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: Ian Richardson, one of your strongest points is obviously your voice. Is it easier to play without being seen, without seeing the audience when you are giving your voice?

IR: I… I’ve done that, you know, in radio plays, and also narration, and things like that. And also, quite recently there was a film called Hogfather - Terry Pratchett’s fantasy - which was done over Christmas, and there was Death in the shape of a very tall skeleton with a cloak and hood and… but that wasn’t me, I just did the voice. [uses a much deeper tone] I lowered my voice quite considerably, but it was me, you know. I remember when I was a student leaving drama college in Glasgow, I went for my final interview with the Principal. And he said to me ‘Richardson, you are not particularly tall, but that can be dealt with, because we can give you special boots with cork inside, and a bit of a heel on the outside and suddenly you will be six foot tall’ - which is true, and that’s what I did and which is why, I think, my knees are giving me problems now as an elderly man. And he said, ‘Well, you are not very tall but you can… you know, you can have these cork things to make you taller, but you’re not exactly the matinée idol type, are you? I mean, no-one would describe you as remotely handsome or anything like that, so you haven’t got that going for you. But,’ he said ‘you have the makings of a fascinating, interesting, rather beautiful voice. And if you work on that, if you really make a go of that voice of yours, people will imagine when watching - and listening to you, more particularly - that you are six foot tall and that you are really an extremely handsome young man’. And so I worked on the voice. But you see, as my young actor son tells me now, I’m really the old brigade, I’m rather old fashioned, because nowadays the actors are… actually prefer to speak with regional accents because… Well a lot… a lot of the business has been - as we say in the vernacular - dumbed down. Now, if you address the audience with my kind of voice, they find it intimidating, whereas if you talk like that [uses a Cockney accent] they say ‘Oh. he’s one of us, in’t that nice!’. And many actors… I can think of one in particular, talking of Hogfather - I won’t mention his name, think you can guess - has a made a brilliant career out of [uses Cockney accent] just talking like that and being like the next boy. I couldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t be able to make emotional contact with my creative centre. If I made noises like that it would just be a noise, because it’s just not part of me, you know. Anyway, that’s the voice. I’ve got it and I’m stuck with it. I just have to confess that I’m only useful to producers if they want a good old-fashioned articulated noise.

AS: And one of the final questions maybe. I know it’s maybe a bit annoying to ask you that but do you have any role that you like best in the theatre?

IR: Well my favourite role in Shakespeare was Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost. I wasn’t originally going to be doing that, it was going to be John Hurt, but he got the first of his many film contracts and backed out, and you know, in a panic they offered it to me. And I was forty. And Berowne is only supposed to be twenty, maximum! But I had a very pretty wig and a nice little beard which covered up my double chin [Laughter] and a very nice make-up and I got away with it! In those days I was quite slim too, which helped the youthful thing. And so because I was too old for it really, and because it came to me purely by accident, and because it was exceptionally well-received by the press, it’s remained my favourite. I can remember on the first - by this time we had previews - I can remember on the day of the first preview, after we had been given our notes from the director, we all broke for lunch and I had no appetite - I never have on a performance day - and I thought, ‘Oh God! I’ve been rehearsing all this while, but I don’t really know…’. I was so conscious of the fact that I had to get a move on and learn the lines and take over John Hurt’s mantle, that I’d left a lot of digging undug, and I walked up the side of the river to Holy Trinity Church - where, as you probably know, Shakespeare’s tomb is - and very fortunately when I went into the church there was absolutely nobody in sight. I went up to the tomb and I said, ‘Will,’ - meaning Shakespeare - ‘I understand, if the stories are true, that you were persuaded to write the part of Berowne for yourself because your company got fed up with you playing Hamlet’s… ghost of Hamlet’s father and William the Rustic in As You Like It, and they had persuaded you to write yourself a really good part, and you wrote Berowne. Well, I’m playing it tonight, and I don’t know where I’m at. Socan you help me?’. Just as I - and I said this out loud, but quietly - Just as I finished speaking, the church bell started to ring, so I thought, ‘Well, there’s a sign!’. And that night I went out on the platform, with David Suchet as the King of France, and he was making his speech about how we were all to sort of to stop being these gallants and go into study, you know. And I came out with my first line and got the first laugh of the evening. Very loud laugh. And I remember saying under my breath - not to anybody but to the person I was hoping was listening - ‘Thank you, Will! Stay with me, stay with me!’. Being a Scot, I’m very superstitious, you see. And it was a personal triumph. So I’m very, very fond of it for that reason. The only other parts - and I played oh! so many of them! - the only other parts that were great fun to do was Richard II, Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, certainly I played both Antipholi - the two twins - I started off playing Ephesus in Comedy of Errors and then graduated to Syracuse, so I played those, and they were fun to do, with Diana Rigg as my wife in one of them, and as my sister-in-law in the other. [Laughter] And I only have one regret, and that is that I never actually got around to playing King Lear which I would like to have done, just to sort of finish everything off… It’s too late now, I can’t do it, because you need a lot of energy to do - play - King Lear. I see that Ian McKellen is going to do it very soon, and he is only about six years younger than I am, and that’s… even now it’s too old for… Depends on who the Cordelia is, because you see, you have to carry her at the end. So it was… when it was Paul Scofield, it was Diana Rigg, and when we were on that tour that I talked about at length, he used to come over to the breakfast table where she was sitting, and look to see what she was having to eat! And if she… and if it was a main meal, like lunch or something, with potatoes, he would just pick up a knife and push the potatoes to one side of the plate and waggle his finger at her, and say, ‘No, no, Diana, no, no!’. [Laughter] So that’s the problem there, although I did say… I did say to… to one of the directors at Stratford when I was doing that Hollow Crown there that there was a possibility of Lear pulling a cart on with a dead Cordelia on it, because after all, when you hang someone on a battlefield or on the edge of the battlefield, there is no gallows, so you put them onto a cart and you string them up over the branch of a tree and then you pull the cart away - so - from under them and then they hang, and when they’ve hung there until dead you push the cart back again and somebody cuts them down. And then the body just thumps onto the… So that you can come on with the cart with the body lying on it and Lear can actually clamber up onto it for the bit about, you know, ‘Look she lives, see there, look there’ and all that… And so he dies with her on the top of the cart, and then at the end they just trundle it off. So, unfortunately, like an idiot I told Greg Doran - one of the directors at Stratford - I told him this piece - this idea - and his eyes lit up, so I shall be very interested to see how he makes Ian Holm [ed. corrected to McKellan] cope with that. If he pinches my idea I shall be furious! [Laughter]

AS: OK, finally, would you agree that British Theatre between 1945-68 was the golden age of British theatre? Compared to today’s scene…

IR: Oh yes, very much so! But you see, those were the days of the Tennent empire. I mean he was the Cameron Mackintosh of his day. There were not as many musicals as there are now: straight theatre, drawing-room comedies, classic straight theatre was at its height during that time. And you know, people were writing those sort of plays at that era… and one thinks instantly of Terence Rattigan. Now, you see, what happened… let’s stay with Rattigan. As we came into the area of… where we talked about accents and everything like that, Kitchen Sink – so, it was particularly at the Royal Court Theatre where… where you know, Look Back in Anger suddenly becamethe thing in theatre, and suddenly the sort of... the drawing-room comedies were terribly old hat. Also, television was picking those up, and television was doing that sort of output. So therefore, the straight play for the straight audience began its decline, until now we’ve reached the point where it’s mostly musicals, and the straight plays just don’t pull in the audiences at all. It’s tragic but when you’ve got televisions now that offer you so many choices and channels and everything like that, you can’t compete. Especially with these enormous great screens so the people have little cinemas in their own homes, you know. You can’t compete! So [pause] unless you are part of a classical group like the National, as I was quite recently, or the Royal Shakespeare Company [pause] and you have your own built-in audience who have made a point of coming to see the repertoire of both of those companies over the years… Or, you do what the National Theatre does, and that is the side seats in the vast Olivier Auditorium, they sell for ten pounds for a… per performance. Which means that a lot of young people who are fascinated by the theatre know that they can get in and see some really good stuff for ten pounds! Whereas other people are paying hundreds, you know! So that is a good thing too. Stratford doesn’t need to do that, because as I said to you earlier, it has its built-in audience, the Americans despite the bombs and the suicide things… the Americans still come. And the Australians. Excuse me… I’m talking for too long!

AS: Do we have a chance for another ‘golden era’ in the theatre in Great Britain?

IR: I don’t know. [pause] It’ll be entirely different from what it was when I was a young man. It can’t ever, ever return, because that area of entertainment is so radically different from what it was… so completely different. And I mentioned Binkie Beaumont, the Tennent organisation and making comparison between him - then - and Cameron Mackintosh now. But you see, Binkie rarely did a musical. Macintosh rarely does anything else. If anything else.

IR: Thank you very much, Ian Richardson, for these fantastic memories. Thank you.

IR: You are welcome.

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