Interviews

Actor. Agents; Birmingham Rep.; censorship; Covent Garden; Equity; finding jobs; Fings Aint Wot They Used T'Be; working in Ireland; Keswick Century Theatre; Harold Pinter; The Homecoming; regional theatre; Royal Shakespeare Company; Shakespeare; Spotlight; television; working in London.

Conducted by Kate McNiven

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TR: My name is Terence Rigby, I’m an actor, and I’m in my sixties now. I trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in the late fifties after taking an interest in theatre when I was very young, in the boy scouts and then at grammar school in Birmingham and then later in the Royal Air Force, all on an amateur basis.

KM: What year did you go to RADA?

TR: 1958-60, so coming from Birmingham I went back for the Christmas holidays in 1960 and I wrote to the Birmingham Repertory Company, a man called Bernard Hepton who is still with us and acting. He was at that time a director and actor. And he decided to take me on in a production of Anthony and Cleopatra which they were preparing as a small part player and also possibly to understudy a larger role.  I was very thrilled because Birmingham was one of the top four or five regional theatres with Bristol Old Vic, Nottingham Playhouse (that is the old Nottingham Playhouse as opposed to the one that was rebuilt. I think that was Goldsmith St., Nottingham) and Liverpool. So that’s Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol Old Vic and Liverpool and they were the top really of British regional theatre at that time.  I don’t think I’ve missed anybody out. They were the 4 that all actors wanted to work in if they wanted regional theatre.

The other two companies (of course that’s not to exclude the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was formed in the mid sixties, or early mid sixties, under Peter Hall, Sir Peter Hall. We are talking about the regional things, although that would include Stratford) were Pit Lochert in Scotland which ran a whole season of plays for about 9 months each year, actors would want to go into that company as well.  And the only other place I remember was this curious theatre, well I say curious as we didn’t know much about it, in Nairobi in Kenya which used to do a kind of summer season. Of course the idea of going to Nairobi to act was a wonderful kind of thing. It was obviously a colonial type theatre and you would get looked after pretty well but whether they were subject to segregation at that time I really don’t know, although I did make one or two auditions for that company but was never accepted.

However, Birmingham (that’s the old Birmingham, all the things I refer to are the old versions) the old Repertory Theatre at Station Street, and Bernard Hepton was directing. I suppose it’s of interest [that] Derek Jacobi - the man who’s now Sir Derek - he was making his debut at that time having come down from Cambridge, he didn’t go to the drama schools but he came down from Cambridge University group.

KM: That’s amazing to think every fortnight…

TR: Yes.

KM: A very quick rehearsal process.

TR: Yes, well of course there were theatres around that would do it every week as well. But they were mainly called summer rep.  But to get back to this. Derek Salberg had a small part in a production that was coming up in an Agatha Christie play called Murder on the Nile. He had a part of what was termed a Nubian steward, who was on this riverboat when this murder took place. The whole thing was set on a riverboat. He needed an actor to dress up as a black man to go about and dust the rooms and squirt things in the air and occasionally bring a drink in and then disappear off and then come back and then wander out again. I think I had a couple of lines at one point and he paid me, I think he paid me 5 pounds. I was able to do it for two weeks as RADA was down at the time, so I was able to do it.

Effectively, in an odd sort of way, that was my first introduction to professional theatre in that play. However, technically I suppose I wasn’t a professional as it were until I’d finished my RADA course and, going backwards now, that was when I got this part in Anthony and Cleopatra at Birmingham Rep. Bernard Kirby played Caesar beautifully, and Elizabeth Spriggs played Cleopatra, and Tony - dear Tony Steadman - played Anthony. And in those days we rehearsed for 3 weeks and played for three weeks, which was very, very special and was a reflection of the quality of repertory theatre itself. Bristol would be the same and Nottingham and Manchester – oh, Manchester also had a very good reputation, I mustn’t forget Manchester. I think that’s the original theatre not the Royal Exchange, that hadn’t started by then, the Royal Exchange came later. But Manchester did have a good following and was highly rated, almost in a group with those original four. 
I stayed on at Birmingham and did She Stoops to Conquer, the Goldsmith piece, and at that time Sir Barry Jackson was the head, the overall head of the Birmingham repertory company. He was a very, very famous gentleman of the theatre and many other things I’m sure but that was his great thing, the theatre. And he had helped to start or actually created the Malvern Festival, which was where Bernard Shaw - George Bernard Shaw, the writer - premiered most of his plays before perhaps running them into London. But Barry Jackson was there, and I actually met Sir Barry and he was a very elderly gentleman when I was there, and in fact during the time that I was there he died and we went to his funeral and, you know, saw him off. So that was for me quite a historical little thing which happened in Birmingham.

KM: How did it compare between Birmingham and Hull?

TR: Well the great thing about Hull at the time was that it stank of fish! [Laughs] It  really did stink of fish because the ports were nearby and that was where all the boats came in, and at certain time of the day they’d be unloading the fish and the wind would carry the smell right across the city. That would be a lesser kind of theatre, it was really perhaps a touring type of theatre, a theatre in which shows would pass by for two weeks, pass by for two weeks etc. And so we must have had say, two weeks rehearsal for this particular one, we weren’t a tour. I think they were trying to set up a company like Birmingham or the other places, you know, a repertory company. And I think they did a whole season that year, that would have been about 1962 I should think, I did that.  I don’t remember anything in particular, except that there was a lot… I became aware at that time of a lot of kind of internal theatre politics. not a grave matter but politics of the sort where the director and the leading lady would be at loggerheads, and the leading lady would be lobbying some of the other actors to get them on her side, and the director would be doing the same, and there was a situation actually which came to a head after I had left where the leading lady actually managed to get the director sacked, so one became aware that such things were possible; became aware of the antagonism that existed between certain individuals, which up to that point I’d not come across before.

After Hull, of course having been at RADA and lived in London one developed over two years a taste for London and got to know London, and so rather than keep going back to Birmingham, my old home where my brothers and sisters and family and father were, you go back to London because that’s where the agents were and it was the ambition, one’s early ambition is to try and find an agent you see. Some actors at RADA if they won, there were a certain amount of prizes available at RADA and if you were fortunate enough to have won one of those prizes you would get recommended to a big theatre, so one or two actors and actresses, they were given these places in big theatres right from the start. Ironically of course I had done the same thing by chance, just by writing I’d got into one of the big…

I remember the late, and much lamented, John Thaw, he and I were at RADA together. He was the man who played... was it Frost? [Corrected by interviewee: Morse] He did all these big serials on television.

KM: Yes, I know who you mean.

TR: John was given a place to play very big parts at Liverpool, that was his prize. And Tom Courtenay - who has more recently become Sir Tom Courtenay - he was in my class and he was given a part at the Old Vic in a Chekhov play, so they had kind of cushier starts than some of the other actors but because they’d won prizes or they were special people.

You see, what most actors did, mainly they were based in London in some way and they’d go off to a regional theatre for a short period of time or a long period of time and then come back, and in the meantime while they were in the regional theatres they would write letters to London managements and London agents to encourage them to come up to Liverpool or Birmingham or Nottingham or Manchester to see them playing Hamlet or to see them playing a big part, in the hope that they would want to put them on their books in London.

Interview continued...

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