Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  In those first weeks, I saw the National’s Much Ado About Nothing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Three Sisters, and A Flea in Her Ear, in thrilling productions featuring such actors as Joan Plowright, Derek Jacobi, and the very young Anthony Hopkins. Over at the RSC, I squeezed in three or four productions of Shakespeare, brought down to London after a summer season at Stratford-on-Avon. Sprinkled throughout that company were young actors whose names would one day become household words all over the world, including Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, and Helen Mirren. The fervent pace of my theatergoing, combined with the relentless, unaccustomed cold and damp of the English climate, sent me to bed wracked with influenza, causing me to miss an entire week of school just after classes had gotten underway. For days I alternated between raging fevers and bone-rattling chills, with Jean hauling sweat-soaked sheets to the coin-op laundry and ministering to me in our dismal little bed-sitter in Courtfield Gardens. It was the sickest I’d been in my life. But the tradeoff was the finest theater I’d ever seen. I barely minded at all.

  At some point in that autumn avalanche of playacting, I saw Laurence Olivier in Strindberg’s Dance of Death at the Old Vic.

  It has always mystified me that some stage performances live on in your memory as if you had seen them the night before, whereas so many others are completely forgotten. Olivier as Edgar, the tempestuous, tyrannical army captain locked in a diabolical marriage, was one of the indelible ones. During my time in London, I probably spent a hundred evenings in different theaters, opera houses, and concert halls. If I had seen only Dance of Death, it would have been worth the trip.

  I’d never witnessed such power onstage. Olivier’s military strut, his trumpet bark, his satanic humor, and his scary flirtation with madness were all woven together into the best piece of stage acting I’d ever beheld. Most compelling was the soaring arrogance of the character and, seemingly, of the actor playing him. The National was a company virtually created in Olivier’s godlike self-image, and when he was onstage there was no question who was number one. And in taking on the role of Edgar, Strindberg’s savage and self-lacerating despot of a husband, Olivier had cast himself to perfection. His Edgar was a roaring lion of a man, exchanging verbal body blows with his equally ruthless wife, Alice (Geraldine McEwan). But as Olivier played him, Edgar’s manic savagery alternated with a whiny, strangulated insecurity. Marriage was driving the man crazy.

  But Olivier’s audacity extended beyond the brilliance of his bravura performance. At that time it was common knowledge all over London that he was fighting a prolonged battle with cancer and continuing to perform in spite of it. His muscularity and titanic energy onstage belied any infirmity, but the fact of his cancer undeniably hung in the air. As a consequence, at every performance of The Dance of Death, there was a palpable sense in the audience that they might be watching one of his last performances. It is unimaginable that Olivier was not aware of this fact. And in one scene in particular, he had clearly chosen to exploit it to the hilt.

  It is the play’s signature scene. Alice sits at the piano downstage right and plays a snappy mazurka. Her husband Edgar dances to the music with martial crispness, wasting not a single step or gesture. He grins maniacally and his black boots flash, a figure out of the acid ink drawings of George Grosz. Alice’s piano playing grows more percussive, almost violent. She quickens the tempo and Edgar dances faster. And faster. It becomes a contest between them, a marital fight to the death, music versus dance. At a certain point, Edgar appears to be losing his breath. He dances upstage, heading toward a sofa. Suddenly a seizure hits him like a thunderbolt. He pitches forward awkwardly, banging to the floor behind the sofa like a fallen horse, and then lying there inert. Witnessing this on the stage of the Old Vic, every member of the audience gasped audibly. Suddenly this was not Strindberg’s Dance of Death. This was not Edgar. This was the great Olivier, mortally stricken before our very eyes. We sat there frozen in shock. Seconds passed. Olivier staggered to his feet. The play lurched back to life and we regained our composure. Once again, we were just an audience in a theater. We had seen a dazzling, deeply disturbing piece of stagecraft, executed by a genius of manipulation. As my heartbeat slowed, I felt a crazy mixture of feelings, enthralled and bamboozled, in equal measure. Sitting in the darkness, I silently addressed myself to Laurence Olivier, my new hero:

  “You bastard! You knew just what you were doing!”

  © Zoe Dominic. Courtesy National Theatre of Britain.

  The following morning I spoke to a friend about The Dance of Death. He was an English acting student, one of my newly acquired school acquaintances. I was still under the spell of Olivier’s performance and spoke of it with worshipful effusiveness.

  “My god,” I said. “What a great actor!”

  “Yes,” he replied, with withering scorn. “He’s a great actor. A great 1945 actor.”

  What was this? Was my new hero old hat? It was my first insight into the fact that, between English and American actors, the grass is often greener on the other side of the pond. I had traveled to London to study acting, pricked on by the sense that classical English acting was the high-water mark in English-speaking theater. I would soon learn a surprising truth: I came from America, home to an acting tradition that my new English friends envied, to an even greater degree than I envied theirs. In days to come, I myself would lose patience with the decorous manners of the English stage (and even tire of Olivier’s bag of tricks). But for now, it was everything I wanted. In West End playhouses I was gorging myself on a steady diet of plays, like so many sausages in the pubs of southwest London. And in the classrooms and studios of my new school, I was learning how the sausages were made.

  [16]

  D Group Days

  In the world of British theater, “The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art” is too much of a mouthful. They just call it LAMDA. When I enrolled there in 1967, LAMDA had been around for a while, but it still had the air of a breakaway, upstart institution. Situated in the unprepossessing neighborhood of Earls Court, the academy was crammed into a musty, three-story gray-brick building, referred to with wistful grandiosity as “The Tower House.” Today LAMDA boasts a sterling reputation with a long list of renowned alumni. But in those days it was the second choice for most young English applicants, far less prestigious than the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), its venerable Bloomsbury rival. RADA, after all, had produced Gielgud, Finney, Courtenay, Caine, and Rigg. The best-known fact about the more proletarian LAMDA was that the boisterous Richard Harris had been kicked out of the school for unruly behavior and dirty fingernails.

  But for aspiring American actors looking to travel to London for a heavy dose of British academy training, LAMDA was the place. LAMDA, you see, had the D Group. This was a special one-year program offered to fifteen “overseas students,” many of whom had already had a couple of years’ experience in the profession. In a typical year, a dozen of the fifteen D Group kids were Americans. Of that dozen, one actor and one actress were there on a Fulbright grant from the U.S. Government. And that year, I was the Fulbright actor.

  The D Group year was a kind of British drama school horse pill. It was LAMDA’s entire three-year curriculum squeezed into one. Our group worked from nine to five every weekday, a regimen as taxing as preseason training in professional sports. Every morning, we would run a gauntlet of intensive classes and every afternoon we would rehearse for one of five productions, spaced out over the year. In my year we performed two plays by Shakespeare and one each by Shaw, Chekhov, and Congreve, directed by a mixed bag of staff teachers and veteran London actors.

  Shakespeare, of course, was at the heart of our curriculum. And Shakespeare was spoon-fed to us by an extraordinary teacher named Michael MacOwan. Michael was our Yoda. He was in his late seventies, a stringy little man just over five feet tall, with a booming, gravelly voice seasoned by a lifetime of cigarettes. He was colorful and endearing but prone to crankiness and sudden inexplicable rages. Ar
ound the school his quirks and foibles were legendary. In recent years, he had occasionally forgotten where he had parked his car, angrily insisting that it had been stolen. He had been the longtime principal and guiding light of LAMDA, but by the time we arrived he was in semiretirement. His only students were the Shakespearean neophytes of the D Group.

  Three times a week, Michael led us in an hour-long scene study class. His teaching method was simple but idiosyncratic. He would assign each of us a speech from Shakespeare. One by one, we would deliver our assigned speech, listen to him hold forth about it, then speak it again. He would grunt and grumble as we spoke, chuckling with pleasure when his notes bore fruit. His head would bob with palsy as he stared intently at each of us in turn, his dark-brown eyes magnified by horn-rimmed spectacles. In his rambling responses to the speeches, he would tease out the meaning, emotion, and music of the verse. He would sprinkle his talk with tales of fabled productions and performances, tossing off nicknames like Larry (Olivier) and Johnny G. (Gielgud) as if they were old friends (which they were). He would educate us in the vast range of Shakespeare’s knowledge, dissecting even the most obscure references, images, and metaphors. And on a Saturday in autumn soon after we started classes, he took us on a field trip to Penshurst, the grand manor house and gardens in Kent. On our way home in the late afternoon, he treated us to supper in a centuries-old country pub. He thrilled us with the fact (or possibly fiction) that the building had once been a hunting lodge belonging to Henry V himself. We arrived back in London after dark, his adoring disciples. The whole glorious day was Michael MacOwan’s notion of a young actor’s education. No one could truly understand Shakespeare, he said, without experiencing the gentle splendor of the English countryside.

  Besides the gift of his wisdom, one day Michael did me an enormous favor. The favor was unsolicited and unintended. Indeed he was never even aware of it. A few years before, when he was still LAMDA’s principal, a certain acquaintance of mine had been a member of his teaching staff. This was none other than Tony Boyd, the crazed martinet who had made my life so miserable back in the States during the summer of The Great Road Players. When I learned of Boyd’s tenure at LAMDA, I disingenuously asked Michael about him. Michael wearily shook his head as he answered.

  “Tony was a brilliant teacher,” he said. “Very energetic. Very original. The students loved him. But he was a difficult man—chippy and bull-headed. We had a few too many run-ins. It was a messy business. I’m afraid that in the end I had to let him go.”

  At these words a wave of relief broke over me. In my mind, I had shouldered all the blame for the Tony Boyd fiasco for two long years. Michael had unwittingly unburdened me. He must have been considerably taken aback when I blurted out, “So did I!”

  If Michael MacOwan’s Shakespeare tutorial was the heart of our LAMDA training, the rest of our classes provided its blood, bone, and gristle. These classes included movement, voice, diction, historical dance, choral singing, stage fighting, and even tumbling. Our half dozen teachers ranged across a broad spectrum of English eccentricity. At one end of this spectrum was Elizabeth Wilmer, the prim finishing-school headmistress of a certain age who spent an entire diction class teaching us the difference between the formation of the words “blow” and “blue.” At the other end was B. H. Barry, our furiously energetic young fight instructor (now one of the premier fight arrangers in American theater). In Barry’s class we learned to fence, box, fling each other to the floor, impale each other with knives, and deliver hideously convincing blows to the face, gut, and nape of the neck. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum was Anthony Bowles, our choral singing teacher. Appropriately nicknamed “Ant,” he was a wiry, febrile little man with a mocking wit who, by some mysterious magic, coaxed sublime close-harmony madrigals from a chorus of young acting students that included not a single decent singing voice.

  This wildly varied teaching crew shared a single coordinated mission: to tear us down and build us back up, and to do it with patience, kindness, and good humor. Layer by layer, they peeled away the facile habits and manners that I had accumulated in my short, packed career onstage. In performing Shakespeare I had long ago fallen into a tight, singsong imitation of John Gielgud, probably the result of listening a few times too many to a scratchy LP recording of his Ages of Man. My LAMDA teachers were determined to put an end to this. In voice class I learned to completely relax from my waist up, to reflexively fill up my diaphragm with air, to loosen the tense tangle of muscles in my neck and throat, and to produce an easy, natural sound, more Lithgow than Gielgud. On account of my height I had always tended to unconsciously slouch to the eye level of whomever I was acting with. This question-mark posture constricted not just my body but my voice as well. In movement class, I learned to straighten my spine and stand up to my full height, to vocally stand and deliver.

  Finally there was the deceptively simple business of making dramatic sense of what I was saying. Gielgud’s Shakespearean speech favored music over meaning. For all its glories, it was a throwback to a much earlier, near-operatic stage tradition. Under Michael MacOwan’s penetrating gaze, I learned to tilt the balance back toward meaning, to fall a little less in love with the sound of my own voice. He was teaching me lessons that I had spent the last several years ignoring. In his patient prodding, I occasionally heard echoes of my father’s voice back home:

  “Just speak the words.”

  I loved the D Group. It remains the only formal acting training I’ve ever had. The months I spent in LAMDA classrooms and London theaters were challenging, exciting, formative, and fun. But the LAMDA experience had its distinct drawbacks. It saddled me with two heavy burdens that I would carry with me like twin millstones when I finally joined the American acting profession.

  First of all, I became far too English. I had thought that studying acting in the company of a dozen other Yanks would inoculate me from this curious affliction. I thought I could take what I needed from English academy training and then go home with my red-blooded American actor’s identity intact. I was wrong. Osmosis, it turns out, is a powerful thing. I came home with a fruity British accent that I didn’t even realize I had acquired, complete with lilting inflections and arch locutions. Old friends would look at me askance when I’d chirp “Bob’s your uncle,” “spend a penny,” or “a bit how’s yer father.” My own sister Robin wouldn’t speak to me until I dropped “that awful English accent!”

  “Wot acksnt?” I asked, puzzled.

  She refused to answer.

  I was . . . well, gobsmacked.

  For my first year back in the States, I emanated Englishness like cheap cologne. At the end of that year I was subjected to a kind of radical therapy that finally purged it from my system. I was cast as Andy in Neil Simon’s trifling sixties comedy The Star-Spangled Girl, in a summer-stock production at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I have long since forgotten the name of the show’s director, an unsurprising memory lapse since he barely directed it at all. But during rehearsals he taught me an invaluable lesson. I failed to appreciate it at the time. Indeed, I bridled against it. But it was just what I needed.

  In the play, Andy is a sanitized, Simonized hippie, the youthful editor of a radical San Francisco magazine. The boy is an American—“an American, dammit!”—and my director was determined to rid me of any trace of an English accent in the role. As we rehearsed, he sat behind a table with a tiny bell in front of him. Every time he heard the slightest English inflection from me he would ring the bell. In the first few days of work he was ringing that damned bell every ten seconds. It was absolutely infuriating. I couldn’t believe that, a year after coming back from England, I still sounded that English. But by the last rehearsal, the bell had stopped ringing. The show was godawful and I was pretty dreadful in it. But I was an American again. I was cured.

  The second problem was not so easily remedied. LAMDA turned me into an insufferable Shakespeare snob. Until I went off to England, American product
ions of Shakespeare’s plays had suited me just fine. I had loved to act in them and I had loved to watch them. They were my birthright, after all, and my father’s abiding passion. I had adored their reckless energy, broad comedy, and high spirits. By the late 1960s, the American style was virtually defined by Joseph Papp’s free Shakespeare at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. I had always savored every visit to the Delacorte, a pastoral oasis in the midst of a clamorous city. My heart had swelled at the populist spirit of those shows, with their raucous, grateful audiences and their tossed salad of acting styles, accents, and ethnicities. The crowds never seemed to understand half of the lines (and, for that matter, neither did a lot of the actors). But it didn’t matter. This was Shakespeare at its most joyful and exuberant.

  England dulled my enthusiasm for it. My taste was now defined by everything I had seen and done over there. For me, the bar had been set impossibly high. Oh, certainly I had seen plenty of bad Shakespeare in London and Stratford. Some productions were stagey and predictable, some woefully misconceived. But the good ones had been amazing—Peter Brook’s Lear and Midsummer Night’s Dream, John Barton’s panoramic Troilus and Cressida, Clifford Williams’ daring all-male As You Like It. And no matter how good or bad the productions were, the standard of acting had always been uniformly high. There are at least a dozen characters in every Shakespeare play, so every production requires at least that many actors capable of handling the particular challenge of Shakespearean speech. To my overly trained ear, half the actors in every American production of Shakespeare were either miscast or inept.