Alan Rickman (26 page)

‘Sinclair in the film was a calm, solid, eccentric, tender man, rather like Alan. I'm not shy of him. I have never found him intimidating; that's Alan. He and Rima came to see me in Stephen Poliakoffs play
Sweet Panic
at Hampstead Theatre in 1996, and he's the kind of person who always knows nice places to eat. That sort of thing fascinates me about him, though I couldn't begin to say what he's about. I always feel very positive about him; I never feel intimidated by him.

‘Sometimes I feel as if he's playing a game of being aloof on purpose, but it's just the way he is. Sometimes he takes his time before he's worked out what's going on.'

After wall-to-wall filming, Rickman was ready to head back to theatre with the Japanese play
Tango At The End Of Winter
, the story of an actor in crisis. His old friend Peter Barnes adapted it for the Edinburgh Festival and the West End stage, with the legendary director Yukio Ninagawa directing it.

Rickman played Sei in the Kunio Shimuzu play about a famous matinée idol whose wife urges him to go back to the stage in order to stay sane. ‘He has the usual actor's madness,' Rickman told Jessica Berens in the September 1991 issue of
Tatler.
‘You know,
the voices inside the head. The usual . . . this is terrible, why on earth are you doing this?' What a prophetic question; and very appropriate in these circumstances.

His hooded eyes already looked the part; he was perfect for an Asiatic role. Unfortunately, even Peter Barnes' adaptation couldn't save this ponderous theatrical metaphor for life. Why did Alan do it? Because it was produced by his old friend Thelma Holt, who has been called ‘the last true impresario' of the British stage. Like Alan, she's a dedicated internationalist. But ultimately the name of Ninagawa, the Japanese Peter Brook, sold the project to Alan. There is a mystique about Ninagawa, as with Dennis Potter, whose own flawed script for
Mesmer
would later involve Alan in a major law-suit and creative stalemate for the first time in his career.

Amid much publicity about rehearsals stopping for Japanese tea ceremonies, one sensed a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Rickman had seen Ninagawa's
Medea
and thought: ‘This is what the word “unforgettable” means.' Not everyone agreed: I remember a fellow critic muttering ‘This is the campest thing since
Sunset Boulevard
' as he and I fled to file copy at the end of the show as though our trousers were on fire.

But Rickman rationalised it to himself in an interview with Peter Lewis in
The Sunday Times
in 1991: ‘If you have such an experience watching someone's work and are then asked to work with him, you are not being true to yourself unless you do,' he said. Usually he's too analytical and too aware of his working-class roots to gush, but this appealed to his quixotic side.

‘It wasn't an easy decision. But there's a voice somewhere inside that eventually packs the suitcase. It said, “If you are any good in films, it's only because of what you do in the theatre.” Hence the sideways move in what many have seen as a quirky career. But as Albert Finney once pointed out, actors don't ascend a great golden staircase to the heavens – it doesn't work like that.

Rather more prosaically, Ninagawa had chosen Rickman for the lead after seeing him in
Die Hard
– wherein he shot a Japanese tycoon in the head. He had also caught a preview of
Truly Madly Deeply
.

Ninagawa is clearly not cocooned from reality, even if he does issue such statements as: ‘The playwright is the mother, the actors are the father, and between them they bear the child called Theatre. As director, I am only the midwife.'

And the critics played King Herod. I reviewed the première at Edinburgh for the
Daily Express
: ‘Only the legendary status of Yukio Ninagawa can have persuaded Hollywood's favourite British villain Alan Rickman to star in this empty domestic epic about a Japanese actor's mid-life crisis. Yet even he flounders in a cliché-ridden play laden with pretentious symbolism.'

Yet Ninagawa had directed, in Japanese, an unforgettable world-class production of
Macbeth
, with the fall of the cherry blossom symbolising the death of the tyrant and a Samurai parallel with medieval Scotland's war-like hordes.

Tango At The End Of Winter
was Ninagawa's first production with a British cast of actors. He didn't speak English, so they communicated via an interpreter. Ninagawa did his own casting by making people talk about themselves at their auditions while he watched their facial expressions.

Tango
was a popular hit in Japan in 1988, but the predominantly female audiences there worship actors. A play on such a subject was bound to succeed, whereas in the West we see it more as a self-referential indulgence. The action was set in the shabby auditorium of a defunct cinema, with tattered curtains fluttering at the entrance to symbolise the transience of life. Figures from the actor's past appeared and reappeared as if in a dream, summoned by memory, as he struggled with his madness. Acting styles varied wildly, given the language barrier between director and cast. Sylvia Syms' talented daughter, Beatie Edney, played Rickman's mistress, having appeared alongside Alan on Broadway in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. Friends believe that Beatie had a big crush on Rickman; an impression strengthened by the fact that later she dated his lookalike, a morose young actor called Ronan Vibert who is frivolously known as ‘Moanin' Ronan'. He has never quite forgiven the London
Evening Standard
for calling him the poor man's Alan Rickman in the BBC bodice-ripper
The Buccaneers
. Ronan certainly has a piratical smile but not, as yet, Alan Rickman's gracefulness and subtlety.

The elliptical
Tango
was not popular with either reviewers or public at the Piccadilly Theatre, at the time a somewhat jinxed venue that had had more than its fair share of flops (it has since recovered its fortunes with a string of hits).

David Nathan in the
Jewish Chronicle
wrote: ‘Sei's plight is not gripping, especially as conveyed by Alan Rickman, who . . . 
declines from his usual melancholic lassitude into terminal lethargy.'

Benedict Nightingale in
The Times
thought it lacked coherence as Rickman reeled about, ‘filling the stage with his sardonic self-absorption', in the role of the actor who goes mad because he fears he has lost his talent. Could this be a dry-run for
Hamlet
?

‘“This is embarrassing,” announces Alan Rickman halfway through, and the guy ain't joking,' wrote Lyn Gardner in
City Limits.
Jack Tinker in the
Daily Mail
found Rickman ‘languid to the point of torpor'.

Yet Michael Billington in the
Guardian
felt that ‘the play is a dense tissue of allusions to
Hamlet, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Casablanca, Limelight
and an old Ronald Colman movie . . . Rickman exactly captures the Hamlet-like melancholy, the doomed romanticism, the exquisite narcissism of this falling star. It . . . makes me hope someone will cast Rickman as Shakespeare's gloomy Dane forthwith.' Someone did: Thelma Holt a year later.

Although the finale featured a beautiful transformation-scene, most critics, nevertheless, felt the journey there wasn't worth the effort.

The lack of narrative drive made it a difficult vehicle for the West End, which at least demands a good story from its artier endeavours. So the production was a commercial failure, despite a strictly limited season that turned out to be something of a loss-cutting exercise. Alan's old English teacher Ted Stead feels strongly about it to this day. ‘Alan was very disappointed with the reaction to
Tango At The End Of Winter,'
says Stead, who took a party of schoolboys to see Alan's performance. ‘Alan found eight performances a week very trying and demanding, and the reception was lukewarm. He was going to do
Peer Gynt
with the same director, but that never materialised.

‘I'm convinced it flopped because Alan wasn't allowed to have star billing in the West End; it was the director who got the billing,' argues Ted, who believes that the crowds would have come if Alan's name had been prominently displayed. Certainly, Peter Barnes testifies to the enthusiasm of the Rickman fans that did make it to the stage door. But Thelma Holt explains: ‘Alan specifically didn't want star billing. It was an ensemble company, therefore the billing was alphabetical.' And Alan himself had gamely told the
Sunday Times'
Peter Lewis on 4 August 1991: ‘I'm
trying to make myself like an empty vessel, a piece of equipment labelled actor.' This was test-tube theatre.

In Japan, Ninagawa is a god whose word is not questioned. For once, Alan didn't argue; and he was also obliged to submit to the strict regime of the Taiwanese director Ang Lee on the film
Sense And Sensibility
five years later. All very noble in the cause of good global relations, but such self-effacing modesty just didn't make commercial sense in the West End where Alan Rickman would have brought the faithful flocking to theatre's equivalent of Eric Cantona, had the billing deified the right guy. Alan's fans had to search for his name near the end of the list underneath the banner headline ‘The Ninagawa Company'. In retrospect, it was pointlessly purist of him. His talent and personality elevate him.

In a curious twist ten years later, the Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri was to recruit him as her dancing partner in the video for ‘In Demand' and thus enhance his street-cred even more. As she explained, ‘I thought it had to be someone who would rip your coat off and pull you into the tango, so I thought of Alan Rickman.' Well, quite. Who wouldn't? He does rather throw himself into these things, as Emma Thompson found out when he whirled her round the room at a
Sense And Sensibility
location party.

But the bold experiment in international theatre was not to be the last for Alan and Thelma. They had taken the hint about
Hamlet
.

THE FOYER OF
the Royal Court Theatre in London's Sloane Square is well accustomed to the odd loud-mouthed wino who comes in from the cold steps outside. No problem. Even after it reopened in February 2000 with an urban-chic redesign which included a front-of-house revamp that left the box-office looking more like the
maitre d's
desk at a fashionable restaurant, the home of the theatrical angry brigade can still cope with noise pollution on any scale. If the evening – either on or off the stage – has been completely devoid of what Dr Feelgood used to call firkin this and firkin that, I never feel I've had my money's worth from the Court. The old 70s chocolate-and-orange decor of the main house used to scream at you, of course; and if you're a sensitive vegetarian, the gorgeous new leather seats now scream at you instead. And even after its refit, the late-Victorian building that first introduced George Bernard Shaw's loquacious jaw-jaw to British audiences still regularly rattles to the sound of the tube trains entering and leaving the underground station next door. It's not a place to go for a quiet time.

However, a public shouting-match between the actor Alan Rickman and the theatre director Jules Wright over their rival bids to run the Riverside Studios arts centre shocked even the hard cases. Three years later, everyone at the Court still remembered the row.

The acrimonious confrontation took place on 28 November 1993, the night of departing Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark's fund-raising party for his new Out Of Joint theatre company. That well-known character, ‘Arfur (Half of) London', had been invited to send Max on his way; all the more amazing, then, that the furious exchange of views between the irate Alan and Jules was never leaked to the outside world.

What Jules now describes as ‘a fairly monumental row in which everyone else was extremely entertained' was the culmination of five months of tension and acrimony directed towards Jules Wright.

The so-called ‘Rivergate' affair in the summer of 1993 led to a furious campaign in the Press by the supporters of Alan Rickman
and the producer Thelma Holt, who headed a starry consortium to take over a dilapidated white elephant in West London's Hammersmith. It was their ambition to turn it into a new Royal National Theatre.

Among the allegations were stories about a missing – perhaps stolen – document that was leaked to the Press, plus the extraordinary sight of Alan Rickman handing a queue of bemused theatre-goers copies of a published letter of support from leading theatre critics. That kind of activism hardly goes with the languid image of a man who likes chaise-lounging around.

The previous year had begun exceptionally well for Rickman's career, but Rima's political ambitions were to be bitterly thwarted. On 26 January 1992, Alan was named Best Actor in the London
Evening Standard
Film Awards for his threefold triumph in
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Close My Eyes
and
Truly Madly Deeply.
For her performance in the latter, his friend Juliet Stevenson deservedly won the Best Actress trophy.

‘Now I know it's possible to win an award for over-acting,' quipped Rickman, referring to that witty old slimeball, the Sheriff of Nottingham.

He was busy, busy, busy. Rickman and Ruby Wax had formed their own production company, Raw Produce, to develop ideas that would exploit their shared sense of humour. It was Alan who put a shape to the Ruby Wax phenomenon, bringing her one-woman show into London's West End for a short season in April before a provincial tour. Rickman was turning out to be quite a Svengali with his American Trilby.

At the same time, he was also quietly helping Rima with her General Election campaign. A slightly scowling Rickman could be spotted lurking modestly at the edge of a photograph of Labour candidates and their supporters in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea.