by Antony Sher
The day is spent in monk-like silence, resting the voice. And making first-night cards for the Company - individual cartoons. It's relaxing using sketching to make this dreaded Sunday fly by.
Monday r8 June
FOURTH PREVIEW In the dressing-room, Black Mac is laying out my costume and deformities, while I'm practising one of the speeches under the shower.
He says, `Clever, henny, clever, must be clever to remember that fokkin bollocks.'
But this is just Black Mac bravado. Later he confides to me: `The shows I've seen here mate, the memories I've got, and I've viewed them from angles no other bugger has ever seen, no fokkin critic, not even the directors have seen them like I have, from my special places in the wings.' He taps his forehead, says, `They're up here mate. Special memories.'
Tonight's performance is done on three large bottles of mineral water at room temperature instead of gallons of iced Coke. Ian MacKenzie (Ratcliffe and understudying Richard) told me that Coke wasn't very good for one, and iced Coke positively bad. The vocal chords are muscles, and to be constantly doused with icy fluid when they're overworking isn't a good idea. I am grateful but puzzled - I thought understudies were meant to push you down stairwells, not recommend ways of keeping you going.
Mark through the performance very lightly, particularly vocally. Very unusual sensation this, holding back in front of an audience. But I've got four performances to get through this week and, however much I try to pretend tomorrow night isn't special, I'm determined at least to be in good voice.
So, a feeling of being once removed from my performance tonight, once removed from the whole experience of being on stage. Looking out calmly at that beautiful black space, the green exit signs like jewels on black velvet. During the Richmond scenes at Bosworth, when the lights are down on my side of the stage, I sit staring at the wall of people. How bizarre it is.
The nightmare speech remains a disappointment to me, shared, I know, by Bill. He has always regarded it as one of the finest speeches in Shakespeare. He said earlier today, `The trouble is, you're playing it exactly like the rest of the part. But a new man is born there. It's as if T. S. Eliot has thrown a speech into a Shakespeare play.'
Maybe tomorrow night ...
Two mogodons to sleep without thinking about the opening night tomorrow.
Tuesday 19 June
I wake with that feeling, that sickening feeling. It only lasts as long as I lie in bed. There are still the last cartoons to be drawn. Sadly, I run out of time and fail to do ones for Alison Sutcliffe, Charles and the rest of stage-management.
The day is warm and thick like treacle. 'Twill be a storm .. .
Entering the stage door, the first signs of hysteria. Flowers, cards, presents already piling up. A carnation from David Troughton with a card written as Bouton to Molicre - `Master, have a glorious summer' - starts me crying again.
Rehearsal on stage with the coronation cloaks. Apparently, on several previews the naked hump (or `The Money' as Bill D. has taken to calling it, because of Tucker's astronomical bill) hasn't been fully revealed when Buckingham disrobes Richard. Endless suggestions - change the fur to silk so it will slide off better, weights in the hood to drag it down. After an hour of rehearsing this, Mal says he's now more nervous about this responsibility than playing Buckingham.
The whole day feels like someone has their finger on the fast-forward button. Dashing into town to buy booze for tonight's party and presents, dashing back for the afternoon call, the stage door now looking like a florist's and greeting-card shop.
2.00 P.M. Conference Hall. The cast in a circle. Bill asks us to speak the play quietly, stopping one another if there's a word or phrase we can't understand. Very useful to hear the story again. Atmosphere sober. Blessed bubbling and twinkling as always, but I resist the temptation. Important for this exercise not to disintegrate into corpsing. Hope my whispering seriousness is not misinterpreted as nerves, which I don't feel yet.
4.30 p.m. On stage with Ciss. All of us standing in a circle (`A circle is always aggressive,' she says, `use it to get rid of tension'), humming, rocking, chest-patting. Words from the play exchanged across the circle. Animal words, religious words. The atmosphere very similar to the end of the play - an army gearing themselves up.
5.00 p.m. Now the two-hour wait. No sickening nerves yet. Maybe they won't come this time.
Jim's first night present is beautiful - a huge joke-shop spider in a rather elegant Victorian perfume bottle.
Massage. Doze off to Don Giovanni.
THE OPENING NIGHT 6.oo p.m. Cold shower. Muttering `Now is the winter ...'
6.15 p.m. Mac arrives, relaxed and chatty, bearing piles of cards from downstairs. The heat of the evening is intense. As he advances with the hump I say, `I don't think I can bear wearing that tonight, Mac.' He says, `Righto mate, I'll go and tell them Richard's got better.' Phone rings. Bill, sounding stiff and formal: `Just want to say have a good one.'
6.40 p.m. Fight rehearsal in the Conference Hall. The tension backstage relatively low. `Good luck, good luck' is the constant greeting as people pass one another. Some of my cartoons have been opened and are being passed round, making people laugh.
6.45 p.m. Dressing-room. 'Give me ten minutes alone, Mac.' Strolling around doing `Now is the winter . . .' Oddly calm.
6.55 p.m. Beginners' call over the tannoy. Look at myself in the mirror and say aloud, `Right, let's go and play Richard the Third.'
6.57 p.m. Waiting in the wings with Allam, Paul Gregory, Jonathan Scott-Taylor and Guy Fithen. We peer at the audience through the tracery walls of the set.
`Come on, you buggers, get into your seats.'
`Look, the critics are writing already.'
`Tony, when your crutches first appear, expect a cacophony of scribbling.'
7.00 p.m. Graham Sawyer arrives from front-of-house to give the final clearance. Philip mutters into his mouthpiece `Going', and the house lights start to dim. The music crashes and I scurry on stage. Get into position and feel the lights change. Open my eyes.
` "Now is the winter ..." '
The first thing that strikes me is that the audience might be in more of a state than I am. Waves of tension that you can reach out and touch. How stupid first nights arc! The frosty passivity of the critics ('We're not actually here, we're just observing') mixed with the nervous supportiveness of friends, relations and theatre staff. It's like playing to a dozen audiences at once. The laughter is muted and only starts about a third of the way back, behind the scribbling heads. A feeling that there might be some real people, ordinary members of the public, out there somewhere.
I underplay moments, overplay others, in an attempt to reach this totally untypical jumble of spectators. I dry briefly in the Lady Anne scene and have to do one of my Shakespearian rewrites. Later in the same scene I'm horrified to hear my line `I'll have her' come out as 'Oil 'av'er!' Still, there is an exit round, albeit rather token.
Better from here on in. Realising that I'm expending too much energy in trying to sort this lot out, I calm down to the point of indifference. Whenever I go backstage, worried faces loom out of the dark to whisper, `How's it going `Extremely well,' I keep replying and take a perverse delight in their expressions of surprise. Know they're thinking, 'Well, he's not getting the laughs he got at the previews.'
At the coronation the big moment comes - Mal comes to disrobe me. We share a smile and I whisper, `Your big chance Mal, go for The Money.' Don't know whether he managed it or not. Forget to ask afterwards.
The second half is much better. The audience appears to have decided it's not at all bad. They're more relaxed and confident and therefore so am I. Who's in charge here?
My voice lasts well and, thank God, I've got some big guns left for the oration. But no breakthrough on the nightmare speech.
Curtain call. The applause is disappointing, but I'm told there were some bravos and we are called back for another one. Blessed, Mal and I yell to one another over the appla
use, `Well, you're on yer holidays!' Glimpse the scribblers scurrying up the aisles, dashing to their deadlines. Wonder how they find enough telephones?
Great relief backstage. People surround me, hugging and patting, Blessed sweetly saying, ' 'Kin marvellous performance, inspiration to us all, great triumph.'
In the dressing-room, a race to get out of the drenched deformity and into the shower before people start arriving.
Standing naked under a stream of water, shampoo, soap, stage blood, running mascara - the most beautiful feeling. I survived.
A knock on the door and, through the rushing water, a familiar hoarse voice: `Tone, where are yer?' Gambon!
Lots of other faces from the old Company: Chris Hunter, Monica McCabe, Ludo Keston, Dusty Hughes. How wonderful that they should have come all this way.
Now the dressing-room full of R S C hierarchy. Suddenly Trevor Nunn pushes his way through and `Trevs' me. I've heard a lot about this `Trevving', but never had it done to me. From what I'd heard, a `Trev' is an arm round your shoulder and a sideways squeeze. But this `Trev' is a full frontal hug, so complete and so intimate that the dressing-room instantly clears, as if by suction. I'm left alone in the arms of this famous man wondering whether it's polite to let go.
He says, `When this show moves to London there are going to be queues round the block. It's going to be one of those.'
A flash of a night in Joe Allen's some millennia ago.
At last alone. Step outside on to the little balcony, gasp at the fresh air. The storm never happened. It's a gloriously warm, almost Mediterranean night.
At The Duck, Pam whispers that the word is good and nods towards a table where they sit: Billington, Coveney, Tinker and others. These crazy evenings in The Duck after an opening night, when we all pretend we don't know one another - us and them. I miss James Fenton because he used to cross no man's land and offer you a drink.
Mal and I sit with Gambon and his companion, Lyn. Try and recapture the patter of two years ago, but there is something melancholy in the air. Beginning the descent. Gambon starts to talk about how strange it was driving into Stratford tonight, and his eyes fill.
We go to the party. It has been arranged by Steve, Jonathan, Guy and Hep. They have floodlit the garden of their digs. There is a barbeque and a Richard III cake to cut. Something which has happened, invisibly, over the last couple of weeks is that the Company has cemented together round this show. The cynicism and indifference are gone. There is a new enthusiasm for the work. I think that's one of this production's triumphs.
The only wet blanket this evening seems to be me, sitting alone at the back of the garden, forcing myself to eat although I still have no appetite. The exhaustion is massive, preventing me from having even one wild night of celebration.
Eventually find Bill. He has slumped alone in the living-room. Looking as wrecked as I feel. We smile at one another. Nothing left to say.
Later, I'm glad to have the opportunity to tell Gambon that at last I understand why he felt so disparaging about his great performance as Lear. At the time his behaviour seemed like destructive modesty. But Shakespeare's great parts are humiliating to play, or at least, humbling. You get to meet his genius face to face.
Leave the party early. Have to do it all again tomorrow and then again on Thursday.
Walking through Stratford on this warm, clear night. Not a soul about, just the beautiful timbered buildings, which often you can't see for the crowds. Late at night, this place looks like any quiet country town.
Jim and Lyn fall behind as Gambon and I stroll along Waterside saying very little. It means a great deal to me to have him here tonight. Lear and Fool. Where this chapter of my life began.
August 1984
Summer again. A glorious summer. As you come up over the hill from Chipping Campden, the world below has turned the colour of straw. One of the worst droughts in years, but droughts are in my blood, so I love these dry, bright days. The countryside is baked and cracked; sheep pant in little shaded groups under the trees.
Much has changed at the theatre and yet somehow it remains the same. Hamlet is in rehearsal now, and so the Green Room chat is about that: when the question of ghosts comes up now, it's hamlet's father; when a head is passed around, it's Yorick's skull.
But the days following the opening were, for me, some of the worst I can remember - dominated by the news that a friend had been murdered. Drew Griffiths, writer, director, actor. We worked together in the early days of Gay Sweatshop. He was murdered on the afternoon of Saturday, i 6 June, and they still haven't found the killer.
This, together with the usual post-natal depression, made these days very bleak.
As far as I can see, the only disadvantage in not reading reviews is that they can't help to fill these horrible days. They don't supply a new charge, fuel for excitement or fury. Suddenly - time on your hands. Suddenly - nothing on your mind.
But it does become apparent that we have a success on our hands, perhaps even a big success. Without reading reviews, you have to rely on other signs: now the applause at the end is rapturous, we are regularly called back for a third time, people stand and cheer.
Celebrities start flying in to see the show. And I am asked whether I'd mind if they came round backstage afterwards. If I'd mind? Michael Caine, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Peter Brook, Donald Sutherland, John Schlesinger, Chariton Heston ... Charlton Heston? I was making plasticine models of him when he was in The Ten Commandments and I was in nappies. Best of all, Mum and Dad are in the audience that matinee and are invited to have tea with him during the interval. Dad goes round for days afterwards shamelessly name-dropping, telling everyone that he had tea with Moses.
Michael Caine should have the last word on the reviews: `What about those reviews then?' he said.
`I don't read them.'
`Don't read them? You wrote them didn't you?'
The Richard III Society descends in force. Most of them celebrate our production and write thrilling letters, but one or two are less enthusiastic: `I read in the papers that you are yet another actor to ignore truth and integrity in order to launch yourself on an ego-trip by the monstrous lie perpetrated by Shakespeare about a most valiant knight and honourable man and most excellent King.'
As soon as we opened, the lines ceased to be any problem at all. Now they all come out effortlessly to the last `thee' and `bath'. I have not become prematurely senile, I have not lost my powers of memory. It was simply this show's special gremlin.
Otto Plaschkes has successfully raised the finance for Snoo's Shadey film. So this gentle character, this little misfit whose only ambition is to change sex, will live alongside my psychopathic bottled spider for a few weeks in October and November, as I commute between Stratford and London.
Busy, full days, in what I thought was going to be such an empty year.
The dollar is strong. Americans invade. Stratford gets so full it might be sick. It's a perfect time to be far away in Chipping Campden in a beautiful cottage, dictating a book to a lovely lady called Ainsley Elliott, who plays her typewriter like a piano.
We work with the French windows open to the garden, the dry lawn, the drooping, still trees. With one hand we have constantly to fend off wasps and bees, with the other we encourage ladybirds to land and bring us luck. Or money spiders. There are spiders everywhere these days. Every known species seems to be spinning webs in the garden, or under the eaves, or all over this room. Each morning I come in to find new running, glinting lines tying everything together, the furniture to the ceiling, the windows to the doors, the grandfather clock to the table on which lies a pile of notes and sketches from this past year, my battered copy of the play resting, in pride of place, on the top.
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