Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  The General Election

  Following the British election of February 1974 the Labor Party, under Harold Wilson, came to power, replacing the Conservatives and their leader, Edward Heath. Both before, during, and after polling day, conversation about this national event is at a minimum, reinforcing my sense that actors live in a separate dimension. What comments there are deal wholly with Heath’s and Wilson’s diction and acting style, not their policies. Thorpe is rated superior to both of them in performance, and it is suggested that he might do well as Uncle Vanya. A straw vote taken by me two days before the election predicts a small Labor victory, with the Liberals a close second and twenty percent of the company undecided or not telling—leaving out Irene Worth, who says she thinks most politicians disgusting and hasn’t bothered to vote in years.

  Theatrical Economics

  Before I knew better, I assumed that most British actors were rich or at least comfortably off, living in regal grandeur or trendy luxury. This notion came from faulty association of ideas. When I saw them on stage or film, they were often wearing brand-new expensive clothes and living in large, bright, elegantly furnished rooms. Sometimes they were dressed like kings and queens and lived in castles. Also, more obviously, the actors I saw most often and heard most about were the most successful—the few who really did have three cars, a town house, and a farm in Provence.

  But beyond these few are a great many who are not very comfortable. The British Equity Association minimum rate of pay for a West End production is less than most secretaries earn. For the Greenwich productions, classified as “Subsidized Repertory,” the Equity minimum is less than the pay of a bus conductor. And these rates are for public performances; rehearsal pay is still lower. Jonathan is popular with his company because he insists on full performance pay from the first day of rehearsal, but this is unusual.

  Most of the company of Hamlet earn more than the Equity minimum, but not very much more. A few earn several times as much; but this sounds better than it is, since almost no actor in England works continuously. It is quite usual to be unemployed for half the year, and many members of the cast were out of work for months before this production started. And it must be remembered that these are not typical Equity members, but exceptionally talented and successful ones.

  How do they manage to live at all, then? Mainly by selling themselves to films, television, radio, and advertising, where the pay scale is higher. Nicola Pagett (Ophelia) comes in late to rehearsal one day because she has been excused to do a “voice over” for a TV commercial. Eventually, while romantically colored views of Italy are flashed on the screen, she will be heard reading aloud a thirty-word script which she now repeats in a burlesque bedroom voice for us in the hotel bar: “The moon … the pines … my first Campari!” For this morning’s work Nicola will receive more just in “expenses” than she earns in a week at Greenwich, and every time the ad goes out on TV, she will get another £3.

  The easiest way to make a lot of money is by appearing in a well-known TV serial. The danger is that if it gets to be too well known, no director will cast you in a play. Philip Lowrie, the gentle, thoughtful actor who plays Horatio, was in Coronation Street from 1961 to 1968, then quit and spent the next four years without work. “They kept inviting me to come back on the show,” he tells me. “I played Dennis Tanner, he was this sort of lovable layabout, but I’d got to absolutely hate him, and I knew if I didn’t stick it out, I was done for.”

  Other members of the company make ends meet by posing for magazine advertisements or reading lectures on educational TV. Nicky Henson (Laertes) has appeared in gangster and horror films with titles like Psychomania and Vampira. “It was so bloody bad,” he tells me of another such film, “that I was terrified it would become a camp success. But thank God, so far nobody’s heard of it.”

  In effect, Jonathan tells me, Nicky and the rest of them are literally subsidizing the British classical theater by taking jobs like these—buying themselves time to appear in plays like Hamlet, Ghosts, and The Seagull. Jonathan Miller is doing the same thing. He is paid a flat fee of £600 to direct these three plays, or about £50 per week—often a fifty- to sixty-hour week, since Equity doesn’t protect directors from overwork. He buys this time by directing films for TV and contracting to write popular books and articles. Usually he is behind on these contracts; on opening night, for instance, I found him in the stage manager’s room simultaneously trying to listen to the play as it came out of the loudspeaker overhead and to type an overdue chapter of his current book.

  Irene Worth

  More than anyone else in the company, she looks and behaves like the popular notion of an actor. A leading lady in the grand tradition: I can imagine her photographed soft-focus, swan-breasted in classical draperies on an Edwardian sepia postcard. When rehearsal stops, the others turn off that invisible energy charge that makes them seem larger on stage than they are in real life. Irene does not turn it off. She is always on stage, as if she had no other personality: she orders cottage pie in the hotel bar with the resonant diction and eloquent gestures of someone who thinks five hundred people are watching.

  And according to report she has no other private self or private life. She lives, in the old-fashioned phrase, completely for her art. Unlike less single-minded actresses, she has not managed (or cared) to accumulate jewels, country houses, husbands, children, relatives, or hangers-on. As far as anyone can tell me, she appeared fully formed on stage in the premiere of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, as Celia, the beautiful young religious martyr—taking on at that moment, perhaps, something of Celia’s character, if not her destiny.

  Like Celia, Irene Worth believes utterly in the importance of her mission. Nothing else matters. Called upon to die of poison in the last scene of Hamlet, she crumples onto the cold, filthy, bare floor time after time, without any evident thought of what is happening to her pink angora sweater. Other actors find her difficult to work with at times because of this single-minded intensity, and because of her freely expressed scorn of anything she considers artistically shoddy or conventional.

  Considering Irene’s reputation, and her undoubted brilliance as an actress (which everyone in the company admits, even when they are furious at her), she does not appear on stage very often. This isn’t just because some directors are afraid of her temperament. Irene also turns down all roles and plays that do not meet her standards. She is interested in experimental drama, in improvisation. “I want to be where the theater is new, alive—at the moving edge,” she says, with a gesture which indicates that this edge cuts like a knife. Then she tells me, her eyes shining, of the moment recently when she came nearest to Celia’s famous martyrdom on the anthill: in 1971 when she toured the Near East in Peter Brook’s production of Orghast, a play by Ted Hughes written entirely in an imaginary emotive language and presented before native audiences in a tent.

  I was surprised to learn from Who’s Who that this great lady of the British theater was born in rural Nebraska fifty-seven years ago. (It even seems strange that she should be of any definite age; she looks barely forty some days and nearly seventy on others, and has the gestures and walk of a young girl.) Yet in her passionate devotion to Art, Irene recalls other actresses and dancers who came out of the rural American Midwest, such as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. When I try to imagine her childhood, I see Model T Fords and feed stores and dust blowing through empty small towns and out across an endless prairie. I think of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, and wonder what sort of cyclone it was that carried off Irene Worth.

  Acting as a Caste

  What I have been told is true—the theater is a world apart, with its own language, history, and culture. It has its leaders and heroes (the name “Laurence Olivier,” by my count, is invoked twice a day on the average). But socially at least, all actors are equal. Within the theater, the barriers of class—which to an American sometimes seem to turn the English social landscape
into a tiresome maze of muddy quagmires and thick thorny hedges disguised with roses—hardly exist. There is no electrified fence between Robert Stephens, whose father was a builder’s laborer, and Jonathan Cecil (Osric), the son of Lord David Cecil—one of whose ancestors, Lord Burghley, was Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and a probable model for Polonius.

  To become an actor is often to step outside one’s class into a separate caste. Two members of the company, however, have not had to do this, because they were born into theatrical families. Antony Brown (Polonius) is the son of a man who worked in vaudeville with Charlie Chaplin and Kate Carney; his grandfather was stage director at the Gaiety Theatre. He is an actor in the old comic tradition, and looks the part: he has the bald domed head and chin beard of figures in classical farce, and when he smiles, his mobile face becomes the classic comic mask.

  Nicky Henson is the son of comedian Leslie Henson. After his father’s death, he tells me, his relatives warned him against going into the theater; there were already too many starving actors, they said. So instead Nicky entered the stage management course at RADA. But he wasn’t able to stay backstage; he began singing with a rock group, and then appeared in a musical. “The first night I opened in a real theater, my mother was there, and when the curtain rose she started weeping… . No, I wouldn’t want my own kids to go on the stage, it’s much too chancy economically. Of course, if they insist, what can you do?”

  If there is a difference between Antony and Nicky and the rest of the cast, it is that they take being in the theater more easily. For them it is less of a sport and more of a craft; they know how to do it the way other men know how to lay bricks or remove an appendix. Both of them are married to actresses, and they are much involved in their families. When I met Nicky, he had just arrived at the theater on his motorcycle, and looked like the toughest guy in a gang—square-jawed, unshaven, in boots, jeans, studded jacket, etc. But the first thing he did after unstrapping his helmet was to pass round photographs of his two-year-old daughter and tell how, upon seeing her first snowfall that morning, she had remarked indignantly, “Dirty birds.”

  The Theater as a Tradition

  Not only class barriers, but age barriers, are dissolved within the theater. Between the youngest and oldest members of the Greenwich company there are more than fifty years: Graham Seed is twenty-three; while both Anthony Nicholls and George Howe are well over the age at which people in most jobs are forced into retirement, yet they are still valuable to a director.

  Their presence in the company is also valuable to the other actors, especially in the early awkward days of rehearsals. It seems to promise that this clutter of anxious people in a cold room will eventually turn into a production of Hamlet, part of British theater history. Tony Nicholls, a tall, calm, distinguished-looking man, whom Jonathan describes to me as “a real theatrical gentleman,” has appeared in almost every play Shakespeare ever wrote. At the first reading, where the rest of the cast are turning pages and stumbling over strange words, Tony speaks the Ghost’s lines in a clear, resonant voice and without a book, for he has played the part often before. It is literally as if a spirit from the past spoke, inspiring and blessing the enterprise.

  George Howe, who looks like a very wise, cheerful, and attractive gnome, has an even longer history as a Shakespearean actor. He first appeared in Hamlet in 1934, and has twice played Polonius with the Old Vic Company in a castle at Elsinore. At lunch breaks he, like Tony, is surrounded by younger actors listening to his (sometimes scandalous) anecdotes of the theater.

  As for Graham Seed, this is his first speaking part in a London production—or rather parts: he is not only Barnardo and the Player Queen, but a priest in the graveyard scene. He plays them all with a childish seriousness and constant delight in simply being on a stage, which is also important to the rest of the cast, and sometimes cheers them up on dark afternoons. Graham is here because Jonathan noticed him at Chichester in a production of The Taming of the Shrew. He was one of a bunch of Petruchio’s servants who had no lines, and nothing much to do but move furniture. At rehearsals it was obvious that all of them were bored and impatient, except for Graham. While the others went through their duties mechanically, and talked and smoked and read the papers between cues, Graham watched what was happening on stage. “I didn’t say anything to him at the time,” Jonathan tells me. “But I made a note of his name, and I remembered him later.”

  Nicola Pagett

  Why has this good-looking, well-brought-up girl, out of so many like her, become an actress? She has natural gifts, of course: a good figure, a musical voice, and the right kind of looks. Seen up close she is tiny, with a bright, doll-like prettiness and eyes almost too large for her face: on stage or film she becomes an incandescent beauty. But to be where Nicola is at twenty-nine you need talent, ambition, and endurance; you have to prefer the uncertainty and hard work of the theater to the security, ease, and comfort you might have if you married one of the successful young men who buzz round beautiful rich girls.

  Perhaps some of the cause is in her past. Nicola was born in Cairo and brought up in Egypt, Cyprus, Hong Kong, and Japan, as her father, a Shell Oil executive, was transferred from one office to another. From twelve on she spent part of every year at school in England, traveling half round the globe alone on airplanes. The idea that there are many different worlds in which you must play different roles was familiar to her very early. She didn’t acquire a love of travel, though; she says now that she doesn’t ever want to leave England again. “Of course if I had to go on tour, that’d be different. I’d feel safe anywhere in the world with an acting company round me.”

  Nicola is very happy with the Greenwich production. “It’s every young actress’s dream; three parts like these, with a director like Jonathan,” she tells me. But early on in rehearsals her ideas about Ophelia conflict with Jonathan’s. She wants to go round the stage in her mad scene kissing people and giving them flowers, while he insists upon a sterner and more complex interpretation. “Ophelia’s a girl who doesn’t know who she really is; who lets other people, men, define her. When they’re knocked off one by one—her brother gone, her father murdered, Hamlet out of his mind, as she thinks—she cracks up, she retreats into childhood. Schizophrenic regression. I want her to ignore everyone else in the room, to suck her thumb and play with dolls, like my daughter Kate did at three.” Nicola frowns and protests, but Jonathan wins in the end—and the reviews will bear him out.

  Yet he knows how to do more than impose his will: he can bow to necessity and turn the limitations of an actor to advantages. He does this for Nicola when it turns out in a later rehearsal of the mad scene that she has great trouble learning or carrying a tune. As she falters again and again, the rest of the cast try to help her: at one point Irene, Robert, Philip, and Nicky are all singing at her simultaneously, in perfect pitch, but to no avail. Nicola panics. “How should I your true-love know, know, kno-ow, no, no!” she cries. “It’s no use. I can’t do it.” Jonathan comes to the rescue. “Don’t try to get it right. Go ahead and hesitate like you just did. let it go flat, that’ll be marvelous.”

  Acting Schools

  A noisy discussion at lunch in the hotel bar on this subject. In general the younger actors speak well of their training, while the older ones call it a waste of time or worse compared to practical experience. Robert Stephens gives a scathing imitation of the mannerisms of candidates for the Old Vic, and George Howe thinks standards have fallen since he was at RADA in the early twenties and learned his trade from real professionals like Claude Raines instead of theorists who wouldn’t last one night in weekly rep.

  With much laughter, mimicry, and trading of mock insults, it is explained to me that RADA produces flashy sophistication (“You may not get the best instruction, but you get a good agent, and learn how to light a cigarette on stage in the West End”). LAMDA teaches earnestness of purpose and intense belief in The Theater and your own ro
les. Central is currently the most technical, with classes in singing, dance, mime, and stage accents.

  Condemnation and ridicule of the Actors’ Studio style of training is general. “I don’t care how somebody feels about a part—that’s between him and his conscience,” Jonathan says. “What I want is an actor who can say a line eighteen different ways. I am not running a clinic.” Yet a few minutes later he is talking about the relation between his current job and the one he was trained for. “Directing and diagnostic medicine are mirror images. In both cases you’re concerned with small physical signs which connote deep inner states. But you work in opposite directions.”

  Theater Superstitions

  These are famous, of course. Putting your shoes on a table or whistling in the dressing room are bad luck. Worst of all is using the word “Macbeth”; it must always be referred to as “the Scottish play’“ and the leading actor must be called by his first name during rehearsal. Even if these rules are followed, the play is unlucky, and there is a long tradition of disasters occurring during production. Beyond these specific superstitions, there is a general readiness to believe in the supernatural, or at least the uncanny. During the nunnery scene, Peter is supposed to snatch from Nicola’s hands the rosary she has been holding, and throw it to the floor. In rehearsal, one chilly dark day, he does this with such vehemence that it slides across the room into a far corner. At the next break Nicola goes to retrieve the rosary, but she cannot find it. A full-scale search develops; furniture and objects are moved, but the thing has vanished, perhaps down a crack in the skirting board. “It’s a small miracle,” Jonathan says. “The first of many.” There is general uneasy laughter and jokes about God’s displeasure with this production; finally Jonathan promises to get the rosary Nicola will use in the play deconsecrated.