Interviews

Senior lecturer in English Literature at Sheffield University talking about her experiences at Chichester Festival Theatre and the RSC in the 1960s and 70s.

conducted by
Kate Dorney

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KD: I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about your general experience of theatre?

FB: I think it started when I was about 11 and we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that got me hooked on Shakespeare and on theatre in general. And I remember desperately wanting to be a director and not knowing how you did that from a girls’ grammar school in Portsmouth. The only stuff to go and see other than what we made ourselves were the local amateurs on the pier and our local amateurs were noted for doing every single play of Shakespeare, they were going for some sort of record and I hit Titus Andronicus year which was huge fun because they’d obviously seen the Peter Brook one.

KD: Oh yes?

FB: The one where Brook brought Lavinia on with swathes of red velvet about the wrists. They did it with crepe paper which didn’t have quite the same impact and there were quite a lot of giggles in the production but it seemed to be a hugely worth doing sort of thing to put Shakespeare on.

KD:It’s quite interesting that they should pick on something like that so quickly, take it on board…

FB: Yeah. I think they were very clued up about seeing the stuff, then they had to translate it into being the local dentist and the local teacher with a rather limited budget and the same wardrobe that went through many, many productions. You got to recognise the clothes after a bit. But it did mean you got to see a lot of Shakespeare, which was nice.

KD: so when you were at school, who were the main directors? Who were you thinking of in terms of, I would really like to be a director?

FB: I guess you’d just about started hearing about Peter Brook and by the time I got to 6th form level you went up to see the RSC and Peter Hall and Peter Brook and John Barton doing stuff and that was the sort of theatre trips that we’d organise for ourselves where usually, your RSC Barton/Hall Brook, and then there was Chichester [Festival Theatre] just down the road. The National, kind of getting started.

KD: Can you tell me a bit more about the stuff at the Festival [Theatre]?

FB: Chichester Festival, I think it cost about 7/6d on the train to go up to Chichester for the day and see a play and I’d go up with a crowd of friends and we’d start about 6 in the morning and then we’d queue, and there was something like 12 really cheap boxes, little box seats, the rest was incredibly expensive. Very posh, middleclass, I think they wanted to be Glyndebourne but you could get this cheap seats and we saw Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964) that way and St Joan and quite a few early Arden actually. And then there was the school trip to the Olivier Othello, I think mainly because they wanted to try out Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), so it was a double ticket.

KD: Buy one, get one free?

FB: Buy one get one free.

KD: Early marketing. So what was it like? Because obviously the hype surrounding the Olivier Othello is enormous and quite often you find that what actually happened is not the same thing. As a 16/17 year old what was it like to see the matinee idol on the stage, up close.

FB. Parts of it really blew you away. I think we were all in love with him anyway, because we’d been brought up on the Olivier Shakespeare films which were shamelessly sexy really.

KD: And how old is he at this point?

FB: He’s, he must be 50 something I would think. It was also the highlight of the Joan Plowright/divorcing Vivien bit

KD: Yes, of course.

FB: He was quite kind of glamourous in a rather louche sort of way. And we got to see them both, but not in the same play. I saw PLowright do St Joan and she was fantastic.

KD: And who directed that? Did he direct it?

FB: No, he didn’t do much directing at that point. He was the big cheese in charge of the place, it was clearly, it started off as a sort of practice run for the National, and then it became the National’s tryout home before they did stuff at the Old Vic. I can remember in Othello, the bit I remember very well is him just walking on, white robe and bare feet and holding a rose and he was very, very laidback and very urbane and not at all kind of stuffy or majestic. Not those kind of heavy, noble moor type characters. This was a guy who had got out of bed and was still holding the rose he’d obviously just sprinkled on the coverlets or whatever. And he made that joke about the anthopohagi as a lovely throwaway line. This wasn’t a guy, he wasn’t a tragedy, a tragic actor, so it was quite a thunderbolt when he started to disintegrate. I can remember being quite impressed with Frank Finlay’s Iago, you know despite all the chat about that Iago being Olivier’s attempt to squash the second half of the double act and not allow him to make much of the character. I though he was really interesting because he was this kind of grey ghost, and extremely sinister. There was this bit where/

KD. Is Frank Finlay a lot younger?

FB. Yeah, a lot, a lot younger. And there was that bit where Othello has the epileptic fit and you could see him actually, Iago, being absolutely in charge of that, and almost deliberately effacing himself and not showing anything and talking in this very thin grey voice. I though it was a quite remarkable performance, I liked it a lot.

KD. And presumably there wasn’t at the time about the fact that Olivier had strategically arranged the roles so that Finlay couldn’t act him off stage in the same way as he’d tried to do to Ralph Richardson?

FB. No there wasn’t. It was Othello’s play but that didn’t seem such a bad decision. There was also a reaction against Iago that great machiavel that we’re also supposed to be interested in. And the guy is a nasty little racist so the balance wasn’t unreasonable. And the other figure that just blew you away was Maggie Smith as Desdemona because she was so powerful. She had these huge voluminous costumes and she did these great sweeping curtsies. And the Chichester stage is vast and she could dominate it. She really gave Olivier a run for his money.

KD. That’s very interesting actually because they remained friends, didn’t they? He always had a soft spot for her.

FB. Although apparently she used to stand up to him quite a lot. I think they stopped being friends after all the reviews said she acted him off the stage in The Master Builder.

KD. Oh, right.

FB. I mean as Desdemona he does get to strangle you, it’s difficult, you can’t upstage your Othello. But she was a very gutsy one, very powerful one. She didn’t just lie back, mimsy about and take it. It was actually a very strong cast.

KD. Did you have any kind of feeling when he turned up all covered in 57 different layers of boot polish, highly polished up, did anyone know that that was going to happen? Was anyone expecting to see that, or was it a shock?

FB. I think he given out that he was going to play Othello as black rather than as an Arab. And I don’t think that any of the racist implications occurred to us at the time?

KD. But didn’t he look slightly odd?

FB. It was phwoar really.

KD. Really?

FB. Yeah, it’s very disappointing if you look at the film because the make up doesn’t translate. It looks very crude and very obvious, but on the stage it just looked very very sexy. And you got, I think the real surprise was the voice, because he’d trained himself to drop an octave and so this great bass rumble comes out of someone you’re used to thinking of as a tenor. It’s like suddenly listening to a trombone instead of a French horn. The difference is the depth that he’s doing with it?
KD. So was that the first time you saw him on the stage?

FB. That was the first time, yep. I think it was the only time I saw him onstage.

KD. Was he still in the programme selling Olivier cigarettes? Were they still something you could buy in the foyer?

FB. I don’t think so. I can remember that he was actually the voice, the recorded voice who told you you had two minutes to get back to your seat during the interval. So he did kind of pervade the building anyway, Olivier cigarettes or no.

KD. So what was the actual theatre like? How much were the tickets relative to now? How much were you paying? As schoolgirls were there cheap seats?

FB. I think they were about 5 shillings. They were way cheaper than anything else, they were up in some rather uncomfortable little boxes. The view was very good but there was no leg room. And the seats were, I think they were quite expensive. It’s more that the ambience of Chichester was very expensive.

KD. I presume you’re all still dressing up to go the theatre at this point?

FB. No that much because of having to sit on the pavement for a couple of hours to get your ticket. There were certainly some hats and frocks around/
KD. And suits for the gentlemen?

FB. Oh yeah. Certainly if you went off to the tent where you could get your smorgasbord, there were some very fancy gear in there. We couldn’t afford the smorgasbord, it took years before I could afford the smorgasbord, and apparently that was a feature. They got frightfully well bred young ladies to serve you your Danish open sandwich. They were all called Daphne and things, they were rather posh.

KD. [so] they were consciously developing the brand name, as you say, the Glyndebourne, the place to come?

FB. Yes, it did have a very upmarket feel. I can remember earwigging somebody in the foyer saying ‘it makes my heart sing to see all these simple little people coming to the theatre’. And we thought, ‘bloody hell, I think she means us!’

KD. So how old were they?

FB. There was a good raft of middle aged, you know, retired colonels and such. I think Chichester itself took it quite seriously, and that was a posh retirement/commuter kind of town. You had to be reasonably well off to live in Chichester.

KD. The cathedral ladies and so on.

FB. Yeah, there were quite a lot of those going I think.

KD. Were there also lots of people your age going to take advantage of the cheap seats, or lots of Larry’s friends from Brighton?

FB. I don’t remember any Larry’s friends from Brighton. I don’t ever remember seeing anybody famous in the foyer, although there probably were some. And there were certainly always queues for those cheap seats. You had to get there early to get them. SO there was a youngish clientele I think, but of course you could always pick up the National stuff later at the Vic, by the time it got to the National showcase as it was by the time of Othello. So you got chances to see stuff up in London. I think they transferred stuff like Armstrong’s Last Goodnight as well, it wasn’t only, I’m not sure of that was a National production now or not. But things certainly had later lives besides Chichester.

Interview continued...

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