Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (14 page)
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Authors: William B. Davis
All of this is interesting speculation, but we had a season to prepare. Tony had decided that instead of doing weekly rep in the spring season, we would mount a true repertory season. We would present five plays, alternating them through the season. The potential advantages were twofold: towards the end of the season we could do more performances of successful shows and, hopefully, we could find more rehearsal time for each play, the continuing challenge for stock companies of the time. One huge disadvantage would only become apparent later. No potboilers for me in this season. I was to direct William Gibson’s
Two for the Seesaw
and Arnold Wesker’s
Roots
.
Tony and I headed to London to audition actors for parts that had not yet been cast. I had arranged for one pretty good Canadian actor to play in
Two for the Seesaw
, Donald Sutherland. Coming in to see us for the other role was another Canadian and one of my favourite actresses from Toronto, Jackie Burroughs. We had cast Jackie in summer stock based on seeing her one and only previous play, a Trinity College production at Hart House directed by Herbert Whittaker, when she really didn’t know if she wanted to be an actress or not. She had lost interest in acting yet again and was working in a low-rent restaurant in Soho when Sutherland saw her and suggested she talk to us about Chesterfield. We cast her in the season and she went on to a marvellous career, largely in Canada, winning tons of awards as a film and television star. Jackie was perfect casting for both
Two for the Seesaw
and the Joan Plowright character in
Roots
. When I walked her downstairs after her audition she gave me this very friendly hug and kiss, well, more than friendly actually. Only later did I realize it was a ‘promise.’ Jackie was a short, slim, red-haired pixie, full of energy and generous to a fault. Later she was to get heavily involved in the Sixties, marry one of the Lovin’ Spoonfuls, and, in the words of one CBC director, “never got out.” Be that as it may she was to play the lead for me years later in my first major radio drama, George Bernard Shaw’s
Man and Superman
.
With a cast like that, how could you lose? There was one major flaw in Tony’s plan for a repertory season. Normally a theatre has at least one ‘dark’ night, a day that can be used for set up and technical rehearsal for the next play. In Tony’s new scheme the first play opened normally at the beginning of the week but the second play, my
Two for the Seesaw
, opened on Thursday of the first week even though the first play had played on Wednesday. In other words, there was one day to strike the set of the first play, set up the set for my play, light it, and run technical and dress rehearsal. Someone was dreaming in Technicolor. Perhaps they thought
Two for the Seesaw
was a simple show; it had only two characters and one set. I guess they hadn’t read the news story describing how the touring production that came to Toronto had a crew of forty. The fact is, the play has tons of prop changes, to say nothing of sound and light cues. Perhaps I was remiss in not warning Tony of the challenges. In any event the play did open, sort of. Opening night was a catalogue of disasters, missing props, missing sound cues. The proverbial rug was truly pulled from these wonderful actors.
What made things worse for the two stranded actors was the way we had rehearsed the play. Unlike many productions in rep we did not impose a structure of action and gesture. With the luxury of a little extra rehearsal time we explored the underlying interplay between the characters and allowed the action to take its own shape. What one actor did or said prompted the next response which led to the next. Of course all acting should be like this, but seldom is. So often, two pre-planned performances are presented side by side. I often used to say a play is what goes on between the characters. Donald and Jackie responded well to this approach. Adding to the sense of realism, we rehearsed much of the time in my apartment (that was how we got the extra rehearsal time). The strength of this method is the life and vitality brought to the stage. The danger is, if one step is missing, the whole fabric can crumble. And, more or less, that’s what happened on opening night. A missing prop or a missing phone cue and the actor has no prepared performance to fall back on. S/he is left vulnerable and struggling. The result was truly a disappointment and no fault of the performers.
And yet, on the next performance two days later, the coin flipped. Most of the technical requirements were in place and the performance soared. It was a night in the theatre to remember. We were not watching two actors giving wonderful performances; we were watching two people going through the joys and torments of their lives. This was theatre as I had always dreamed it could be. As it happened, Geoffrey Ost, the Director of the Sheffield Rep, the prestigious theatre company an hour north of Chesterfield, attended this performance. An old pro, he said it was the best night in the theatre that he could remember. He also said I should apply for his job which he was leaving at the end of the current season.
Years later, as we looked back on this production, Donald spoke of how important it was to him and how it was the first time in his career he actually cried, that the emotion welled up unbidden, brought on by the action of the play itself.
As I recall Donald was supposed to be in my next production as well, but left the season early, his film career beginning to gestate. But whether his departure was a response to an actual film offer or pressure from his wife, I’m not sure. At that time Donald was married to Lois Hardwick, an odd match, and not just because she was half his height. She had stayed in London when Donald came to Chesterfield, but one day, to Donald’s dismay it appeared, on that famous tech day I think, she showed up at the theatre unannounced. Why Donald’s dismay? It seemed Lois had not been pleased with Donald’s decision to come to Chesterfield in the first place. What was odd about that to me was that he explained this by saying she thought he ought to be getting on with his career. Foolish me, I thought doing this play, rehearsing it the way we had, developing his acting, would be part of “getting on with his career.” Of course at the time I had no idea that his career would involve becoming a movie star.
But it raises the whole question of how one measures success. Another thing Donald said once has continued to perplex me. He didn’t respect Michael MacOwan, the Principal of LAMDA, because he was a “failure.” Two things worry me about that statement. First, I would have thought, still think, that being Principal of the best drama school in London did not qualify as failure. But perhaps it’s true as Shaw says, “Those who can’t do, teach.” But second, if one is not going to respect anyone who could be deemed a failure, there may be precious few people left to talk to. But there is no denying that Donald’s single-minded pursuit of his goal has borne fruit, whether prompted by Lois or not. Of course it’s also possible that Lois showed up unexpectedly because she was afraid Donald was sleeping with Jackie. He might have been. I never did ask. They hung about together a lot. But after he left, she was sleeping with me.
Meantime we had the production of
Roots
to rehearse and mount. Once again, Jackie did a terrific job in the lead role. Once again the technical side failed me, but this time the failure was artistic and I was complicit. The play has three sets, a challenge for a rep company. The designer proposed a very clever plan of nesting each set inside the other so that rather than having to change the scenery completely, we could simply remove the internal set during each intermission. The only flaw in this plan is that the final set, what would be the front room of this working class family home, would be the largest. And this decision may have cost me the job at Sheffield Rep.
Sheffield, a much larger city than Chesterfield, had a wonderful theatre, smaller, more intimate, and more modern than the Civic. The larger city and smaller theatre allowed for runs of three weeks instead of one and correspondingly more rehearsal time. The theatre had the money and prestige to bring in major actors from time to time. It was a dream job and I was the current director’s chosen candidate. I had hoped Geoffrey Ost would have been as thrilled with
Roots
as he was with
Two for the Seesaw
. Alas, no. In particular he was critical of the large room in the last act. Who knows whether his lukewarm response to
Roots
was the main factor; what is certain is that I interviewed for the position, but in the end they engaged an established English director/actor. My first, but far from my last, professional setback.
Setback number two was only weeks away. As I have said, Tony planned this to be his last season at Chesterfield and had proposed to the Board that I take over from him. While the Board had not made a final decision, it seemed prudent that I pave the way for my succession. To this end, I needed to divest myself of the Straw Hat Players, which I was scheduled to run that summer. With some reluctance I was able to turn the company over to Marshall Bruce and Peter Wylde, who had been an actor in our company, and commit myself to a career in Britain. Just as this transfer was being completed I received my second “Dear John” letter of the year, this one of a professional rather than personal nature. It was a long letter from Tony saying that he and the actress Linda Polan had decided to marry — something of a surprise in itself since I was sure he was gay — and as a consequence he needed a steady job and would not therefore be leaving his position in Chesterfield after all.
When I was a child, our housekeeper had commented that I always wanted the largest soft drink, the largest chocolate bar. Why wasn’t I satisfied with what was good enough? Here was a case in point. In retrospect, Tony’s position was reasonable. I don’t think he had any idea what I had given up. He needed the job and he was quite prepared for me to continue as his associate director. Had I been a kinder, less self-centred person I might have accepted his personal appeal to understand the situation from his point of view. But to my youthful testosterone, his change of heart was a betrayal. I sacrificed my theatre company for his and now he wants to keep his company? There followed an unpleasant conflict in which we both vied for the job. The result? Neither of us got the job.
I’m happy to report that we both landed on our feet. I went to Dundee the next season and he went on to head radio drama for the BBC in the Midlands. He and Linda also went on to have a son; more than that I don’t know. I always had a soft spot for Linda, a very popular character actress, for, among other things, saying that my Don John in
Much Ado
was the best performance in the production. I guess for a director I wasn’t too bad an actor.
The truth is, until it went up in smoke, Dundee offered me more creative opportunities than Chesterfield could. The Dundee Rep now proudly announces that it produces six of its own productions a year. When I went there in 1962, it produced twenty-six a year, a new production every two weeks for the entire year. At that time, the theatre was run by its general manager, as opposed to a director or an actor. In this case it was the marvellously sensitive Jack Henderson, a kindly bearded patriarch who truly loved the theatre and the people who worked in it. On the strength of an interview in Edinburgh he hired me to be Resident Director and, beginning in the summer, to direct eight of the nine productions that would take us to Christmas; he reserved
Hamlet
for himself. He could not commit to the following year as he was unsure of his own future.
Situated on the east coast of Scotland at the frontier of the Scottish Highlands, Dundee was another world. When I first arrived there I stayed in a house belonging to the theatre electrician. One day when I was going home he said there would be some messages outside the door and would I put them inside for him. When I suggested that I could bring them to the theatre when I came back later he looked at me as if I had lost my marbles. How was I to know that in Dundee “messages” means groceries? Eventually I found a charming two-bedroom flat in the upper storey of a house in Broughty Ferry about four miles east of the city. As the days grew shorter, and they grow very short in this northern city, the flat’s charm abated somewhat. Why was my bed so cold? Pretty simple, really. It was damp. And the temperature in the room was below freezing. Nothing like snuggling up to two slabs of ice. I bought an electric blanket. By the time winter truly set in my morning routine went something like this: alarm goes, switch on the electric blanket, leap out of bed and switch on the two electric heaters in the room, run to the bathroom and plug in the heater in the bathroom, run down the hall lighting a match and light the fire in the kitchen that had been set the night before, run back to the bedroom and jump back in bed and wait for twenty minutes. Heating in the theatre was no better and we often rehearsed wearing five or six layers of clothes.
A more makeshift theatre than Chesterfield, the Dundee theatre, upstairs off a side street, was also smaller and more intimate than Chesterfield. Rather plain and beige, in some ways it felt more like an auditorium than a theatre, a problem we would address in a few months time. I shared a humble office with Jack next to the smoke-filled Green Room with its overstuffed furniture and large central table. The intimate theatre bar off the foyer would be where I would meet my second wife.
Best of all for me at the time, the theatre was fortnightly. We had two weeks rehearsal. What a luxury. I developed a rehearsal structure that worked pretty well. For roughly a day and half, maybe even two days, we would read the play and clarify the action of scenes, then we would rough block the play very quickly, in a day or a day and a half. We would then work through the play twice, once with the actors still on book if they wished, and once with the actors off book. If there was time we would do a fast third work through to tighten, followed by a run-through or two and then tech and dress. Actors would sometimes complain that they wanted more run-throughs. They were not mollified when I assured them they would have lots of run-throughs after we opened.
Slowly I was developing an artistic philosophy, one that would take clearer shape in the new year. I wanted the work to be real, but what did that actually mean? Of course it meant, as we have all read, that the actor should identify with the character and not merely represent the character. But what does that mean? For starters, it means that each moment in a scene needs to lead to the next moment, what one character says or does causes, affects, influences what the next character says or does. Sometimes this quest can mean spending a lot of time rehearsing the beginning of a scene. If the opening beats aren’t right then the rest of the scene can’t follow truthfully. A run-through missing key moments can be worse than a waste of time, forcing the actors to fabricate a performance that lacks a proper foundation. Sometimes an actor can have difficulty with a line, and a lot of time can be spent trying to figure out how to get it right when it turns out that the problem is not with the line itself, but with the whole scene leading up to that point. The error in the trajectory of the scene only becomes manifest when the actor has to say this particular line. For a director to focus on these issues was relatively new in the British theatre in the fifties and early sixties. Claire Bloom complains in her memoir,
Limelight and After
, that her theatre directors in the fifties seemed only concerned with creating the picture. It was not until she worked with Tony Richardson on a film that she found a director who engaged with the actor in her process.
My first production at Dundee was a French farce,
Rollo
. In the cast was an actor I knew from LAMDA, Jonathan Elsom. Also in the cast was a South African who would play a significant role in my life and in the Canadian theatre: Maurice Podbrey. A round bear of a man, Maurice was one of those positive, gregarious people one loves to have in an acting company. Trained at the Rose Bruford College in London, he had been a member of the Brian Rix company in London, which was known for its Whitehall Theatre farces. He was a stalwart member of our company for the full year that I was there; I gave him his first directing opportunities and years later invited him to be my assistant at the National Theatre School in Montreal. From there he founded the Centaur Theatre in Montreal and operated this major regional theatre for the next twenty-five years. I guess that theatre would never have existed if he and I had not met in Scotland in 1962.
Little did Maurice and I know what was to come the morning we embarked on a day’s skiing in November. Little did we know about skiing in Scotland when we set out that day. Silly me, I thought when one went skiing one drove one’s car to the area, parked in the lot, got on the lift, and started skiing. When one got hungry one went in for lunch. Very few of these things happened in Glenshee in November 1962. There were two ski lifts in Glenshee then, a chairlift that was indeed near the parking lot and a T-bar on the other side of the valley just a short forty-minute climb from the parking lot. As it happened there was no snow on the T-bar side so we were, for that day at any rate, spared the climb to the bottom of the lift. We were able to walk from the parking lot to the chairlift and ride up the chairlift. Only one problem. There was no snow beside the lift. Skiing in Scotland is predicated on the wind blowing the snow into deep gullies in the bare hills (the trees long ago removed to build ships). Which way the wind blows determines which gully fills with snow. There was indeed a gully filled with snow, dotted with keen skiers, about half a mile away. Undeterred, we hiked along the ridge from the top of the lift to where they were skiing. Since there wasn’t enough snow to get to the bottom of the lift from there, we needed to climb for each ski run. Not a huge problem, we were young and energetic. The bigger problem was that, being young and energetic, we worked up an appetite pretty quickly and we were nowhere near a restaurant. We decided to persist as long as we could before heading down to the bottom and getting something to eat. Perhaps it should have worried us that some of the locals could be seen perched on rocks eating from a lunch they had brought with them. No bother, we would get food at the bottom at the end of the day. Well, the end of the day came and we worked our way down skiing on patches of snow — and patches of heather. Starving, we hopped out of our skis and piled into the base lodge. Food? Oh no, we don’t serve food here. Didn’t you bring any?
Hungry enough to eat the heather we were walking on, we rushed to our car and raced down the mountain road, frantically looking for some place somewhere that might serve food. Every likely place was closed or deserted. Finally —
finally
— we spied a parking lot full of cars beside a small single-storied building. I don’t remember if there was a sign in front; we rushed in hoping against hope. And yes, afternoon tea. All you can eat for five bob. Possibly the best meal of my life.
Truth to tell though, there wasn’t much time for skiing. The actors had Sunday off each week — one of the actors boasted that they had had sun every Sunday since he had been there; it turned out that he meant he had seen the sun at least once on each Sunday — but as director I was involved in the lighting, which we did on the Sunday before opening. Just one free day a fortnight for me. Not that I minded. I was doing what I wanted to do: direct plays, lots of them. And I was on a mission, to change the style of production from nice representations to a dynamic reality. And over the year I was there we had some success with that, and some failure.
We had a pretty amazing company of actors. In addition to Maurice and Jonathan, when I arrived were Pamela Greenall, Brian Stanion (
The Tomorrow People
), Anne Way (
Masterpiece Theatre
), and Hannah Gordon (
Upstairs, Downstairs
). We added, largely from my contacts in LAMDA, Susan Williamson, David Calderisi, Clive Graham, and Dan MacDonald. Oh yes, and there was a fifteen-year-old apprentice to whom we gradually gave larger and larger acting roles, Brian Cox. A more working-class kid than Brian would be hard to find; it’s a testament to his acting skills that he now plays so many upper-class Brits.
Susan Williamson had an interesting way of dealing with her director. If you gave her a move she didn’t like she wouldn’t argue. She would just do it badly. Eventually you were forced to let her do the move she wanted. I am reminded of Douglas Rain’s advice to young actors when he headed the National Theatre School of Canada. Apocryphal perhaps, but the story goes that he dropped in on a rehearsal class where a student was arguing with the director. “No, no,” he is reported to have said to the student, “That is not the correct way to handle this situation. When you get a direction you don’t like,” he counselled, “simply say, ‘Thank you.’ And then do what you were going to do in the first place.”
I confess to quite a crush on Hannah Gordon who played most of the ingenue roles in the season, including Ophelia. Short, youthfully pretty, recently graduated from the Scottish Academy of Dramatic Art, she went on to a very successful career in British television and theatre. She was really too young for me at the wizened age of twenty-four; I don’t think we ever did more than hold hands. Truth is I was no match for the dark-haired beauty, Veronica Caird, daughter of a local business owner and member of the theatre’s board. Invited to Sunday lunch after a brief conversation in the theatre bar with Veronica and her parents, the die was cast. From time to time Jack would caution me to be wary of her pursuit, but to no avail. We were married a year later.
As usual we did a mix of challenging plays and light comedies during the summer and fall. We continued to explore ways to bring a greater sense of reality to the work. We were young, ambitious, and youthfully arrogant but one day it all broke down. We had just opened the American comedy
The Gazebo,
and we were about to start rehearsals for a dreadful British comedy,
The Amorous Prawn
, a play that seemed to turn all decency and morality on its head all in the interest of a few laughs.
Meantime, Veronica was about to leave for Zermatt, Switzerland, for the winter. She and I were an item by now and I was good friends with her parents as well. While playing a lot of bridge, I learned drinking habits that have stayed with me to this day. Drink gin, a light drink, before dinner, and Scotch, a heavier drink, after dinner. (We didn’t drink wine then; now that wine is part of the mix as well it does add up to quite a lot of alcohol.) To see her off, I drove to Edinburgh, a two-hour drive (there was no road bridge across the River Tay in 1962), after the opening performance of
The Gazebo,
and joined her and her parents at a hotel near the airport. We saw Veronica off at the airport at the crack of dawn; sleepless and emotionally exhausted I drove back to Dundee in time for the 10 a.m. rehearsal.
There was only one problem. I was the only one there. The stage manager finally showed up about 10:30. Even the always punctual Hannah Gordon didn’t arrive until 11. As for the less dependable Clive Graham and David Calderisi, I think we finally dragged them in about noon. It seems there had been a very successful opening night party in my absence. And I guess their interest in doing
The Amorous Prawn
was no greater than mine. (Jack had chosen the play — it had had a very successful London run.) My whole life had fallen apart. My girlfriend had left for six months and my acting company was in tatters. I don’t remember what I said to the company once they were all there, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. I sent them all home and said we would start rehearsals the following Monday, lines learned and on time. And we did. It was a very snappy production, one of the best of the season.
Some time in the fall Jack Henderson announced he would not continue as director of the theatre after Christmas. Where had I seen this movie before? A pattern was developing in my career. First at Chesterfield, now at Dundee, it would happen three more times. Within a few months of my arrival the person who hired me would announce their departure. I really don’t think it was me; I think it was serendipity. But it would have profound implications for my future, sometimes good, sometimes not so. Once again my future was in doubt. Not only was I really enjoying the work, but for the first time in several years I was living in ski country. Despite my first experience of Scottish skiing, I was looking forward to the season when the winter snows would fall somewhere near a ski lift. I didn’t know then that they would fall and fall. Not only would we have to climb to the bottom of the lift, we would have to climb from half a mile down the road. And I was looking forward to Veronica’s return in the spring.