by Helen Mirren
At the end of this, one of the best years of my life, and also one of the most difficult, I decided that I wanted to return to the more normal life of an actor. I especially missed the use of language, and the ease of performing in your own language to people who understand you. I also felt I would never be frightened of anything ever again. Unfortunately that was not the case. And so I bade farewell to my friends. The following year I saw many of them performing in the production Peter mounted called Conference of the Birds. It was one of the best things I have ever seen in the theatre.
Left, middle right: The legendary Moyshe Feldenkrais with whom we directly worked.
Bottom right: Miriam Goldschmidt, Irene Brook and me. Irene and I are trying to be as cool and exotic as Miriam.
Here is the company of international actors working in Paris. We sat for hour after hour cross-legged around a blue-grey carpet. Peter Brook was indefatigable. He was also inspiring, articulate, profoundly intelligent and somewhat intimidating.
Below: My friend to this day, the superb photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who accompanied us through much of Africa. She took all these pictures.
Right: Lou Zeldis and I enjoy the sea, having travelled across Africa to reach it.
Below right: We exercise in the desert. So very serious.
The cold desert mornings.
The group in Northern Minnesota, on an Indian reservation and working with the American Indian Theater Ensemble, now sadly disbanded.
With Carpio, I am in love.
Carpio surprised me at the pow-wow in Minnesota by suddenly appearing in his dancing costume and dancing with bravura. No wonder I fell in love. He was a Pueblo Indian from Taos, New Mexico. The city life was not for him, and soon after our work together he went home to Taos, where his heart was.
Some of our performances in Africa, and one of our encampments. We travelled every day, and made camp each night.
I tried to keep in touch with family and friends while travelling but found it impossible to describe what we were really experiencing. It was easier to be polite or silly.
A letter to my friends Sandy and Lindy, who were staying at my house while I was away.
The flat in Doria Road, Fulham.
When I got back, the culture shock was quite extreme. Even on the plane coming home the waste seemed terrible. I had spent exactly one year with the CIRT. It was frustrating, enlightening, confusing and stimulating, but I wanted to get back to my country and try to put some of what I had learned into my work in mainstream theatre. I was also quite happy to be wearing gold shoes again.
Theatre
My life on the stage – Lady Macbeth to Natalya Petrovna
The first production I appeared in after leaving the CIRT in New York was Macbeth, in Stratford, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Nicol Williamson playing the man himself. This was a case where the actor was so suited for the role that it overwhelmed him. He could not rehearse it.
Days were spent waiting for Nicol to get going. He would argue terribly with Trevor and was just horrible to me. I think his plan, if there was such a thing, was to hold back until the first night and then just let it explode. This meant there was no organisation to the performance and it went far too fast, leaving nowhere to go after about the third scene. Coming from the ensemble experience of Brook, I was thrown right into the deep end of a pool where ego and self-centredness were paramount. It certainly had a kind of power, but was an absolutely miserable experience. The production was also very designed. Having come from a year of making theatre with just a carpet I balked at being a cog in a design.
I wrote a letter to the Guardian, saying that I thought subsidised theatre was becoming too concerned with design issues and losing the art of acting. The powers that be at the RSC were horrified. I understood. To maintain the subsidy was always a struggle, so my letter did not help. However I was also treated with condescension.
Three years later Trevor did the production I’d been dreaming of, with no set, in an empty space and simple costumes and it was one of his biggest successes.
By then I think I had really begun my life as a professional actress. Although the process of learning has never stopped for me, at that point my apprenticeship had ended and the real work began.
Soon after Macbeth, which played both at Stratford and in London, I was asked by Lindsay Anderson to do a season in the West End appearing in a couple of plays in repertoire at the Lyric: Chekhov’s The Seagull and The Bed Before Yesterday by the inimitable, the glorious Ben Travers. I liked the idea of the contradiction in the choice of these two plays, and I could work again with the iconoclastic, acerbic and loyal Lindsay Anderson, with whom I had done O Lucky Man!.
I had a funny relationship with Lindsay. We seemed to be old friends from the moment we met, able to tease one another and loving each other, or at least I loved him. He had this effect on many people and I felt privileged to be accepted by him.
Ben Travers was also a memorable man. He had been a wildly successful West End playwright in the thirties and forties, writing perfectly constructed farces that are now classics. Now in his eighties, he had written a marvellous new farce. It was typical of Lindsay to want to direct the play, as Lindsay had no ability to follow fashion, having instead a simple dedication to everything he thought was good.
Ben was full of laughter and sparkle. He wore his age like a very thin disguise over a sexy, alert and utterly humane persona. I adored him. For his eighty-ninth birthday I gave him a silly T-shirt with something written on the front like I’m sexy, and he put it on under his straight suit.
I believe it is only by performing in a play eight times a week that you really understand its strengths and weaknesses. A critic, coming to a play on the first night, really cannot fathom the totality of it; often they are bamboozled by sets, directing, acting even. Ben’s play, like all his others, was a marvel of construction and wit. My part was nothing to write home about, the usual girly role, but I was happy to serve the play as best I could. In fact, although I was often cast in those roles, I was pretty hopeless at them. Something inside me would be at war with the character, so I was always overcomplicating the part.
As Nina in The Seagull, 1975
The season had been constructed around Joan Plowright. Joan was playing Arkadina in The Seagull, and I was Nina. I had heard it was a good role, but I hadn’t actually read the play when we started rehearsals. I always find plays and scripts very difficult to read; I can never understand who is who or where they are supposed to be. Besides, I am terminally lazy.
Lindsay thought we should spend a week reading and deconstructing the play before rehearsals began, so we met in Joan’s lovely London flat. We read the first act, and discussed it at length. We read the second act and discussed it. During that discussion I said innocently, ‘Gosh, I wonder if Nina and Tregorin have an affair.’ Joan turned her blackberry eyes in horror upon me. ‘Have you read the play, Helen?’ Consummate professional that she was, and married to the greatest living actor, she must have thought that the younger generation was going to the dogs. She had a point.
Joan also played Alma, the lead in the Ben Travers play. The male lead was another great professional actor, John Moffat. John was kind and funny. Joan and he earned my undying respect one night when the edge of the curtain, as it rose, caught the tablecloth on a table right downstage and sent a complete tea service crashing to the floor. The scene they were about to perform, a very elegant tea party drenched with sexual innuendo, was played by Joan and John on their hands and knees, fetching sugar lumps, sandwiches, saucers, milk jugs and teapots from all over the stage. Their aplomb brought the house down.
When I look back at the amount of work I did in this period I am surprised that I managed to fit it all in. I returned to the RSC to play Margaret in Henry VI and finally felt the power to fill that theatre. I also played a number of leading roles in television dramas: in 1974 there was the seventeenth-century play Bellamira, a thriller, Coffin for the Bride, and
another wonderful Jacobean play, The Changeling; in 1975 I did Caesar and Claretta, the story of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci, followed by The Philanthropist by Christopher Hampton, The Little Minister by J. M. Barrie, and The Apple Cart by Shaw. In that same year I appeared in David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles; it first played at the Royal Court and then transferred to the West End in 1976.
That year I also did The Collection by Pinter on television with Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates and Malcolm McDowell. It was an amazing time for television drama. In 1977 I did Wycherley’s The Country Wife, in 1978 As You Like It playing Rosalind, and in 1979 Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter.
And that was also the year I spent four months in Rome shooting Caligula. And at the beginning of this period, I met and fell in love with the photographer James Wedge.
My first production after I came back was with the RSC again, playing Lady Macbeth to Nicol Williamson’s Macbeth in 1975. This play is supposed to be cursed. Thank God nothing disastrous happened in our production except in the relationship between Nicol and me. He hated me.
This is the letter I sent to the ‘Guardian’, complaining about excessive sets and designs. I was fresh from Brook’s concept of ‘An Empty Space’. This letter led to a question in Parliament. I was condescendingly and sexistly described as complaining about a few yards of tulle.
In The Seagull and Ben Travers’ The Bed Before Yesterday, both in 1975.
Working with Lindsay Anderson and Joan Plowright in a West End repertory season of ‘The Seagull’ and ‘Bed before Yesterday’ was a memorable experience. The stage door of the Lyric Theatre is right next to the Windmill Theatre, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. I got to know the call girls and their pimps who hung out there. They were very friendly and sweet, the girls in particular. I loved being one of the Windmill Street crowd. On some Saturday nights the sounds of a very drunken football hooligan crowd would penetrate the walls of the theatre and I would play the final scene of the Chekhov, Nina’s famous, heartbreaking ‘I am a seagull’ speech, to the not so distant sounds of ‘AAAARRRSSSENAAAAALLL’ and the inevitable police siren following on.
It’s only rock’n’roll
I was doing Teeth ’n’ Smiles, which for the first time brought the world of rock and roll into the theatre. My dressing room overlooked the back alley. One Friday night, waiting for my last entrance, I heard the most almighty crashing about coming from the alley. I looked out of the window and saw a man in a pinstriped suit who had fallen into the dustbins and was rolling around on the ground with the rubbish. A drunk. Then I heard the kerfuffle – shouting down the stairwell in the vicinity of the stage door, which then came up the stairs and stopped right outside my dressing room. I opened the door and there was the man in the suit – Keith Moon, legendary drummer of The Who – with the stage door man hovering anxiously behind. He staggered into my dressing room and very sweetly said ‘Hi’ and how great he’d heard the show was. I was thrilled to meet him, but just then the call for my last entrance came over the tannoy. I said I was sorry but I had to go on stage. He said not to worry – he’d come with me! I tried to dissuade him, but he assured me he was used to being on stage. He then followed me down the stairs to the wings where, sadly, he was stopped by the management. I have always regretted that I was too much of an actor that night and not rock and roll enough to have insisted on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be on stage with a legend like K. Moon, albeit drunk and out of his mind.
My second and best go at Cleopatra, in the small theatre with the RSC, 1982. This was brilliantly directed by Adrian Noble. Here I am with my friend Sorcha Cusack as Charmian.
The Duchess of Malfi with Bob Hoskins at the Roundhouse, 1980.
Sorcha was also in the magnificent production of ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, also directed by Adrian. Here I am having a costume fitting. I would say that the three greatest productions I have been in were ‘Duchess of Malfi‘, ‘Orpheus Descending’, directed by Nick Hytner, and ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’, directed by Howard Davies. It is no coincidence that all three were designed by Bob Crowley, now the best and most sought-after designer working in the theatre. Contrary to what I wrote to the ‘Guardian’, great design in the theatre can be the element that elevates it to something legendary. I love to see design that does not fight with the material or performers but informs and frames the production in an astounding and imaginative way. As an actress, there is nothing like being on a marvellous set to present your play. It is not a question of sheer beauty. When the set, the lighting and the costumes combine together to both surprise and delight the audience, it smooths your way. It makes the whole such a pleasure to be a part of. Bob’s designs do this.
Here is my third Cleopatra, this time with Alan Rickman. This was a big and ornamental production in the Olivier Theatre at the National. It was a failure, but I loved playing the serpent of old Nile again, especially in that operatic space. You cannot perform Shakespeare’s plays too often. Each time you can find something new in every line. Also you have the great advantage of knowing the lines. When I played it the second time with Michael Gambon as Antony, on the second day’s rehearsal I found I knew the whole play, from playing it for one week all those years before in the Youth Theatre. Lovely, because I loathe learning lines.
Ruby Wax, an old friend from my Brad Davis years in America so long before, visited me backstage after the first night. She came crowned as the Queen of Thailand. She swore she’d worn it throughout the performance. I had to put my crown back on just to compete.
Rehearsing for ‘Two-Way Mirror’ at the Young Vic, the writer visited us, the great man himself, Arthur Miller. He spent a week with us. Like all the great people I have met he was at the same time deeply intelligent but simple, impressive but approachable. His greatest quality was his absolute love of and dedication to his craft and his chosen art form, the theatre.
‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ gave me one of the greatest roles for a woman. Christine Mannon and I knew nothing about it before coming to it. This production was one of the best experiences of my professional life. The play was four and a half hours long, and I have never known that kind of response from an audience. People would be literally shaking at the end. It was the serendipity of a beautifully cast play, with great design and direction. It will be hard to be in anything better.
New York, 9/11 2001
In 2001 I was asked to do Strindberg’s Dance of Death on Broadway with Ian McKellen. We began rehearsals in the thick heat of a New York August. On September 11, I was up at 7.30 a.m. to go from my rented apartment in Chelsea to our rehearsal room for a last run-through of the play before moving into the theatre. My husband was in London, overseeing the renovations of our London house. At 8.35 a.m. he rang me to discuss what sort of taps (faucets to the Americans) we should have in the bathroom. My sister was with him, talking to her son, Simon, on her mobile. He was on the Internet at the time, and suddenly said to her that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. It was 8.45 a.m. When Taylor told me, I turned on the television to see the morning news, but there was no mention of it. I told Taylor and we agreed that it was Simon being dramatic.
Then it suddenly came on. At this point it was not clear that this was no accident. And then the second plane hit. I watched in horror, and incomprehension. Just before10 a.m. a car arrived to take me to the rehearsals. As we drove to Times Square, I saw people on the street stop and look with an indescribable expression downtown. I looked back and saw that horrible slow-motion collapse of the first building.
Not knowing what else to do, we continued to the rehearsal rooms. When we arrived, some of our cast who had friends downtown had to leave to see what they could do. Ian and I decided to simply go ahead as planned, and we had a strange but somehow comforting run-through of that darkly funny play. In the breaks I went outside. Above the entrance to the building we were working in was one of those huge Times Square screens, and it was showing all the horrors coming out of the downtown district
. People, not knowing what else to do, were standing across the road, looking up at this screen in silence, that indescribable wondering and slightly blank look of disbelief and horror etched on their faces.
All the businesses in the area were now closed, all that is bar one. When I went out looking for some food for lunch, the only business still open was a video porn show, and I saw someone going in. I can’t make up my mind if that was wonderful or terrible.
In the following weeks I learned to respect the New Yorkers for their great courage and resilience. I had always wondered, as a post-Second World War child whose parents had experienced the Blitz, what the ethnically diverse and culturally conflicted people of the great American cities would do if they had bombs dropped on them the way Londoners and the people of Coventry did. I had thought that they would split into factions, at each other’s throats. How wrong I was. They came together – Puerto Ricans, Ukrainians, Blacks, Jews, Indians, Italians, Chinese and all the great mix that is New York – and became one homogenous city in their grief, rising to the challenge. It was a terrible time of vast tragedy and I think it changed New York for ever. It became a stronger place, a better place in its heart. They were incredible, and I was very content to be there amongst them. And yes, they even came to the theatre.
