Michael Redgrave and the Mountebank's Tale
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Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank’s Tale corin redgrave I M R was appearing for the third and last time at Stratford-upon-Avon. The parts he played that year were Hamlet and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing. Hamlet was a brave choice. My father was by then 50. In an age less fearful than ours of growing old, great actors like Sir John Martin Harvey had been able to make a lifetime’s work out of a part like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Sir John performed it 4,004 times and gave his farewell performance in the role at 74 and audiences hardly seemed to mind. But by 1958, to play Hamlet at 50 was a risky thing to do and on the whole I think that Michael managed it with great skill. No, I’ll go further: I think it was the best Hamlet he ever gave. Stratford then, as I think it still does, had a summer festival to which scholars, historians and artists came from all over the world. My father was invited, as he had been twice before, to give a lecture. He was a good lecturer. He had given four Rockefeller lectures at Bristol University in 1953, which then became one of the most suggestive, illuminating books about acting, The Actor’s Ways and Means (1953). Other lectures were brought together in a book called Mask or Face (1958). But on this occasion he must have felt that he had said all he wanted to say about acting in lecture form and he chose instead to write a long short story or novella, The Mountebank’s Tale (1959). I think that this was a shrewd choice. In fiction he was able to say more about himself, his acting, more about his understanding of theatre than he had yet been able to say in the more conventional form of lecture or essay. Corin Redgrave is an actor, director and author. Since his debut in 1962 his work has been divided almost evenly between theatre, film and television. He is the author of Michael Redgrave: My Father (RCB, Fourth Estate, 1995) and Julius Caesar and the English Revolution (Faber & Faber, 2002). As a playwright he has written Roy and Daisy (1998), Fool for the Rest of his Life (2000), Blunt Speaking (2001) and Not Half the Man I Used to Be (2002?), all plays commissioned for BBC radio. He has been the editor of The Marxist, a bi-monthly journal, since 1987, and is an occasional freelance journalist. Corin Redgrave - 9781526137272 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 07:54:00PM via free access MacKillop_21_Ch20 221 9/1/03, 9:52 am 222 ……………………………………… The Mountebank’s Tale was published by Heinemann, but is now a rarity, a collector’s item. It is a tale of two actors, or rather an actor and his double. Joseph Charles is a supremely gifted, cultivated, classical actor in the Austrian theatre. His double, Paul Hammer, is a young man ten or fifteen years his junior but otherwise identical to himself in every outward respect. Charles has taught his young double to speak elegant German. He has also taught him how to act. He discovers that his pupil has a natural gift almost the equal of his own. Joseph Charles is preparing a light comedy whose plot relies on the presence of a pair of identical twins. The play was written for himself, as virtuoso, to double both parts, but for a joke he allows his protégé one evening to play the other twin, without announcing the substitution in the programme. The audience is completely taken in. The performance is a success. Charles decides to continue with the experiment. At first the younger man is quite content to play the second twin without acknowledgement. He is head-over-heels stage-struck, and it is enough for him to be acting before a large audience, sharing the stage with the greatest actor of the day. But after a while he starts to pine for more independence and the chance to make a reputation for himself out of the shadows of his great master. And seeing this, Charles decides on an even more daring substitution. There is a one-act comedy about an old man and his servant and the young man plays the older man, the part normally played by Charles himself, while Charles plays the servant. Again the audience is not informed in advance and is completely unaware of the substitution. It is delighted with the performance and Paul, the young actor, becomes more and more confident as he hears the response to his daring moments of improvisation, his unexpected gags. Emboldened by the applause, he invents more and more. The performance is undoubtedly the most successful of that light comedy ever given on the Viennese stage. And then suddenly in mid-performance Joseph Charles does something that he has never done: he forgets his lines. He ‘dries’. My father was a friend and a disciple of the Danish writer and novelist Isak Dinesen. Today more people know her as Karen Blixen because a film, Out of Africa, was made about her. My father borrowed from Isak Dinesen a very gothic method of story-telling with much deflection and sleight of hand to build up suspense and atmosphere. All these are in evidence in The Mountebank’s Tale. At first one thinks it is obvious that the narrator, a successful man of the theatre approaching middle age must be my father. We find him in his club in Covent Garden, which is unmistakably modelled on the Garrick Club. Corin Redgrave - 9781526137272 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 07:54:00PM via free access MacKillop_21_Ch20 222 9/1/03, 9:52 am ……………… Michael Redgrave and The Mountebank’s Tale 223 He is given a photograph of two men, one of whom he recognises as his late friend, a historian called St John Fielding. The two men are pictured in front of a seventeenth-century Cotswold stone farmhouse, although the presence of a giant eucalyptus tree in the background suggests California rather than the Cotswolds. The narrator is curious to know who the other figure in the photograph might be. He finds amongst his late friend’s scrapbooks and letters a type- script. It tells the story of Fielding’s encounter in Santa Barbara with the legendary Viennese actor Joseph Charles. As the story progresses one realises that each new person we are introduced to bears some resemblance to my father, but is in fact only a decoy. The actor has discarded each disguise, as if flinging off pieces of costume as he runs from the stage to his dressing room. We follow the trail – cloak, jacket, vest – but when we reach the dressing room, the actor is not there. Through this story my father tells more about the art of acting than I think one can learn from him anywhere else. As I read The Mountebank’s Tale I can see my father signalling to me, beckoning me on, saying, ‘This is who I am, this is why I act.’ Why, for example, did Joseph Charles forget his lines? Because he was astonished and somewhat shocked to find that the audience was applauding his young double for doing things that he would never had dreamed of doing. My father had a very strict contract with himself as a performer and he kept to its terms all his life. He suffered under it, somewhat. By comparison with his great contemporary Laurence Olivier, who was the consummate showman, my father very rarely allowed that necessary side of an actor’s personality to dominate his work. Joseph Charles forgets his lines because he is appalled to see that the audience prefers his young double’s decoration of the part to the more chaste, pure, classical performance which he is accustomed to giving. There are other things in this novella that are very reminiscent of my father. In particular, the description of a hellish dress rehearsal in which the slightest unexpected event, such as an actor wearing a different costume or wearing it in a different way, would cause Charles to forget his lines. As a boy of 13 I saw my father in such a dress rehearsal, of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford, stop over and over again to ask for a prompt. He was wearing his costume, of course, wig, beard, make-up and so on, and yet he hardly seemed to be there. And then there is his nightmare. My father had a recurring nightmare, in which he found himself looking at his reflection in a mirror in his dressing room having applied a rather heavy make-up. He was a great specialist in Corin Redgrave - 9781526137272 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 07:54:00PM via free access MacKillop_21_Ch20 223 9/1/03, 9:52 am 224 ……………………………………… make-up, something which we actors today have almost lost the art of. In fact we hardly make up for the stage at all. In his nightmare he looks at first approvingly in the mirror at this make-up. And then the make-up begins to slip down his face and the entire face which he has adopted slides down on to his chest, so that what is left behind is not his real face but a blank. Finally, Joseph Charles decides that he has had enough. He says good- bye to acting and in mid-production he asks his young double into his dressing room and he says, ‘I am never going to appear in this part again or in any other.