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

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Interview continued...

AS: Right. So you had this…

IR: I didn’t have to do anything, I just… I decided that the Herald… As long as everything was going smoothly and well under his control as Master of Ceremonies, everything was fine. But if anything went out of control, he lost – completely - his self-control and just went completely berserk! Which I did, at the very end of the play! [Laughter]

AS: Was Marat/Sade a club performance?

IR: A what?

AS: A club performance?

IR: No, no, it was done… it was done before the paying public.

AS: No, it was Public Bath, I think, with Glenda Jackson?

IR: No, there was no… No, no. It was you paid your money, you came in, I mean, there was no restriction. People just came to see it. And we… as I say, in America too. By that time, as I say, I was playing Marat and I remember the American producer coming to my dressing room on the first night and saying [uses an American accent] ‘Now listen, Richardson, you appear nude, well anyway, from the back you’re nude in this production. If you get arrested, don’t worry, we’ll bail you out in the morning!’. And I laughed because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. And I was actually the first actor to appear to all intents and purposes naked on any stage. But only my back view.

AS: How did it compare for you between the British and the American audiences at that time?

IR: American audiences are not really as reserved as the British audiences were then. I believe, such is the influence of America and Australia, now more particularly, on the audiences here that we are much more outspoken and forthright in our attitude and behaviour towards what’s happening on the stage. But the Americans, if they don’t like something, even though you are in the middle of the performance, they’ll say so, you know. I remember hearing one person saying - not about me, thank God! -

AS: Out loud during the performance?

IR: Oh yes! But about one of the prominent performances, I’m not going to name any names, [uses an American accent] ‘That guy’s drunk!’ And this awful pause… Nowadays, the only thing we have to contend with is mobile phones going off, which they always do. But in America people - and there was another man playing a part in Marat/Sade, whohad a cotton-wool erection in his tight white Empire breeches, and as he was playing a lunatic who was sexually quite mad… he was to stroke himself - his cotton wool thing - from time to time, and there was one night and this man turned to his wife [uses an American accent] ‘There’s a guy up there getting away with murder!’. [Laughter] I very nearly said - because I was right on the forestage in my bath and I was writing as Marat, you know - and I very nearly said to him - because he was quite close to the stage - ‘It’s only cotton wool’, but I didn’t… I lacked the courage to say it! [Laughter]

AS: Do you think they have a different attitude towards the theatre and actors?

IR: Well, not so much now. It was then. They had never seen anything like the Marat/Sade before, you know. They were used to Annie Get Your Gun!,or My Fair Lady, or, you know… or Oklahoma!. You see, once the Marat/Sade had been and gone, we then had Oh, Calcutta! and Hair, and they all jumped on this band-wagon of either being totally nude or… or being extremely rude and doing things which… one didn’t do on the stage, you know. The flood gates opened after the Marat/Sade. For instance, when Hair first came into the West End, the posters outside the Shaftesbury Theatre where it was to open said, ‘Hair makes the Marat/Sade look like Peter Pan!’ It was so over the top, you know! [Laughter] I never saw it, I may say. I think that people should keep their private bits neatly tucked away. But then, I’m old fashioned, as I said earlier.

AS: Right, do you think… do you consider yourself to be more a theatre actor or a film actor?

IR: I’m very much a theatre actor. Unfortunately, since I reached my seventies, which I’ve only just done, but nevertheless I’m there, my hip - my right hip - and my knees are beginning to give me trouble. I’m having treatment - physiotherapy treatment and deep scan things with steroid injection into my hip to help me to walk. But unfortunately, the theatre is something I… The last thing I did in the theatre was at The National Theatre: The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, and I had played Epicure Mammon which was my… Actually, I think it’s probably my swansong in the theatre, until my knees and my hip are put to right. So although I am and always will be a theatre actor - theatre has always been my first love - I’m just physically not strong enough any longer to do it. But I am strong enough to do a television here and there, and certainly a film, because what happens there is you meet up with the director, and the crew are dismissed from the area and you work with the director on the scene. You decide where you’re going to sit, move, maybe go to the window and all that, you agree all that with the director. You run through the scene to be filmed with the director, maybe run through twice, and then he’ll say, ‘Right, let’s bring in the team’, and in come all the technicians of camera, of the sound, the make-up, the wardrobe, everybody. The prop boys as well. And they come in and they form an audience. And you perform the scene for them. And then the camera director says, ‘Right, let’s do it again slowly, and when I say ‘Stop!’, stop and we will put marks on the floor to say where you are going to be.’ And it’s different coloured tapes - I always seem to get red, which I don’t know why - red tape stuck onto the floor. And those were your marks. So when that was all done and he’d plotted it all out, the camera director would then say, ‘OK. Well, we will be about an hour and a half lighting this scene, so go and have a cup of tea’. And so the real actors - the proper actors - go away and sit down on these well-known directors’ seats with your name on the back or sometimes not on the back. Well, they light it with the stand-ins and the stand-ins go and stand - literally - on the marks whilst the camera director lights them. And then the cameras decide how it’s going to move and take that and they work out the shots they are going to do. And when all that’s been done, an hour and a half later you’re called back onto the set. And you do the scene.
But we are here to talk about the theatre, which, as you can see, is something quite different. What I love about the theatre is, all right, you’re under the control of the director throughout the rehearsal period and during the technical dress rehearsals, and you’re still in under his control for the previews. Incidentally, at Stratford when I first went there, there were no such things as previews, you just opened cold, and if the play wasn’t ready for the critics, tough! You know, because there was no preview or anything like that; now it involves quite a number of previews. So consequently you would go in the next morning, and he’s been sitting out front watching it with your preview audience but with his notebook taking down notes about the performance, and then he will give them to you and, if necessary, rehearse new things on the stage. But once you get to opening night, when the play begins he’s no longer around… well, he’s there but he is no longer in control. You are. You begin at the beginning, you stop in the middle for a break, and then you go on to the end. And that’s what I like about the theatre. Whereas when you are doing a movie, it’s ‘Stop, Start, Stop, Start, Stop, Start…’ and… Also you shoot the thing out of order. I remember years ago, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a dramatisation of John Le Carré’s famous spy novel, I played the Mole, Bill Hayden. And the first scene I shot was the scene where I was murdered! Because I was this… the Mole, you know. That was the first scene I shot. Because it’s always completely out of order, according to whichever location you go to, you know. So it’s an entirely different discipline, in fact it’s a stronger discipline working for the camera, because you have to… All right, you have these long gaps when you can take a cup of tea and chat and gossip, but you have to keep at the back of your mind a level of concentration, judged on what you’ve just been rehearsing. You’ve got to keep that at the back of your mind, because in a moment you’re going to have to go back on the set and commit it to posterity on celluloid or tape or whatever.

AS: You don’t really have this power over your role as in the theatre?

IR: Yes. You… Well, I always did because… I was very fortunate. I mentioned Tinker, Tailor, that was one of the first television things I did. And nearly all my scenes were with Sir Alec Guinness who was the master of working for the camera. And since all my scenes were with him, I was given absolute freedom to watch him at work. And he… obviously, you know, he realized that I was observing him, and I said, ‘Please forgive me watching your every move, this is really my first experience of working for the camera’, and he used to give me little tips, you know. I remember on one occasion he used to… it was in his sitting room and he used to kick off his rather rain-soaked shoes and lift his socked foot towards the electric bars of the electric fire to warm his wet feet, which I thought was wonderful. And then when we came to shoot the sequence, he didn’t do that. So in the break, before the camera moved to another position to shoot some more from another angle of the same scene, I said ‘Alec, why don’t you do that business of lifting your foot up to the fire?’. ‘Well, you see, my stand-in said it was one of the funniest things he’s ever seen, and so I thought that if that was the case, it was sticking out, making too strong a statement for the scene. The scene is not about me sticking my foot in front of an electric fire, it’s about me questioning you because I suspect you might… you know? So he just cut the business entirely. And I thought, ‘There is camera discipline, you know, gone mad!’. Whereas, if he had done it in the theatre, the audience would probably have laughed, and he would have enjoyed that, and if anyone had said to him, like a director in the theatre had said, ‘Oh, Sir Alec, I think maybe you ought to cut that’, he would have said, ‘How dare you! I’m not cutting at all!’ [Laughter]

Interview continued...

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