My Life in Pieces (26 page)

In a sense, he had outlived his age. The world of theatre to which he had devoted himself had changed out of all recognition, although, paradoxically, he seemed, when he died at the age of ninety-six, younger than ever, a constantly witty figure, perennially fresh and alive. His countenance, once noble and Roman, had become softer, pinker and rounder, the face of the bonniest baby imaginable. Always appreciated, generally admired, he was by now universally loved, even by those who had never set foot in a theatre.

At Sotheby’s the distinguished guests, including many a knight and a dame of the British Empire, were decidedly of the theatre theatrical, and they were to be observed scattered around the room in anecdotal clusters, telling and retelling their favourite Gielgud stories, all attempting with greater or lesser accuracy the readily imitable voice, with its unique music, starting with a husky warble, oscillating legato around a couple of notes before ending with a characteristic descending fifth. Most of the stories devolved on the failure of his self-censorship mechanism, leading him to blurt out his inner thoughts at the most unfortunate moments. ‘We’ve been working like blacks,’ he said in the presence of the West Indian actor Tommy Baptiste. ‘Not your kind of black, of course, Tommy.’ The solecism was always the more delicious because so felicitously expressed, as if he suffered from a sort of epigrammatic Tourette’s syndrome or as if, perhaps, his subconscious had been scripted by Congreve. Although capable of the silliest of puns, the most direct of Anglo-Saxon expletives and the naughtiest of suggestions, his delight in his own sallies was always so complete and so infectious, and the delivery so impeccable, that one was swept away on a small tidal wave of merriment. ‘Poor Laughton!’ he said to me once, ‘he was so ill at the end, they had to have lorry drivers shipped in for him from the East Coast!’ and then laughed till he almost wept, as did I.

Equally, he could suddenly be moved to tears of sadness by the memory of something which suddenly struck him. It was all part of the lightning speed of his mind, his instant responsiveness to thought. His heart and his mind were as one. In no sense was he, nor would he have claimed to
be, an intellectual, but his active intelligence, the rapidity with which one thought succeeded another, was palpable, visible and in the air like an electrical storm. Congratulated on his consummately quirky performance in
No Man’s Land
at the Old Vic during Olivier’s regime, he famously remarked ‘Oh, do you think so? I don’t know why I got the part, really, I think it’s only because Larry’s dead – I mean dying – I mean much much better.’ This celerity of brain was at the core of his acting, that and the great openness of his heart. His particular genius for Shakespeare and the writers of the Restoration period derived from his instinctive sense of their rhythm and melody, which formed a conduit for the lightning transitions of thought and emotion he matchlessly purveyed. He spoke the words of these writers as if it was the most natural – the only – way in which to speak, and indeed, being with him one felt as if one was oneself in a play by one of these masters; until, that is, one opened one’s own mouth and spoke.

He was an all-consuming reader, and his library is one of the glories of the collection at Sotheby’s, including an exquisite edition of
Hamlet
with Gordon Craig illustrations. He devoured books, his swift brain racing through their pages and delivering instant and often very funny judgements on the contents. He was, too, a tireless correspondent, always replying in person and by hand to letters in which he simply transferred his conversation to the page, bubbling over with gossip, some of it fifty years old, full of non sequiturs, but always faultlessly composed. The letters’ appearance on the page was as distinctive as everything else about him, the left hand margin drifting inexorably to the right, so that the last couple of lines on the page would consist of no more than two or three words.

In his long career and life, he had had many failures, and no one spoke more openly about them than he, but they were never failures of courage or taste. This was perhaps one of the points of common ground that he and Ralph Richardson may have found when they eventually came to be close friends. They were never rivals – as Olivier and Gielgud had been, though in truth the rivalry in that case mostly came from Olivier – and scarcely played the same line of parts, but, as Richardson later admitted, the odd-looking, powerfully built, vigorously heterosexual fellow with a mad twinkle in his eye, struggling initially to find his niche on the stage, felt nervous in the company of the thoroughbred homosexual aesthete upon whom favour seemed to descend as of divine right from the gods
of theatre. From the beginning Gielgud had the manners and the looks of a matinee idol; Richardson was cut of coarser cloth. While Gielgud made Shakespearean role after role his own – Hamlet, Richard II, Romeo, Prospero, Lear, Leontes – Richardson never seemed comfortable with the great heroes. His stupendous Falstaff (a prose role, of course) was a rare success for him in an Elizabethan play; instead he was able to conquer the great outsiders: Peer Gynt, Cyrano de Bergerac. J. B. Priestley wrote a number of plays for him which exploited the unique prose poetry of his acting, the visionaries, the battered romantics, the men of mystery, of which the supreme example was his Inspector Goole in the original production of
An Inspector Calls
.

He had within him a divine spark all the more extraordinary for the rough-hewn exterior. He had access, as an actor, to profound darkness and an ability to convey the numinous denied any of his contemporaries. He was capable of an exquisite sentimental tenderness, too, but somewhere underneath the surface there was always a latent power, bordering on violence. When Peter Shaffer told Gielgud in the late Fifties that he was writing a play about an axe murderer, Gielgud told him without a moment’s hesitation ‘Oh, you must get Ralph.’ He became ever more eccentric, or perhaps one should simply say he became ever more himself. His mania for fast cars and then large Harley Davidson motorbikes persisted well into his late seventies; he was famous for the parrot that perched on his shoulder when he was at home in Regent’s Park, where he sat in his study at the top of the house, sipping Scotch, brooding over his scripts. In the evening when he and his second wife Meriel – the Lady Mu, as he called her – dined alone together, they both wore full formal dress (it is the Lady Mu’s recent demise which has occasioned the sale of the present collection). Richardson’s conversation, too, bordered on the gnomic. Asked to appear in an Amnesty Gala for Imprisoned Writers, he said, ‘I don’t think so. You see, I think all writers should be put in prison.’

In life and in his performances he came to resemble a Zen Master, transcending all conventional notions of behaviour or of thought, cutting through to deeper and more surprising truths. His voice, like his bearing, was interior sprung, an astonishingly unnatural instrument in which vowels of no known geographical provenance were rolled on the tongue like a fine dry sherry, but the end result was expressive, true and always surprising. The tremble from the mild Parkinson’s disease from which he latterly suffered added to the sense of otherness, but it was a very earthy,
a very English otherness, the strangeness of Herne the Hunter, a figure from ancient folklore. There was nothing fey about Sir Ralph.

His taste in clothes, in furnishings and in art was equally original but equally grounded, as the catalogue of his collection reveals. Like Gielgud, he had trained as a painter, but while Gielgud’s instinct was towards the beautiful surface, Richardson sought things of solid craftsmanship and profound significance. There is a feeling about his possessions that he could have made any of them; Gielgud is simply a collector. There is in Richardson’s catalogue a magnificent mahogany folio stand of 1825, a fine creation of struts and hinges, at once practical and beautiful, that is particularly expressive of its former owner. There are timepieces of many sorts; each painting and drawing has an individual power. The William Nicholsons are especially fine, but there are watercolours by Rodin and Wilson Steer, drawings by Lear and Gaudier-Brzeska. The Egyptian figures are exquisite and powerful. Gielgud surrounded himself with charming things, but Richardson’s seem to be part of him.

In both cases, a rich and complex human being is revealed by these collections. Both men, in their entirely different ways, were English eccentrics in the grand tradition, but in both, the spirit, burning so bright within them, transcended affectation. We tell stories about them, not because they were cards, or even because they were exceptionally talented, though God knows they were both both of those things, but because they filtered life through the medium of their souls to create new and rich variations on the human condition: they lived their art to the fullest extent possible. Of whom shall we be telling stories now?

There were, in those days, still companies at the National. Each audito
rium had one, with a director of its own: the Cottesloe, under Bill Bryden
(to which James Grant and the so frequently horizontal Derek Newark
belonged); the Lyttelton, under Michael Rudman; and the Olivier, under
Christopher Morahan, to which I was proud to belong because of the
name. I was ‘an Olivier actor’. Actors didn’t move from one stage to
another, and there was a certain jokey rivalry between us. Dexter quickly
mastered the vast and wide-open Olivier stage, although his bleak and
wintry
As You Like It
, in which, to everyone’s amazement, I played
Orlando, pleased few critics (though audiences took to it well enough). But
the play moved me deeply, the perfection of its music, the freshness of its
discovery of love. I became aware of something I had not quite experi
enced on
Titus
(perhaps because Shakespeare hadn’t yet, either): the
absolute naturalness of the writing, transforming you into the character
even as you speak the lines.

No sooner was
As You Like It
up and running than rehearsals for
Amadeus
started. The play was now being directed – to John Dexter’s intense and
unconcealed disgust – by Peter Hall. It arrived at a critical moment in the
fortunes of the National Theatre on the South Bank, which was just recov
ering from its traumatic early birth pangs: the uncomfortable takeover by
Hall from Olivier, the industrial action which threatened its very existence,
and a number of very public failures. The theatre deeply needed a smash
hit. It got it. It was such an extraordinary event for all of us that I think it
worth printing another, rather different piece about it, written in 2009 for
Gramophone
magazine.

Amadeus
is thirty years old. If that makes you feel a little long in the tooth, think what it’s doing to me. Peter Hall who directed it and Peter Shaffer who wrote it and I who first played the role of Mozart assembled the other day on the stage of the Olivier Theatre at the Royal National Theatre where it was first performed, and chewed the fat. Or was it the cud? In fact, having us all together there (for the first time since the play opened, as it happens) only reminded us of how electric and risky it all seemed at the time. Not that we ever doubted that the play was going to be a success. In fact, it was already – as Oscar Wilde might have said – the most enormous success, before a single customer had crossed the foyer. The moment it was announced, the combination of Shaffer, Scofield and Mozart led to a box-office siege. This, of course, made it all the more nerve-racking for those of us who assembled in Rehearsal Room One at the National some eight weeks before the first night to read the play for the first time. Could we possibly satisfy expectations? What Peter had written was deeply provocative. It offered a portrait of the composer that was profoundly at odds with the public perception of him. Students of Otto Jahn’s three-volume
Life
and Otto Deutsch’s
Documentary Biogra
phy
(and indeed of Emily Andersen’s translation of the – very carefully –
Selected Letters
) were aware that Mozart was, at the very least, a complex figure, but the general view, the view of music lovers everywhere, was of a rococo manikin, sweetly childlike, tragically early death casting a halo over him.

So there was tension in the air. Without being competitive in the anxiety stakes, I think I can safely say that I was more nervous than anyone else. Neither Paul Scofield, nor Peter Shaffer, nor Peter Hall, had ever seen me act. I had been cast by John Dexter, who was originally slated to direct the play, but he had left the production amid sparks of vituperation and recrimination, like the Queen of the Night. Not that he’d seen me act, either. I had, thank God, acted with Felicity Kendal, but I had much to prove. I was also nervous because it was a very difficult part. It was Mozart seen through Salieri’s eyes, vindictively and selectively; even the music was misremembered through his distorting ears.

Mozart makes his first appearance as a pussycat, chasing his wife; there is some seriously smutty talk, after which, uproariously cachinnating, he disappears. He then reappears variously as arrogant, silly, pugnacious and jealous. Shaffer allows him one or two brief moments to speak seriously about music, and then he’s back to his Tourette’s syndrome self. There’s a magnificent long speech to the masked man he thinks is God, but is in fact Salieri, then he relapses into childishness and oblivion in his wife’s arms. All wonderful acting opportunities, but fraught with danger. At the reading, I gave it my best shot. Perhaps rather better than my best shot. In fact, I may have shot my bolt, giggling, shrieking, sobbing. I feared the worst when Peter Hall put an arm round my shoulder and said, ‘That was a very brave performance.’ What he said next, however, transformed my work (and probably my career): ‘But I have to believe at all times that he wrote the Overture to
The Marriage of Figaro
.’ That became my task for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, Paul Scofield was quietly getting on with his towering performance and we began tentatively to engage in the play’s dance of death.