The first time I met Brenda Bruce had been in the early 1970s. There were five of us taking The Hollow Crown on a world tour: Michael Redgrave, Paul Hardwicke, Brenda, myself and our musician Adrian. I knew of Brenda Bruce of course, and of her fame. She, like me, had done her time at Birmingham Rep, twenty years before me, and her extraordinary resilience and well-seasoned skill were now legendary.
I went to meet her where she was staying in a friend’s house near Lambeth Bridge, bringing a big bunch of red roses. She came to the door, and she was very much in her Laura Ashley period, with dresses down to the floor, hair in a pigtail. I presented the flowers, and immediately we established a rapport. I discovered later that her main reason for coming on tour was that Sam, her fourteen-year-old adopted son, had just died from asthma, so she was coming out with us to get over it. She had no children of her own: she had four adopted children, twin girls Jennet and Casey, and Annabel and Sam. She semi-adopted a black boy, too. I believe she fostered him.
Brenda came originally from Shipton. Her first husband was Roy Rich, who created Southern Television; her second was Clement McCallin, a leading actor at Stratford and father of Tania, the set designer who married Michael Blakemore. She was a much greater actress than people thought; although she worked much at the Royal Court she was originally a West End leading lady, and she’d tell stories of how Binkie Beaumont summoned her to his office, telling her she must dress more like Margaret Leighton, the doyenne of fashionable actresses.
But Bren was into trousers: she looked like a boy with her short cropped hair, and at that time in the West End elegance was de rigueur. Actresses like Maggie Leighton would arrive at the theatre in a hat and gloves, and would leave equally attired. When Bren was fêted for a string of West End successes, there was a huge photo of her on the side of London buses with the caption ‘Is this the plainest face in the West End?’
On a cold rainy January day we flew to Miami with The Hollow Crown. We worked our way across America, across the Pacific, across Australia, New Zealand, a bit of Eastern Europe, Greece, Israel, and we had a great time, met a lot of fantastic people.
There was one very odd performance in Fort Lauderdale at the Poncianna Theatre. It was the gala first night, for the ladies came dressed up to the nines, and there were photographs next day in the papers, and on the front of magazines. There was a big commotion when one woman in the stalls turned on and used a handheld hairdryer. Then, about halfway through the second half of the show, the audience started to leave in droves; the seats were banged up, and we had no idea what was going on – they made no secret they were leaving. We reached the end and immediately asked, ‘What was up, what happened?’
This was the first night, they told us, and the ladies had to get their jewels back to their safe deposit boxes by 9.30. So these heavily bejewelled women, who were not there to see the show at all, were traipsing out to take their jewels back. They were there to be seen, not to see us: we were incidental, jesters at the court.
Redgrave wasn’t well on this tour, and we did our best to look after him and love him up. We took him out to a gay tea dance in Florida at Fort Lauderdale which he loved. We had drinks and they played Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. Everyone danced, including Michael, who circled the floor with Bren very gently.
In Honolulu we brought him with us to a gay bar after the performance, and here he got a little tipsy, and really let his hair down, had a ball, and the four of us then went for a stroll across Waikiki Beach. But next morning he reverted to Sir Michael.
The Hollow Crown wove a spell and lasted so well we were still doing it in the Nineties. We went out later with Diana Rigg, which was great fun, and then with Janet Suzman. But it was with Brenda that I loved it most.
Brenda was not beautiful, but she had a wonderfully characterful face, with huge blue eyes and snub nose, and a warm, appealing, husky voice; she was extraordinarily versatile, because she could do the classics, and also the kitchen-sink stuff. Her energy was prodigious: she was at one time playing leading roles at the RSC at Stratford and running a pub, for she was a landlady in a pub just outside Stratford and looked after the lunches and dinners.
She had so much tragedy in her life, losing in a short space Sam, her second husband Clem, her father, then her mother. As the years passed by, Richard became much closer to her than she was to me. He adored her and she adored him, and he did for her what a child would do when she died, but it was not like that to begin with. Initially there was great jealousy between Richard and Brenda, for she was very jealous of Richard being with me, while we were fraternal brother and sister. This passed. We spoke practically every day and she really became part of our family.
Unfortunately the Prospect Company came to an end in something like acrimony – in public poses and unruly emotions. We were in Beijing or Peking with Hamlet after many successful tours, when Toby and the Chairman of Prospect were sacked, while it was announced from London that Tim West was taking over.
By this time Prospect had painstakingly earned that semi-global pedigree suitable for the first-ever British theatre company to appear in the People’s Republic of China. After a rapturous welcome in Japan, where we had been fêted by the traditional Kabuki actors, we flew west into a very different atmosphere of outward conformity and protocol, yet unpredictably noisy audiences.
When we opened in Shanghai I carried my own private sense of occasion, for it was my 200th performance as Hamlet. Looking through a hole in the curtain I saw an audience of identically dressed, identically shorn men and women, all with white transistor wires for the translation issuing out of their ears. Rather rudely I thought of Alcatraz, confirmed by the disquieting barrage of sound, giggling, eating, very loud hawking and spitting which went on throughout. There were five Chinese actors at the back of the stalls in a booth translating simultaneously, and we received a barrage of feedback from this, too.
There was one line, and I don’t quite know why, which always got a big laugh: it was when Hamlet kills Polonius and says over his dead body, ‘Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.’ Whether there was some political comment implied, or the translation put a comic emphasis on it, every night the audience erupted in loud guffaws. We were warned there might be no applause at the end, but quite the contrary happened: their thunderous relish was long and loud. I had no idea what to make of it, beyond a kind of exhilarated dissatisfaction.
We did three performances in Shanghai and five in Peking. One curiosity of the visit was that Toby and I were not allowed to travel in the coach from hotel to theatre or for sightseeing. When we boarded it for the first time officials told us to get off and explained: ‘You are the leading actor and director – there is a car for you.’ This was communism. Toby and I as leaders had to fulfil the functions of notable visitors, and became casualties of the Chinese warm hospitality.
It was only three years after Chairman Mao had died, and the thaw after the Cultural Revolution was beginning, so they were thrilled to try out their English on us. One teenager came up to me in the street saying, ‘How now, brown cow,’ and then ran away giggling. Our typically rebellious young company also had to show off, and in the old Soviet-built hotel in Peking just before we left a group demonstrated against the Stalag-like atmosphere by knotting sheets together and shinning down from the first floor humming music from Stalag 17. By the end we were so tired we slept all the way to Australia, yet we had successfully brought for the first time ever a production of Shakespeare in English to the country with the biggest population in the world.
We were in Peking when we received news of the sackings, and our generous hosts couldn’t understand how we artists and director of the prestigious Old Vic Company could be treated like this. At home the production at the Old Vic of the Scottish play with O’Toole in the title role was about to open, directed by Bryan Forbes.
Peter had last been on the stage seventeen years before (in that flamboyantly exposed Hamlet when I played Laertes). Meantime preparations for the Scottish play were like a gigantic travesty. It was pure farce, as O’Toole called the play ‘Harry Lauder’, and Tim West pleaded with Forbes to make changes to avert total disaster. Before the curtain rose on the first night Forbes went into Peter’s dressing room and found him stark naked except for the Gauloise in his mouth.
‘Can’t wear them, darling, they’re hopeless,’ he said of his costume, and proceeded on in jogging trousers and gym shoes.
Next day the disaster was front page news, and one critic called Peter’s performances ‘deranged’, another – just slightly more politely – a ‘milestone in the history of coarse acting’.
‘How are the houses?’ Richard Burton later asked Peter, who rather gloried in all this madness.
‘Packed,’ he answered.
And Katharine Hepburn told him, ‘If you’re going to have a disaster, have a big one.’
In one cartoon Peter, dressed as Macbeth, is in the wings about to go on with the black-tied impresario telling him: ‘Get on a camel – a few lines from Lawrence of Arabia and this could run forever!’
Tim West dissociated himself from the production entirely, but even so it was a sell-out. I refused to get involved. The wonderful office and production staff at the Old Vic, who were busy planning the next season, were given the push. So this was the sad demise of Prospect, although we were still on tour with Hamlet and had a long final leg in Australia to fulfil, where quite unexpectedly I was to meet my nemesis.