Interviews

Actor. 1964 RSC tour; accent; acting techniques; attitudes to television and cinema; audiences; Broadway; Peter Brook; Dame Judi Dench; Sir Alec Guinness; Sir Peter Hall; Marat/Sade; refreshments; repertory; rehearsals; Diana Rigg; RSC; Paul Scofield; Shakespeare; smoking; Stratford community; theatre tastes; Wilson Barrett Company.

Interviewed by Aga Sikora on 29/01/07

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6

Interview continued...

AS: Did they exist in fives?

IR: Oh yes, little packets of five cigarettes… I think it was Will’s Woodbine was the favourite one among us penniless actors, and the other thing I remember was, you only played for a week, which meant that when you finished the performance, went back to your digs and had a sandwich and a cup of tea and then went to bed and of course you had to stay awake with the light on learning the dialogue for the next play. By this time I’d moved on from ‘A.S.M. and Small Parts’ to being an actor in this weekly repertory company which was only existing during the summer months, which was great for me, because when I got my long summer holiday from drama school I immediately picked up my Union ticket - which was terribly easy, I think it was only seven and six, which is, you know, under one pound - and I got this job, beginning to... of doing A.S.M. and Small Parts, but then they suddenly realised that I was a hopeless A.S.M. but I was quite reasonable as an actor, so they re-organized my contract and I started acting. Anyway, getting back to where I was, it was an absolutely night occurrence throughout the week that you were playing the one play, that you went home, had a light supper, went to bed with your script, your Samuel French script and - yes, I did smoke in those days, because I used a cigarette packet to run down the page of the script to show the cues coming up, and then holding that cigarette packet over what I was supposed to say, and then checking if I got it right: yes. But if I hadn’t got it right I went back and did it again and again and again until I got it right. But you know, in those days of weekly rep, the memory absorbed the dialogue only in a very shallow sense - literally shallow - because I recall on one occasion we had Good Friday when no theatres played. I don’t know if they’ve changed that now but it was a religious observation for obvious reasons. And because we had the night off, when we came back on the Saturday everybody had forgotten their lines! Because it had only had gone in so shallowly and it only stayed there as long as you were performing it at night and twice a week at matinees. And because it was only just under the surface of one’s memory, it disappeared entirely - it was a very frightening experience. Anyway, that’s some recollections of those early days, and I think that’s probably enough of that, you carry on with your questions now.

AS: OK, thank you, Ian Richardson. So… soon after, you joined the Royal Shakespeare Company…

IR: What happened was in 1959 I played Hamlet. And in 1959… Sir Peter Hall - then just ordinary ‘Peter Hall’ - was director - Artistic Director Designate - of the… what was then called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. And he wanted to start afresh with a young company.  So what he did was he sent spies, - there’s no other word for them, ‘spies’, I suppose you call them nowadays ‘talent scouts’ - all over the provinces to see plays done by these many, many repertory companies up and down the country, to see if there were any promising youngish actors - because Peter Hall was not even thirty when he took over, you know. And one of those so-called ‘spies’ was John Barton, and he saw me playing Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and he immediately reported back to Peter Hall, ‘I think you’ll want to get this one!’, and the long and short of the story is that I was offered a contract and I joined the - still the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre - as one of Peter Hall’s ‘babies’ as we were all called, and my contemporaries were Diana Rigg, Ian Holm, Peggy Ashcroft to name but three. And what happened at the end of 1960 was Peter Hall decided that he was going to create an ensemble which would be the pride and joy of the British - well, we weren’t an Empire any more, but of Great Britain you know, ‘Grande Bretagne’ - and he invited actors that he felt that he could work with and promote whenever he - he equally felt it was due to them - to sign a three-year contract. This was unheard of! Unheard of for an actor to have three years of guaranteed security with a weekly…

AS: So it was the first time that it actually happened…?

IR: Yes, it was the first time that it happened. I believe it… it was in Moscow -  at the Moscow Arts Theatre - it happened there, but this was England, you know! And so a lot of us instantly got married and had children [Laughter] because we had three years’ security ahead of us. And indeed, Peter promoted you up the range of roles according to whether he thought you were ready for them or not. And that’s precisely what happened to me. And we were… we did become the Royal Shakespeare Company at the end of 1960, and we did become, by the end of 1964, quite the most impressive Shakespearian ensemble in Europe.

AS: Right… How would you describe the RSC under the directorship of Peter Hall?

IR: Well… He had only recently married Leslie Caron… that unfortunately was a marriage that did not survive – a few years until children - but that’s another story. And because he was a young man with a young wife and a child on the way, he wanted to encourage his actors to treat the theatre not just a place of employment and work in the evenings and rehearsals during the day but as a kind of second home. And it was always rather charming, on a Friday morning, which is the… when… what we called then - and I don’t know whether they call it now - the ‘ghost walk’. That was a saying meaning that we were going to be paid: ‘the ghost walks on Friday’, and on Fridays all the mothers would turn up in the Green Room, by the banks of the Avon with their pushchairs and their carry-cots and…  and sort of have a cup of coffee and wait for their husband to go up to the accounts office for his little brown envelope which had the pay in it, which would then be handed to the wives and they would all disappear and do the shopping! [Laughter] It was really rather enchanting, and this was the sort of thing that Peter encouraged, because he felt that the family atmosphere and the relaxed feeling that one got from that would… travel with the actors on to the stage, and that they would thereupon perform with each other not as total strangers encountering each other as characters in a play on a stage, but actually people you’ve just had a cup of tea with in the Green Room, you know. And it was a wonderful idea, and it worked. And the birth rate among the actors in Stratford-upon-Avon rose by about a hundred percent I would say! [Laughter]

AS: I’ve read also - and, Ian Richardson, you will tell me if it’s true - that the journalists often described the atmosphere at the RSC at that time as very puritanical, because I heard - if it’s true obviously - that thirteen-hour days for months in succession were not unusual, and you often had to rehearse during the day and play during the evening…?

IR: Yes, that’s absolutely true. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t say it was puritanical, because in those days there wasn’t the same stigma against… a Green Room which only served tea or coffee. You could actually buy a glass of wine or a bottle of beer, and they sold cigarettes and things like that. In those days practically everyone smoked, and I remember walking along the back of the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon and the smell of Guinness - which is a very strong stout ale - and cigarette smoke… Well, the unfinished drinks, not in a bottle like the children [Laughter] - young people I mean - not drunk from the bottle like young people do now - you can’t drink Guinness from a bottle, it’s too frothy - but they would be poured out into a glass and just left there with a stubbed-out cigarette in a saucer, so that all along the way along the backdrop you smelt smoke, cigarette smoke and Guinness. And indeed, as I said right at the beginning of the interview, when you went onstage there were people in the auditorium who were smoking as well. [Laughter]

AS: Oh, did they?

IR: [Laughter] Yes… What was I talking about, can’t you remind me?

AS: If it was puritanical…

IR: Ah, you see… so I don’t think it was puritanical, because it was very relaxed in that way, there wasn’t the same… Nowadays my son - my younger son - who’s also an actor, he’s with the Royal Shakespeare Company and he’s just opened with them in Richard III the other day, which I saw, and he says that you have to sign an agreement with the company not to drink before the performance - at all - which must be very curious for people like Dame Judi Dench who… I always remember when I started working with Judi, way back in 1962, that she always had champagne in her dressing room! [Laughter] So, I don’t know quite how she manages to get her way - work her way round that thing, but… So it’s much more puritanical now than it was then: it was much more relaxed, I always had a bottle of Guinness in the interval - we all did! And I remember Patrick Stewart and I were playing brothers in The Revenger’s Tragedy and he… he said to me, ‘Look, we’ve got this nice break in the second half, shall we make that ‘the Guinness break’?’, and by that he meant he would either bring a couple of bottles of Guinness to my dressing room, or I would lay them in in advance, but he would come in and we would both drink a glass of Guinness before going back on the stage to end the play! And nobody thought any the worse for it. And… there were one or two people who did have a problem in that respect, but… but nobody… nobody overdid it, you know… it… so there was no puritanical aspect in those days, it was much more free and easy. And then of course after the performance finished and it was quite late and all the local public houses in Stratford-upon-Avon would have been closed for at least half an hour - if not longer - we used to go to a pub called The Black Swan - but we always called it ‘The Dirty Duck’ - and they had a special dispensation to stay open late for the actors, and I can remember Peter O’Toole and Patrick Wymark and Dinsdale Landen and Patrick Allen and - not so much Patrick Allen - but Jacky MacGowran, an Irish actor in that first season, we all tumbled into The Dirty Duck after the performance, and rolled out about an hour and a half later! [Laughter]

Interview continued...

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6