This Much Is True

The rehearsal room at the Old Vic is right at the top of the building. It has a glass roof and 1976 was the hottest summer on record. Everyone boiled, we poured with sweat all day; the physical discomfort was intense; somehow that spilled over into the rehearsal process. (Adam remembers Glenda buying everyone ice creams and lollies to counteract the extreme heat we were suffering. Maybe she missed me out on her run to the ice cream van.) There was bad feeling from the beginning. The mood was unpleasant and rivalry and discord amongst the cast members sporadically bubbled over in little moments of irritation and nastiness. Jonathan Pryce was particularly combative and scornful if anyone made mistakes. He patrolled the set like a shark, eating up errors from other cast members, although Tom Chadbon remembers Jonathan being larky and fun, enjoying one of the longest corpses (which, in the business, means laughing so much on stage that you can’t speak your lines) he’d ever experienced.

The cast contained many strong and gifted actors but there was a collision of acting styles. Some had come from the Bill Gaskill Royal Court tradition; others from the Peter Hall Royal Shakespeare Company way of doing things. I also sensed a rivalry among the younger men vying for Glenda’s attention. Jonathan Pryce and Jack Shepherd were openly contemptuous of James Villiers, a gentleman of the Old School, with perfect manners and a plummy, posh speaking voice. James refused to battle for a place on the stage; he felt it would be beneath him to push himself forward. He fell for Glenda in a big way; he was always susceptible to female charms and couldn’t resist buying her a pair of flared jeans one day. His then wife, Patricia Donovan, was my dresser.

It didn’t help that I was nervous of Glenda Jackson, a star actress with a formidable reputation. My impression was that she liked people to be frightened of her. At the best of times, Glenda has little patience and no humility. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I admit I behaved foolishly and I was certainly made to suffer later as a result. She was horrid to me. I didn’t like her but I acknowledge her considerable gifts — she has given great performances. Occasionally she hits those heights, but she didn’t in The White Devil. I believe she knew that she was rubbish, which made her even nastier. Although it wasn’t just her — everybody involved behaved badly.

The White Devil contains incest and murder and cruelty expressed in magnificent poetry, and Michael was all at sea. His production wandered between various epochs — it was neither a costume drama, nor was it a contemporary reimagining. There was no focus or particularity to it, because although we were dressed in modern clothes and smoking cigarettes, we carried old-fashioned pistols and Jacobean swords. Even getting onto the stage was hard: there was a revolving door stage left resembling a New York hotel entrance. It’s easy to get stuck in a revolving door, especially when carrying a sword. It seems for some time, in other productions, Michael had wanted to use revolving doors; now he took his chance.

It’s never a good idea to take a production out of its location or period: a play is set in a time and place for a reason. Occasionally it can work: Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo + Juliet is an example, but this was a mishmash — a hideous hodgepodge of absurdity. And we knew it. I remember Patrick Magee getting so infuriated at just how awful it was, that he slammed his hand into the brick wall of the rehearsal room, tearing it badly on a nail, and ending up having to go to hospital.

The rehearsals rapidly became acrimonious. There was no generosity, no sense of collaboration or of comradeship in the cast, just competition and rancour: they were fights, they weren’t rehearsals. Every day was like that. Nobody wanted to come into work. Glenda may have thought she was giving a good performance, but no one else did. She and I had a falling out; I cannot remember what it was about: I called her a cow, and she called me an amateur. I think she won that one!