I was 17 when in 1945 I quit after four years of high school, and got a job on the lowest rung of journalism. Looking back, I was ill-prepared for life, had a rather limited breadth of knowledge about the world and how it works, and a very narrow range of interests. Of course, I knew an immense amount about cricket and its history. And I was accustomed to having on my bedroom wall photos of All Black Rugby teams since 1905, and knew the names of every player. But I can hardly describe such knowledge as an adequate foundation on which to embark on a working life.
In addition I had been brought up in
complete ignorance of sex and its essential place in modern life; and I don’t
believe that at the time I had ever heard of such concepts as homosexuality,
nymphomania, or any other of the many
specialties into which such knowledge is
divided. In other words I had been brought up in such a way as to make
it almost impossible for me to embark on rewarding relationships, especially with
the opposite sex.
In one thing I was extremely lucky. I
found the profession of journalism ridiculously easy, so, once I got into a
writing position, which happened after six months, I was able to leap ahead at double quick pace, and after two and
a half years I was regarded as a trained journalist of senior rank (as defined
in the union agreement), a position that should have taken me seven years.
At the age of 22 --- far too young
--- I married, and my wife and I headed off to have a look around the world.
First to northern Queensland, where we experienced for the first time the
discomforts of a really tropical climate, with its multiplicity of wild and
dangerous animals, later to India, where the dreadful condition of life of a
majority of the world’s people was brought home to us, and finally to Englsnd,
where --- to get on to the subject of this Chronicle, at last --- for the first time in my life I became a
customer of what is generally regarded as the high culture of modern society,
in this case, the incomparable British theatre.
I have already described, I am sure,
probably in an earlier Chronicle, how we were able to be present at performances
by the world’s greatest actors, simply by laying out the magnificent sum of one
shilling and sixpence for a seat in The Gods, the far upper reaches of a modern theatre for drama. I have to
confess my introduction to high drama did not come particularly easily for me.
I had been bored out of my skull in high school by Shakespeare, had never
understood a word of it, and in our frequent trips to the Old Vic theatre, the
London seat for Shakespeare productions in the 1950s, I was for quite a while far less than enthralled.
Fortunately, at other theatres, great actors playing more naturalistic theatre
were much easier to understand. I
remember one occasion --- I think it was in Caesar
and Cleopatra --- a play by Bernard Shaw written in 1898, when, as Caesar,
Laurence Olivier, in a position well back from the audience, and with his back
to us, whispered the answer to a question which, even to those of us up in The
Gods, was perfectly audible, a demonstration of voice control that completely
astounded me. Another great pair who
were playing a series of Shaw plays were John Clements and his wife Kay
Hammond. The play that I enjoyed most I think was The Doctor’s Dilemma, written in 1906, a very amusing story about a dying
genius, a thoroughly detestable, self-centred person whose genius nevertheless
commanded maximum efforts to save him. Unfortunately, he was handed on from one
medical specialist to another: each of them had his own specific cherished
solution to every illness. One I remember was the doctor who claimed he was
suffering from a nuciform sac, whatever that was, and insisted on treating him,
unsuccessfully for that. Shaw’s
prescience with this play has always impressed me. Years later, in Montreal, my
wife appeared to fall seriously ill, fell into the hands of a man described as
the greatest heart doctor in the city, who scared her half to death by
equipping her with an arm band that would enable anyone to see at a glance what
was wrong with her should she collapse in the street, as he seemed to think
inevitable. She remained in this half-stricken condition until a younger member
of the profession, who happened to be the son of one of our friends, asked the eminent
doctor if he could examine her. When he did so he discovered there was nothing
wrong with her heart: she was simply suffering from post-menopausal hormone
imbalance. I have since heard of a number of people who have suffered from the
obsessions so amusingly illustrated by Shaw in his play undermining the medical
profession and its pretensions so long ago.
I have other vivid memories from my theatre-going
in those early days of my education. Sam Wanamaker, a harsh-voiced but riveting
American actor, teamed with Michael Redgrave in a Clifford Odets play about a
drunken shell of an actor who was offered by the American producer a chance for
one more attempt at rehabilitating his reputation. With Googie Withers playing
the hard-done-by wife, this play was so compulsive that I returned to it at
least twice. Wanamaker, a refugee from the oppressive political system that was
imposed on much culture in the United States in the 1950s, later adopted as his
personal project a scheme to rebuild on the South Bank of the Thames, in almost
the exact place of the original Globe theatre in which Shakespeare’s plays were
first performed, an exact replica of the original theatre --- a project
triumphantly brought to a conclusion, so that it is possible to see the plays
in the same conditions as Londoner originally saw them in the seventeenth
century --- truly a gift from abroad
that Londoners must cherish.
Do not worry, dear reader, I did
eventually get on to Shakespeare, and I can remember the exact occasion: it was
in Edinburgh, where Claire Boom and Alan Badel combined to play Romeo and Juliet and at last their
speaking of the lines was so luminous and clear that I was able to follow what
they were saying and become throroughly
engrossed in the story. Alan Badel was a
magical actor, a man with a voice that was itself like a musical instrument,
and although Bloom was not his equal, she was so lovely to look at as a young
girl to make up for any other inadequacies.
I have at last arrived at why I
decided to write this. Today, passing my favourite bookshop, The Word on Milton street, I chanced
upon a huge volume of 500 pages called Peter
Hall’s Diaries, for the customary out-front price of 50 cents. When I
returned to London in 1960 to represent The
Montreal Star Peter Hall, who had been a wunderkind in the British theatre since his first production at the
age of 23, had founded a new company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Aldwych
theatre in central London, with the object of introducing the best of the great
bard plus the best of international theatre. Working with the even more
brilliant talents of Peter Brook, this company attracted me, as a persistent
theatregoer by this time, to many unforgettable productions. I will never
forget the feeling in the audience at
the conclusion of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The
Representative, about the alleged indifference of the Pope to the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe. When one entered the theatre one was
confronted not with a stage curtain, but with two vast rolling metal doors, the
doors to a gas oven. Every scene played by the Pope was played inside this
oven, and when the play was over so intense had it been that the audience sat,
without applause, in stunned silence for at least three minutes, before they
could even stir themselves to leave the theatre. That was not Hall’s work, but it represented
the sort of challenging theatre he and Peter Brook placed, month after month, before the London audience.
I notice since I started to write
this that Hall died last September at the age of 86, and was generally agreed
to have dominated the British theatre in its last 50 years.
The Diaries are not the sort of book I would normally read, but I
started in on it this afternoon, and am already deeply interested in the
rivalries and tensions revealed during the 1970s, when Hall’s Shakespeare Company
was merged with the new National Theatre that had been directed by Laurence Olivier
for its first years before it had its own new theatrical home.
I can tell I am going to read on: already
the sharp dislike of Hall for Kenneth Tynan, the acerbic critic who was the
dramaturge for the National Theatre during Olivier’s reign, has added a bit of
spice. When the question of Hall’s taking over from Olivier as director of the
theatre was raised, Hall made it clear that if Tynan were to stay, as he was
manoeuvring to do, Hall would not take the job. Although he accuses Tynan of
creating problems for his takeover, when the two eventually met, someone had
tipped the wink to Tynan who accepted it without further debate. He was out,
and Hall was in.
Hall had four wives, the first of whom was the French actress and dancer Leslie Caron. From each of them he had
children, six in all, and one of them, Rebecca, is one of my favorite actresses
presently working. A mistress of seduction, even though she is only moderately
good-looking: she seems to have inherited from her father an instinct for the drama that was on show in Woody Allen’s beautiful film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays the plain English girl
who is pursued by Javier Bardem, as a typical Latin lover. To my mind she ran
away with the picture, even against such strong performers as Penelope Cruz,
Scarlett Johansson, and Bardem.
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