Theatre Archive Project: Interview with Alan White
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THEATRE ARCHIVE PROJECT http://sounds.bl.uk Alan White – interview transcript Interviewer: Kate Harris 9 November 2005 Actor. Acting style; actors' mystique; actors' strike; Alan Aykbourne; audience reaction; Canterbury and Leatherhead; censorship; digs; Frank Matcham theatres; Arthur Miller; matinees; new writing; refreshments; repertory; technical changes; touring; Waiting for Godot; writers; Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford. KH: Can I begin by asking about when you first started working in theatre, your first experiences of working in theatre? AW: Well, in 1954 I started in a repertory at Leatherhead and Canterbury, Canterbury Theatre was called The Marlowe and the Leatherhead was in the High Street in Leatherhead, and you rehearsed and played one week in Leatherhead and took the same play to Canterbury and rehearsed another play and so on, and the system was you opened on the Monday night and on the Tuesday you blocked the next play, the morning the first Act and the second Act in the afternoon. Wednesday morning off because you did a matinee on Wednesday afternoon. Then Thursday you went through the first Act, Friday through the second Act. Then Saturday you had a run through, sort of stagger through, this was still playing the other one on Saturday, matinee and night. Then you moved to Canterbury, did a run through, dress rehearsal on Monday afternoon and opened on Monday night and then you went on with the next play and that’s for three months, play after play after play. KH: Did you find it a very punishing schedule? Did you find it difficult working to that kind of regime? AW: It is, and you have to find a way yourself that you can cope with it, and the best way I found anyway is to learn the lines and follow the punctuation, because a writer takes a long while to write a play, sometimes a year, and if the actor paraphrases or breaks up the speeches then the whole thing goes sideways. If you follow the actual words, only the actual words and their punctuation, you can get the part right in a short space of time. You have to learn that, but it’s very necessary you know. If you are a writer and somebody is paraphrasing; ‘Oh God! What are they doing to my play!’ you know. KH: Where did you move from when you moved from the first repertory theatre that you were at? http://sounds.bl.uk Page 1 of 15 Theatre Archive Project AW: I think I did Guildford after that, Guildford had a theatre in the main street before the Yvonne Arnaud and it was burnt down subsequently, but that was a weekly rep. The Canterbury and Leatherhead was a fortnightly, so that was a weekly rep, so they did a different play every week. KH: Was that transition quite difficult - going from two weeks to one week? AW: It wasn’t really, because you worked out… it really worked out this way, you were open on the Monday night and from then on the second play that you were doing, two hours, generally speaking all plays were two hours long, and you had to go back after you’d finished the show in the night and learn eighteen pages a night. If you didn’t learn eighteen pages a night you got behind, so you’d find yourself on the opening night – on Monday night - grasping around, panicking and all the rest of it. So that took you to about… from the time you finished the play, which was about 11 o’ clock, got home and then I used to cut out at about 2 o’clock in the morning but just learning right through, and learning this absolutely off the text and off the punctuation in particular, and then it sat together. But you got the Monday night where sometimes, if somebody had been learning it sitting up in bed and when they’d go into a speech, ‘Where were you on the such and such?’’, ‘Well as a matter of fact on the night…’ you know, this would happen and the most difficult stuff to learn, which people watching television may or may not know, is detective plays, Agatha Christie’s, because it’s all exposition: so and so did this on that on that and the other, and ‘where were you on the night of…’, and so for people like John Thaw doing those plays, it must have been terribly difficult because everything is a mass of exposition, practically nothing else. KH: What kind of plays were you doing when you were working at Guildford? AW: Those plays were, generally speaking, plays that came from the West End successes so if it was a success they wanted to see it at Leatherhead, and Leatherhead was a commuter zone so you got two different audiences, you got Leatherhead was commuting and you got Canterbury who were rather agricultural, so the timing was different, with the same play it would time fast in Leatherhead and slowly in Canterbury, you had to give them time to get used to it. KH: Because of the audience change. AW: Yes, what they did for a living and Leatherhead was closest to London. Timing in London is very, very sophisticated timing. Well, most of the big cities are you know, and there’s an extraordinary difference between, from Edinburgh to Glasgow, if you take a slightly risqué play to Edinburgh they’ll love it. It goes to Glasgow and they’ll sit there and hate it, you know. Everywhere you go there’s a different kind of audience that reflects the place. You know, Liverpool for instance, very lively people they are, and this reflects it. http://sounds.bl.uk Page 2 of 15 Theatre Archive Project KH: Did you find that the audiences changed over the period, the fifties and sixties? Was there a change…? AW: I don’t think they did, I mean, we were researching a play to go on up here in the Shaw by about ten playwrights. It was called Thomas More, the story of Thomas More. It was written by these different playwrights in the time, and was banned because it would have been insulting to Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s only writing, actual writing of a scene, is in there, in his handwriting, it’s the only one they’ve got, it’s in here [The British Library] and in that time there were so many theatres, I think there were something like fifteen theatres in London, in the early 1600’s and the English people, this hasn’t changed, they had a survey in the Sunday Times in the seventies, I was in The Mousetrap at the time, because they were comparing this and there were, over the fifty year period, exactly the same number of farces, thrillers, straight plays, musical comedies, opera and ballet, were going on 50 years later, which shows just how the audience doesn’t really change and what they’re after is that. This has probably gone on right since the beginning… it’s just the English people as such, they love the theatre, you know, that’s why it’s survived, nowhere in the world is anything like in England, you know, theatres. KH: When we were talking on the phone, you mentioned some of the changes, the technical changes in the theatre - could you just say a little bit about that? AW: The technical changes, yes they were very important, this happened in the middle of the 1950s. When, normally they were lighting a theatre, it would be a laborious affair. Put that in there, put that in there and so on, and a man called Michael Northern and another man called Joe Davis invented a lighting board which completely blocked in the lighting like you do in a film set, every bit was lit, and this was able to be done in an afternoon, off your lighting board. And before that, because the lighting was dark, I believe when originally they did the plays in the afternoon, in Shakespeare’s day because there were no lights. And then in the period of the Drury Lane they had candles, they lit with candles, sometimes that’s how theatres burned down, with the candles on the stage, then when they got to this stage the lighting was rather poor, the actors wore Leichner stick make-up - it’s a German stick make- up - put it on very heavily and this stood you out, and the women similarly, and then when this lighting was invented by Michael Northern, it immediately looked like make-up on the stage so you didn’t use it any more. They put the base like we have a base now, a base makeup, and then men nowadays don’t wear any at all. KH: They don’t need it because the lighting… AW: …The lighting was so marvellous in it. It was really a great innovation and the other one just recently was Trevor Nunn with the Sennheiser body mic. They were in The Olivier, it’s a… any open thrust stage you’ve got sound going everywhere. So in a normal proscenium stage you had three microphones in the footlights and they, you know the actors knew they were there but they weren’t playing to them and the minute you turned upstage the sound went, indistinct or whatever it was. So when we were doing An Enemy of the People, which was the first play he did there, when he took the theatre over, it was in The Olivier.