In 1974 Jonathan Miller invited me to watch rehearsals of Hamlet, the third in a season of “Family Romances” he was directing in repertory at the Greenwich Theatre. I said yes at once. I had been in love with England and English literature ever since I was a child reading E. Nesbit and Winnie-the-Pooh. When I first arrived, at twenty-three, it was like stepping into an alternative reality, a wonderful looking-glass world where people actually drove on the left and had afternoon tea. But I was a tourist, there only for a few weeks, as invisible to the inhabitants as they were unknowable to me.
Twenty years later I returned—this time, fortunately, with introductions from my editor and from friends who had lived in England. After six months as the wife of a Cornell professor on sabbatical, I was more enchanted than ever. I returned as often as I could, renting apartments for a month or more almost every year. I began to meet people who had just been names in the book sections of newspapers and magazines. (Not bold-face names, back then: almost none of them were as well known as they later became.) Among them were Jonathan Miller and his wife, Rachel. Jonathan had made a splash in the review Beyond the Fringe and was now starting to be known as an innovative director. I was keen to discover what he would make of what is probably the most famous play in the English language, and how he would express his thoughts, using not words but a stage, lights, scenery, and actors.
I was also interested in how a stage production is put together, and in what professional actors are like—who they are, where they come from, and how they learn to pretend to be alternately kings and tramps, heroes and saints, lovers, madmen, fools, and murderers. Would these people and their world be different from the amateur actors and little-theater groups I had known in America, or the same? (The answer was: essentially the same, only more so.)
I began going to rehearsals, starting with the first meeting of the company in Greenwich in February 1974, following them to a hotel off Earl’s Court Road for rehearsals a week later, and finally back to the theater. I talked to the cast and had lunch with them; I sat in the audience at the first preview, and drifted around backstage on opening night.
Jonathan Miller
He is usually compared by journalists to a large untidy sea bird, a stork, or, more accurately, a heron; mention is made of his height, his long legs and wings, prominent beak, and rumpled feathers. Photographs reproduce this accurately; what they cannot show is that he operates at a different film speed from other people; that he thinks, speaks, and moves noticeably faster. Often he is mentally or literally two impatient steps ahead of everyone else. As a director, this gives him great advantages. He can, for instance, see everything that is happening in a scene involving eight characters.
But speed and intelligence are not enough. Directing is an exhausting job, requiring a great deal of energy and willpower. In rehearsal there are essentially no times when Jonathan is not on stage, nothing and no one he can afford not to attend to. Sometimes he stands back like a painter from his canvas, but more often he watches from nearby in the crouched position of a runner, balancing on his toes, then sprinting forward to stop the action. He explains rather than demonstrates, not imitating the intonation or gesture he wants, but describing it. This is deliberate. “I don’t want anyone to parrot me,” he told me on the first day. “I want them to find their own way.”
A successful director is, almost by definition, someone with a strong ego. There are times when, in order that his ideas shall prevail, Jonathan will use every weapon at his disposal: wit, charm, threats, praise, flattery, bribery, patience, impatience, argument, and scorching ridicule. There are times when all those weapons fail, and he goes home at the end of the day not only exhausted but, for the moment, beaten.
Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, for him to play a part himself?
“No. I could never be an actor, because of my stutter. I was all right in Beyond the Fringe because there I could improvise. The stutter only comes on when I have to give a prepared speech, or say lines someone else has written.”
“A protest against anyone’s telling you what to do?”
“Yes, perhaps.” He looks away, is silent.
The First Day
In the theater at Greenwich. It has the haunted, dingy look of all empty public rooms, and is also quite dark and very cold—economy and the fuel crisis having combined to extinguish all heating except during performances. Everyone is huddled in winter coats in the front rows while Jonathan, hunched on a box at the edge of the bare stage, delivers what he has called “a general brief chat” and turns out to be an elegant two-hour monologue full of erudite references and in-jokes.
“I want to make this production clear and diagrammatic.” he begins. “Get away from all the romantic clutter, all the romantic fog.” The set (by Patrick Robinson) will be absolutely simple—plain benches at the corners and center of the half–arena stage, and fixed screens at the back made of ropes strung vertically. The costumes (designed by Patrick’s wife, Rosemary Vercoe) will be sixteenth-century, but subdued—blacks and browns with slashes of color, based on the portraits of Titian. (Jonathan leans forward to show and then pass round a book of reproductions.)
In line with this conception, Jonathan goes on, he will not try to make the Ghost look like a supernatural apparition. “Death isn’t a disease which makes you misty, hollow-voiced, and ten feet tall. A ghost is simply, and horribly, somebody who shouldn’t be there; somebody who has broken his contract and then suddenly comes back on stage during a performance.”
Claudius, he continues, should not be played as a lecherous monster, but as a Renaissance prince who, like so many others, has murdered his way to the throne—and consolidated his power by marrying the queen. He is not in love with Gertrude, or she with him; instead she is terrified and fascinated—but not sexually, rather as a bird by a snake. (This interpretation is to cause much trouble later: it contradicts not only theatrical tradition and Shakespeare’s text, but Irene Worth’s and Robert Stephens’s stage personae. During rehearsals there will be a continual attrition of Jonathan’s version of the King and Queen, so that by opening night there is, to say the least, a strong undercurrent of sexual feeling between them.)
Basically, Jonathan announces, this is a play about the conflict between thought and action, “the standard Renaissance dilemma.” On the one hand you have Hamlet and his university classmates Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern—young men trained in the scholarly and courtly virtues. (Here follows a lightning exposition of the traditions of the Renaissance gentleman, with references to Castiglione and Sir Walter Raleigh.)
On the other hand you have Claudius and Gertrude and their court, concerned with worldly power and authority. Here problems are practical rather than theoretical, and the important human relationships are those of husband and wife, parents and children, rather than scholarly and Platonic friendship between men. “1 don’t mean they’re buggering each other,” Jonathan adds hastily. “It’s an intellectual thing… . A conflict of generations. For Hamlet and his friends the world of the court represents corruption. It’s something they have to reject, or come to terms with or, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, maybe be seduced by power and become killers.”
Peter Eyre
“I’m very excited about the idea of doing Hamlet with Peter,” Jonathan said to me before the production began. “He’s one of the most conscious and intelligent actors I’ve ever worked with, and also one of the most sensitive and intuitive. Any good actor can project a strong emotion. Peter can do that, and he can also convey two conflicting emotions at once, a situation which is much more common in real life, especially in this country.
“But beyond all that he has a quality that’s very very, rare in the theater. When you see Peter, you don’t say, What a wonderful actor. You don’t get the feeling he’s acting at all, but that he’s just an ordinary person who’s got on to the stage somehow. At first the other actors are always thrown off by him. He hasn’t had the same training, so he’s always stumbling into them, breaking up their patterns, because he doesn’t know the rules. That can be corrected in rehearsal, of course. But this time I don’t want to correct it entirely, because that’s the role of Hamlet in the play.”
“I don’t have to explain Hamlet’s speeches to Peter,” Jonathan tells me later during rehearsals. “What I have to do is to get him to speak the verse properly, musically, without losing that quality he has of seeming to think aloud.” This will mean a lot of work, he says, but it is absolutely essential. “And besides, it will be good for Peter to work hard.”
In Jonathan’s view, Peter is now at a point in his career when he may become—and he actually did become—one of the best actors in England. The trouble is that he has too much money and knows too many fashionable and purely decorative (or in cruder terms, rich and idle) people, who encourage him to waste time and remain only a brilliant amateur.
Others besides Jonathan have plans for Peter. He will become their friend, their lover, their child; they want him to read their favorite books and see their favorite films. Robert Stephens (Claudius), who goes to a gym twice a week to work out, will invite Peter to come with him (“All he needs now is to get into condition, build some muscle”), Irene Worth (Gertrude) wants to cook him dinner and give him a bath. He gets fan letters from strangers in remote London suburbs who feel that he is their soulmate and beg or demand a meeting.
Yes but, what is Peter really like? Wishing to avoid the sort of projection I have just described, I will only say that he is a tall, thin, pale man in his early thirties, who looks about ten years younger than he is. He is much subject to illness, real and imaginary. (During the first week of rehearsals, he and everyone else was in a state of anxiety because he was spitting blood, but X-rays proved negative.) He is one of the eight children of an American businessman and an English aristocrat; he was born in New York, educated in England, went to drama school in Paris, and has already appeared with the Old Vic and in plays and films.
Peter has wanted to do Hamlet since he was a child, when his governess taught him and his brother and sister to recite scenes from the play to their parents. “I think now that playing Hamlet will be like being analyzed for the fourth time,” he told me when we were having lunch in his tall thin house full of contemporary art in Kensington, before rehearsals began. The fourth time? “Yes. I’ve had an Adlerian analyst, and a Freudian, and a Jungian—he was by far the best.” After the play has opened, I ask him if it has in fact been like an analysis. “Oh. yes. It made me think about my parents, and my father’s death; about brothers and sisters—about suicide, especially… . But isn’t that what it’s supposed to make everybody think about?”
Backstage
For someone who has spent most of her time in theaters sitting out front, it was amazing to see, that first day at Greenwich, how shabby and makeshift things are backstage. Just out of sight of the audience are mops, brooms, and coils of rope; you descend the back stairs into an area of dingy cement corridors, naked lightbulbs, rickety folding chairs, wire coat hangers, and spilt powder. The common loo provided for the women in the cast is like what you might find in a railway café: small, cold, and dark, with a damp gray-veined sliver of soap on the edge of a bare washbasin—far inferior to the loo for ladies in the audience.
When the company moves into London, conditions are even worse. There, for four weeks, rehearsals take place in the White House Hotel in Earl’s Court, in a large draughty square ballroom, once grandly Victorian. Now the cut-glass chandeliers and gold-framed mirrors are broken and dusty, the whipped-cream scrolls of plasterwork chipped and stained, the pink brocade loveseats as grubby and hamstrung as old Victorian whores. On fine mornings a weak sunlight leaks into the room through tall dirt-streaked windows—and also a steady, damp, penetrating cold which the single tiny electric heater cannot touch. “It is a nipping and an eager air,” as Horatio keeps saying: the temperature in the room, like that outdoors, varies between six and ten degrees centigrade. The actors rehearse in coats and scarves, and there is a tendency for them to stand with arms folded for warmth even in scenes where other gestures might be more appropriate.
But nobody complains. It is not English to mention physical discomfort, and besides there is an economic crisis.
It occurs to me finally to ask whether these working conditions are approved of by the actors’ union. But apparently this is not the sort of thing British Actors’ Equity is concerned with. They have other matters on their mind, as the Equity Deputy, or shop steward, for this production explains to me. And they are not in a very good bargaining position vis-à-vis management—of the Equity members in the country, over half are out of work at any one time.
It seems right that this Deputy should turn out to be Lionel Guyett, the serious, handsome young actor who appears at the beginning of the play as Marcellus, and again at its end as Fortinbras—both soldiers, examples of orderly authority. Lionel volunteered for his job on the first day of rehearsals, and he has been Deputy for several other productions. His duties are to keep an eye on the management to make sure that they do not break any rules, as by asking the cast to work more than ten hours in a single day, and to collect Equity dues. He has had a quiet time with this play, but things are not always so easy, what with actors who never have any ready money and managements who try to avoid paying overtime.
The Duel
An expert has been brought in to choreograph the fight in the last act. He is Bill Hobbs—a slight, spare, flat-faced man with the instant reaction time and sinewy stripped-down build of a tennis pro, who travels all over Europe staging duels and battles. He has a thick folder of scripts for fights, with stage directions and diagrams (“Laertes—cut to head… . Hamlet—parry with rapier… .”) which he goes over with Jonathan.
Bill’s job is complex, for the weapons and movements must be historically correct as well as looking realistic. It is also quite dangerous. Theatrical swords and daggers are blunt-edged, but they must appear sharp and heavy; an awkward thrust can cut your hand badly, or even blind you. Bill has already been injured several times by clumsy dramatic swordsmanship, he tells me. “It is probably just a question of time,” he says, shrugging and grinning, “until some ass gets me again.”
The appearance of Bill Hobbs in the dusty rehearsal room has a marked effect on the men in the company. Even those who will not draw or carry a sword in Hamlet get up and move around, play with the practice foils, and make jokes about their own or each other’s clumsiness. Uneasy anecdotes are recalled—that time in Chichester when Smith cut up Jones’s face so badly he had to leave the cast, while Smith took over his (much larger) role. Standing armed opposite each other for the first time, Peter and Nicky Henson, who plays Laertes, exchange a nervous glance. But Bill knows his job. By the end of the second week, the fight scene is so good that when the rest of the company sees it for the first time, they break into applause.
Robert Stephens
What I notice first is his physical presence, the impression he gives of being more alive than other people—as if his body, like Jonathan’s mind, ran at a higher metabolic rate. As he moves about the room, I have the sense that this is an exceptionally large, strong, handsome, healthy human animal, the kind that wins ribbons at county fetes.
Along with this good health goes unusual good nature, a ready interest in and affection for the rest of the company. “I like having Robert in a show,” Jonathan tells me, “not just because he’s a fine actor, but because he’s so good for the general morale.” Even when he isn’t on stage himself, he watches the rehearsal closely, and is generous with praise and suggestions afterwards. As he talks to the others, he stands close to them, often with his arm round their shoulders; he hugs or kisses them as they arrive or leave. (“It’s like being kissed by a cross between sandpaper and a sea anemone,” Jonathan remarks.)
If Robert’s own morale is good, it may be because of his sense of his own good luck. He began acting as a child in the back streets of Bristol, where his father was a laborer: putting on plays with his friends and charging the neighbors a halfpenny admission. When he told his mother that he wanted to be an actor, she was horrified. Actors, to her mind, were no better than gypsies and tramps. “‘Why don’t you go on the tugboats like my uncle?’ she said to me. ‘That’s a good, steady, honest job.’ But I didn’t listen to her.” Robert laughs—as if still, after years of success, he is surprised by his good fortune, like a man who wakes up every morning to discover that he has won on the pools.
At intervals during the production Jonathan worries about Robert: about whether his high spirits arc growing too high to be safe or healthy. He also worries because Robert is what is called “a slow study.” It takes him a relatively long time to learn his lines, and still longer to get fully into a part. At first he is puzzled by the role of Claudius, and keeps asking questions. “Why do I say that?… How do I feel about Polonius?” Jonathan’s psychological explanations make him frown, but his face lights up when Jonathan says “You want a businessrnan voice here, very fluent, comfortable, full of knowing authority. You’re telling him. ‘Well, just between us—as a matter of fact I have four of my chaps on the planning board.’” “I love Jonathan,” Robert told me later. “I’d go through flood and fire for him.”
The General Election
Following the British election of February 1974 the Labor Party, under Harold Wilson, came to power, replacing the Conservatives and their leader, Edward Heath. Both before, during, and after polling day, conversation about this national event is at a minimum, reinforcing my sense that actors live in a separate dimension. What comments there are deal wholly with Heath’s and Wilson’s diction and acting style, not their policies. Thorpe is rated superior to both of them in performance, and it is suggested that he might do well as Uncle Vanya. A straw vote taken by me two days before the election predicts a small Labor victory, with the Liberals a close second and twenty percent of the company undecided or not telling—leaving out Irene Worth, who says she thinks most politicians disgusting and hasn’t bothered to vote in years.
Theatrical Economics
Before I knew better, I assumed that most British actors were rich or at least comfortably off, living in regal grandeur or trendy luxury. This notion came from faulty association of ideas. When I saw them on stage or film, they were often wearing brand-new expensive clothes and living in large, bright, elegantly furnished rooms. Sometimes they were dressed like kings and queens and lived in castles. Also, more obviously, the actors I saw most often and heard most about were the most successful—the few who really did have three cars, a town house, and a farm in Provence.
But beyond these few are a great many who are not very comfortable. The British Equity Association minimum rate of pay for a West End production is less than most secretaries earn. For the Greenwich productions, classified as “Subsidized Repertory,” the Equity minimum is less than the pay of a bus conductor. And these rates are for public performances; rehearsal pay is still lower. Jonathan is popular with his company because he insists on full performance pay from the first day of rehearsal, but this is unusual.
Most of the company of Hamlet earn more than the Equity minimum, but not very much more. A few earn several times as much; but this sounds better than it is, since almost no actor in England works continuously. It is quite usual to be unemployed for half the year, and many members of the cast were out of work for months before this production started. And it must be remembered that these are not typical Equity members, but exceptionally talented and successful ones.
How do they manage to live at all, then? Mainly by selling themselves to films, television, radio, and advertising, where the pay scale is higher. Nicola Pagett (Ophelia) comes in late to rehearsal one day because she has been excused to do a “voice over” for a TV commercial. Eventually, while romantically colored views of Italy are flashed on the screen, she will be heard reading aloud a thirty-word script which she now repeats in a burlesque bedroom voice for us in the hotel bar: “The moon … the pines … my first Campari!” For this morning’s work Nicola will receive more just in “expenses” than she earns in a week at Greenwich, and every time the ad goes out on TV, she will get another £3.
The easiest way to make a lot of money is by appearing in a well-known TV serial. The danger is that if it gets to be too well known, no director will cast you in a play. Philip Lowrie, the gentle, thoughtful actor who plays Horatio, was in Coronation Street from 1961 to 1968, then quit and spent the next four years without work. “They kept inviting me to come back on the show,” he tells me. “I played Dennis Tanner, he was this sort of lovable layabout, but I’d got to absolutely hate him, and I knew if I didn’t stick it out, I was done for.”
Other members of the company make ends meet by posing for magazine advertisements or reading lectures on educational TV. Nicky Henson (Laertes) has appeared in gangster and horror films with titles like Psychomania and Vampira. “It was so bloody bad,” he tells me of another such film, “that I was terrified it would become a camp success. But thank God, so far nobody’s heard of it.”
In effect, Jonathan tells me, Nicky and the rest of them are literally subsidizing the British classical theater by taking jobs like these—buying themselves time to appear in plays like Hamlet, Ghosts, and The Seagull. Jonathan Miller is doing the same thing. He is paid a flat fee of £600 to direct these three plays, or about £50 per week—often a fifty- to sixty-hour week, since Equity doesn’t protect directors from overwork. He buys this time by directing films for TV and contracting to write popular books and articles. Usually he is behind on these contracts; on opening night, for instance, I found him in the stage manager’s room simultaneously trying to listen to the play as it came out of the loudspeaker overhead and to type an overdue chapter of his current book.
Irene Worth
More than anyone else in the company, she looks and behaves like the popular notion of an actor. A leading lady in the grand tradition: I can imagine her photographed soft-focus, swan-breasted in classical draperies on an Edwardian sepia postcard. When rehearsal stops, the others turn off that invisible energy charge that makes them seem larger on stage than they are in real life. Irene does not turn it off. She is always on stage, as if she had no other personality: she orders cottage pie in the hotel bar with the resonant diction and eloquent gestures of someone who thinks five hundred people are watching.
And according to report she has no other private self or private life. She lives, in the old-fashioned phrase, completely for her art. Unlike less single-minded actresses, she has not managed (or cared) to accumulate jewels, country houses, husbands, children, relatives, or hangers-on. As far as anyone can tell me, she appeared fully formed on stage in the premiere of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, as Celia, the beautiful young religious martyr—taking on at that moment, perhaps, something of Celia’s character, if not her destiny.
Like Celia, Irene Worth believes utterly in the importance of her mission. Nothing else matters. Called upon to die of poison in the last scene of Hamlet, she crumples onto the cold, filthy, bare floor time after time, without any evident thought of what is happening to her pink angora sweater. Other actors find her difficult to work with at times because of this single-minded intensity, and because of her freely expressed scorn of anything she considers artistically shoddy or conventional.
Considering Irene’s reputation, and her undoubted brilliance as an actress (which everyone in the company admits, even when they are furious at her), she does not appear on stage very often. This isn’t just because some directors are afraid of her temperament. Irene also turns down all roles and plays that do not meet her standards. She is interested in experimental drama, in improvisation. “I want to be where the theater is new, alive—at the moving edge,” she says, with a gesture which indicates that this edge cuts like a knife. Then she tells me, her eyes shining, of the moment recently when she came nearest to Celia’s famous martyrdom on the anthill: in 1971 when she toured the Near East in Peter Brook’s production of Orghast, a play by Ted Hughes written entirely in an imaginary emotive language and presented before native audiences in a tent.
I was surprised to learn from Who’s Who that this great lady of the British theater was born in rural Nebraska fifty-seven years ago. (It even seems strange that she should be of any definite age; she looks barely forty some days and nearly seventy on others, and has the gestures and walk of a young girl.) Yet in her passionate devotion to Art, Irene recalls other actresses and dancers who came out of the rural American Midwest, such as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. When I try to imagine her childhood, I see Model T Fords and feed stores and dust blowing through empty small towns and out across an endless prairie. I think of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, and wonder what sort of cyclone it was that carried off Irene Worth.
Acting as a Caste
What I have been told is true—the theater is a world apart, with its own language, history, and culture. It has its leaders and heroes (the name “Laurence Olivier,” by my count, is invoked twice a day on the average). But socially at least, all actors are equal. Within the theater, the barriers of class—which to an American sometimes seem to turn the English social landscape into a tiresome maze of muddy quagmires and thick thorny hedges disguised with roses—hardly exist. There is no electrified fence between Robert Stephens, whose father was a builder’s laborer, and Jonathan Cecil (Osric), the son of Lord David Cecil—one of whose ancestors, Lord Burghley, was Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and a probable model for Polonius.
To become an actor is often to step outside one’s class into a separate caste. Two members of the company, however, have not had to do this, because they were born into theatrical families. Antony Brown (Polonius) is the son of a man who worked in vaudeville with Charlie Chaplin and Kate Carney; his grandfather was stage director at the Gaiety Theatre. He is an actor in the old comic tradition, and looks the part: he has the bald domed head and chin beard of figures in classical farce, and when he smiles, his mobile face becomes the classic comic mask.
Nicky Henson is the son of comedian Leslie Henson. After his father’s death, he tells me, his relatives warned him against going into the theater; there were already too many starving actors, they said. So instead Nicky entered the stage management course at RADA. But he wasn’t able to stay backstage; he began singing with a rock group, and then appeared in a musical. “The first night I opened in a real theater, my mother was there, and when the curtain rose she started weeping… . No, I wouldn’t want my own kids to go on the stage, it’s much too chancy economically. Of course, if they insist, what can you do?”
If there is a difference between Antony and Nicky and the rest of the cast, it is that they take being in the theater more easily. For them it is less of a sport and more of a craft; they know how to do it the way other men know how to lay bricks or remove an appendix. Both of them are married to actresses, and they are much involved in their families. When I met Nicky, he had just arrived at the theater on his motorcycle, and looked like the toughest guy in a gang—square-jawed, unshaven, in boots, jeans, studded jacket, etc. But the first thing he did after unstrapping his helmet was to pass round photographs of his two-year-old daughter and tell how, upon seeing her first snowfall that morning, she had remarked indignantly, “Dirty birds.”
The Theater as a Tradition
Not only class barriers, but age barriers, are dissolved within the theater. Between the youngest and oldest members of the Greenwich company there are more than fifty years: Graham Seed is twenty-three; while both Anthony Nicholls and George Howe are well over the age at which people in most jobs are forced into retirement, yet they are still valuable to a director.
Their presence in the company is also valuable to the other actors, especially in the early awkward days of rehearsals. It seems to promise that this clutter of anxious people in a cold room will eventually turn into a production of Hamlet, part of British theater history. Tony Nicholls, a tall, calm, distinguished-looking man, whom Jonathan describes to me as “a real theatrical gentleman,” has appeared in almost every play Shakespeare ever wrote. At the first reading, where the rest of the cast are turning pages and stumbling over strange words, Tony speaks the Ghost’s lines in a clear, resonant voice and without a book, for he has played the part often before. It is literally as if a spirit from the past spoke, inspiring and blessing the enterprise.
George Howe, who looks like a very wise, cheerful, and attractive gnome, has an even longer history as a Shakespearean actor. He first appeared in Hamlet in 1934, and has twice played Polonius with the Old Vic Company in a castle at Elsinore. At lunch breaks he, like Tony, is surrounded by younger actors listening to his (sometimes scandalous) anecdotes of the theater.
As for Graham Seed, this is his first speaking part in a London production—or rather parts: he is not only Barnardo and the Player Queen, but a priest in the graveyard scene. He plays them all with a childish seriousness and constant delight in simply being on a stage, which is also important to the rest of the cast, and sometimes cheers them up on dark afternoons. Graham is here because Jonathan noticed him at Chichester in a production of The Taming of the Shrew. He was one of a bunch of Petruchio’s servants who had no lines, and nothing much to do but move furniture. At rehearsals it was obvious that all of them were bored and impatient, except for Graham. While the others went through their duties mechanically, and talked and smoked and read the papers between cues, Graham watched what was happening on stage. “I didn’t say anything to him at the time,” Jonathan tells me. “But I made a note of his name, and I remembered him later.”
Nicola Pagett
Why has this good-looking, well-brought-up girl, out of so many like her, become an actress? She has natural gifts, of course: a good figure, a musical voice, and the right kind of looks. Seen up close she is tiny, with a bright, doll-like prettiness and eyes almost too large for her face: on stage or film she becomes an incandescent beauty. But to be where Nicola is at twenty-nine you need talent, ambition, and endurance; you have to prefer the uncertainty and hard work of the theater to the security, ease, and comfort you might have if you married one of the successful young men who buzz round beautiful rich girls.
Perhaps some of the cause is in her past. Nicola was born in Cairo and brought up in Egypt, Cyprus, Hong Kong, and Japan, as her father, a Shell Oil executive, was transferred from one office to another. From twelve on she spent part of every year at school in England, traveling half round the globe alone on airplanes. The idea that there are many different worlds in which you must play different roles was familiar to her very early. She didn’t acquire a love of travel, though; she says now that she doesn’t ever want to leave England again. “Of course if I had to go on tour, that’d be different. I’d feel safe anywhere in the world with an acting company round me.”
Nicola is very happy with the Greenwich production. “It’s every young actress’s dream; three parts like these, with a director like Jonathan,” she tells me. But early on in rehearsals her ideas about Ophelia conflict with Jonathan’s. She wants to go round the stage in her mad scene kissing people and giving them flowers, while he insists upon a sterner and more complex interpretation. “Ophelia’s a girl who doesn’t know who she really is; who lets other people, men, define her. When they’re knocked off one by one—her brother gone, her father murdered, Hamlet out of his mind, as she thinks—she cracks up, she retreats into childhood. Schizophrenic regression. I want her to ignore everyone else in the room, to suck her thumb and play with dolls, like my daughter Kate did at three.” Nicola frowns and protests, but Jonathan wins in the end—and the reviews will bear him out.
Yet he knows how to do more than impose his will: he can bow to necessity and turn the limitations of an actor to advantages. He does this for Nicola when it turns out in a later rehearsal of the mad scene that she has great trouble learning or carrying a tune. As she falters again and again, the rest of the cast try to help her: at one point Irene, Robert, Philip, and Nicky are all singing at her simultaneously, in perfect pitch, but to no avail. Nicola panics. “How should I your true-love know, know, kno-ow, no, no!” she cries. “It’s no use. I can’t do it.” Jonathan comes to the rescue. “Don’t try to get it right. Go ahead and hesitate like you just did. let it go flat, that’ll be marvelous.”
Acting Schools
A noisy discussion at lunch in the hotel bar on this subject. In general the younger actors speak well of their training, while the older ones call it a waste of time or worse compared to practical experience. Robert Stephens gives a scathing imitation of the mannerisms of candidates for the Old Vic, and George Howe thinks standards have fallen since he was at RADA in the early twenties and learned his trade from real professionals like Claude Raines instead of theorists who wouldn’t last one night in weekly rep.
With much laughter, mimicry, and trading of mock insults, it is explained to me that RADA produces flashy sophistication (“You may not get the best instruction, but you get a good agent, and learn how to light a cigarette on stage in the West End”). LAMDA teaches earnestness of purpose and intense belief in The Theater and your own roles. Central is currently the most technical, with classes in singing, dance, mime, and stage accents.
Condemnation and ridicule of the Actors’ Studio style of training is general. “I don’t care how somebody feels about a part—that’s between him and his conscience,” Jonathan says. “What I want is an actor who can say a line eighteen different ways. I am not running a clinic.” Yet a few minutes later he is talking about the relation between his current job and the one he was trained for. “Directing and diagnostic medicine are mirror images. In both cases you’re concerned with small physical signs which connote deep inner states. But you work in opposite directions.”
Theater Superstitions
These are famous, of course. Putting your shoes on a table or whistling in the dressing room are bad luck. Worst of all is using the word “Macbeth”; it must always be referred to as “the Scottish play’“ and the leading actor must be called by his first name during rehearsal. Even if these rules are followed, the play is unlucky, and there is a long tradition of disasters occurring during production. Beyond these specific superstitions, there is a general readiness to believe in the supernatural, or at least the uncanny. During the nunnery scene, Peter is supposed to snatch from Nicola’s hands the rosary she has been holding, and throw it to the floor. In rehearsal, one chilly dark day, he does this with such vehemence that it slides across the room into a far corner. At the next break Nicola goes to retrieve the rosary, but she cannot find it. A full-scale search develops; furniture and objects are moved, but the thing has vanished, perhaps down a crack in the skirting board. “It’s a small miracle,” Jonathan says. “The first of many.” There is general uneasy laughter and jokes about God’s displeasure with this production; finally Jonathan promises to get the rosary Nicola will use in the play deconsecrated.
Theatrical Magic
Dramatic theatrical experiences have a strange effect on many people. In the intermission at an Oscar Wilde play I and my friends seem to speak in epigrams, and on the way home from a suspense film the streets are full of sticky shadows and suspicious delivery vans. And this occurs after only an hour or two. The same thing can happen to those who must speak the lines we have only heard, day after day in rehearsal, and then night after night.
Already, just a few weeks into rehearsal, there are moments when the mood of Hamlet appears to dominate the company. Even the “sickness imagery” noted by the scholar Caroline Spurgeon seems to affect them, so that presently not only Peter but also many of the other actors are or have been ill, and there is much talk of symptoms and remedies. The rehearsal hall also begins to look like one of the spare ballrooms of a rundown Scandinavian castle; the actors lounging round it like disaffected courtiers who most of the time have no occupation, but dare not leave for fear of the king’s displeasure.
When I silently question something Jonathan has told them to do (as when he tells Peter to deliver a soliloquy lying flat on his back), he begins to look like Claudius—an upstart who has usurped the throne of the dead ruler (Shakespeare). At other moments, when I approve of his direction and feel that the actors are wrong to object to it, Jonathan looks like Hamlet, a noble mind driven half-mad by the ignorant stubbornness or self-seeking hypocrisy of the people about him.
On the cast, the effect of the play is even stronger. Infection of an actor by the personality he assumes is a traditional occupational hazard of the theater. It isn’t supposed to happen in a repertory season, where Petruchio cancels out Macbeth and vice versa. But this season is different. In each of the three Family Romances, Irene Worth plays a dramatic and dominating woman with some secret in her past; Robert Stephens her lover, revealed in the course of the play as a phony if not a villain. Peter Eyre is her brilliant, sensitive, neurotic son; and Nicola Pagett, in each case, is an intense young girl, baffled in her love for Peter, who is superior to her in rank. And Antony Brown, as Nicola’s father, provides homely wisdom and comic relief.
Of all this lot, only Robert Stephens seems to have escaped infection, and have nothing in common with Claudius, Manders, and Trigorin except his worldly success and sexual energy. Others, off stage, appear at times to merge into their roles. Irene’s need to be stage center, Peter’s illnesses and subtle wit, the jokes and theatrical anecdotes Antony tells at tense moments, come to seem quite natural—and I am not really surprised to observe that Nicola, as she kneels at prayer during the rehearsal of Act II Scene I, is simultaneously mending the lining of Peter’s overcoat.
The Play Scene
In other productions it has always seemed to me slightly pointless and contrived. Now it begins to have many meanings. The Player King is not imitating only the bombastic actors of Shakespeare’s time, but also, and quite deliberately, those of the recent British theater. “You’ve got to understand that there was a complete change after the last war,” Jonathan explains to me. “The source of it was in the universities, especially Leavis at Cambridge. Before his students took over the British classic theater, it was all historical pomp and pageantry, trumpets and banners, with very little serious attention to the meaning of a play or its patterns of metaphor.”
But beyond this, as Jonathan stages the play scene, it becomes clear that it is not just a theatrical in-joke, but a way of drawing us in. He has Claudius and the other members of the court turn their backs on us to watch the Player King and Queen, so that we become part of the real audience.
The implicit suggestion is that the audience at Greenwich will also be “struck … to the soul by the cunning of the scene” and recognize our own past misdeeds in it. What we are watching, of course, is a murder, but a very peculiar one. The Player King, like Hamlet’s father, is killed by having poison poured into his ear—as if Shakespeare were making a bitter and ambivalent joke about the power of words, his words—or our own—for good or ill.
Opening Night
Jonathan has tried to get round the usual anxiety by having a preview the day before, and putting the critics off until next week. It works only up to a point. By seven o’clock everyone backstage is highly keyed up. The dressing rooms are full of flowers and telegrams, and the actors, some in partial costume, are running back and forth between them. Irene, in the star dressing room below the stage, stays put, but Nicola, who is also solitary, finds it lonely, and keeps going into the large room shared by nine of the actors, where there is a lot of clowning and general high spirits.
Up the stairs at the back, where Robert, Peter, Jonathan, Cecil, and George Wood share a smaller room, things are more tense. Peter has been ill for twenty-four hours with food poisoning and is even paler than usual; as he crosses the room, he seems to tilt slightly sideways. He has twice as many flowers and telegrams as anyone else, but the telegrams are all unopened and the roses and irises and freesias still in their cellophane. (“I regard it as bad luck to read my telegrams until after the performance. Anyhow, tonight I can’t spare the effort.” He laughs rapidly.)
As the audience begins to file in, they can be heard in every dressing room over the sound system. The remarks of those nearest to the stage come through clearly above the general murmur (holders of front-row tickets please note). “Oh, darling, lovely to see you!” “Tell me, who is that strange man over there with Diana Melly?”
When the play begins, the actors stop talking among themselves and listen intently. They know where trouble is likely to occur, where a laugh may be expected. Halfway through the first court scene, when it is clear things are going fairly well, they relax, begin to speak of other things, read a newspaper, or play cards. But nothing holds their interest for long—they keep breaking off to listen to the resonant, emotional voices coming over the loudspeaker, which are interrupted at intervals by the calm, even, Scottish voice of Jeannie, the pretty girl who is assistant stage manager: “This is your call, Miss Pagett, Mr. Henson.”
At intermission Jonathan comes into the dressing rooms to praise and hearten all the actors individually and report favorable comments he has heard in the bar. They seem encouraged, but not yet at ease. Nicola shuts herself in her room to practice feeling mad, and Graham Seed is frantically changing from one of his three costumes and makeups into another.
There is some relaxation, but not much, during the second act, and even more rushing about from room to room. Only at the end, when everyone in the cast is either on stage or waiting in the wings for their curtain call, is there finally silence in all the dressing rooms, broken only by a roar of long-awaited and long-continued applause.
The First-Night Party
It is held at the house of Lady Antonia Fraser, the well-known London beauty and biographer (Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell) who is an old friend of Peter’s, and much admired in the company. There is a midnight supper of Edwardian lavishness prepared by Antonia’s Scottish cook, Mrs. Hepburn—roast ham, turkey, duck, smoked salmon, etc. The actors, most of whom haven’t eaten for twelve hours due to first-night nerves, crowd round the table hungrily. It is a motley gathering, which Antonia, in a long golden caftan, presides over like Titania at her feast. Besides the cast, there are rich and titled persons (what Jonathan calls “Peter’s aristos”), journalists, drama students, star-crossed lovers, several elves and fairies, the Frasers’ beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter Flora (barefoot in Pre-Raphaelite silks), and a genuine rag-and-bone man whom somebody found in a pub on their way to Campden Hill Square. I wander among them, feeling as if I had walked into a classic English novel of the sort I read long before, almost invisible but completely happy. The party goes on until dawn, long after I have left. The last guest is found asleep on a sofa at eleven the next morning, by the men from the caterers who have come to collect the rented champagne glasses and gilt chairs.
The Reviews
These are mixed, as usual with Jonathan’s productions, and cause the cast those sensations of delight, indigestion, and indignation one might have after a lengthy dinner combining rich spiced dishes with cold tinned slops. The play as a whole is described by the daily papers as “superlative,” “eccentric,” “bleak,” “fascinating,” and “enjoyable.” Peter’s performance is “exciting,” “arbitrary,” “neurotic,” and “somberly intelligent.” Similar contradictory adjectives are applied to most of the company. Robert and Irene are generally praised, but here, too, there is contradiction: one reviewer sees Claudius as “self-tortured and conscious-stricken” while another speaks of his “cold, matter-of-fact defensiveness.”
It doesn’t matter, really, because Hamlet, and indeed the whole Greenwich season, is already sold out. Still, everyone feels better on the weekend, when the Sunday Times comes out with a long brilliant rave review by Harold Hobson, who calls the production “extraordinary… . an absolute revelation of the meaning of a play that we wearily thought we knew backwards and forwards.”
Afterword
The play goes on at Greenwich, but Jonathan Miller’s part in it is over, and he is not sorry. “It’s been by far the most difficult production I’ve ever done,” he tells me the next day. “And not only because Hamlet is such an important play.”
One reason it has been difficult, perhaps, is that it is the sort of play that cannot help but reflect and stir up private feelings. Jonathan’s original interpretation set the intellectual world of Hamlet and his friends against one of practical action and power represented by Claudius and Gertrude and the court, and it is not hard to find parallels. You begin with a group of university classmates, young single men writing or appearing in Beyond the Fringe. But as Jonathan says of Ophelia, “Not to grow up is madness.” It is necessary to move on, to enter the real world—but this world is guilty, corrupt, and destructive. To act is to kill, since whatever you do will destroy the existing pattern.
I remember a day in Earl’s Court when they were rehearsing the scene in which Hamlet and the Captain (in this production, Fortinbras) watch the Norwegian army pass. Jonathan got up and stood beside Peter and Lionel where the edge of the stage was marked on the floor with masking tape, and looked down as if into a deep valley. “You see them going by, twenty thousand men. The horses, the loaded carts, the guns on their carriages, the flags looped back over their standards. Twenty thousand men. Some are walking, some sitting on provision wagons—think of Mother Courage. You watch them passing, and you say to yourself, Why am I not acting, who have cause, when these men who have no cause are on their way to do something? Of course, the action they are going to do is murder.”
However, there is a third way. You can engage the world indirectly, without guilt (or with less guilt) by interpreting it—by painting pictures or taking photographs—or, like me, writing articles in which, by a cleverly biased selection of details, you try to alter history so that people afterwards will remember a production of Hamlet as you have described it.
Or, more seriously, and with greater risk and reward, you can direct a play. At Greenwich, Jonathan gives orders and moves people around, but he does so in the service of an idea. “Directing is a mid-point between the world of the mind and the world of action. It’s a narrow point—one is always balancing on a thin edge. But when it works right, for me, there’s nothing like it.