I had loved playing the Old Vic, for it is a theatre with a soul; it had been so well lived in that with the end of Prospect it was a deep sorrow to part after so many years. The theatre itself lets you know if it likes the performance. I can feel approval or disdain oozing down the walls.
The Barbican, which was to be my next London port of call, where the Royal Shakespeare Company had its base, is early Mussolini-style. Here we rehearsed part of the time, the rest of the time at Stratford. The rehearsal areas are below sea level, so we spent the day under fluorescent lights, breathing recycled air. The canteen was down there as well, so there was no escape from the Stygian blackness. There are so many doors in this underworld that opening and closing them we would suffer from what was termed ‘Barbican elbow’.
The first of my RSC plays was Much Ado in which I was Benedick, to be followed by Cyrano, Peer Gynt and The Tempest. It is a very curious thing about the Benedick and Beatrice plot, for it is the Claudio/Hero one which is supposed to be the principal plot of the play, but it never feels like that. The audience first of all wants to know the outcome of the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick.
I love the play, particularly in the production Terry Hands set out to stage, for its blatant romanticism. It has glamour, beautiful music, laughter and tears – and it is not just a frivolous comedy, but has depth. It has, too, a very black side, and that black contrasts with the other colours. It is not just a piece of tinsel – there is a touch of ‘hell hath no fury’ in Beatrice’s character. There has been a kind of tradition recently to play the couple as though they are well on the shelf, finding each other almost at the last possible moment, with Beatrice in particular as a real old maid. That is a plausible interpretation, but it is not exclusive.
Sinéad Cusack and I set out to play the lovers as being somewhat younger, so it would become believable that during the play they experience a very violent attraction to each other. At the outset the real attraction is on the side of Beatrice. That she is not married is not because she could not get a decent fellow, it is that for her none of the possible suitors has matched up to Benedick. He has the same problems about the possibility of marriage which she seems to have.
The second approach, which we explored during rehearsals, was that as Benedick begins to catalogue all these virtues it gradually begins to dawn on him that he is describing someone he knows and that when he gets to the colour of her hair he realises it is Beatrice. As in all performances and indeed rehearsals, we were on a journey, and we emerged different in many ways and far more mature. So it is a comedy of growing up. I discovered it was very personal to me. I had just lost my nerve. My mother had died. Not very long before I had moved into a wonderful house where I would probably be living for the rest of my life. And I had found on the threshold of forty a couple of years before a partner with whom the wish and intention was to become permanent.
In rehearsal, the tart-tongued sceptic, the emotionally reticent Benedick, demanded from me a personality performance where I had to find and call on areas of rage, anger and fierceness. Before my stage fright my performances had been purely instinctive and intuitive, but now I had become more self-aware. These deep emotions may not have been part of my surface personality but I now knew they lay beneath it, so that – and this was rather daunting when I confronted it – I knew I was playing a version of myself.
I could use my advanced or sophisticated sense of humour, or rather Benedick’s advanced sense of humour, to hide my real feelings, for I did – and still do – experience myself as a bachelor in a world of couples, an adolescent court jester in a world of grown-up people, who is more at home in the world of the imagination than in the real world. It is my capacity for dreamy wonderment, combined with a terrible insecurity about who I am, where I am going and why and how, that gives me a craving, an absolute need to act.
I was to be in command again, much more than in real life, because I knew who I was supposed to be and what was supposed to happen. On stage I can somehow be noble about all the sad, distressing things that happened to me in my life. My mother’s death several years before was hugely traumatic for me. And yet on stage, if I can recall what it did to me at the time, it became no longer hurtful inside. The process is a kind of purging.
We were still in rehearsal when I discovered all this. I was looking forward so much to going on stage again, for extraordinary things happen there.
Rehearsals of Much Ado were very productive, but before the first night, would terror – that stage fright – come back and hit me with a vengeance?
It did.
I have never been so frightened in all my life as on the first night of Much Ado About Nothing at Stratford. It had taken me twenty-two years to make the 23 miles from Birmingham to Stratford. The triumph was entwined with mortal fear and disaster, for as in the Kipling verses I had to confront the twin impostors just the same. To return to the stage was something I longed to do, and I realised that if I did not accept their offer of four leading roles I would never go on the stage again. I just had to face it.
My terror was so extreme, so gut-rotting, that I even thought at first that I would fall over.
We were on a glass stage in Ralph Koltai’s set; a glass, raked stage, with my high-heeled shoes. I was wearing shot silk, dull pinkish shot silk, and I had been on stage less than a minute and it was black with sweat. Every pore in my body opened up. The terror was awful! I would look down at my feet and see my whole reflection mocking me.
Fortunately no one else noticed the terror and self-doubt I was going through. It was not the impression I gave to others. I am like that: I can un-inhabit myself at will, as I did over my stage fright. Even Sinéad Cusack, who played Beatrice, saw nothing of my state, for she remembers me mainly sitting in rehearsal reading the Daily Telegraph and doing the crossword.
I had to do some serious thinking about memory. Up to this moment I had taken it for granted that it was there: I was a quick study, my memory was instinctual and, as I have said, virtually photographic. But over the period I had this stage fright this all changed.
People ask these questions, and I now had to ask them of myself: ‘How do I learn? Why do I learn? How can I learn?’
For the first time I had to make a conscious effort to feel sure it was there – that I would remember all my lines, to put it bluntly, and to shift for ever that concrete yoke, and that is what I did – painstakingly. Only one director I worked with at this time saw it: Marvin Chomsky, who directed me as Hitler in Inside the Third Reich. He could tell in my eyes that I was frightened, what was going on in my mind, and guessed it was a killer: very gently he helped me to find my feet in it. But it was up to me. No longer would I ever be able to rely on my performance being a self-oblivious, magical process.
Gradually I got back my life on stage through Much Ado and the three productions that followed. It took a long time before the panic wore off. Every day I still dreaded the thought of having to do it, of having to go on stage. I had this terrible disease, and the cure anyway, I was told, would be to actually face it head on. I had to get back on the stage and do a whole series of make-or-break parts. It was tough, and only by creating momentum did I have a chance of blasting my way out of difficulty.
This was the beginning of my and Sinéad’s three years together; we both grew old in the service of Beatrice, and we went after Stratford to London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Beatrice attacks Benedick because she feels love, but cannot admit to the possibility that she loved him previously, when she had a closeness to him, and now feels furious about the way he treated her by going off to war. So there is a strong implication that he has hurt her and this motivates our relationship: we have had a past together. If the relationship was shallow and superficial, both actors and audience would have got bored very quickly.
Knowing this and playing this was the reason neither of us ever became tired, for our roles changed and grew more complex and more nuanced, the performances changed in every country we visited according to the way audiences influenced us. For instance, in New York Beatrice’s hurt and fury registered strongly in that very matriarchal society. Here on St Patrick’s Day morning I opened the hotel window to watch the Macy’s Day Parade and the giant Woody Woodpecker balloon when I slipped and cracked two ribs on the radiator. The understudy Ken Bones took over. Cynthia’s business partner Dale, one of the producers of Much Ado, rather naughtily invited me that evening to Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, where a member of the audience angrily demanded why I was there, and not on stage.
As I settled down everyone came to love Benedick. Truly he was purifying and reshaping my soul. And here again it was laughter, the audience’s laughter through my contact with it, that was a strong healing agent. This was such a crucial stage to pass through in my journey. I had to filter Benedick through the force that was in me, otherwise I would be playing a creature with no heart and no insides.
So to see Much Ado as a play about the difficulty and danger of growing up, in which Benedick often plays the underdog, my voice full of wheeling and impotently exasperated inflections, often playing the mock innocent with farcically prolonged vowels, then hardening into firm masculinity as love replaces self-regard – well, what can I say, other than this was just me!