I love acting. But I’m not sure I like actors. Except in their proper place, which is in a play: rehearsing it, performing it, maybe even chatting about it afterwards. Take their part away from them, and they’re not sure what to do. Some of them manage to play normal human beings in daily life – but you can see it’s an effort. Others don’t bother to make that effort, and try to play themselves, which is a disaster. Some of them have so many identities that it verges on the pathological. Others have no identity at all. Wedekind, directing his own plays, said, “Just be unnatural, all the rest will follow.” But it doesn’t. Some of them stay unnatural, offstage and on, and don’t get served at bars, because when they order a pint, nobody believes them.
When I direct plays, I tell everyone that they are
ALL vital. And I mean it. An extra can mess things up just as badly, by coming
on at the wrong moment, as the star can by forgetting their lines – to say
nothing of sceneshifters and lighting crew. Of course, that total sense of
community only lasts the length of the production. Later reunions (which people
always want to have, because the buzz was so great) inevitably fail to
recapture it, like a puppy chasing a sunbeam. But while it lasts, it is so
potent that everyone sits around talking about the next time, what play they’ll
do together, who will play what, and so on. Happiness involves the suspension
of the passage of time. These planned productions seldom if ever happen, but
when a thing is good, we want it to last forever, and as this one can’t, we
have to think about the next one.
Of the actors I knew at Cambridge, it tended to be
the least pleasant (and least gifted) who were most determined to succeed in
the profession. I exclude here those people who were personal friends, and whom
I knew before I ever acted with them – none of them actually stuck it out in
acting, not least because they were far too nice.
But there was one exception: a brilliant young
Hamlet, to whom I played Polonius, and who went straight to TV stardom, with
his picture on the front of the Penguin edition of the Classic Serial. And
after that – nothing. Or at least, nothing that I heard of and knew about –
apart from some work in radio drama, that I saw in Radio Times
occasionally, always after the broadcast.
And then there was a nice big article about him in
the RT – which I always read, in order to understand other people’s
conversations, without actually having to watch the dreadful programmes
themselves. His career, it seemed, had suddenly revived, both on television and
in the theatre. Someone had rediscovered Sexton Blake, with his aquiline
profile, as a rival to Sherlock Holmes, and in between recording episodes of
that, the former Prince of Denmark would be appearing as Prospero, Leontes and
Lear at various provincial playhouses.
I was delighted – and fortunately I was able to tell
him so personally, because I ran into him at Waterloo, as we were both peering
up at the electronic oracle.
“Brett?” I said, questioningly, though I was
absolutely positive, since his kind of lean, spare face didn’t change with the
years.
“Mike!” he replied with certainty, because in my
case nature had imitated art, and I had actually grown the Leonardo sort of
beard that gauze, crepe hair and spirit gum had manufactured for me half a
lifetime ago, and which I had not been permitted to remove between the matinée
and evening performances. (The show ran over four hours, and although the
evening performance didn’t actually start the moment the afternoon one ended,
“it followed hard upon”, as they say, so they fed us in the theatre, and quite
a few of the cast never bothered to get out of their costumes.)
“I’m so pleased to see you’re getting some
decent work again,” I said – not bothering with any of the mundane stuff, like
wife, house, kids, car, pets, partly because I didn’t know any of it, and
partly because it doesn’t actually matter, compared with the real stuff,
which is real precisely because it’s unreal, and therefore eternal. “How did it
happen? What was the breakthrough?”
“Ahhh,” he said, and glanced up at the oracle, which
was changing its electronic mind every minute. “I’ve got another train in half
an hour. Have you the time? It’s a complicated story, and I’d really like to
tell someone.”
We got drinks and seats by the window in the upper
gallery of the station bar, with a fine view over the concourse, and he began:
“It was a production of Hamlet. More money in
it than sense. Someone from The Bill was the King, and Roger – you remember Roger? – he was Claudius in
Cambridge – Roger was playing Polonius.”
There was a silence between us. What does
Zarathustra say? “Where I cannot bless, I will go by in silence, without
cursing.”
“And the Prince?” I enquired.
“Don’t ask. Some young kid who’d got a medal from
Lamda for stage-fighting. Anyway, it was proper work, with a long rehearsal
period, and in a fascinating venue – an old theatre they were hoping to rescue,
even if only to use it for filming productions. It had all the machinery from a
hundred years ago, and most of the dust. Remember the ADC?”
I remembered the Amateur Dramatic Club at Cambridge,
where we had rehearsed our Hamlet. When I first arrived, I thought the
seats were tasteful grey velvet. After putting my hand on one, and looking at
the grime that came off, I decided they might well be sky-blue-pink.
“All the stuff. Trap-doors, in the plural, and a
gallery for flying things – and people. I had to put my foot down. I told them
it was Shakespeare, not Peter Pan. But the trapdoor was reasonable. We used it
in Cambridge, after all, though I was worried then that Denis wouldn’t fit
through it. Very physical actor, Denis.”
“So you were....”
“The ghost. Well, one of the ghosts. You see, the
theatre was supposed to be haunted. They said that was one of the reasons it
had been dark for so long. No one else in the cast or crew worried about it, or
noticed the atmosphere. Well, some actors only admit other people exist if
they’re blocking the audience’s view of them, and they want them to move, and a
ghost can’t mask you. But I felt something. And I found out about it. Research
for my part, I suppose, though I’ve never been one of those actors who needed
to be the person I was playing. Just as well, when you think of it, because
I certainly don’t intend being dead for quite a while yet.
“Anyway, I’ve always been a bit solitary, not much
of a one for dressing-room chit-chat, and as the Ghost I had a lot of time
offstage, so I chatted to the stage doorman, who told me the whole story. He
saw me pacing the corridors, learning my lines, and invited me into his little
cubbyhole and made me tea on his gas-ring, which was so old it must have been
illegal, and told me about the past.
“To start with, he showed me a whole wall of posters
and a trunk full of programmes and newspaper cuttings featuring Bob Roberts,
the Hamlet of the Halls. As I looked through them, I could see that what might
have been just a marketing ploy had become an obsession. Each “turn” that Bob
Roberts did had a title taken from Hamlet – of course, that isn’t as
difficult as it sounds, since so many of the lines have become familiar
quotations, even if nobody understands what they mean any more. There was
sheet-music, too, comic songs with beautifully illustrated title-pages, “The
Primrose Path of Dalliance”, or “Hoist with his own Petard, the Biter Bit!” and
“Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be!”
“The dates and places on the programmes told their
own story. From 1912 to 1932, every week was somewhere different, and he was
always in the upper half of the programme. But then he started sliding down,
and doing whole summer seasons in the less fashionable resorts, with nothing in
the winter. It was a rapid fall, but understandable: the Depression,
unemployment and the cinema were all to blame. He’d not been foolish with his
money – he’d bought a part-share in the theatre we were playing in now – and
when I noticed the stage doorman’s name-badge, I understood why he was still
employed there, despite his advanced years. His son, maybe, or a nephew, or
even a lover – they managed these things much more subtly then – and
understandably a fan of his benefactor.
“After I’d spent over an hour looking at his
collection, in complete silence, he said, “He died here, in this theatre, you
know.” And he produced a much-folded cutting from his wallet. Bob Roberts, it
seemed, had wanted, at the end of his life, to move from being a music hall
performer to being a serious actor. The obituary mentioned how Mr George Robey,
the Prime Minister of Mirth, had played Sir John Falstaff in Laurence Olivier’s
film of Henry V – but it didn’t mention that Mr George Robey didn’t have
any lines as such, and only had to look old and ill for a few seconds, which he
was, anyway. Nonetheless, it was the path Bob Roberts wanted to tread, so he
part-financed a production of Hamlet and got himself cast as one of the
grave-diggers – but a tragic accident with the machinery of the trap-door... I
passed it back, without reading to the end. I was supposed to be using that
trap-door!
“The stage doorman must have had the telepathic
gifts that go with the job, because he said, “Don’t worry, they’ve fixed it
since then. Besides, he was probably plastered – it got him so nervous doing
stuff with written-down words! He always preferred learning by watching someone
– some real old trouper – and then he’d make that material his own.” I nodded
in sympathy, thanked him for the tea and the sight of his collection, and went
back to learning my written-down words. As I left, the doorman said,
half to himself, “He was gentle, you know, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Do you know the Ghost’s part?” asked Brett.
“Yes,” I said, “I played it at school, but they made me tape-record it, to get an echo-effect.”
“Poor you! A ghost needs to be live – if you see
what I mean. And tradition says that Shakespeare wrote it for himself to play.
It’s a huge piece of barely interrupted narrative, like a Messenger speech in
Greek theatre – longer than any of the other great speeches in Shakespeare –
and full of the most remarkable lines:
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf...
– can’t you
just see it, like the Avon that flows past Holy Trinity where he’s buried? It’s
the same greeny-brown reed-fringed river that Ophelia drowns in... It was so
good, it scared me. Being an actor, you have to add something. But there was
nothing I could add to this without taking something away from it. Like the
statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, you don’t want it played by
a human being who has to do mundane things afterwards, like going to the loo.
“That was when I began hearing the footsteps behind
me, began knowing there was someone else waiting in the wings, besides me.
Someone, moreover, watching every detail of my performance in rehearsals. It
certainly wasn’t the director – he was far too busy trying to recruit Ophelia
to be a naked celebrity castaway in trackless Buckinghamshire, her return to
civilisation being conditional on her cooking a full Sunday lunch with all the
trimmings, putting up a couple of rolls of William Morris wallpaper in the
downstairs loo, and performing one or two other acts of a personal nature that
were unlikely to make it on to terrestrial television.
I asked the doorman if he knew anything about the
ghost that was said to haunt the theatre, and he said, of course he did, but he
was kind, and gentle, and wouldn’t hurt anyone. He said, he just wanted his
chance, like anyone else. I didn’t understand what he meant by that at the
time, but I do now.
“It was press-night – and the press were there in
force, attracted by the big-name TV actor, and by the pretty boy playing the
Prince, who photographed mean and moody and was known to have stripped naked on
stage once when he was bass-guitarist in a pop-group at school. If I hadn’t
been so nervous, I wouldn’t have had to go to the loo between my appearance at
the beginning of the play and my big scene at the end of Act I. But I did. And
that was when it happened. In some ways, of course, it was just a joke. No harm
in it at all. Though it could have been very awkward if nobody had taken my
place on stage – but theatre companies do that kind of thing – both kinds of
things, that is, the silly jokes, and the rallying-round to make sure that the
play goes on.”
“What happened?” I asked, since Brett had fallen
silent.
He sang his reply. “ ‘Oh, dear, what can the matter
be? My, my, what a calamity! Hamlet’s Dad’s ghost is stuck in the lavatory!
Nobody knew he was there!’ And they didn’t, either, because it had been built
on later, at the back of the theatre, down a little corridor all of its own!
Before the 1920s, the players used the same loos as the patrons... Anyway, I’m
sure you can imagine my feelings as I found I couldn’t get the door open, me
shut in down below, not exactly in the dark, though it was only a 40 watt bulb,
while everything of importance went on up there, in the light. It was a real
little room, too, not one of those cubicles where I could have climbed over the
top or slid underneath, and I didn’t want to make too much noise, in case it
could be heard on stage and I disturbed the play. In the event, I must have
lost track of time, because I heard this wild roar of applause, and assumed it
must have been for the scene between Polonius and Laertes, so I screamed and
shouted a bit, and one of the sceneshifters out the back for a crafty fag heard
it and came and let me out by turning the catch with a 10p piece – the handle
had sheared off inside. I rushed up to the stage, very much afraid I might be
late for my entrance, only to be pummelled soundly by all the cast who were
there, congratulating me on my brilliant performance. The applause, it turned
out, was for the Ghost. Since I’d made my exit via the trapdoor, they weren’t
at all surprised to see me come puffing up the stairs.
“I’m afraid I didn’t enlighten them as to the true
state of affairs. Two thoughts went through my head: Given what’s just gone on
– which I know nothing about – how am I supposed to play my appearance in the
closet scene in Act III? And even more importantly – how can I live up to this
tomorrow night? So I slunk off to pace the corridors alone, and worry.
As it turned out, I needn’t have. Halfway through To
be or not to be the fire alarm went off – and not a moment too soon! The
real Hamlet was a whizz with words, but not too good with a foil – the actor
playing him, on the other hand – I never found out for sure whether it was the
gas-ring we had to thank, or the ghost. There was a little bit of smoke-damage,
and a bit more sprinkler-damage, but the body of the theatre was completely
unharmed, and since the production was insured, and the backers had seen quite
enough, they discreetly abandoned it and everyone went back on the labour
market. Except me. Because people had been reminded of who I was and what I
could do. And now it’s time for our trains.”
“Didn’t you feel in the least bit – guilty?” I
asked, as I followed him downstairs.
“Not at all!” he said, as we trotted across the
concourse. “He was just one old trouper helping another in the only way he knew
how – and besides, he got what he wanted.”
“Sorry?” I said, looking up at Brett as he stood in
the carriage’s open doorway.
“Even great actors,” he said, “can only play the
parts they’re suited to. And you can’t have the Prince of Denmark played by
someone who’s dead. But the clown always wants to play Hamlet. And he did!”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. But just
then the automatic door closed and the train moved off, so I had to run for
mine, and as we rattled out through Vauxhall, I thought about what he’d said, and
recalled the lines of the play, which I knew pretty well, having acted in it
twice, and realised that he was absolutely right.
Do you know what Hamlet’s father was called?
We are told – twice. Go and look it up!
31st
October 2002, 10am to 2.15pm