This Much Is True

To learn my lines, I often go off and lock myself away for a week or two and do nothing except learn and properly get to know the text, and I see no one and do nothing apart from that script. Then I hire someone for another week to run through it again and again with me until it is written deep into my brain. I then remember it until the end of the last night of the show — then it’s wiped clean.

Forgetting one’s lines is only one of the potential pitfalls of performing on stage. When I was in Sir Peter Hall’s 1993 production of She Stoops to Conquer, I played Mrs Hardcastle with Donald Sinden as Mr Hardcastle and David Essex as Tony Lumpkin. Everybody adored David Essex. He had perfect manners and a melting smile. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, he was safe with me but not with anyone else. We laughed from morning to night. Donald was another wonderful colleague. He very much enjoyed my dirty stories and had a way with audiences. For example, one night somebody in the audience had a hacking cough. They kept coughing and coughing and coughing, and finally Donald stopped the performance. He went to the front of the stage, leaving Squire Hardcastle behind, and said in his ordinary voice (except that it wasn’t an ordinary voice at all, but a magical one of strength and masculinity), ‘I say, that’s a bad cough you’ve got there. Has anybody near you got a throat pastille, or something?’ Somebody passed the man a cough sweet, and Donald said, ‘Have a good suck on that, that’ll help you.’ Donald was a delightful colleague. At the curtain call one night, a particularly unresponsive audience — real puddings all evening, suddenly erupted into a standing ovation. Donald muttered to me: ‘Too late.’^[11]

It was after one performance of She Stoops that Princess Margaret came backstage. She was tiny and cool but had enjoyed the show and congratulated us. Carl Toms, who was a friend of hers, had designed the show. I knew he had been ill and, without thinking, I asked if she would pass on to him our loving best wishes. For a split second, her eyes narrowed and she stiffened: she was deciding whether I had been guilty of massive impertinence. But she saw from my concerned face that I only wanted to send Carl good wishes. She relaxed and said, ‘Yes, I will. I enjoyed your performance, rushing acraws the stage, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.’ And she smiled. The danger was over.

I have only once broken character. I was doing Dickens’ Women at the Hampstead Theatre Club and a lady in the audience had an epileptic fit. At first, I didn’t know what it was: it was a continuing snorting and growling sound. I thought, ‘Do I stop? What should I do?’ The audience was becoming restive and clearly anxious. Finally, I decided I must stop the show. I held up my hand, came to the front of the stage and said something I never thought I would say: ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ And, of course, because it was Hampstead, nearly everybody stood up. The numerous doctors in the house attended to the lady, the show resumed and, I’m pleased to say, she fully recovered.

Mobile phones ringing and buzzing and beeping are another hazard. It’s disgraceful that people are allowed to bring them into the auditorium in the first place; they should be obliged to hand them into the cloakroom. When I was playing Madame Morrible in Wicked, I could see clearly when people in the audience were using their mobile phones. In the interval I would report it to the ushers, and ask them to find that person in the second row, or the upper circle, or wherever, and remove the offending article. People don’t seem to understand that if they are using their mobile they can be seen — you can see the light on the phone from the stage and it’s obvious if someone is photographing. It’s rude and horribly distracting. As actors, we are trying to create a little world for those on stage, and for the audience in the theatre. We have a pact not to tear down the walls of the little room that we’ve built for each other.

The noisy munching of sweeties and incessant chitchat of some audience members is another bugbear. Once I was in the audience of a show in New York. I don’t remember which show it was, but there were people talking and volubly snacking on a shared box of Maltesers. They talked and rattled and crunched all the way through the show. In the interval, I couldn’t help it: I burst out and said to them, ‘You are barbarians!’ They looked at me, and I said, ‘You’ve been talking and chattering right the way through the show, spoiling it for everyone else. Have you no manners? Did your mother never tell you how to behave in a theatre?’ One of the men said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Get out of here, I’m a member…’ I cut him off. ‘Shut up! Somebody else is talking, not you. I don’t want to hear you talk, your talk is stupid. Behave yourself!’ And they did shut up after that.