by Simon Callow
The great bulk of John Gielgud is devoted to recording the career of that voice’s owner, and it does so thoroughly and engagingly. Morley is of the chronicle school of biographers, eschewing dry analysis in favour of an enthusiastic evocation of the ambience and aura of his subject. He is the John Aubrey of biographers, irresistibly drawn to gossip, believing – rightly – that an anecdote is often more revealing than an autopsy. His affection for Gielgud is palpable and his appreciation warm; he understands (partly thanks to his own family background in the theatre and his own experiences as director and performer) what the job consists of, what is hard and what is easy. He unfolds the story with considerable flair and a great deal of judicious quotation, tracking his quarry into every nook and cranny of his career. Interestingly and unexpectedly, however, despite impeccable thoroughness, he ends up with an enigma, or at the very least a phenomenon, that no amount of investigation can explain. As the patient chronicle unfolds, Gielgud himself (generally referred to by Morley as John G, which rather adds to the mystery, as if he were a character in a Chekhov short story) becomes more and more inexplicable. The given circumstances are all clearly established – the cultured Anglo-Polish background (how curious that our two greatest actors should have both had such unEnglish names!) with theatre blood on both sides, but most directly on the side of his mother, Kate Terry, giving the young stage-struck boy access to his aunt Ellen Terry and her notorious son, Edward Gordon Craig (Uncle Ted); the fairly swift establishment of his career after a stumbling start, leading him to almost universal acclaim by the age of twenty-five when he played his first Hamlet at the Old Vic; his first Lear, when he was a whole year older, was accounted an almost equal success. From now on he was regarded as a paragon in classical theatre (even if, as Agate succinctly observed, ‘all that goes with a bowler hat eludes him’) despite the fact that he was, as he was always the first to admit, very awkward physically: many are the attempts to describe his peculiarly inexpressive physique, from Ivor Brown’s famous description of him as ‘niminy-piminy… scant of virility… from the waist down he looks nothing. He has the most meaningless legs imaginable’, to Lynn Fontanne’s (apparently approving) remarks comparing him to ‘a newborn colt, and I also adore your feet, which are the youngest I have ever seen on stage’. But it was the voice, always the voice, which drew the most eloquent praise. His seemingly instinctive ability to speak verse was widely perceived to be an inherited gift (‘the Terry voice’; like Ellen he spoke Shakespeare ‘as if he had only just left him in the next room’); the same was said of his emotionalism (‘the Terry tears’). Soon he began to direct, then to create companies within the commercial theatre, and both in his productions and in his companies he pioneered an integrated approach to the theatre which was in its way, and in its day, radical. He also constantly challenged himself by working with the greatest talents: Komisarjevsky, Harley Granville Barker, Michel Saint-Denis, Peter Brook, Noguchi, Derek Jarman, Edith Evans, the young Olivier, the young Scofield. There were ups and downs, including a period in the wilderness when he seemed to have lost his touch, only to reinvent himself in a series of plays from Brook’s primitively powerful production of Seneca’s Oedipus and Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On to the triumphant Indian Summer partnership with Ralph Richardson in Storey’s Home and Pinter’s No Man’s Land.
Eventually, inevitably, as he entered his tenth and final decade he began to feel a little detached from the theatre (memorably remarking, after the Globe was renamed the Gielgud, that ‘at last there’s a name on Shaftesbury Avenue that I can recognise’), but his contribution to the theatre and to the art of acting was universally acknowledged; even Lee Strasberg, who might have been expected to be fundamentally opposed to everything he was and stood for, noted that ‘when he speaks a line you hear Shakespeare thinking’. An exemplary life in the theatre, a life of unceasing devotion to the art, of unremitting creation of extraordinary performances and exquisite productions. The theatre was his home, the centre of his being. As his mother remarked of her young son: ‘When he was not acting in the theatre, going to the theatre or talking about the theatre, he was to all intents and purposes not living.’ His writing about theatre (liberally quoted in John Gielgud) is lucid, elegant and practical; he has little time for theory, but he has a matchless gift for going to the heart of a play or a performance.
None of this quite accounts for the extraordinary impact he had. There was something about his performances which was beyond interpretation, beyond intelligence, beyond talent even. This was as true in life as it was on the stage. It is Alan Bennett who puts a name to it: a name that Gielgud would dismiss with a giggle. The word is ‘saintly’: ‘But,’ adds Bennett, ‘it requires no effort. He was just born good, there has been no struggle to get there.’ Perhaps the word is grace, in the theological as well as the social sense, a kind of effortless radiance stemming from some profound ground of being. Derek Granger put it in more secular terms: his acting, according to Granger, is about ‘everything that is expressive of an intense inner life’. ‘The poetry in John always sustains him and nurtures his spirit,’ says Dudley Moore, Gielgud’s co-star in the most unlikely of all his manifestations, Arthur. ‘We all need to find what John has.’ Peter Brook notes that ‘submerged in each of John’s performances is a core which is pure, clear, strong, simple and utterly realistic’; ‘His rhetoric is impeccable,’ says Lindsay Anderson, ‘but his moments of pure, exposed emotion are inexpressibly touching… sheer and absolute acting genius.’ And yet – and this is the paradox – this is a man who said of himself with no false modesty, ‘In the theatre I have quite good taste: in my real life I’m absolutely tasteless. Outside the theatre, I’m clumsy with my hands. I’m a very bad judge of character. I’m not learned. I’m always so terribly aware of how little I know.’ A man who loved to catch the occasional porn movie, who gloried in gossip, who cracked wonderfully silly schoolboy jokes. Yet to be with him was a benison, a curiously exhilarating and anarchic experience, as the lightning celerity of his thought processes took you on a kind of helter-skelter ride of surreal non sequiturs, sudden accesses of emotion and ribald asides made all the more bizarre for being uttered in those honeyed tones by the impeccably elegant gent before you. It was a personality like none other, bearing some small resemblance perhaps to the licentious monks of the Zen tradition. Certainly there was something of God about it.
John Gielgud is a very good, warm-hearted and almost comprehensive account of the man and his career, written with unmistakable affection. The story is a little repetitive, but then so was the life; essentially it was one show after another. While Olivier’s life was a wild, Marlovian, Sturm und Drang affair of titanic ambition and cruel humiliations, Gielgud’s was altogether more Mozartian, with occasional darknesses and minor-key interludes, but on a much more even keel, sparkling and sunny, pulsing with inner life. It perhaps calls for a Ronald Firbank or an E. F. Benson to do full justice to its subject’s tender, frolicsome, sublime spirit, but in their absence, John Gielgud will do very nicely.
For an eighteen-year-old to be exposed, however much at second hand, to these huge figures, and to the processes of theatre-making at such an exalted level, was intoxicating and inspiring. I sneaked into rehearsals at the Vic whenever I could and was mesmerised by what I saw from the shadows at the back of the stalls – fascinated not so much by the occasional brilliance on show, but, on the contrary, by the slowness and the difficulty of the job, by the painstaking struggle and trial and error. This was work, the first work I had come across that I really wanted to do. Then, and only then, was born in me the desire to become an actor. Being part of the theatre – albeit in the box office – had cured me of any illusions about the glamour of the theatre. In the canteen I had overheard enough about the frustrations and disappointments of the job to be disabused of any showbiz tosh; I had seen the toll that running the theatre was taking on Olivier; I was aware of the violent clashes of personality which could tear a theatre apart; I had observ
ed from my eyrie in the box office how success was by no means guaranteed, even to the most talented – and there is no clearer proof of the public’s unsentimentality than in the cash till. But I was excited by the thought of being part of the enterprise of putting on a play, of working – as I saw it – at the coalface of art, of grappling with all these massive and intractable problems, because the reward at the end would be to bring to life some great and complex story which might shake an audience out of its complacency or its depression, as I had seen it shaken by The Dance of Death, by A Flea in Her Ear and, shatteringly, by Oedipus, and perhaps change its life. I also had a pretty clear idea of the colossal amount of will involved in the process, and that one could get badly burned in action. But it was all that I wanted.
In the box office (along with the Box Office Manager’s copy of the then-banned Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was kept in the safe), we all read a hot new theatre novel, Next Season, by the director Michael Blakemore. It was, one was reliably assured, not about us at the National but about the old Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Either way, it tore the lid off the life of a theatre company. We were agog. I felt that it had been written for me personally, that I was destined to read it at exactly that moment. It may seem improbable that a youth as theatre-obsessed as I was had not contemplated the idea of becoming an actor, but the penny had finally dropped. Many years later, I wrote an introduction for a paperback reissue of Blakemore’s novel.
When I first read Next Season, its jacket had been replaced with brown paper. It was being passed around the box office and front of house at the National Theatre like a samizdat. This was 1969; though no more than a year old, it was already out of print. It was widely rumoured to be a roman-à-clef, although no one seemed very clear as to who precisely the characters were based on. ‘Sir’ (Laurence) was one of the models, said some; Peter Hall another, according to the head usher. The events referred to the Nottingham Playhouse, if you believed one lot; no, said a different crowd, it was Stratford-upon-Avon. We faintly knew who Michael Blakemore was: he ran the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, where Albert Finney had gone after his film Tom Jones; and ‘Albert’ (we felt we owned him) had just opened on Broadway in Blakemore’s acclaimed production of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. All I really knew was that it was about the theatre, and it had been written by an insider. That was more than enough for me.
The sensational aspect of the book went right over my head. I tried, from my tiny store of theatre lore, to identify the characters, or at least Braddington, where the novel was set. It was hopeless; but after a very few pages, I had ceased even to try, because something far more important was coming through: this man was telling me what it was like to be an actor. I had found what I was looking for. The other books – I’d read them all – told you how to act (Stanislavsky) or (Michael Redgrave) mused on the meaning of acting, but this one was about the demands and the rewards of acting, what it takes from you, what it gives you back. Acting as work, work as passion. I cried for joy. A way of life existed which would use my energy, my brain, my bursting heart; one which was useful and important. Somehow, never having set foot on a stage, I knew that Sam Beresford/Michael Blakemore’s experience was authentic; knew all about his fear that his small part would be cut, his elation at finding a characterisation that released the scene’s wit and menace, his obsession with finding and if necessary making the right kind of glasses for the part, his despair at failing to triumph when called on to take over from another actor. Above all, I knew exactly what he meant when, running through the part of Hamlet in his mind, he felt ‘an absolute certainty that he could play the bloody thing, that if a stage were to materialise at that very moment, he could step on to it and astonish any audience, anywhere’. He was speaking directly to the as-yet-unrealised actor in me.
Everything that I encountered when I eventually became one confirmed what Blakemore had written. Rereading the book the other day I was struck all over again by the precision and vividness of the observation; but now I saw that I had been too swept away by the revelation of acting to see what a very good novel it is. Sam Beresford, the central character, is mercilessly exposed in his emotional confusions and calculations, trying, in a rather cold way, to organise his sexual relationships, angry and frustrated when they don’t work out. The milieu of a young actor of the late Fifties is excellently evoked, its greyness and dinginess the more sharply perceived in the light of Beresford/Blakemore’s Australian background. ‘Grey towns drowning in lakes of smoke; hills plowed into rows of terraces that presented against the sky silhouettes as sharp and ugly as blades of rusty serrated saws.’ And Braddington, the theatre and the social life of the company are all well done. But the novel’s great triumph is to have placed an actor’s work, his professional and creative processes, at the centre, and to have made the artistic vicissitudes of a young man who is not yet and perhaps never will be a great artist, so enthralling. The sense of uplift achieved at the end of the novel because that young man is going to continue to try to make theatre, is an exceptional achievement. Why should we care? But we do; desperately.
The conviction of ours, twenty years ago, that the book contained thinly veiled figures from the real world is not strictly true; Blakemore has transmuted his raw material into art, and conflated and refashioned his originals. If there is a clef, it is probably the Stratford season of 1959, in which the author played, but that legendary season in which Olivier, Robeson, and Edith Evans all appeared, was a very different affair to Braddington’s. Touches of those great individuals can be seen here and there, but his major achievements of characterisation, Ivan Spears, the old classical star, and Tom Chester, the young director of the season, are so fully presented as to be archetypes rather than life-sketches. Spears, who has some traits of Charles Laughton, to whose 1959 Lear Blakemore was Knight, to whose Bottom he played Snout, distils practical wisdom to the point of genius, betraying deep understanding of the text with profound experience of realising it. ‘Freddie, if you do get into difficulties, look, I think I have the trick of this scene. I think I could help you,’ he says to his co-star, and we understand that the ‘trick’ is the master-craftsman’s deep intimacy and ease with the play and the author. ‘This particular play (The Duchess of Malfi) was Ivan’s. Everything he said about it, and everything he did in his own performance, had an immediacy and a vigour which claimed the material as his own. Webster had found a spokesman, one who responded not so much to the formal qualities of his play, anchored in their own time, as to that enduring impulse that had led to the writing of it, and which, centuries later, in the terms of his own experience, Ivan was able to affirm. The play was his by right of talent, and he was there to turn its pages for the entire company.
In the character of Ivan, Blakemore affirms the actor’s contribution both in himself (‘in the terms of his own experience’) and in his intuitive ability to release the play’s (temporarily) frozen life – the profoundly creative coupling of the actor’s inner universe with that of the play. In the context of the novel’s action (the author metes him out a drastically symbolic fate), Ivan comes to embody the passing order. Tom Chester is what replaces him and his kind; Tom Chester, the prototypical directocrat, manipulator of destinies, coiner of clichés, the new man. It is a devastating portrait, bred of deep resentment. Blakemore shows the invisible processes by which the politician director, equipped with a few borrowed insights, a little oily charm and unlimited faith in his own indispensability, hijacks a complex craft from its true practitioners, replacing the living organism which was the end of their labours with a product which satisfies critics and Arts Councils and has every appearance of the real thing, but on closer examination proves to be only a plastic facsimile.
Blakemore’s ear for the director-speak invented by Tom Chester and his contemporaries, part-matey, part-schoolmasterly, is flawless: ‘Well, everybody, that was awful, absolutely awful. I can’t tell you how bad it was. You’ve simply got to be better than that. And I know you
can be.’ And: ‘This is a play about horror… we’ve got to create this atmosphere of darkness and cruelty, and really use the stage to suggest currents of evil moving through this enclosed Renaissance world.’ More sinister, though, is Tom’s power over careers and lives. In a chilling interview towards the end of the book, Tom tells Sam why he won’t be in the next season: ‘Talent’s important, of course. Of primary importance. But talent’s nothing without – well – ferocity. That’s what makes it interesting. Class has gone. Race is going. You can’t be above the battle any more. Which I sometimes think you try to be…? That’s what I look for first in an actor. Determination is the polite word. Your trouble is you’re a bit too nice.’ These conversations continue to the present day; not even the script has changed. The important point, as Blakemore makes clear, is that Tom Chesterism has made the discussion of whether work is good or bad irrelevant, because the discussion is always conducted in their terms. They have won; and there will be no more Ivan Spears.
