hopelessly behind schedule and it becomes apparent we aren't going to make the dress rehearsal this evening. Since photographers from all the national newspapers have come up expecting a full run-through, we have to hurriedly improvise a photo-call for them. Which means getting into make-up. I find myself sitting in front of the dressing-room mirror, wondering what to do. Unusual for me. I end up doing some functional stuff for the large theatre - outlining the eyes, slightly shading the bone structure - which in the old days would have been called `basic juvenile'.

  Sit staring at myself in the mirror. Richard is definitely not a character job after all. He looks and sounds very much like me. I'm rather pleased. Maybe this is what Postlethwaite meant when he talked about me eschewing the predictable way I would play the part. Strangely enough, of all the things that various people have said, his comments have haunted me most.

  Thursday 14 June

  Despite two mogodon I wake at 6.3o a.m. Fresh, not too frightened. Today - the dress rehearsal and the first public preview - will be too chaotic for fear. I think I function better under pressure.

  Get up and practise the lines. This is still my greatest worry, a fear so private that I hesitate to write it even here. At yesterday's tech `the Breton Richmond' came out as `the Briton Wretchmond', and `to make the wench amends' became `to make the mench awends' (the first Jewish Richard?).

  It's my birthday today. Yesterday, somebody asked how old I'd be and I didn't know, genuinely didn't know whether it was thirty-four, thirty-five or thirty-six. Suppose that first blurred birthday happens to everyone eventually. I've worked it out - I'm thirty-five today. Happy Birthday.

  By chance I overhear the Radio Three news this morning for the first time in weeks. It would seem that the outside world does still exist. And it's relatively relaxed - the coal strike continues, a new divorce law, voting for the European Parliament, the cost of living either highest or lowest in Bradford, a football tour, cricket. Only at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon does a brave little group face Armageddon.

  At the theatre a pile of cards - birthday and good luck combined - await me, as well as a mysterious pink box and telegrams from South Africa. Mum and Dad's says, `Hope you find your horse, keep your Kingdom, and conquer the world.' Normally I find their overblown sentiments embarrassing, but today they're oddly touching. The excitement they must all be feeling back home. Also messages from Esther, Randall, Verne and, unusually, Joel - which instantly makes me cry. The pink box opens to let a helium balloon float out with `Dickie III rules OK' scrawled on it by Charlotte. Also a card to the Animil from Mac. Another with love to Richard III from Dickie I. And Sara Kestleman has sent a beautiful print of an engraving of Richard III. The trouble she must have had finding it moves me terribly. I sit in my dressing-room and again am unable to stop crying. I'm hopelessly tearful these days.

  THE TECHNICAL CONTINUES Racing against time now. A problem with the death. How to get into the best position for Chris to slide in the Boar-sword - there's a small gap in the armour to take it, and a metal sheath inside to keep it well away from my own back. He's behind me, so I can't tell when he's there.


  Guy: `Can't you take a cue off the music?'

  Me: `Can't I'm afraid. I'm tone-deaf.'

  Bill: `Well, when the singing stops. Even you must be able to tell the difference between singing and instrumental.'

  Me: `Bill, we've worked together long enough for you to know I'm so tone-deaf I can't tell the difference between music and silence.'

  Chris: `Look, I'll nudge you with my toe before I stab you.'

  Me: `It's all right, Bill. Chris is going to nudge me before he stabs me.'

  Guy: `A killer and a gentleman.'

  Everyone says the slaying looks excellent from out front. Bill has ditched his idea of having the full cast on stage, but seems to have achieved a coup de theatre similar to the coronation, with just two people, music and lights.

  Odd that I've never been as self-conscious about `A horse, a horse' as `Now is the winter'. I think it's because the former is so rooted in my concept of the whole deformity: the man simply can't run away, he needs that horse desperately. So it's never seemed like a famous quote.

  The osteopath has given the go-ahead to the throne-bearers, as long as they are supplied with weight-lifters' support-belts and padding for their shoulders.

  DRESS REHEARSAL Bill and I have agreed that I should take it very quietly and gently if I'm to have anything left for tonight. He assembles the cast to warn them not to let this reduce their own energy.

  The run-through is basically smooth. Miraculously everything from the last few days slots together. I sweat fiercely - Blessed said that, by his first entrance (five minutes into the play), it was like acting with a portable shower unit. As the afternoon progresses it gets worse. Black Mac bears the brunt - dripping wet clothes don't lend themselves easily to quick changes. But despite the heat, it's pleasurable strolling through the performance using a normal voice. Have to hold myself back from the big moments towards the end, such a temptation to have a go at them, but have to keep marking through. A useful discipline and exercise - these great parts need mapping out like this. Rest camps on the side of Everest.