Interviews

Summary. 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

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Interview continued...

AS: So it was not that monastic…!

IR: It was not monastic. It was just that you were dedicated to what work that you did and Peter understood - Peter Hall understood - the necessity for a little bit of playtime: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ might have been his very motto, you know, so that used to happen quite a lot. What else did we…? Peter was a brilliant man and he… he was a staggeringly good administrator. I… I hate to say this, but I have to. He could be very hit or miss when it came to directing. He made an awful mess in Macbeth with Paul Scofield in the sixties, but you see he was brilliant with David Warner - whom I met the other night at Stratford-upon-Avon - as Hamlet in… ’66 or something like that. So I mean, you know, he could get it all wrong, but he could get it terribly right. And I think… I think he expected his actors to be that way too, and indeed I was: I was absolutely hopeless as Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night - totally miscast - but I was awfully good as Oberon in Midsummer Night’s Dream, you know. [Laughter] It just… it just depended on the chemistry really.

AS: Right… Did you have that feeling to be a bit cut off from… because you were all in Stratford?

IR: Yes, we were cut off completely. And what Peter did - when I say ‘Peter’ by the way, I’m talking about Peter Hall all the time - was he signed an agreement with the owners of the Aldwych Theatre in the West End of London, just across the road from Bush House, the BBC’s Overseas Service Broadcasting Unit, and he signed a lease with them, and what he did was whatever plays out of the five-play repertoire, there were - in Peter’s regime there were five plays done throughout the season, OK? - and whichever of them was successful, he transferred to the Aldwych for a London season. So although… to begin with, we all felt completely cut off, and the producers in the West End, you know, would forget we even existed. And… and you must remember, too, that television was in its infancy. There was no such thing as a soap opera or an ongoing series… It was… The television only came on, usually in the evenings with a news broadcast, and sometimes during the day there would be… ‘Listen With Mother’, but it only lasted about two hours and then they shut down. And so anchored was television to theatre in those days, when eventually they started doing plays - and they did theatre plays for television, and live, no recording or anything like that - when the interval came along, the screen would go black and up would come a card saying ‘INTERVAL’, and about fifteen minutes later a bell would ring - just like it does in the theatre - and you would have made your tea or made fresh drinks or whatever and come back and been seated down, and when the bell rang it was time for the next half. And so the screen lit up again and you went on with the play. So television was actually sort of... moving, in a way close - parallel - with what was happening in the theatre. [pause] There was something else that I thought to tell you, I think it was about the television thing.  But there was no such… there was very, very little work opportunity in television in those days - and there was no commercial television. It was BBC, and then it was BBC and ITV. And then they… finally it became BBC, ITV, Channel 4 etc, etc, etc, where there are so many opportunities nowadays, there were not at that time. And you know, we had an attitude to the… to television - and indeed to film-making as well - which was, ‘you only really did it if you wanted to make enough money to pay off the mortgage on your house. It wasn’t really about acting. Acting was standing on a public platform with a curtain that went up and down – [Laughter] - doing live theatre. That was acting!’ This cheapskate thing of going and making a movie was… was something we looked down upon. In fact, I remember John Gielgud saying that, ‘He was going off to make a film, don’t tell anybody about it, don’t tell, I don’t want any of my friends to know!’ [Laughter]

AS: But that was what happened to the majority of the actors from Stratford. They all moved to the cinema and movies later on…

IR: Eventually, but not until the seventies did it happen. It happened for me in… 1979 that I moved from live theatre to doing television and movies. And I think… I mean, when I left, David Suchet, who’s now terribly well-known as Hercule Poirot - among other things, but that in particular - and Patrick Stewart for that matter who was - what is it called? Star Trek, is it? You know… Captain Picard, or something like that. When I left Stratford-upon-Avon to go to New York to do My Fair Lady, playing Higgins in the musical, Patrick and David, well, I left them behind, and they were just a few steps behind me on the promotional ladder and they were just coming up into the roles that I had played and gone on from. And so I left them filling the space of... of… of, you know, the leading parts, yes…

AS: Yes, could you tell us something more about the Aldwych, because the Aldwych was a London-based counterpart of Stratford, but with different plays obviously…

IR: Yes. Yes, well to a certain extent the Aldwych Theatre was a counterpart of Stratford, but  while you were doing the season there of Shakespearian works brought - or Jacobean works, because he didn’t stick entirely to Shakespeare, you know. He did usually one Jacobean play, or a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, too, like a Ben Jonson or something like that as well as the Shakespeare repertoire. And whilst they were being performed, we would rehearse a play by Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky, Bernard Shaw, you know, sort of good contemporary or recent dramatists - you can’t say that Ibsen was contemporary, but what I mean is modern-ish compared with Shakespeare – and so we used to do quite a lot of modern plays and new plays. I remember in the year that President Kennedy was assassinated - which was ’63 - we were doing a play called The Representative about the Holocaust, written by Rolf Hochhuth, which was not a very good play but as a… the subject matter was so astonishing that it was, it was a most talked-about success in ’63. I played Mengele, would you believe it? The first one of many baddies that I seem to be cast in. So that, as I was saying, as well as the classical repertoire - which was played again in… You know, you would, actually in those days you would do one play for a matinée - let’s say it was King Lear - and then in the evening you would do The Comedy of Errors! [Laughter] You know, it must have cost a fortune paying the stage staff who had to take down the scenery! But by this time the curtain had disappeared, and sets were much more simplified, and the platform - the stage platform - was built out over what had been the orchestra pit, and the orchestra now played in an area off stage with microphones and with… Their contribution was as strong as ever, but they played in a little orchestral room on their own with the microphones and some sound controller brought up the speakers to bring the music in when we wanted it. So we weren’t using the orchestra pit, and what they did was they put steps - they left a gap at the edge of the forestage, and there were steps coming up from what used to be the orchestra pit. So there were two entrances from down there, and then at the side there were what we called ‘the assemblies’ just beyond what had been the proscenium arch. I think nowadays the young actors call them ‘vomitories’ after the...  yes it’s after the… the gladiators. ‘Vomitories’ [Laughter] - for obvious reasons! [Laughter] And then the whole of the rest of the stage, of course, was open to the interpretation of the designer. And so the audience would come in and they would see, there’s the set, but it wouldn’t really amount to very much except what was necessary for the action of the play - steps usually.

AS: Do you think it was the same audience from Stratford and from Aldwych?

IR: No, entirely different. The London audience was… very, very different from Stratford’s. Stratford… You know, during the season, Stratford was constantly the meeting place - the venue - for American and Australian tourists. And in those early days, students - who obviously had theatre in mind as a profession - used to sleep, in sleeping bags, out on the ground, all the way from the box office, down the side of the building to where the stage door was. And they would sleep overnight to be first in the queue to get cheap seats for that day’s performance. And I can remember coming into rehearsal - rehearsals always began at ten in the morning - and having to step over these poor children, still asleep in their sleeping bags! [Laughter] These were really great days. Now, the Aldwych, the audiences at the Aldwych… well of course, we did get quite a number of tourists, but… No, they were much more sophisticated, the audiences at the Aldwych, and you… that’s why you only took the very best of your repertoire there, because anything that hadn’t quite worked would not be tolerated.

Interview continued...

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