My Life in Pieces (62 page)

Many heavyweight actors have succeeded in losing substantial amounts of avoirdupois, only to find that their careers have whittled away, too. Sometimes the thing you want to change most is the essential ingredient of yourself, the fuel of your talent. Old timers will tell you that nothing Peter O’Toole did after having his nose altered to play Lawrence of Arabia comes within a mile of what he achieved in the glory days at the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company when, as Peter Hall says, he led with his nose. Noses, being so unavoidable, are something of a focus for obsession. Barbra Streisand’s refusal to tamper with her stupendous natural endowment was a heroic gesture, the greatest blow for nose lib since Cyrano de Bergerac. Men are often embarrassed, for crudely Freudian reasons, it would appear, by smallness in that department. Orson Welles almost never appeared on stage or film without prosthetic enhancement of one sort or another. Anxiety about overendowment remains more common. Welles told the tragic story of Everett Sloane, Mr Bernstein in
Citizen Kane
, who thought he looked older than he was. Longing to be a
jeune premier
, or at least a leading man, he decided that his nose was the obstacle. He began, as Welles said, ‘bobbing it’; twenty operations later, with no discernible improvement in his career, he killed himself.

Any devotion to an external image must surely tamper with the actor’s freedom. The present cult of the body beautiful, especially among men, is terribly dangerous. The
summum bonum
of a worked-out body is a tight stomach; ab fab, indeed. But a free, relaxed stomach is vital for the free
expression of emotion. The stomach, rather than the heart, was held by the Elizabethans to be the centre of the emotions; almost any emotional reaction – fear, anger, lust – is experienced first through the stomach, so anything which turns the stomach to steel must limit the actor.

Every era has its
beau idéal
, a physical matrix which we all – consciously or unconsciously – measure ourselves against. This body fascism has started to create cloned actors. They all look the same. Attending a recent performance at that excellent drama school, the Drama Centre, I was struck by how much more physically athletic the actors were than in my day, a quarter of a century ago. ‘But where are the fat ones?’ I wanted to know. ‘Where are the long spindly ones?’ I wonder whether we’ll ever see the likes of Margaret Rutherford or Ernest Thesiger again. They’d be down at the gym, valiantly eliminating what made them such fascinating representatives of the human race. Actors take huge delight in transforming, popping up as someone different. A romantic leading actor like Brad Pitt metamorphoses as frequently and as radically as a self-confessed character actor like Dustin Hoffman, changing his appearance every time, altering the colour of his hair, the colour of his
eyes.

Yet, somehow, it’s still old Brad up there, not because his exquisite physique remains the perfect creation that it is, but because his imagination has merely exercised itself on his appearance, not engaging with his centre. Some years ago, Robert De Niro was hugely admired for his performance as Jake la Motta in
Raging Bull
, above all for having gained a couple of stone to play the character. To the extent that all anybody thought about while watching the performance was: ‘Gosh, what a lot of weight he’s put on!’ Similarly, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of
Mary Shel
ley’s Frankenstein
, we marvelled at Ken’s new body – almost more impressive than Dr Frankenstein’s creation of the monster – but were thus barred from entering the obsessed brain of the young scientist; while Rupert Everett’s work in progress on that sculptural masterwork, his torso, leaves us awed by the hours spent on the Nautilus machines, but some way away from the haunted husband in
The Comfort of Strangers
(as well as having given him a rather strange swaying gait – so much muscle must be hard to move around).

Far from credibility being enhanced, attention is drawn away from the character onto the actor. This is surely not what is meant by character acting. That self-confessedly plain woman, the late Edith Evans, with minimum recourse to the make-up box, made thousands of spectators believe
that she was beautiful. Laurence Olivier, a man of medium height and slight build, appeared on stage to be a giant. While they were acting, they were, respectively, beautiful and gigantic. This is the true mystery of acting; it is the magic of transformation. The part of the brain that is the essence of the actor’s gift has not yet been identified by medical science, but it is that part with which, by thought alone, the mind transforms the body. So that body has to be ready and waiting. Nothing more is required of it.

Stamina and the ability to perform whatever you demand of your body is
of course indispensable to actors, especially in musicals, in which actors
are far more liable to appear than they once were. I made my all-singing,
all-dancing debut on stage very late in the day, in
The Woman in White
.
I thought at the time that for me this was the theatrical
ne plus ultra
: I
had never dreamed of appearing in a musical. I never dreamed of
appearing in a pantomime again, either, but coming back to
Aladdin
was
outrageously exhilarating, as Ian McKellen had discovered the year before.
I wrote this for the
Guardian
in 2006.

Last year, after a gap of thirty-two years, I returned to one of the commanding peaks of dramatic literature: Abanazar in
Aladdin
. This was by no means a case of seeking to relive a joyous experience:
Aladdin
in Lincoln was one of the more alarming chapters in my professional life, dodging flying Coca-Cola bottles and other weapons of mass destruction expertly lobbed by the infant audience, accompanied by cries of ‘Fook off, poof’. These juvenile critics were not entirely unjustified in their lack of enthusiasm for what they were witnessing: we had no idea what we were doing. I based my performance on the late great Bill Fraser, Widow Twankey gave a very creditable impersonation of Frankie Howerd, and everybody else did whoever or whatever they could do. A feeling for the form was largely absent. I’m not sure any of us had actually seen a panto. Over the years, I’ve caught up, seeing the great pantos at the Glasgow Citizens’ in the Seventies, fresh as paint, the Martin Duncan ones at Stratford East, so wittily designed by Ultz, Danny La Rue’s extravaganzas, Ian McKellen’s saucy postmodern romp at the Old Vic. I was not especially tempted to appear in any of them, delightful though they all were: my secret yearning was to be part of a panto which was head-on traditional,
with a dame built like a brick shithouse, a very leggy girl as principal boy, and me as a madly braying villain with a heart of pure malice.

When I was offered Abanazar in the
Aladdin
at the Richmond Theatre, I didn’t need to ask whether it was traditional or not: Christopher Biggins was directing it and in it, so of course it was (although even he was unable to swing the principal boy thing. It may be a political correctness issue. Instead we got Rosa Luxemburg’s grandson Henry. Go figure). The script was entirely satisfactory: the storytelling was brisk, the jokes appalling, the characters familiar. There were a number of references to television and to supermarkets, which is quite proper: Victorian pantos were similarly strewn with points of reference from everyday life, but there was no attempt to drag in characters from other media. It was the authentically bizarre but consistent world of comic-book China, a never-never land filled with everything oriental the Western imagination had ever encountered: the Willow pattern, Chinese laundries, pigtails, rickshaws, an Emperor (who speaks with a Japanese accent), take-away dim sum. The design, despite having been round the block a few times, was really rather exquisite, with delicately painted backcloths and flats, which are so uncommon in the theatre these days as to be positively radical. The musical score was the usual hotchpotch of songs from other shows –
Annie
,
Mamma Mia!
– plus, as the big number, ‘Show Me the Way to Amarillo’, a song to which I was then a stranger but which is now for ever engraved on my brain.

I was appearing in another show almost up to the first night, but the rehearsal schedule was easily accommodated, since, basically, there is none. We showed up every day for a couple of hours and bashed out the routines, but as almost everything is inextricably bound up with the spectacle, the main achievement was to have learned it. Everyone had done panto before, and they marked their parts, under the amiable leadership of Biggins, who would from time to time bawl out instructions like a fair-ground barker, when he wasn’t actually in a scene, and even then he used to bawl out instructions, often to himself. In adjacent rehearsal rooms, Susan Hampshire and Richard Wilson were engaged in a similar process for
Cinderella
at Wimbledon: the rather austere Jerwood Space in Southwark where all this was taking place became, for a couple of weeks, a panto factory. The Donmar was rehearsing
The Wild Duck
there at the same time; I never did find out who was playing the Dame in that. Or was that
Mother Goose
?

We threw it all together in a scarily short time in Richmond. The scenery was put through its paces at reckless speed; seamstresses were applying rhinestones to costumes as their wearers ran on stage; cash-flow crises were resolved by raiding the box office; dancers snatched warm-ups wherever they could find a vacant square yard (in the corridor, mostly), singers yodelled in their dressing rooms and all in all it resembled every backstage movie you’ve ever seen but the like of which I had never, till then, experienced in real life. Biggins was in field-marshal mode throughout, and being barked at by a large man in a frock is a strangely galvanising experience. Eventually, at the dress rehearsal, he reverted to merely playing the Dame. The producer watched the show and afterwards said some very hurtful things about it and then we were on.

To be precise,
I
was on. Accompanied by a loud bang, a flash of gunpowder and a lung-threatening quantity of dry ice, the curtain whisked up to reveal the vision of nastiness that with the application of a lot of mascara and greasepaint I had become. ‘HahahaHA!!!!’ I roared, but was quite inaudible over the noise coming from the audience, who booed and hissed like maniacs for nearly five minutes before I could speak. Very gratifying. This was not a hostile audience, like Lincoln’s: this was an audience playing the role of an audience at a panto. It’s a wonderful sight, to stare out over the stalls and watch an audience overacting. Finally I am able to persuade them to shut up for a bit while I tell them about this magic ring I have which will summon the genie. But how? I invite suggestions as to what I should do with my ring. ‘Rub it, rub it, RUB it,’ they all scream – all of them, all ages, genders, classes, races – roaring and shrieking. ‘You want me to
rub my ring
?’ I ask, eyebrows arched in disbelief. ‘An unusual suggestion, but I might as well give it a try.’ They’re howling away, and over the roar one wit shouts out, ‘It’s behind you!’ That’s the great thing about panto: you don’t even have to make your own jokes.

After a spot of vigorous rubbing, much applauded, there’s more gunpowder and yet more smoke, and – da-dum! – Patsy Kensit is standing there in all her loveliness and there’s a sort of tidal wave of pleasure from the auditorium because there she really is, off the telly and out of the papers, there before their very eyes, in person, not a facsimile, only feet away from them. This celebrity factor is an indispensable ingredient of the event, a touch of glamour, a piece of real magic. We whisk off to find Aladdin; Widow Twankey is on next, and Biggins unleashes his personality on the audience who are suitably overwhelmed by it. He has (as in
life) a genius for creating immediate intimacy. It’s as if he’s in their front room, a bit bossy, incurably curious, asking them all sorts of personal questions, getting some hapless chap up on stage to hand over his coat, which is then thrown in the washing machine, to be returned to him in shreds. ‘
What
a good sport you are!’ cries Biggins, as he all but throws him down the stairs back into his seat.

Wishee Washee, played by the brilliant young comedian Frankie Doodle, seems to come from another age, a more innocent one than Biggins or Kensit or me. He teaches the audience some odd chant with which they’re to greet him every time he walks on stage, which they obediently do. They’re up for it all. I can see the front ten rows very clearly: it’s very touching to see families together, sometimes four generations from the smallest kid to his great-granddad. Fathers generally take the most warming-up, they’re there as a chore, and stare at us moodily but after a quarter of an hour, they’ve given in completely. The children mostly have toys with flashing lights that they buy in the auditorium and they switch these on and off quite arbitrarily. Normally, the slightest fidget in the auditorium vexes me, but here, it’s Liberty Hall. Anything, pretty well, goes. They talk, they shout out, they stand up and walk about. As long as they’re awake and looking in the general direction of the stage, it’s fine by me. They are invariably ecstatic when the flying carpet hovers over them, and the toilet-roll sequence is pure paradise. What’s astonishing is how passionately the kids care about the outcome of events on stage. When Aladdin momentarily considers giving Abanazar the lamp, they scream themselves hoarse, as if his life were at stake. How they hate me. How pleasing this is.

Biggins is particularly good at teasing the audience, stepping in and out of character, or rather in and out of the characters of Biggins and Widow Twankey. His interviews with the children, though always kindly, carry a slight air of disapproval. His questions concern their homes and what Santa will bring. One child confidently declares that this year Santa will bring him a toilet. The embarrassment of the child’s parents and the crowing of other parents in the audience are full of the anxiety which lies behind all comedy. When John, the chap who lost his overcoat in the first half, comes back up to get it (dry-cleaned, Biggins assures him, though it is no such thing), Biggins announces ‘And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: John will sing “Show Me the Way to Amarillo”,’ and he does, but only with the rest of us as part of the curtain call.
The audience is made to get on its feet, and there was never a show when I wasn’t moved almost to tears by the sight of them all on their feet, belting out this corny old rouser, all the generations, all the ages, all the races – more than once I saw a large Indian family in the front rows who were obviously utterly captivated by the whole thing, beaming at everything with great dazzling smiles, and it occurred to me that it must be like the Kathakali drama with its gods and demons, desperate lovers and pesky old parents. Or perhaps just Bollywood. Whatever else it is, it’s like nothing else in the theatre. It is the last remnant of the
Commedia dell’Arte
, the final refuge of the music hall, the ultimate flourish of burlesque. It depends on strong, clear plots, larger-than-life characters, surreal verbal comedy. It can allude to television, but it cannot be of it. It is the theatre theatrical in all its living glory.