Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (16 page)

After “the flare-up” I went back to doing alternating productions at Colchester. While Colchester paid a living wage for the two weeks of rehearsal, they didn’t pay me for the two weeks between productions. Of course, they should have; that’s when I did my prep for the next production. So, for the first time since my brief stint in the bowels of Woodbine Race Track, I needed to find some other work, some day job. I soon found myself selling advertising space for a buying guide to be placed in all the rooms of a new hotel. To this day I am not sure the book was ever placed in the hotel. I’m not even sure the hotel was ever built. I know I never received the promised second and third year commissions. Never imagining I would be any good as a salesperson, I took it on as an acting exercise. I convinced myself the product was a marvellous opportunity for any merchant and lived truthfully in these imagined circumstances. And darned if I wasn’t good. Soon I was making more money when I was out of work than when I was in work. When I finally had an offer of full-time employment as a director and had to give up the sales job, the business owner offered me a huge increase and a car if I would please stay. I refused. It took thirty seconds. But I refused.

It is 1964. I am living in London eking out a living as a professional theatre director. I’ve settled into a fairly comfortable routine directing every second play at the Colchester Rep and directing occasional student productions at London drama schools. I get a call, or a letter, I don’t recall which, from the National Theatre of Great Britain, the most prestigious theatre in the country. Would I come for an interview for the position of Assistant Director? I am twenty-six and ambitious. Of course.

It turns out there will be three interviews: the first with the General Manager, the second with Associate Director, John Dexter, and the third and final interview with Sir Laurence Olivier himself. The first of these went very well. General managers usually have people skills and this lovely man was no exception. We had a pleasant conversation and I was assured of interview number two. John Dexter, a long story himself, was brilliant but full of himself. All I had to do in interview two was listen to John Dexter talk. And then came interview three.

I still recall sitting in the reception area waiting for my interview with the great man himself. The scheduled time for my appointment passed, and passed, and passed. After what seemed like an hour, though was likely less, a pale-faced individual emerged from what I assumed was the meeting room and staggered towards the exit. My god, I thought, this is going to be a test indeed.

After a few moments, I was summoned inside to be met by two people in addition to Sir Laurence himself. I was invited to sit. There may have been, must have been, a few polite opening remarks. But all I remember is silence. And Sir leaning forward and staring at me. What should I do? Stare back? Finally, I figured I should talk. But about what? In the end I babbled for two or three minutes, whereupon Sir said, “Thank you very much,” and I was dismissed. What a disaster! My predecessor had been in the room for an hour and I lasted no more than five minutes.

A week later, they phoned and offered me the job.

The National Theatre, now the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, opened in 1963, domiciled in both the Old Vic Theatre and the Chichester Festival Theatre, the arena style theatre modelled after Stratford, Ontario. In the 1970s the company would finally move into its own home on the South Bank. Laurence Olivier was the general director, John Dexter and Michael Elliott were associate directors; assistant directors such as me were quite a bit farther down the depth chart. The acting company included Albert Finney, Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Michael Redgrave, Joan Plowright, Robert Stephens, and Frank Finlay. There were two separate companies, one in Chichester and one in London, the A and B companies. One could always remember which was which. Olivier was in the B company. I was to be in the A company.

We had a slight wrinkle as I was opening a play at the Guildhall School during the first week of rehearsals for the Chichester season. I had been assigned as assistant director of a double bill of
Miss Julie
and
Black Comedy
. Michael Elliott was directing
Miss Julie
with Albert Finney and Maggie Smith, and
Black Comedy
was to be directed by John Dexter with Derek Jacobi as well as Albie and Maggie. Management assured me starting a week late would not be a problem, but during that week I had an angry phone call from John Dexter. “Where are you?” When I explained, he barked that no one had told him. Not a propitious beginning. Was that why my sole duty on the production turned out to be to check sight lines at one rehearsal? (Although I was also responsible for rehearsing the understudies, one of whom was the young Ronald Pickup.) Dexter was short and dark with a menacing air, but his bark turned out to be worse than the proverbial bite and he was quite friendly when I finally did get to rehearsals. He just didn’t have anything for me to do. On the other side of the bill, the stage manager for
Miss Julie
assured me I wasn’t missing anything: they were just talking, and talking, and talking.

Despite being relegated to observer status on
Black Comedy,
the experience was instructive. Peter Shaffer had written a warm humorous play about light and dark, seeing and not seeing. The play opens in darkness with the characters on stage apparently going about their normal lives — we know this from what we hear them saying — when suddenly the lights blaze on and the characters are seemingly plunged in darkness by a power failure. A nice conceit that sets in motion a light comedy with something to say. Dexter’s blocking of the first half of this one-act play was brilliant — if only it were a Feydeau farce. Problem was, it’s not. Halfway through the play the Maggie Smith character enters, and the play moves (or should I say, moved) into more profound territory. But the powers that be were flummoxed. Maggie Smith, the great comic actress comes on, and the play isn’t funny anymore. What to do? We young types — who included my old girlfriend, Carolyn Jones, who was a junior member of the company — sat at the back of the theatre and watched while John Dexter, Peter Shaffer, and Kenneth Tynan (the great critic and now dramaturge of the company) sat in the front row trying to make the second half of the play as funny as the first half. It was quite a pathetic sight. It didn’t occur to any of them that the problem might be the first half of the play, that maybe the first half didn’t blend with the second half because it should never have been directed as a farce in the first place. But no one asked us.

My experience with
Miss Julie
couldn’t have been more different. The stage manager was indeed correct; they were still sitting around a table talking by the time I joined them.
Miss Julie
, by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, is a play about class, privilege, power, and ambition. Miss Julie herself is in a double prison, being both a woman and upper class. The play takes place in the kitchen of the estate on Midsummer’s Eve in nineteenth century Sweden and centres on the dynamic between the aristocrat, Miss Julie (Maggie Smith), and the servant, the ironically better educated Jean (Albert Finney). Why so much talk at rehearsal? Why didn’t they get on with it? After a time it became clear that the director, Michael Elliott, had an intense vision of the play surpassed only by his intense vision of theatre in general, what it could and should be. There were to be no tricks, shortcuts, generalities, or handsome performances in this production. We were searching for truth, clarity, and immediacy. And unlike Dexter, Michael would take me into his confidence.

Two particular rehearsals stand out in my memory. At one of the first rehearsals after I joined them, Michael began as usual talking about the play and related ideas. I’m a director and I could feel Albie and Maggie becoming energized, anxious, and ready to begin rehearsing. If it were me I would have had them on their feet; clearly they were ready. But Michael went on talking — and talking. Gradually Albie and Maggie slumped back in their chairs and engaged in the discussion. ‘What kind of director is this,’ I thought. He doesn’t know when his actors are ready to begin? Only later did I realize he didn’t care whether his actors were ready to begin; it was not his job to get a professional actor in the mood to work — they are professionals, they can do that on their own. It is his job to get them ready to work in the right way with the right understanding of the work they are to undertake.

Of course, they did finally get on their feet and rehearse the play. One day the rehearsal was electric, sparks flew between them. Had I been the director I would have been thrilled. What was Michael’s response? As I described earlier he took a slow puff on his cheroot, nodded his head, sat down with them at the table, and talked for two days. Britain may have had a class system in 1965, but it was a pale shadow of Sweden’s class system of the nineteenth century; the actors needed to understand, to feel, to embody the chains of that time so that on this Midsummer’s Eve they could rattle those chains, challenge that prison, and fail. Again, good acting was taken for granted. The work is to do the right acting.

Speaking of good acting, Finney was in such good form at one rehearsal I was sure he was improvising; his work was so fresh, so spontaneous. I kept checking the script. He was word perfect. Michael was leading Maggie to some of her best work ever. He would never let her rely on a trick. He took away all her mannerisms, all her props, leading her unerringly to the heart and tragic pain of the character.

In the middle of the play, the stage is invaded by a mob of peasants whose state of uninhibited release, permitted by the once a year tradition of Midsummer’s Eve, echoes and reveals the primal lust being released in the next room by Julie and Jean. The scene is brief, but powerful, dramatic, and chaotic. Michael gave the performers an inspiring talk and then turned the scene over to his choreographer Litz Pisk and me. Not that being a sounding board for Michael wasn’t illuminating, but finally I had something to do.

Was the play the success it should have been? Not entirely. It played in a double bill with
Black Comedy
and followed that piece, which in its original form might have set up
Miss Julie
nicely, but metamorphosed as it now was into a slapstick farce, the two plays were quite mismatched and certainly presented in the wrong order. Yet, a year later Michael wrote to me — I was by then in Canada — to tell me that when the double bill moved to the Old Vic in London
Miss Julie
had come together beautifully.

It is small wonder that Finney had to make a leap of imagination to grasp Strindberg’s experience of class structure. One day after the company had moved to Chichester for the summer he invited Veronica and me to dinner at the house he had rented a few miles south of town. Rather than give us directions he suggested we follow his car in ours. His car was a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce — his insurance would not allow him to drive himself, not that he was a bad driver, he was too valuable an asset — while our car was a thirteen-year-old Aston Martin DB2 that might or might not last the short trip. When we arrived the four of us had drinks in the living room — he had his current lady friend with him — before moving to the dining room table, which was set for six. Before I could make a fool of myself by asking if there were more guests coming, the four of us were joined at the table by the chauffeur and the cook. The son of a bookie, Albie had not let his money betray his class.

One day I was watching a dress run-through of another play in the repertoire,
Armstrong’s Last Goodnight
, in which Albie was playing the lead. Although not a full dress rehearsal, it was pretty close to it; I was startled when Albie stopped the rehearsal before a long speech of his and said to the director, “I don’t know how to get into this.” What happened next, I don’t recall. But what has stuck with me to this day is there is no point chattering on with a long speech if you don’t know what gets you into it. I often tell students to rehearse the start of a monologue — no point rehearsing the rest of it if you don’t have the beginning working.

Before we moved to Chichester for the summer the manager asked me to make sure I saw a performance of
Royal Hunt of the Sun
in the London theatre, as I would be assisting Desmond O’Donovan when he directed the remount of John Dexter’s production in the fall. Duly noted. Duly done. But what neither of us predicted was that in the fall Desmond would not be available — illness, I think, but I don’t recall. So guess who is directing the remount of someone else’s production? That he has seen once several months earlier? The good news was that Dexter would return after the first week of rehearsal; I had only to man the ship until then. So my job along with an equally bewildered stage manager was to block five new leads into the production. Rehearsals went something like this: “Does anyone remember where
X
was standing at this point?” “Oh, thanks,
Y
move over to there, and where was
Z
then?” “No one knows? Well, try there, let’s see if that works, etc.” Hardly the best way to introduce oneself to this prestigious company as the dynamic young director of the future.

Gradually though it was becoming apparent that assistant directors at the National were just that, assistants. They weren’t seen as apprentice directors who would be given their own productions anytime soon. But another unexpected opportunity appeared. Finney asked me if I would assist him when he directed his first film. He was going to star in it so he needed a director to work with him. We both had seven months to go on our National contracts, but the project would begin at the end of that. Meanwhile we could location scout on weekends.

And so, while film was not a great ambition for me at the time, a working life stretched out in front of me, a longer horizon than most in my field. Veronica was well settled into her publishing job; we had a new garden flat in Hampstead, our aging Aston Martin was running as well as could be expected, and we had found a new water ski club. What’s to complain?

And then the telephone rang.