THEATRE ARCHIVE PROJECT http://sounds.bl.uk Simpson, Richard – interview transcript Interviewer: Rahul Bahal 21 January 2012 Richard Simpson, actor, on: Angry Young Men, Anthony Richardson, Belgrave Theatre Coventry, Censorship, Sir Peter Hall, Harold Pinter, Jonathan Lynn, Sir Ben Kingsley, Look Back In Anger, Sir Ian McKellen, Nottingham Playhouse, Sir Trevor Nunn, PARADA, RADA, RSC, Sir Patrick Stewart, The Comedians. RB: So how did you first get involved in drama? RS: Well I was born in Skegness which is a seaside resort in Lincolnshire and I was a war child so there wasn’t a lot of theatre going on, obviously, except amateur work and I got it amateur at school. My father was a very good amateur actor; in fact, the night I was born he was performing in a farce called Lord Richard and The Pantry; so I was called Richard. But after the war, just immediately after the war, there was theatre in Skegness as there was in a lot of the country at that time, mainly weekly rep. When you talk about weekly rep to youngsters now they can’t believe it happened, that is a play a week. You can imagine what that was like. Plays in those days were mainly written in three acts so it was learning an act a night, and then performing in the evening. Absolutely incredible, but it was the law and there was two reps when I was still at school, at ‘Skeg’, and they wanted a young boy for a play called Frieda, so I was recruited in to that and then in my last year at school a famous Rattigan play called The Winslow Boy they wanted a young naval boy; so I did that. And then my father, God bless him, said ‘Do you really want to pursue this?’ because I was extremely shy at school I wouldn’t read aloud in the class, or anything like that. And he said ‘Do you want me to find if I can get you a drama school?’ Well drama schools in those days were, I don’t know if there were more than six, in London. I mean, can you imagine how many there are now? And he wrote to Sir Kenneth Bonds who was the principal then of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and he said ‘He’s very young’. I was just tipping sixteen I think. ‘Bring him up let’s have a look at him’, so I was brought to London, to Gower Street, and in those days, they had a junior academy long since gone, in Highgate called Preparatory Academy to The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and so I took the test for RADA and to my amazement they said ‘Yes, he can go to PARADA’. Well it turned out to be a, I wouldn’t say a racket, but it was supposed to be for young people, but there were of course older people coming out of the wall so we were a mixture and the first term was pretty disastrous. I got a terrible report which I glory unto this day reading it out, you know ‘This boy resents everything he was told’. Etcetera and I wasn’t, I didn’t resent anything I was just terrified, I was coming from a provincial background into what those days was... people going into drama on the whole were upper class; the girls particularly all came from finishing schools in Switzerland you know and all spoke like that [imitates accent]. I still have a Lincolnshire accent to a certain extent, in those days you had to learn to speak ‘posh’, like I do now. Now it’s just the reversal you must keep your provincial accent and so I did that, fortunately I then had to take the test for RADA proper, which I did. Got in, but the Forces intervened and in those days we had to do National Service. So I went in the RAF, http://sounds.bl.uk Page 1 of 8 Theatre Archive Project hoping to see the world because in those days, you didn’t get anywhere, and they posted me thirty miles down the road, at Cranwell in Lincolnshire, and I spent my two years, fortunately a good drama department, I ran the drama department and then I went back to RADA and then I started my career in weekly rep at a place called Bexhill-on-Sea, in Sussex and I stayed there for I think five years not doing a play every week, because in those days you started as a stage manager as well, or an acting stage manager. Acting, they used to call it, ASM, they still use the phrase acting stage manager, and the girls would start particularly acting ASM and, of course, at the end of the sixties, I think it was, that all changed, because stage managers suddenly became technical only, which they are to this day; a different branch entirely so that opportunity young actors had to learn their trade has gone, disappeared, because that’s how you started. So yes I started in weekly rep; again, am I rambling on too much before more questions? RB: Oh no, no, not at all. Not at all. RS: There was an order to the theatre in the sense that you started in the theatre, you hoped to progress to a posh rep, there weren’t many of those, but say, Birmingham I think was four weekly, Liverpool was two weekly, oh yes, magnificent and then you hoped to become a West End actor so you went up the ladder as it were. Then of course, overnight, television arrived and the order was thrown out, and of course you could almost start at the top in television, not quite like you can today, you still weren’t allowed to do television unless you done so much theatre work I think. So it all changed but we were very lucky I think I was talking to a colleague only the day before yesterday and I think we had the best time of all theatre wise, probably every generation says this, but I think it’s true that we did, because as I say, there were all these theatres across the country and of course they were getting better reps then after the war. For instance I went to Coventry and that was the first theatre to be built after the war and it’s called The Belgrade Coventry, because the Belgrade citizens gave the wood for the theatre in recognition of the war effort, you know and I went there and that was three weekly, and I stayed there three years, doing not always a great play, but many splendid plays, every three weeks, which is a tremendous way of gaining experience, which the young people today just don’t have; they probably go for one play, or two and that’s it. But there we were, we were even in repertoire as opposed to repertory I mean we did, a season of seven, six plays alternating them through that period, and I did that at Nottingham Play House as well much later, and of course the directors also had terrific training for instance when I was at Coventry, this young boy came along he looked all of fourteen years old, and when he got to his feet one day we thought he was a young stage manager, apparently. We had a very vague director called Anthony Richardson, not to be confused with the film director Tony Richardson, and this young man was Trevor Nunn, and of course Anthony more or less handed the season over to him quite soon and he proved he was of course a wonderful, wonderful talent and director, and Peter Hall came over from Stratford and took him away almost overnight and the rest is history; within I think five years he was appointed to lead the Royal Shakespeare Company. But he also had to act, he also had to perform. For instance I did Twelfth Night, and I gave my Malvolio and he gave his Fabian all those years ago and when I made a big career move, across to Leicester that was very well thought of theatre then, I mean again doing a play every three weeks and the young trainee director there was a man called Richard Eyre, well you know, and he had to do some acting it’s the way you discovered if you didn’t like acting you’d better be a director. Look at him now, our juvenile actor at Coventry was Ian McKellen and so on and so on. So you’ve got this great wealth of talent and when I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company because of Trevor, bless him, in 1967, the first production Trevor ever did, a Shakespeare production, was Taming Of the Shrew and it turned out to be a wonderful production. But I was one of the oldest members, and I was then I think thirty five, but everyone in it had had wealth of experience already. They’d come from Manchester rep. Patrick, now Sir Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley playing a huntsman, Sir Ben Kingsley, all these people. Whereas today, you get, I gather, an incredible mixture, you get some very experienced people but, on the whole, you get people who’ve had no real experience going into these top http://sounds.bl.uk Page 2 of 8 Theatre Archive Project companies, and it shows I think technique wise, vocally. That’s one of the other great complaints these days that you can’t hear them, and in our days most theatres not like Leicester were big, were large and you just had to accommodate that size and you did.