I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  I’m glad my dad had the domestic life that allowed him, and us, at least a glimpse of his true self. In his house, on his throne, for a few hours a day, he was the man he wanted to be. The tragedy is that there are still millions of men doing the same: shielding private versions of themselves. In the wider world, they are uncomfortable opening up, and with that comes tremendous pressure, potentially breakdown. Honesty about masculinity is the way forward. But how can that happen when it suits every controlling interest to present vulnerability, sensitivity, independence of thought, in the working class as something to be swatted like a fly? There will, I fear, be stacker truck drivers with a dictionary by their armchair for a good few decades yet.

  20

  MACBETH

  ‘Oh, yet I do repent me of my fury.’

  Macbeth

  The trigger for my obsession with Macbeth was obvious. It went beyond simply wanting the part; I needed it. I knew my dad had given me the ultimate preparation and permission, an intimate knowledge of both Macbeth’s mental and, equally importantly, physical state. Macbeth is a soldier bred for brutality. Alone, I couldn’t put myself in that position, but with my dad alongside me I could. A soldier? My dad? Oh yes, he could easily have done that. He might have been a student of philosophy like Hamlet if he’d had a public-school education, but he could definitely have been a soldier. He had loyalty, bravery and purpose – and he could more than look after himself. You wouldn’t want to get in a boxing ring with him, or an argument in a pub, any more than you would want to face him on a battlefield. More than anything, Macbeth had the ability to frighten. And that, for years, was the dominant emotion I felt from my dad.

  Ronnie was Macbeth, he just never knew it. Within all that ornate and extraordinary language, Shakespeare presents to us a man who knows, ‘If I do this, I’m going to mess myself up’ – and then does it. My dad was the same, capable of wilfully destructive behaviour that would ultimately damage himself more than anyone else, letting himself down, betraying himself, and then, also like Macbeth, experiencing great remorse. ‘I know this isn’t right but I’m going to bloody do it.’

  If he really lost it with me, an hour later he’d be mortified. Even as he was losing his temper there was self-hatred in him. He knew it was wrong, that he would regret it, but he was going to do it anyway. Whatever age I was, I recognised that mental process. There was a self-lacerating quality to it, an almost Catholic conscience that would churn and churn. He’d brood, and you could feel it. Of course, with Macbeth, the loss of control, with deep ramifications, is amplified many times over, and yet it still felt so close to home, the reason being Macbeth is not ethically deformed, he is a decent person. Allied to his overt masculinity, albeit rarely made visible, he has a tenderness, a gentleness, and a vulnerability. With typical astuteness, Shakespeare takes an everyman character, like my dad, who’s good at life, and his job, and has many sound and positive characteristics, and has him destroy his own morality and, therefore, his own sense of self. It sounds extreme, and it is extreme, but I could imagine my dad, not like Macbeth because of his ambition, but because of his extreme frustration and passion, killing somebody in a rage, just the same as I could imagine myself killing somebody in a rage, and I could imagine how that act would consume and eventually destroy him, and me.

  My dad informing, inhabiting, Macbeth – that’s what happens when you invest in these amazing Shakespearean parts, these works of genius. For the first three months, all you are doing is remembering the lines. Slowly, however, the character soaks in and you get an aerial view of their journey, the pivot points, and what’s elemental to their personality. By osmosis there’s then a drip, drip of your own past experiences into the portrayal. The result is that, with all the major Shakespearean roles, Hamlet, Macbeth, even the vain and pompous Malvolio in Twelfth Night, what you end up doing, through the filter of the character, is becoming more and more yourself and those around you. That’s possible because Shakespeare’s plays are about very elemental and primal things. He writes about blood and bone. On so many occasions, he invites us to imagine what it would be like to be a person not so very far removed from ourselves. With Macbeth, he delivers the same invite as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment – ‘You’ve all imagined killing somebody and what it might feel like. Now I’ve done it for you. Come to the theatre, here’s your worst nightmare, taking another human life.’ The point is that actually both Macbeth and Raskolnikov are decent people.

  I wrote to the Royal Shakespeare Company and asked to play Macbeth. I then failed badly at the beginning of the run, and that was hard. Professionally, and just two years out from a breakdown, I had determinedly sought out the biggest test I could possibly have taken on, the defining role in British theatre, at the RSC, and I wasn’t getting anywhere near it. A lot of the reviews, quite rightly, reflected that distance. The most devastating was Michael Billington in The Guardian. ‘His speaking of the verse lacks irony or light and shade,’ he commented. Those words devastated me. I read that review and then had to go on stage that night. I respect Michael Billington, which was why it hurt. It stung also because early on he was right. I was dreadful. I was down for 120 performances, but what could I do? Again, my dad was in my head. If I’d said to him, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ he’d have kicked my arse from Stratford to Salford and back again. As it was, I did numerous performances where I didn’t want to be there. Friends were saying, ‘What’s wrong with you? You were born to play this role.’ But if you don’t feel the part, then such words, appreciated as they are, become meaningless.

  Why read reviews? I had this exact argument with Niamh Cusack, who played Lady Macbeth. Thatcher must somehow have worked her magic on me because I see it as though I’m running a business. I’ve run it since 1989 when I started working and if I’m making a product I want to know what people think of it. Avoid the reviews and you’re trying to guess. You are left looking for little signs, how people around you, actors, directors, family, friends, agents, are behaving – ‘Has he read the reviews? Has he not?’ ‘Does he know what’s been said or hasn’t he heard yet?’ – trying to decodify their language, their expressions. There’s another thing: I’m an egomaniac. I’m convinced the reviews are going to reveal me as the greatest actor of my generation, which, of course, they never do because I’m not. In seeking that high, I risk the low. A bad review takes me right back to that young lad who thought he should never be an actor in the first place. It tells me what I’ve known all along, that I don’t belong, a feeling I carry to this day. With Macbeth, I’m proud that I read those reviews and kept going. Eventually, I reached a point where I felt I did belong. The confidence came back and, by the end of the run, I believed I had the right to play the part and was a better actor for it. I also understood that if you want to be a great theatre actor you have to spend your life doing it, and I haven’t. I’ve spent my life being a TV actor, and I got exposed. My ambition tripped me up – literally when I ended up in front of the stalls. ‘TV actor falls off the stage’ – says it all.

  Hubris – so often a visitor to my door. I’m honest enough to say, in my career as a whole, I thought I was going to change acting, like Olivier changed acting. I thought I was going to surpass Robert De Niro and Gary Oldman and be up there with the best. If you don’t think like that, what are you going to do? Head out saying, ‘I’m just going to be middle of the road’? As time has gone on, I’ve understood I wasn’t going to change acting, I was just going to be an actor, sometimes good, sometimes bad. In a business that doesn’t always reward talent, it’s difficult ever to know where you fit on the scale of acting ability. You don’t always reach the top on merit, which is why sport appeals to me. Fastest, highest, strongest. In my industry, as I know, you can be rewarded for being in the right place at the right time, getting a role above an actor better suited because you are perceived as being box office or having a higher profile. It’s hard to get a measure of self-worth in an industry that operates like that. I
get my self-worth elsewhere. The mere act of sticking myself up for judgement allows me to draw a certain value. It’s an industry where somehow you’re always disappointed, but I’ve learned to take the positive from that, which is: ‘I gave it a go.’

  With Macbeth, I transformed a bad experience into a good one, which ultimately made it more satisfying. I’ve been acting, one way or another, for almost forty years, and I learnt more in those six months in Stratford – to fail, to fall, to be reviewed so badly, and yet recover – than perhaps any other period in my career. There is actually something truly fantastic about entirely losing your confidence. If it vanishes, and then you get it back, you know you’ll never lose it to that extent again. An actor has something in common with a sportsperson in that a bad performance is always a possibility, but soon enough there’ll be a good one to counteract it. I see a parallel with my mental illness. At my most fragile, I felt genuinely suicidal, and yet I managed not to give in to that desire to harm myself. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s a terrible cliché, but it’s true.

  I learned in the end not to fixate with Macbeth. When I play a character, I can become very obsessed, a drive, an attention to detail, an intensity (that word again), which I know absolutely started from trying to work out my dad. Sometimes, though, as an actor, it’s better to step back. At the start of the run, when I was struggling, I knew exactly what the issue was – relaxation, or rather a lack of it. In order to find variety – vocally, physically and psychologically – in performance, an actor has to be relaxed, and in order to be relaxed they have to be confident. My confidence was on the floor with the rest of me. And when you’re not confident you become stiff, not just in delivery but physically and imaginatively. At that point, the audience knows you’re not getting it. And you know they know you’re not getting it. That’s the flipside of my job: I succeed in public, but I fail also.

  Sounds pretentious, I know, but Allen Ginsberg once reported how he saw Dylan in the early days and found him wholly inseparable from his songs. He didn’t know whether Dylan was the songs or the songs were Dylan. Ginsberg put it that Dylan became basically ‘a column of air’. I remember puzzling over that comment and asking myself, ‘Should that be my aim when I’m doing Shakespeare?’ To almost remove myself from the process? There’s something to be said, when playing Shakespeare, in not imposing too strong an intellectual idea or emotional colour. The language is so rich anyway. Throw more at it and it quickly becomes too busy. I feel like the job is actually just to say it. Don’t try to hammer it into a particular intellectual or emotional shape. Let it flow through and past you. Be in the moment and just let it come out.

  The same can be said of any performance. As an actor, to move an audience, you need an element of detachment. It’s not important what the actor feels; it’s important what the audience feels. There’s something surgical about acting and I don’t think actors should be ashamed about admitting it. Playing Derek Bentley, with the bones I had, I knew the best angles to make the most of them and, in purely practical, technical terms, those angles worked brilliantly. There are far better actors than me, but something can happen to their features so that what they are trying to convey doesn’t come across. I knew my angles because I’d spent so much time in the mirror as a child and had an instinctive understanding of their relationship to camera. I’m afraid it’s not some extraordinary alchemical thing going on inside, it’s just I understood that if I adopted a certain look at a certain angle, an audience would feel more sympathy than if I lifted my face five degrees and did it another way. If I did it one way, it was Derek, if I did it another, it wasn’t. That’s mathematics. I was a bit disappointed an actor could achieve so much technically, because my gods were Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis, who seemed to fashion their accomplishments on a much more cerebral basis, but, believe me, they’ll understand the laws of mathematics too. Angles were my ally. I also had a great deal of neurosis and self-doubt. Put a camera on that and something happens. The clinical nature of acting appeals to me because I come from tradespeople. Yes, there’s something mysterious that goes on between actor and audience, but basically it’s a trade. My brother Alan makes beautiful furniture. My aim has always been to make a beautiful performance that, practically, does what it should. I would argue there is no more virtue in a beautiful performance than in a beautiful chair that has been made by hand. They are both there to create a feeling, not in the creator, but in the receiver.

  The challenge with stepping back from Macbeth is that it’s a role played on the inside as much as the out. It’s not easy to untie the binds, and there are times when the character can feel like a burden, an awful thing to say for a role that most actors would die for, but reflective of the fact that he brings with him a terrible discomfort. In my case, all my worst nightmares are about killing somebody, changing my life for ever and never being me again. That’s what Macbeth does and that’s what I did night after night. The remarkable thing is I grew to relish the experience. The way I played Macbeth at the end was so different to when I started out. I learned things about myself, and him, in that time. But how can an attitude to a character not change? Forget stage fights; actors have days when they must face their own battles before they arrive at the stage door. I’ve had those days, and the subsequent performance may see the surfacing of that sadness or anger. The beauty of theatre is you are living, and you bring that to the performance. You have to tell the story, you’ve got to be true, but your own existence is unavoidable. The two are interlocked, physically as well as mentally. When I had a three-week mid-season break from Macbeth, my psoriasis, generally an infrequent visitor to my scalp, ears and elbows, spread to my shins, hips, knees and backside. I was doing a weird and highly adrenalised job. Once I relaxed, the psoriasis shouted up to tell me, ‘This is what you were feeling like on the inside.’ As much as I had grown to love Macbeth, I needed a break from him. Through the character you gain knowledge, good and bad, about your own humanity. I needed that time to escape the microscope I was pointing at myself.

  I’ll never be the Macbeth I thought I could be, but I did it, at the RSC, and without doubt it’s the biggest achievement of my career. For my generation of actors, playing a major Shakespearean role is the top of the top. But it’s about more than just me. Back in 1961, when Albert Finney depicted the life of Martin Luther in John Osborne’s play at the Royal Court in Chelsea, and his name was in lights above the door, he invited his mum and dad down from Salford. He took them for a meal on the King’s Road and then walked them to the theatre in Sloane Square.

  ‘There you are, Dad,’ he said. ‘What do you think of that?’

  ‘Hmm,’ pondered his dad, ‘doesn’t my name look good in lights?’

  That’s how I feel. My entire career has been aiming towards performing at the RSC and that’s where I reached. But what’s genuinely wonderful is that it was an Eccleston at the RSC, not me. If any of my grandparents were still alive, the idea that an Eccleston could play Macbeth in Stratford-on-Avon? Unheard of. I see that achievement as my dad at Whiteacre, my mum cleaning toilets at Worsley Baths and working at the launderette for the council. That’s what I took on to the stage, because everything I’ve ever applied to my acting comes directly from what they taught me about concentration and hard work. A group effort of my mum, my dad, my brothers, and me. When it came to me doing any landmark production, a little moment of contemplation was very important. ‘This is for the Ecclestons.’ I’d felt exactly the same when with Jude I went to Cannes.

  There’s an important caveat to that statement. If you’re from Salford, or any working-class area, and you find yourself on stage in a dream job, yes, you can be allowed a moment of ‘I made it – who would have thought?’, but that should never mean there’s a surprise in someone from that background having the ability to do so, or that they wouldn’t be encouraged by their family. I was approached for the role of the dad in Billy Elliot, but to me it was just a cliché, the working-class f
ather who can’t comprehend that his son wants to become a ballet dancer. I never saw any of that and I don’t believe a lot of other working-class kids do either. Forget Billy Elliot; the minute I said I wanted to go into acting my dad was right behind me, as was my mum. Yes, she had the fear of ‘I’m going to lose my lad’, but she was just as supportive. The same assumptions are applied to friends, that when I chose acting as my path in life a lot of them would have been sneering – ‘An actor? What?’ – again, the Billy Elliot cliché, a middle-class view of working-class people.