Charles Vance – Interview Transcript
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THEATRE ARCHIVE PROJECT http://sounds.bl.uk Charles Vance – interview transcript Interviewer: Dominic Shellard 4 September 2006 Actor and Producer. A Glass Menagerie; Cyril Cusack; Devonshire Park Theatre; In Praise of Love; Irish theatre; Anew McMaster; Memorial Theatre, Stratford; Arthur Miller; Harold Pinter; Terence Rattigan; repertory; The group of three; touring America. DS: Thank you very much for coming in this afternoon, Charles. We’re delighted to have this opportunity to interview you. Can I just start by asking you your permission for us to place the recording in the British Library’s Sound Archive for people to consult? CV: I would be very flattered that you should want to consult it. DS: Thank you very much indeed. Now, you’re famous for being the longest-running commercial producer in the United Kingdom, but before we talk about the company you first founded can we start as an undergraduate in Belfast and could you describe to us how you moved from being an undergraduate to moving into the professional theatre. CV: Well, it comes in two pieces. I had actually made a professional appearance - meaning I was paid a guinea at the age of 7 - to take part in a children’s broadcast for the BBC called Castles of Ireland and that was the age of 7 and that got me a guinea and I knew I was going to earn a living from then on [laughs], it was pretty safe to say. I was an undergraduate, I was reading law, with the sole purpose, as far as my family was concerned, of going into Parliament. That’s the one thing I’ve never wanted to do! However, I don’t regret having read law because what I learned then and the jurisprudence and cross-examination, all of that, and the laws of contract was very, very useful for the rest of my life. But as an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast, we had a very… I wouldn’t say iffy, but it was mediocre in terms of great quality, ADC, Amateur Dramatic Club, but I was in it and we had some very good actors and suddenly a call came from, literally, metaphorically, across the road, from the Grand Opera House opposite the Great Northern railway station. They had a terrible problem. They were doing some play or other and their leading man – dashing leading man - who was 6’2’’, a man called Edward Mulhare, had been taken ill and could I take his place? When would I be doing this? And they said in about quarter of an hour [laughs] and that’s called show business. And do I get a script? Well, there’ll be one that you can wing your way through, I’m sure, and that’s what one did, I couldn’t even… I think the play was called The Family Upstairs by an American writer called Harry S. Delf. That really covers you with absolute pride of your career, it’s wonderful. But… http://sounds.bl.uk Page 1 of 13 Theatre Archive Project DS: So were you on stage with the script? CV: No. Wouldn’t do it. I winged it. No. I’ll tell you a story about that if we get that far and that is the day when I actually did go on with a script and what I did with it when I went on, which is actually quite an amusing anecdote. DS: Well, tell us that now. That would be great. CV: I’ll tell you now. Yes, of course. It was when I was running with Devonshire Park Theatre at Eastbourne and I was directing a then very, very famous Royal Shakespeare Company actor who was very, very high-profile in the cinema and in television, and his name was Patrick Wymark. He was also renowned for his unbelievable intake of alcohol which was absolutely awesome but it was… And he did it, and I directed him playing Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey. You know the play of Harvey, it’s the story of an invisible white rabbit. And the opening of Act II is the arrival of Elwood Dowd in his sister’s house with Harvey and he opens the double doors and I’ve never… it was… I was pouring fear! [laughs] And I remember saying ‘Here you are, Harvey. Here’s your coat and here’s your hat and here’s your chair, and this is your script. No, on second thoughts, I think I’ll keep that for myself!’ [Laughter] And it worked, and so I read Harvey’s script and I wasn’t cribbing at all, you see, so everyone was very happy and I was happy doing the Harvey’s things. DS: That’s great. How did your acting career develop from Belfast? CV: It was amazing because I graduated very, very young. I was 17+ but I mean, 17, when I graduated with Honours in Law and no, I was not going to practise it, and I knew a man who was one of the great Irish actors, not the greatest, but one of the great Irish actors, was a man called Anew McMaster. A great Shakespearean actor, brother-in- law of Michael McClermagh and he toured what we used to call the Irish Smalls, in Shakespeare, and I asked for a job and he said ‘Very well,’ he said ‘you will play Laertes, you will drive the van, you’re in charge of the wardrobe and you’re on 25 shillings a week – and you’re playing Laertes, driving the van’, that’s right, and my other ASM had to do about the same thing. The other ASM was a young lad called Harold Pinter and he kind of did okay! [laughs], and that’s how it started. I toured for McMaster, I think it would be honest and fair to say because I don’t like exaggeration but I was very privileged. I came into Irish theatre at one of the most halcyon periods of its time, I mean, we had the giant – he was a midget but he was a giant – Cyril Cusack, one of the most incredible Joxter Daly’s I ever saw in my life in Juno and the Paycock. He and his wife, Maureen, were just wonderful actors. Stanley Elsley and Neil McCabe doing the more popular plays, things like The Winslow Boy and I played that with them and I worked for Mac, and I then transferred to the Dublin Gate Theatre which was a big step forward, a very exciting step forward because I was actually going to the great, great theatre, The Gate, The Gate in Dublin. God, it was like going to heaven, and it was run by Michael and Hilton and Lord Longford, and Christine Longford, she was a great authority on Molière. And that’s where I worked and it was fascinating because they took me on board as a sort of protégé. They had this thing about me being their protégé. I don’t know why but they liked the idea. I think it was the sort of thing, Michael, you see, was born in England, he was born of good Protestant stock, he http://sounds.bl.uk Page 2 of 13 Theatre Archive Project became Irish by changing his name, teaching himself the Irish language, and loved the idea that he was going to give a start in the theatre to one of the Jewish race’s most famous actors in Ireland’s nephew - which was my Uncle Harold Goldblood - and that’s where I finished up, and, God, the people with! I mean, this is 1947/48. We were working with Christopher Casson, Paulette Goddard, Burgess Meredith. I mean, these were names, these were famous, famous actors. DS: What do you remember about Harold Pinter from that period, then? You said you were both ASM’s. CV: Yes, but I mean, we were both ambitious and hungry and both wanted to be actors, and we did and we went on to be actors but Harold, Harold was more physically ambitious than me, he worked harder at it, and he did get himself moved to other places where he’d go and study his classics and work with companies like the then Memorial Shakespeare Company, it was called. It wasn’t the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford, it was the Memorial Theatre which was run by [theatrical accent] Robert Atkins, you see, [theatrical accent] who was the last of the Actor Managers. That’s another one, if you want an anecdote you’ve got it coming very rapidly because I was enjoined to become a member of Anthony Quayle’s company… DS: Is this after The Gate or a bit later? CV: Oh this is a follow-on, straight follow-on. No, strange things had happened at The Gate. The strange thing that happened at The Gate was that I’d been taken on as a protégé. Harold was there as a protégé. They had taken, years earlier, in 1940, no, in 1939, they took a young man from New York called Orson Welles and Orson lied, told them that he was the star of Theatre Guilds’ productions in New York and he would be proud to let them have his talents in their theatre in Dublin and all this, frankly, rubbish. But by the time they had checked up on his credentials he had wowed the audiences and he became a huge star in Ireland, but he had already frightened the proverbial out of the general public in New York when he did his War of the Worlds which actually terrified the whole of the hoi polloi of New York City.