• The Seeds of Lord Peter Wimsey
  (Excerpts from Edward’s forthcoming book of memoirs)
• Between Two Heavens
• Very Big, China
• Ubiety: A Short Whimsical Experiment
• Brecht the Bohemian (Preface to Artist’s Impressions)

The Seeds of Lord Peter Wimsey

Since 1987 people have been telling me that I was born to play Lord Peter Wimsey, and who am I to deny their democratic right to say so? I blush to admit that there is a sense in which the likes of Peter Wimsey had been my model ever since I’d aspired to go on the stage. I’d had to make the transition from provincial backstreet boy to actor in 1953, three years before the apotheosis of kitchen-sink drama. In those days there seemed to be only one way to do it. Willie Mossop, the young cobbler hero of Hobson’s Choice, notwithstanding, the stage needed as its staple diet a constant supply of young men of ‘good’ family, entering through French windows and able to say that line about tennis. Outside the French windows there might only be a tawdry depiction of a corner of the Home Counties on canvas, and beyond that a strategically placed bucket painted red and filled with sand, and beyond that and the stage door only the provincial streets leading to one’s lowly theatrical digs. But, if the contract read, or at least implied, ‘must dress well on and off’, one’s training had emphasized that one must speak well on stage and off.

I didn’t actually model myself on Wimsey, of course – I’d never read the books. But from the day I went to theatre school in Coronation year, I saw myself as a growing sprig of the theatrical aristocracy and a candidate for the Prince of Denmark. Off stage, I suppose, I developed a persona to operate wherever I found myself: in the rehearsal room or in the fill-in jobs I was to do between times. It was always open to me to play waiters, factory hands, soldiers from the lower ranks, warehousemen and shop assistants, and I would have been a definitive Willy Mossop, but I would play them quite differently from how I played them in life. When I was employed briefly at Jones & Higgins department store in Rye Lane, Peckham, as late as 1963, I must have brought a West End light-comedy style to the sock, tie and handkerchief counter such as had seldom been witnessed in London SE15 retail before or since.

* * *

The very first ‘toff’ I played (perhaps the first warm-up for Lord Peter), at the tender age of sixteen, was an elderly poet in an old folks home. It was in a one-act play by Peter Ustinov called Beyond as part of the 1952 Drama Festival of the Association of Bradford Boys’ Clubs. The other inmates of the home were an embittered inventor, looking forward to meeting Isaac Newton in the ‘beyond’ of the title, and a retired soldier, hoping heaven would be Africa. My poet was called Johnny La Force. Now that I have pretensions to being a poet, with no need to pretend the elderly bit, I look back on this character with some curiosity. I have no vivid recollection of feeling too young for Johnny La Force, but then it is fifty-seven years since I rehearsed him. Perhaps there was something still deft about Johnny.

Our little production played in the dilapidated premises of the Sedbergh Boys’ Club, a large soot-blackened, double-fronted stone house, plain but with a pillared portico over the front door. An extension added to the back contained the little hall and makeshift stage. It was a curiously anomalous house, bigger and well above the station of any other in our part of West Bowling. (Could it have been built for the minister of the Rehoboth Methodist Chapel opposite?) But it was adjacent to a set of streets down Bowling Old Lane that we, in our respectable though humble streets higher up, considered to be dubious and scruffy. The occupants of the big house, whoever they were, must have long since decamped, leaving the building with the air of one requisitioned by the army for the use of other ranks. The club depended, in its environs among those dark satanic mills, on the charitable support of Sedbergh’s famous public school, set in the wilds, I imagined, of Cumberland to the east of the Lake District and on the edge of the Pennines. I knew of that beautiful region only by repute. Now Google Earth has swooped me down to hover and I see the school is set amongst trees in verdant pastureland.

We rehearsed in one of the large front rooms of the house, with the muted sounds of ping-pong matches and the click of billiard balls coming from the hall. The club’s ethos wasn’t to my taste; though I always liked the gruff rough diamond with a Geordie accent, who single-handedly ran the place and later used his influence to get me a job in a local wool warehouse during my first summer holiday from theatre school. I joined the club when I was fifteen, only because they were entering the Boys’ Clubs drama competition; perhaps I was ‘headhunted’. We rehearsed to play characters miles above and beyond our experience and social station. In 1951 I had played one of six men, shipwrecked and snowed up in the Arctic for the long sunless winter, in a one-act play by Michael Redgrave – yes, the Michael Redgrave – called The Seventh Man. The following year I was Ustinov’s elderly poet with the first line of the play, a plangent ‘Another autumn.’

Reading these short plays again, I’m amazed at their ripe, almost hothouse literary style. In the Redgrave piece, I was required to be in danger of going mad and blind; to read the Bible by the light of the only lamp and speak rather biblically; and to go out of the hut and come back in, giving the impression I’d seen a stranger – the seventh man of the title (almost certainly Jesus) – harbinger, as it turned out, of the returning sun. What I can still hear of this play is not my own lines at all, but the voice of a tall boy named Derek Armitage, who lent a certain stoic, iron-willed authority to the proceedings and who held nerve and discipline together in the part of Gaffer. I can also hear another boy’s voice pronouncing a line from the gloom up left behind me: ‘The women of Ireland! The women of Ireland! I can’t bear to think of it!’ The audience didn’t laugh in the wrong places and took the drama as seriously as we did.

As Ustinov’s poet in Beyond, longing for death and a glimpse ‘beyond’, I had lines about wanting a splendid funeral. As I write this, by the most amazing coincidence, the radio is playing the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, the very piece that Ustinov specified in his stage directions should be playing quietly on the radio during the action of the play. It seemed to me contrived that the music just happened so perfectly to underscore the sentiments the men were expressing – like a film score. Anyway, this touch may have helped because our production was nominated for the All Bradford Boys’ Clubs Drama Finals and transferred to a little custom-built theatre in Lister’s Mill across the town. Lister’s was the hugest silk mill in the world and perhaps the most magnificent of all Bradford’s industrial architectural wonders; it had a mill chimney to outdo the Town Hall clock tower in height and aspired to bring to industry the spirit of the Renaissance. It was built by Samuel Cunliffe Lister, the man who made a fortune investing in and perfecting the Nip Comb, which put hundreds of woolcombers out of work. Presumably, it was he who caused my great-grandfather in the census of 1851 to style himself ‘woolcomber and ginger-beer seller.’

Some time had elapsed by the occasion of the Finals. I had become a drama student in the interim at Bradford’s own Theatre School and had just turned seventeen. So it was as a combination of the backstreet boy amateur actor and the aspiring professional that I arrived at Lister’s Mill. I cannot vouch for the exact whereabouts of the little hall and stage (built for the mill workers to do their pantomimes and Gilbert and Sullivan). It was somewhere within the immensity of Lister’s daunting building. Now the great edifice has been partially gutted, preserving the rich brick and stonework and the classical iron pillars that once stood by whilst velvet was being woven for the coronation of 1911 or for Washington DC’s White House in 1976. In World War II the weaving had been of parachutes and fifty miles of khaki. Now that the building has been rescued from the vandals, squatters, pigeons and foxes, who took over in 1992, and restored to accommodate luxury apartments, who knows what happens on the spot where I once said:

I find myself now hoping for the ‘gentle and noble’ bit. The poet’s two companions, the soldier, hoping heaven will be Africa (tall Armitage again), and the inventor, hoping to meet Newton in the ‘beyond’ (‘Tich’ Armitage, his brother), both die on the penultimate page. Johnny, desperate not to be left behind, takes the soldier’s loaded revolver (which he and the inventor only just learned about a few pages before) out of its hiding place, tries it out on the ceiling, with a dramatic falling-plaster effect, and then turns it towards his head, only to find he has used the single bullet. My last line was (infinitely sad): ‘Yet another autumn … and another autumn … and another … and not so much as a glimpse … beyond.’

What possessed the local amateur actors, a husband-and-wife team, Audrey and Tom Woodrow, who selected and directed us in this play, to think that it was a fitting vehicle for boys from the back-to-back houses of West Bowling? Nevertheless, it was a play, and plays were seldom about the likes of us; we took the culture gap for granted and set about bridging it as best we could. I had been bridging it for some time, with a vengeance against all odds, not even aware of a gap when I sang ‘Oh! For the wings of a dove’ as a boy soprano in the chapel opposite Sedbergh Club, or learnt Schubert’s ‘The Trout’ for a singing competition in the Wharfedale Music Festival to be judged by the famous composer Herbert Howells, of whom I had not heard. These were democratic possibilities. Incidentally, Howells’s report called me ‘a fine young musician with a fine gift of word delivery.’

Who now sits where the women were sitting in 1953 as I walked through one of the grand entrances of Lister's Mill, serving that night as a stage door? They were the mothers of other competitors I assumed. One of them said with deadpan irony after taking me in, ‘Oo, don’t ’is muther keep ’im nice!’ I made the attempt to preserve my savoir-faire and found a place where I could make up the hair at my temples with white greasepaint and create other signs of age to transform seventeen into seventy-one – as practical, if unlikely, a task as the other way round. Anyway, I won the little shield for the best performance.

* * *

At drama school I had been expanding my efforts to play gentlemen of all kinds, poets or not, and to become a gentleman actor with a poetic gentleman’s voice. Yes, it was difficult whilst living at home, but my parents never complained – I don’t know how much I soft-pedalled the posh when talking to them. Had we but known, at the same time, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay were determinedly preserving their North Country accents down in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

The voice is only the tip of the personality iceberg. The cultured voices I’d grown up with had emanated from the wireless on our windowsill, courtesy of the BBC. They came from an otherwise unreachable world of dreaming spires, erudite opinions, and country-house weekends set in olde worlde villages or amongst trees in peaceful pastureland, of fees in guineas and private incomes, of knowing which knife to use and having the right kind of furled umbrella, or of being one of the scruffy tweed-and-corduroy-wearing poets haunting the pubs around Broadcasting House, or of being T. S. Eliot, who wore a four-piece suit, as Virginia Woolf quipped, and went to work in a bank.

Saturday Night Theatre on the Home Service made the cadences of the West End an intimately recognizable dramatic vernacular to us. ‘Good English’ pervaded the air of our little gaslit room where we sat mute in front of the huge cast-iron range, two tin cans filled with cinders in the heart of the coal fire – no doubt the result of a useful tip from a BBC radio programme to give the precious coal supply extra body. I say ‘mute’ because my father wouldn’t talk and my mother, since her stroke two days before my birth, couldn’t, not fluently. My father saved his fluent wit for work; I only learnt that he could be a comedian after his death, from a colleague who’d worked with him in the wool warehouse. Thank God for the flow of vicarious intercommunication from the little box on the windowsill.

Every Sunday lunchtime I listened to The Critics discussing the play, the book, the film and the art exhibition in carefully phrased tones of civilized Oxbridge. On Tuesday evenings we listened to The Brains Trust – C. E. M. Joad, Commander A. B. Campbell and Julian Huxley. The Brains Trust was originally as much a part of the war effort as ITMA (It’s That Man Again!), the one providing civilized discussion and reflection, the other, verbal slapstick and fun, along with the later Variety Bandbox when we were buttonholed by the juicily absurd, marvellously timed confidences of Frankie Howerd. There was a tacit acknowledgement between us that we knew and depended on the confidences of all these voices as we sat round the fire or listened with the street door open on warm summer evenings (always conscious of the BBC’s requests that we should on such evenings be considerate of the peace of our neighbours, but they were all listening in anyway, up to 20 million of them if it was a popular comedy programme). In a way these radio personalities were more familiar to us than our neighbours, though I remember my father complaining of The Brains Trust one night, ‘I could do with these people but they never give a straight answer to a question.’

Julian Huxley was a biologist interested in eugenics, though I gather he did not believe in superiority between races, nor did he believe that the working classes were genetically inferior (which brings us glancingly back to Peter Wimsey and the idea of ‘good breeding’). Our local breeding stock on nearby Round Street, a street of unpaved dirt with the occasional stone sticking up, had produced not only Pat Paterson but also Stanley Brogden, who in 1929 was selected to play Rugby League for England. Two examples of the special cases that occur when nature, as opposed to nurture, comes up with a magic genetic formula.

But what about the people with no noticeably spectacular gifts, like my father, who was probably the ‘runt of the litter’ and born with poor eyesight, who lost his job as a warehouse foreman when I was small and remained a low-paid ordinary warehouseman for the rest of his working life? Or my mother, who took in a little washing (all done by hand) to make ends meet until she was disabled by the stroke, though she continued to do all the housework and our washing until the advent of the laundrette. Neither of my parents drank. They somehow managed to keep up certain modest standards and they were stoic. They had the new pleasures of the twentieth century, thank God; they saw a film once a week and had the radio, but now I begin to see how brave and steadfast they really were – had to be. My mother was very depressed that she could do no kind of job to make a little extra money; her main mantra was a frustrated ‘I wish I could work’ with an occasionally plaintive ‘I wish I was far away.’ I hope it was a catharsis for her that I was able, as a boy soprano, to transfigure the sentiment when I sang ‘Oh! For the wings of a dove’ in our Methodist chapel.

On the wireless, there were perceived unintentional absurdities as well as the planned comic ones. I recall Dad scornfully quoting one phrase from King Edward VIII’s abdication speech, perhaps because I had been born when Edward became king and was surely named after him, months before he spoilt it all. ‘The woman I lurve’, mimicked my father one night. But think of it, the intimate confidences of a monarch shared with every subject in the land. Unprecedented in the whole of history. Dad did not go into further detail; he was not loquacious like a comic or a member of The Brains Trust, or indeed, on that occasion, like a king, but I inferred that the sentiment, as well as the pronunciation, was what he thought absurd.

Recently I heard a recording of the Poet Laureate at the time, John Masefield, reading his famous ‘Sea Fever’, a poem we had chanted at elementary school. The poet himself sounds like a genteelly bred Anglican clergyman with a taste for the lyrical, intoning ‘And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover’ in a way that would have wiped the smiles off the faces of any gathering of old salts you can imagine, or made them roar with derisive laughter.

Being in Bradford, I never saw the owners of these voices. I imagined them, and I began to see them played by West End actors in the pre-London tours that came to Leeds Grand Theatre, and in films of course. Hollywood was a parallel universe throughout my childhood. I saw Brando in On the Waterfront during my first year at theatre school, and in Chapel Street at the Civic Playhouse, the custom-built amateur theatre, which interspersed plays with rare and foreign film seasons, I saw a number of French films starring Jaques Tati, Fernandel and the great and exquisite Edwige Feuillière. It was a time for working out who I was not as well as who I thought I was to become.

* * *

In 1985 the BBC were planning twelve episodes of Sayers’s mysteries, and the producer, one Michael Chapman, handed me out of the blue three entire novels of which Lord Peter Wimsey was the hero. This might, at first, have seemed to be giving me the advantage over an actor invited to play, say, Hamlet, with nothing but five acts to go on. The three volumes, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, all new to me, were a delightful weight of reading and went some way to compensate for the fact that I’d never actually met a lord, I mean a real hereditary lord. By now, I hold a personal hat trick, having by 1970 trod the boards with two theatrical lords, Olivier of Brighton and Miles (Bernard) of Puddle Dock, and in 2000 with Archer (Jeffrey) of Weston-super-Mare. Note the nautical motif throughout, though only one of them was ‘at sea’ as an actor. Even the noblest of this trio, truly great actor though he was, was hardly, as a lord, the ‘real thing’ – simply a coronet without the Norman blood. Tennyson’s ‘kind hearts and … simple faith’ doesn’t quite fill the bill for Olivier either; he was far too complex for that. There was, however, a Baron Olivier before him, Sir Laurence’s uncle, who was created the first Labour peer. Sydney Olivier was a friend of Bernard Shaw’s and a founding member of the Fabian Society.

The real thing, the Earl of Chesterfield, spoke some celebratory words on the mystery of the peerage in the House of Lords in the eighteenth century: ‘We, my lords, may thank heaven that we have something better than our brains to depend on.’ These words were countered by David Lloyd George in the House of Commons in the first decade of the twentieth century: ‘They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth – just to prove that they are the first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on these principles.’ Sayers avoided giving Lord Peter the dubious distinction of elder son and set him apart, making his uncle say, ‘He is all nerves and nose – but that is better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brother’.

In my childhood in the 1930s and 40s, the ‘toff’, or man about town, endured as a figure of fascination in popular culture in many eccentric variations, and my father ensured that I saw one of them. One May night in 1949, he took me on a tram from our cobbled street to the Bradford Alhambra to see Thanks for the Memory, a variety bill of old stagers with, amongst them, ‘Burlington Bertie’ in the person of Ella Shields. (Burlington Arcade is just along Piccadilly to the east of where Lord Peter’s London flat, number 110A, was situated.) Shields first sang her famous signature song in Newcastle in 1914 and subsequently made six commercial recordings of it. Even the freshest of these, which I knew from frequent airings on the wireless, was an ancient period piece to me. Her posh Edwardian accent, with immaculate diction penetrating the surface hiss, was one thing. But what did it mean to us, halfway through the century, to see her live, in a shabby tailcoat and a monocle made out of a ring of wire attached by a piece of string to a safety pin on her lapel, singing with a lilting, dignified hauteur:

Another snatch I remember is:

For my father, I suppose, this was pure nostalgia, but was there ever anything we might have called ‘agitprop’ about Burlington Bertie – this curious figure whose poverty was extreme, though anything but abject? My father knew, first hand, that even moderate poverty was no joke. I can imagine the song being sung quite differently by a wispy, starved clown of a man, slightly crazed – another character within my comfort zone.

Dad was a Daily Herald reader and Labour voter. Let’s not forget that Bradford was the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party, a fact I was never taught at school nor at my Bradford theatre school, despite Bernard Shaw’s presence at the ILP’s foundation conference in Bradford in 1893. On the other hand, no one ever tired of telling us that the first actor to be knighted, Henry Irving, had given his last performance and died in Bradford – this fascination with the toff again, you see. My dad, however, would have been alive to the social comment in J. M. Barrie’s stage directions describing another toff, created in 1902 in his play The Admirable Crichton, directions that leave the actor who plays him in no doubt as to the social position of the Hon. Ernest Woolley:

The play’s hero is the low-born butler Crichton, whose practical abilities and courage – and indeed nobility – save the grand Woolley family when they are shipwrecked on an island in Act II. The third act takes us back to England where ‘order’ is restored. The following pithy duologue closes the play:

Sayers redressed Barrie’s ‘prejudice’ against the ruling class. Her hero Lord Peter’s resourceful, distinguished service in the trenches in the First World War (the DSO, followed by a nervous breakdown), the admirable Bunter as his batman, and his subsequent secret work for the Foreign Office, would make him an excellent companion on a desert island, ingenious and practical. His knowledge of literature and his ability to quote from it, his gift for engaging prattle, coupled with his musical talent, almost make the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and eight gramophone records redundant. He might be considered by some castaways to be a luxury item in himself.

Harriet Vane, the heroine of the Wimsey novels, is an uncommon commoner and, like Sayers, a writer of detective novels. She is as much in love with Peter, however much she tries to deny it, as Dorothy herself. Amid all the sleuthing, it is their story that sings clear and sometimes sweet through the surface hiss of history and through what has become the quaint period detail of the books. It does not seem at all a dated notion, at least whilst one is under Sayers’s spell, that if she can only get Harriet to the point of accepting Peter’s hand, England, Britain and the world will seem to be a better place. But then vanished worlds have an attractive, piquant poignancy.

* * *

There is a certain nobility in the actor’s special sense of obligation to the integrity of a novelist’s plot and characters. Playwrights’ heroes are crying out for the actor; Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cleopatra, miraculous though they are, are incomplete on the page. The novel’s characters, great and small, are complete as soon as the author lays down his pen. Dramatization only puts them in double jeopardy, first at the hands of the adapter-scriptwriter, who begins to take the living things out of their element; secondly comes the usurping actor, prising the hero off the page and out of the imagination of the reader. This is not to mention the adulterous hands of directors, designers, editors, and all the cooks who might spoil the broth, which was never intended to be broth at all.

Achieving the ‘definitive’ Wimsey was sometimes a struggle in the midst of all the approximations and impurities. I must, however, pay tribute to so many felicitous production touches: those wonderful lady dons; a host of supporting character studies, many of them excellent; innumerable design triumphs; a perfect score by Joseph Horovitz, a name to inspire musical confidence; my suits alone, ‘shoulders tailored to swooning-point’. Irrespective of these touches, I soon found it necessary to cast myself in the part of purist policeman, insisting that the TV audience, like the reader, should have all the clues. Harriet Walter and I managed to insist on the deciphering business in the last minutes of Have His Carcase; we thought the detail of it was quintessential whodunit stuff and exciting as a cerebral game. Most importantly, as soon as I saw the script of the last episode of Gaudy Night, I declared, in league with Harriet, that this was un-actable and that we wouldn’t act it unless the proposal to Harriet Vane and her acceptance were not a perfunctory two-line incident halfway through it, but, as in the book, the climatic final sequence.

On our last day in Oxford, our sympathetic but harried director was off on various quests, our producer was mysteriously in London, whilst Harriet Walter and I found ourselves in one of those curious lumber rooms that always manifest themselves on locations, however elegant, being repositories for everything and anything that must be got out of shot. We were in a room just off the beautiful colonnade at Corpus Christi College in which the proposal was to take place. In amongst a clutter of furniture and rolled-up carpets, we conferred and pored over the novel’s immensely long build-up to the proposal and its acceptance, both in Latin. We hastily re-drafted our final exchange, necessarily pithy and all of it in English. Michael Simpson would breeze in at junctures, casting doubts and leaving counter-suggestions, buzz off again as the clock ticked nearer to the moment that afternoon when we should have to commit our fresh dialogue to memory, rehearse it and get it into the can. All of Sayers’s marvellously photogenic stuff on the roof of the Radcliffe Camera was lost (too expensive, I suppose), the winking traffic lights, the agonizingly romantic stretching of the dénouement, which I’d loved on first reading but afterwards found emotionally and philosophically convoluted, as exotic and indulgent as an overplanted hothouse. We didn’t manage to get in everything we wanted to and, when it came to it, the length of the colonnade, down which we strolled, dictated the pace and essence of the scene. The scene was about walking on eggs, culminating in the golden egg.

Retrospectively, I can understand Michael Chapman’s urge to get out the secateurs and prune things a bit, but it was Gaudy Night that suffered most at his hands. He never tired of proclaiming that the first thing he did when taking on the project (which had already been developed to some degree by someone else) was to reduce Gaudy Night from four episodes to three, even though it is the longest and densest of the three novels we adapted and arguably the best. In a ridiculous bid not to give the ending away, the character of the culprit was crudely marginalized, although the actress Lavinia Bertram does very well indeed with what there is.

It was the idea of being involved with a ladies’ college for several weeks that set our producer’s teeth on edge and he made sure we didn’t film at Somerville College (Sayers’s alma mater); Corpus Christi, founded in 1517, is, of course, one of the ‘ancient’, traditionally male colleges. Yet the female cast was Gaudy Night’s great strength. We had a very good ensemble of lady dons; they held a reunion or two for a time, one of which I was invited to. The Warden of Shrewsbury was played by Sheila Burrell, who had doubled as Euripides’ Agave and the Fairy Godmother in my Actors’ Company production of The Bacchae and The Beanstalk. Caroline John (Miss Burrows) and I had also acted alongside each other, in brown body makeup and gold masks, as Inti Coussi and Villac Umu in The Royal Hunt of the Sun in repertoire from 1964 for longer than we care to remember. Very beautiful names some of those actresses have, a few with theatrical resonance: Dilys Hamlett (Miss Devine), Charmian May (Miss Hilliard), Auriol Smith (Miss Barton), Carol MacReady (Miss Martin), Meralina Kendall (Miss Lydgate), Charlotte West-Oram (Miss Pyke). They all made up, to some degree, for the plot being oversimplified.

I understood Harriet Walter becoming distressed at one point and insisting that, even in the face of the greatest aristocratic detective, she might be permitted to have some clues of her own, even if they must, perforce, be at the cost of Peter’s unparalleled prowess. What I liked most about Harriet was her good-humoured willingness to engage in both serious discussion and witty badinage in the muddiest of location car parks at 6.30 a.m. Those lovely deserted coastal shots in Have His Carcase were only possible very late in the season when all the holidaymakers had left. Invariably we were wearing thermal underwear and waiting for the sun to emerge for a few minutes so we could capture a scene between clouds. I was rarely bored waiting and, of course, on the screen it all looks balmy and beautiful, like an old LMS railway poster come to sun-kissed life.

I do not forgive myself in that second adaptation for merely complaining and actually submitting to the appalling ‘beef-up Bunter’ idea that came from God knows where, but suddenly arrived ready-scripted one day. Richard Morant’s Bunter, rather than Wimsey, was to ride the horse bareback over the sands at Wilvercombe. I know there are lots of people who love the books, or have come to know them well, through the television series, and so it may be worth explaining this particularly wrong-headed corruption of the original for those aficionados. There is a pivotal moment on the sands with Wimsey and the horse when Harriet suddenly sees Peter as the archetypal shining knight:

We gave absolutely no trace of this crucial turning point in Harriet’s perception of Peter.

It was suggested by the director Chris Hodson, fibbing to me in a hotel corridor in the West Country, where I challenged him about the script, that, as I had only the tamest equestrian experience, I would not like the alternative – to be exposed to ridicule on the public beach astride a mechanical hobby horse when filming the close shots. I assumed, rightly, that it was standard practice to have bareback riding in long shot done by an expert stunt rider. I did have a previous experience one early misty morning, in the filming of M. R. James’s story The Ash Tree, of seeing from a distance my stuntman thrown by a horse and, as the creature was being brought back, hearing the director’s voice clearly in the still, damp air say, ‘Don’t tell Edward.’ In my scene that evening on the same horse, I had to ride past some Elizabethan windows carrying a flaming torch whilst banging with a stick on the shutters. I was foolhardy enough to do it out of sheer masculine pride. The horse behaved perfectly and I felt like a hero in a costume drama, which is what I was supposed to be.

When our stuntman in Have His Carcase had completed the long beach ride in long shot and the sands were deserted, Richard, wearing a raincoat and apparently no better qualified than I, mounted a mechanical hobby horse for the close shot. In order to look like a convincing shining knight, I would have mounted that contraption on the beach at Blackpool on August Bank Holiday amongst jeering crowds (who could have been digitally removed in post production). What I suppose I couldn’t ultimately bring myself to do in this instance was dig in my heels and snatch back Wimsey’s rightful heroic sequence from my colleague. In a funny way I was too proud to do that, because it would have felt like an actor’s pettiness. I did insist, however, that Bunter and I should toss a coin to see who would undertake the ride down the beach, so there would be no doubt that both characters were capable. I then concentrated on somehow keeping my heroic credentials in place during the scene of waiting for Bunter to appear. The line, ‘There rides the man who fills my hot-water bottle and cooks like Escoffier’, is my own creation – no credit or extra fee for ‘additional dialogue’, mind you. My advice to anyone in the same situation would be: bugger all that, phone the agent, argue artistic differences, defend the original author’s intentions, walk out and speak to the press (good publicity), come to blows if necessary, be unpopular, but ride that bloody horse!

By the time we got to the third book and the proposal, I decided that we had enough artistic credit in the bank and I was ready to fight for Peter and Harriet’s, and Dorothy’s, just deserts. By then I felt we had achieved the status of shaman, so second nature to us was it to enter into that waking trance in which we took on the personalities of our hero and heroine, abetted by Dorothy, who had provided three thick books of delightful biography for us to examine for atmosphere and evidence.

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Between Two Heavens

In my youth, this was the sort of thing you’d find in books of hints for amateur actors. This photo was taken in my dressing room during the Actors' Company season at the cavernous Wimbledon Theatre in 1973. It shows the influence of the far-too-much-makeup school of characterization as celebrated particularly in the photographs of actors at Stratford and the Old Vic in the 1930s and 40s. Nobody formally taught this kind of thing, but somehow I went on tour in 1955 with a cigar box full of makeup, including a rabbit’s (or was it a hare’s?) foot, for whisking off superfluous powder; crepe hair in several colours (you never knew when you might have to design and make yourself a beard and moustache); and spirit gum. I must confess that, as well as a stick of Leichner lake liner for drawing shadows and wrinkles (those were the days), I had a carmine (scarlet) liner and an orange (cocktail) stick to apply the red dots at the inner corner of each eye. I had nose putty and, of course, a fake gold ring or two, with the largest glass jewels possible, to adorn the fingers of non-speaking Renaissance courtiers. The idea, as I had first understood it, was that the even light from the footlights and the batons would flatten your features, so they needed a little help with light and shade; it was quite usual to highlight the whole length of the nose with Leichner No. 5 or a touch of white, as well as emphasizing the eyebrows with a brown liner, and the eyes by putting white greasepaint on the lower rim of the eye inside the eyelashes (note the photos of Olivier’s 1937 Hamlet). Max Adrian, who was an original member of Olivier’s National Theatre and played the Inquisitor in Saint Joan, would sometimes use pale blue there.

Brecht’s influence seemed to put the breaks on this kind of thing. In a 1957 production of Orson Welles’s adaptation of Moby Dick at Ipswich – I was a deckhand – the footlights had been removed and, in true Brechtian style, the lighting rig was completely exposed and there was not a single coloured gel. This is commonplace now but was revolutionary then. The imaginary ship and the whale appeared on a stark stage, bare to the back wall. We knew from Tynan’s reviews that real Brechtian actors looked like people you saw at bus stops (or on whaling ships) and had faces like potatoes. By 1964 I was at the start of what turned out to be six years in Olivier’s National Theatre Company and a hint of Max Factor Pan-cake was overtaking lashings of Leichner in popularity. But Olivier was always advising the men to wear artificial eyelashes, and often wore them himself, even as the Captain in Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.

My Hotel Manager above in Feydeau’s Ruling the Roost, for the Actors’ Company in 1973, looks rather more like Toscanini, and I don’t know what to say about Lear’s Fool, except that one was always being told ‘It’ll look all right from out front’, and perhaps it did. In any case, irrespective of the face, which in both these instances I seemed to think needed help with a ‘lived-in’ look, a performance literally stands or falls by the lived-in life history carried by the whole body, by what Brecht referred to as the Gestus: ‘an attitude or a single aspect of an attitude, expressible in words or actions’; an attitude to life and the world in general or an attitude towards a person or situation in particular.

In Jonathan Miller’s BBC TV Lear of 1982, which I dipped into on DVD the other night, the lived-in face of Frank Middlemass’s Fool had the dead white makeup of the nineteenth-century French Pierrot, though the play was meticulously costumed in a fifteenth/sixteenth-century court. The Fool’s face was present throughout Act I, scene i (Hamlet might have said, ‘and let not your clowns appear earlier than is set down for them’). One could have accepted the anachronism of this French full theatrical slap had not the gestic music of Frank’s Fool been all wrong, a front-footed, querulous, insistent and intrusive way of speaking to the King. I don’t believe the King would have allowed himself to be nagged like that; literally ‘in yer face’, as the phrase goes. For all the Fool’s quips and songs, and his ‘all-licensed’ status, there is something of the ‘still, small voice’ about him, and his quicksilver material has often to be delivered obliquely just because it is so acute. I thought of him as an adrift early English stand-up comic, who probably slept by the dying fire with the dogs. The whip is a reality, not a turn of phrase. He yearns for, but has of late despaired of, the King’s ability to learn by and ‘get’ his jokes.

The feet of Feydeau’s Hotel Manager seemed to me more important than his face. In my case, they were inspired by the feet of one of the Busby brothers, not as in Berkeley, but of Busby’s department store in Bradford. I was beneath Mr Arthur Busby’s notice in my parcel delivery boy’s brown coat, so I could observe him closely as he walked about the store in high proprietorial manner, with fallen arches, his gate betraying a meaningful relationship with his chiropodist. Daumier might have designed my Hotel Manager, but the long hours on his feet in the lobby, the years as bellboy and waiter, had taken their physical toll, and the farcical permutations of the bedroom bookings took a moral toll on his savoir-faire. It was a tiny part but, such was my status in the egalitarian Actors' Company, that in my main tiny scene I got away with getting a round on the pose I struck on my entrance, an exit round and, in between, a round on a piece of business with a pencil on a chain. None of these were mere gags, you understand. The Hotel Manager was the personification of the dubious status and condition of the Hotel Ultimus, ever under threat from the old goings-on behind its art-nouveau façade.

By the way, Sir Michael Hordern’s feet, as Jonathan Miller’s Lear, though not in shot in the scenes I saw, were much in evidence by virtue of the sound they occasioned on the resonant boards of the set and an odd syncopated clompety-clomp they made in the presumably high-heeled Renaissance shoes. Had I been the Fool, I would have said to Dr Miller, ‘Prithee, nuncle, this is not a play about the King’s chiropodist.’

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Heaven for Anthony Hopkins is not having to play King Lear in the evening, and hell, if I quote him correctly, is standing on the stage of the Old Vic during a wet Wednesday matinée in wrinkled tights. I find myself between two heavens and, if I could go back and stand in those wrinkled tights once more to do a matinée of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, I would. It is a minor miracle that I have a heaven to look forward to, playing King Lear for the first time on the evening of my 71st birthday.

You could say that the entire conceit of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead depends on the existence in people’s heads of Hamlet: a preconception, shadowy and yet definitive, even archetypal, a ‘performance’ of Hamlet hovering in the public mind, ready to settle on the boards, complete with Elsinore Castle, the Prince, the Ghost, the courtiers and the troupe of itinerant players – all oh so familiar to us (rough hew them as directors and Prince Hamlets may!) but oh so unfathomable and unfamiliar and threatening to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. You could say that. Perhaps you should, because that is the Hamlet in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, though they don’t know it. Furthermore, though we see so little of this Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s play, we know it is always going on somewhere in the farthest reaches of the stage – in ‘the strange darkened realms of the place’, to use Gordon Craig’s phrase – so that, however familiar or over-familiar we think this Hamlet is to us, and however distracted from it we may become by the pyrotechnics of Stoppard’s two jumped-up supporting players, filling in their long waits so poignantly and hilariously, the tragedy’s omnipresence gains in potency the more nebulous it becomes, and the ungraspable implications of its great transactions finally take their toll on the small change of our two attendant lords.

Stoppard’s Elsinore in our production of 1967 might have been archetypal, but his two attendant lords were wonderfully novel. Shakespeare’s Lear is ever new but the audience comes with expectations (again there is a performance of King Lear in the public mind) and the actor is between two stools, needing to confound the expectations and fulfill them. The critic James Agate, who was so often right, describes the character of King Lear as an oak tree. Entering as a silver birch holds no terrors for me. At the age of twenty-nine, when I opened the script of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at a bus stop in the Waterloo Road and read the first act on my way home to Peckham, I felt as if my life as an actor up until that point had been the perfect preparation to play the part of Guildenstern. After forty-two more years what have I been doing if I am not prepared to face the challenge of King Lear?

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Very Big, China

It was 1982, and China was just beginning to open itself to the West. I can’t remember whether it was on the Great Wall of China, or whether it was perhaps in the Philippines, in Manila surrounded by Jeepneys in a particularly seamy part of town, or it might have been in Japan after seeing Hamlet done in the Noh style, but in heavily accented English, a bullet-train ride from Tokyo; could it rather have been on the day when I had prayed at the Shinto shrine to the god of actors in a dressing room and went on to collect the round of applause I had just asked the god to grant? Whenever and wherever it was, I must have said what fascinating tales I would have to tell when we got home. ‘People won’t want to hear them’, said John Fraser, founder of the London Shakespeare Group and veteran of many British Council tours to Africa, South America and various Arab countries.

‘And what have you been up to?’ asked a particularly distinguished actress I was sitting next to at a dinner party in London a month later.

‘I’m not long back from a tour of Twelfth Night that took me to China, Singapore, the Philippines and Japan.’

‘China must have been interesting’, she said conclusively before turning to the person on her other side.

Fresh in its original dustcover I have Stephen Spender and David Hockney’s China Diary, which I bought when it was published in the same year, 1982. At the time, I gave it almost as short a shrift as my dinner companion gave me. I have just dipped into it now and read a page or two and looked at a few of Hockney’s watercolours, some of places I saw too. The watercolours are done in the same, dare I call it, naïve, perfunctory style in which he portrayed Bradford for the GPO telephone directory in 1989/90, much to the disgust of the locals, though I remember reading that somebody got hold of a job lot and sold them at £20 a time in Los Angeles.

Be that as it may, I guess you are likely to be a sympathetic reader, especially if I distil my traveller’s tales and give you the essence only: the Noh Hamlet, for example; all you need to know is that a third of the text of the play, watched across pools filled with golden carp on which a light rain fell, took four hours and we seemed to slip into another dimension. To conform to Buddhist philosophy, the most famous line in drama, as it was chanted, was amended to: ‘To be or not to be is not the question’.

In fact, the best solution might be to show you my photographs – I wasn’t doing drawings then unfortunately. I shall be ruthless and show only a selection.

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Ubiety: A Short Whimsical Experiment

I fully expect the word ‘ubiety’, which, until today, I couldn’t have told you the meaning of, to crop up at least twice during the next seven days; ‘new’ words do that, don’t you find? According to the Concise Oxford, ubiety refers to whereness, to being in a definite place; though what being in an indefinite place is, if that is possible, since being in a place – even if one doesn’t know where it is – still defines where one is … arguably … What I am trying to say is that I don’t know the word that would describe being in an indefinite place, unless it is ‘lost’. I chose the word ubiety almost at random from the dictionary, because I liked the look of it and because it was relatively obscure. I needed to use it as the answer to a crossword clue in an anecdote in my essay on Wimsey, though I have not had to go to the trouble of inventing the clue; I hate crossword puzzles anyway.

Talking of words, I had occasion to look up ‘shaman’ a day or two ago, for the same essay, and found, not surprisingly, that it came after ‘sham’ – to feign, pretend, simulate. My favourite definition of a shaman is: ‘a priestlike figure who travels as an intermediary in a state of trance between the world of the spirits and the “natural” world.’ I feel that to simulate, to perform the ‘sham’ of acting properly, one needs to be in a trancelike state between two worlds.

Let us now try a little experiment. There’ll be no sham about this, what would be the point? I have just thought of the number 76. ‘Seventy-six – love’ is one of the scores in the game of heads or tails Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play; that’s how 76 happened to come into my head just now. Come to think of it, Stoppard describes the two attendant lords at the play’s opening as being ‘in a place without any visible character’. They start off in a kind of anonymous ubiety. I’ve decided 100 will be as good a number for love as any, nil not being very useful to us. I’m thinking of love as in ‘warm affection’ etc. (the Concise Oxford again); well, the deep real thing would score a hundred.

Now I am picking up the Concise Oxford … oh, I’ve picked up Who’s Who in the Theatre by mistake. They are very similar. Let’s go with it – it might be meant. On page 76 we are still in London Playbills for 1973 and the hundredth word on the page is … ‘author’, which is astounding, you may agree. However, just so that we are not playing too safe, I think I should look up the Concise Oxford as originally intended, and I shall decide, before I start, to count only the words that are to be defined rather than get my index finger lost in the intricate, uncertain ubiety of counting all the definitions, elaborations and abbreviations. Which takes me over to page 78 and the word ‘autograph: author’s own manuscript; person’s own handwriting; esp. signature.’ Wow!

Just in case we are interested, I’ve looked and the other, discounted method of counting would have given us ‘instrument’, the first word in the definition of ‘audiometer: instrument for testing hearing power.’

Nor I suppose in the pen of him that writes it.

I’m fond of thinking of the actor as the most sophisticated performing instrument, and a shaman may be thought of as an instrument too: both certainly measure the hearing power of their audience. To go further, believe it or not I have already discussed the reluctance of Roland Barthes to call the author by the name of author; he prefers scriptor or even shaman! That’s how I came to look up the word ‘shaman’ in my dictionary.

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Brecht the Bohemian (Preface to Artist's Impressions)

Airborne on the flight from Berlin to London, the afternoon of 20 October 2009

The taxi driver, perhaps forty-five years old, who drove us to Schönefeld Airport, spoke the name of Hitler and, like a schoolboy, imitated the sounds of planes, bombs and guns, and took his hands off the steering wheel to mime, in explanation of the fact that we were passing the location of the airfield from which the Luftwaffe launched its attacks. It is now a built-up area, the blocks of, I’d say, 1960s apartments were bright yellow and cream in the autumn sunshine.

At this moment, I suppose, I am in the same airspace that sounded regularly with the roar of the RAF and Luftwaffe: a tepid Easy Jet paper cup of coffee is balanced by my laptop as I remember my own light brush with the Blitz and see so clearly the candlelight on the white-washed walls of our coal cellar in Bradford on the night of 31 August 1940, not a month after my fourth birthday. It was a novelty to be sitting on dining chairs in the cellar. If my parents were frightened, they managed not to transfer their fear to me. It was thought that a stray enemy plane had offloaded its last few bombs on the centre of Bradford before going home. It didn’t happen again.

That memory of the cellar might be my earliest. Stoppard’s Guildenstern asks Rosencrantz, ‘What’s the first thing you remember?’

Tempting to go on – it gets funnier – but it may be today, in writing this, that I have designated the cellar memory as my first. I feel sure that there used to be another candidate, something to do with sunshine and a pram, but it seems hopelessly nebulous now and unconvincing. The point being that this little occasional volume might encompass my first memory and come bang up to date (no wordplay intended) with one of my last memories. To leaven the somewhat arbitrary selection I am able to include in the available space, I’ll call on a German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, whose apartment I was in only two days ago. His widow, Helen Weigel, left Bertolt’s rooms as they were when he died suddenly in 1956 (they had an agreement to live separately on different floors with only a communal kitchen and dining room).

Their apartments made a deep and what will be a lasting impression on me. When we were in Weigel’s sitting room, I felt I had to announce to the guide and the little group of visitors that, as an actor at the National Theatre in London in 1964, I had been introduced to Helen Weigel and shaken her hand. (I thought it a bit odd that no one sought to shake mine before we dispersed!) It occurs to me, now that I am safely back home in London, to look up Brecht’s diary for 31 August 1940 and see what he was doing whilst the German pilot decided to bomb Bradford.

Well you won’t believe this, but his last entry before the 31st is the 29th and his next is the 2nd of September. However, the entry for the 29th comprises three Greek epigrams. They are introduced on the 28th in the following way:

From Brecht’s entry for the next day, the 29th of August, I quote the lines of ANYTE, after OEHLER:

Chausseestrasse seemed a busy, unlovely thoroughfare of old tall apartments and shops in what had been drab post-war East Berlin. We peered into the closed, and as far as we could see, unremarkable restaurant that Helen Weigel started on the ground floor of number 125, and then walked through an entrance into a cobbled courtyard at the side of the building, sequestered from the street and strewn with autumn leaves. We soon realized that a beautiful cemetery was this building’s nextdoor neighbour. We entered up some narrow bare wooden stairs to a little door opening into the museum box office converted from Brecht’s own small kitchen where he brewed coffee in the morning.

The grey image of himself Brecht presented to the world, in a kind of European Mao jacket, Havana cigar in his hand, coupled with the haunting memory of seeing, at the Palace Theatre in London, so shortly after his death, the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage, a stark symphony of greys and earth colours such as we had never before seen in a theatre, left me unprepared for the spacious comfort and even elegance of his apartment. The guide engineered a theatrical coup. After Brecht’s book-lined study with its white walls, leather armchairs, dark woodwork table, muted wall scrolls of Confucius and a poem by Mao, she flung open the door onto his large study; light poured in from three windows opposite us, looking out onto the autumnal trees of the garden and the neighbouring cemetery.

There were seven tables, and still plenty of floor space; some of the tables we would call Georgian, slender, in blonde wood. Our guide said that the air would have been blue with cigar smoke and the cigarette smoke of the people who came to work with Brecht. There was a big empty ashtray on every surface, and each table, she said, would have been swamped in papers, the floor piled with books. The objets d’art included what Shakespeare’s Richard II calls ‘a pair of carvèd saints’. There had been photos of Lenin and Marx, of course, but there was no Mickey Spillane paperback on Brecht’s bedside table in the small bedroom in which he died (as I had been led to expect by Richard Eyre only a few days before), but Weigel’s shoulder bag was hooked over the foot of her bedstead in her larger bedroom. The last room we were shown was Weigel’s sitting room, which she had built for herself after Brecht’s death, a timber addition, jutting into the garden with windows all along two walls – a charming garden room in fact, almost like a conservatory. This too would have been hazy with her chain-smoking.

My wife and I had gone to Berlin to attend the premiere of the Constantin Film production, Pope Joan, in which I completed shooting my cameo part a year ago. I suppose it is gratifying to see one’s name, solo, stretching across the wide screen, but shocking to see what in the rough cut had been my tasty chunks, reduced to flavoursome shavings.

This slim volume, for all its cuts and edits, will give a fuller picture, not of Pope Joan, of course, but of many rooms – not ‘edited’ and tidied for your inspection, their occupants flown: no, many rooms, peopled, and some of them with three walls and a row of footlights, and a thousand witnesses in the darkness beyond – open spaces, too, and the places in between my ‘first’ memory – a tiny Bradford coal cellar in 1940 – and the one I have selected to be the last, here recorded at one minute to 13.00 hours on 21 October 2009: it is the smile and warm handshake of that Berlin taxi driver as, wordlessly, he bid us farewell at Schönefeld Airport, yesterday afternoon.

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