Greasepaint Monkey E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A book for actors, for would-be actors and for everyone who has a curiosity about theatre as it is on the inside. The bareback performance of the histrionic art as it has been since the Greeks. This is one actor's experience over 60 years as a professional, including roles in The Avengers, Dr Finlay's Casebook, Jason and the Argonauts and This Man Craig.

Leseprobe

JOHN CAIRNEY is well known to audiences in Scotland and internationally through his one-man shows about Burns. Indeed, in many minds he is synonymous with the Bard and is considered as one of the leading interpreters of the works of Robert Burns.

In more than 50 years as an artist, he has worked as an actor, recitalist, lecturer, director and theatre consultant. He is also a published author and an exhibited painter. Trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he was a notable Hamlet at the Citizens’ Theatre and a successful Macbeth at the Edinburgh Festival. He was also This Man Craig on television and has appeared in many films like Jason and the Argonauts and Cleopatra.

He gained a phD from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and is much in demand as a lecturer, writer and consultant on Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Robert Burns. Dr Cairney has written books on each of these famous Scots, as well as other books on football, theatre and his native Glasgow, where he lives with his New Zealand wife, actress and scriptwriter, Alannah O’Sullivan.

Some people in Scotland regard him as a legend and a national treasure. But he sees himself as a jobbing actor and always will, as long as he can stand up and talk to an audience. As he says, ‘Theatre has given me a full, wonderful and rewarding life. Now, it is payback time. Hence this book.’

Dr Cairney’s previous books include:

Miscellaneous Verses

A Moment White

The Man who Played Robert Burns

East End to West End

Worlds Apart

A Year Out in New Zealand

A Scottish Football Hall of Fame

On the Trail of Robert Burns

Solo Performers

The Luath Burns Companion

Immortal Memories

The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson

The Quest for Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Heroes Are Forever

Glasgow, by the way but

Flashback Forward

Uncorrected Proof Copy – Not for Resale

First published 2010

eISBN: 978-1-912387-89-2

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emissions manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by

Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typeset in 11 point Sabon

by 3btype.com

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© John Cairney 2010

To the late Michael Williams, Actor (1935–2001)

I am a persuader

Using the radar

Of my mummer’s art,

Spoken lines to impart

A thought for a moment

For an audience to catch and consider;

To let the imagination

Dance to the music of the word.

Is it not absurd

That a mere player

Can take it to places it might never see

Except in the mind’s eye?

The pleasure and the pain go with the ticket.

A lifetime’s recollections of delight

Can be bought at the box office

Or a passing sensation

Rented for the night.

JOHN CAIRNEY – Glasgow, 2010

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Prelude

Prologue

Side 1 What is an actor?

Side 2 Getting Started

Side 3 The Director’s Team

Side 4 Who’s Nervous?

Side 5 Is there an Audience in the House?

Side 6 Facing the Critics

Side 7 Dealing with Fame

Side 8 Typecasting

Side 9 Have Script Will Travel

Side 10 Is there Life after Acting?

Side 11 The Play’s the Thing

Side 12 The Green Room in the Sky

Postlude An Actor’s Apologia

Bibliography

John Cairney’s Selected Credits

Acknowledgements

THE AUTHOR WISHES to express his gratitude and appreciation to the following for their trust, help, information, advice and encouragement in the making of this memoir. First place has to go to my publisher, Gavin MacDougall, whose idea it was that I put into print what he had heard me say so often from the platform or stage, in the car and around the dinner-table. Gavin made practical what has been recognised down through the ages that people have always been curious about the actor.

In a long and happy career of nearly 60 years on the professional stage, I have had many masters and many colleagues. It is to them, their comments and conversations, I owe all of the ideas and anecdotal quotation that may be found in the following pages, not to mention the practical help given by so many friends in putting the material on to the page. There are too many to name them all, but the following may be mentioned as being of particular assistance,

David AndrewsClare BrotherwoodBill BrydenJennifer CairneyRichard Demarco OBEThe late Sir Alec GuinnessThe late Sir Tyrone GuthrieAlice JacobsLesley JohnsonJane LivingstoneThe late Duncan MacraeThe late Roddy MacmillanFreya MannersDavid McKailAlannah O’SullivanThe late Sir Michael RedgraveThe late Alistair SimDr Donald SmithGordon SnellPaul Taylorand particularly Dame Judi Dench. 

but my deepest gratitude is due

to the audiences I have known in my career.

They have taught me everything

I have learned about theatre

in a love affair that has lasted a lifetime

Foreword

I WAS FIRST AWARE of John Cairney at the Edinburgh Festival in 1959 when he and Tom Fleming both appeared in The Thrie Estaites, directed by Tony Guthrie at the Assembly Hall.

We did not meet until 1990 when Michael and I accompanied our daughter Finty to Greece. We went as chaperones, as Finty was only 17 and had been cast as one of the leads in The Torch which was filmed in Greece and Yugoslavia for Edinburgh Films. John and Alannah were in the cast as, subsequently, were Michael and I. Later on, we shared a lovely Highland holiday weekend at Eriska in 1990 before John and Alannah left for New Zealand. Their last night in the UK before emigrating in 1991 was spent at our house, and it was in our local, The Bell, that Michael suggested to John the subject for this book.

This book is the result and it is about the job we all love – acting! It tells the story of persistence against all odds because we care passionately about the work that we do.

It is a tribute to actors. You might not always know their names, but you recognise their faces when they turn up in plays, on television or in films. This book is about the sweat and tears of getting started, working under a director, nerves on the first night, facing the critics, coping with type-casting, and worrying about old age. In spite of all the angst, through it all is the inner dynamic of sheer pleasure in the work and satisfaction in the results, and, above all else, the relationship all actors build up with their audience. This, to me, is the kernel of the book and its main thrust: that theatre in the end doesn’t belong just to the actor, but to the audience as well.

Judi Dench, 2010

Prelude

THE WHOLE IDEA OFStage Whispers started with a simple line – ‘What wilt thou, my Lord?’ This might have sounded innocuous enough had it been uttered in any Shakespearian tavern around the end of the 17th century, or perhaps today in the most pretentious of London clubs, but it was actually said to me by that late and lovely actor, Michael Williams, in a pub in Surrey in 1991. He was asking me what I would have. Like all well-brought-up Catholics we had repaired to the ‘Bell’ straight from Sunday Mass and with the yardarm at least a whole afternoon away it was time to enjoy our first beer of the day. However, as Michael had asked me in his second language, which was the Shakespearian iambic pentameter, I attempted a reply in the same.

‘A beer, i’ faith. For ‘tis said, that here in England, the Sabbath morn is not complete without its ale.’

‘Without fail.’ replied Michael immediately, ‘By the Mass, the soul having had its balm, the body calls for same support. A beer, you say?’

‘I do, and with much thanks.’

It went on like this for ages, with Michael coping effortlessly and me running hard to keep up until I had to call out,

‘Michael, hold, enough. A glass of ale, I say.’

‘’Tis done. I will away.’

While he headed for the bar, I took a seat near the dart board and set myself for the delights of a sunny, May morning in an English pub.

I had halted our ‘Shakespearean’ exchange, not because I was desperate for a beer but because I knew I couldn’t sustain it at Michael’s level. All his years at Stratford and elsewhere had given him a love for the Bard and an easy assurance in the delivery of the standard line as it might have come from any of the plays. He revelled in Shakespeare’s timeless rhythm. I had a young Hamlet under my belt, and a middle-aged Macbeth, not to mention assorted Shakespearian casting over the years but I was no match for my morning companion’s broader bardic experience, or indeed his wider, practical appreciation of the whole formidable canon. This gave him a rare insight into the essentials of drama, at least as the Bard of Avon saw it. As Michael said, ‘Let’s face it, Shakespeare’s said it all, hasn’t he? And if other writers have said the same thing, so what? He said it better.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that. Here’s to the Immortal Bard.’

‘Cheers.’

Over our beers, Michael and I talked much as all actors talk, that is, with a love of the spicy and the humorous, hinged on the personal, but not entirely egotistical. Michael Williams was much too diffident a man, and genuinely modest, to be vain, but he knew how to cast himself as story-teller and he had every actor’s love of the anecdote – especially the delicious sort that deals with the performer’s predicaments on stage and their often hilarious consequences.

Stage talk, or greenroom gossip, is a conversational genre all of it own. It’s rarely barrack-room bragging or cocktail party innuendo. It’s full-blown, Rabelaisian bluster delivered with gusto, and enjoyed by the speaker as much as his audience. If it is personally-based it is likely to be self-deprecating. That’s a safer way to win the listener and help steer the speaker away from the exhibitionistic tag that dogs the actor of whatever type or nationality. In my experience, and I go back a bit, the greater the talent, the less histrionic the off-stage personality. Quite rightly, and if only for self-preservation, the real actor keeps ‘exhibitions’ for the boards, where they belong, and for which he is paid. Unlike the second-rate performer, he is unlikely to be seen or heard giving second-rate performances for nothing at dinner tables or even in conversation at the corner of a bar, but Michael Williams was no second-rater.

I couldn’t help noticing that while our fellow patrons at the ‘Bell’ enjoyed his presence, and knew well who he was, they gave him a regular’s privacy and didn’t bother him. That’s real respect. He was liked, so he was left alone. This is unusual. In any gathering the actor always seems to be the stranger. The ubiquitous enquiry to someone met at a cocktail party or dinner. ‘And what do you do?’ Generally delivered with the eyes already looking over your shoulder and one ear on the nearest conversation, the polite enquirer rarely expects to hear ‘I’m in the theatre,’ and one can see the eyes whip back in reflex. The questioner is now interested and follows up with, ‘Oh really? Should I know you?’ This is the normal assumption that all actors should be famous. This is not always so. The journeyman actor doesn’t worship at the Court of Celebrity. Fame is something thrust upon him, if it does happen, so he learns to live with it and take it as a compliment to his work and not the person he is.

Michael Williams was such an actor, and such a man.

I was due to go off to New Zealand the next day and was planning a book on Solo Performers for an American publisher. I very much wanted to include Michael, because of this very quality of likeability, mandatory for any soloist. The audience must sympathise at once with the soloist or they will never go the distance with him. And there is no longer journey for both actor and audience than the two hour traffic of the stage when one party in the act is uncomfortable with the other. Michael exuded stage ease and won houses over with, apparently, the very minimum of effort. He was the perfect solo player (as he was later to show as John Aubrey) because he was of that rare breed that found no difficulty in filling the stage with his presence.

At that time, however (May 1991), I was trying to persuade him to play Rob Wilton, the famous English North-Country comedian, who was also, like all great comedians, a superb actor. I could just see Michael bring off the earthy, kindness of the man and in that voice that was so near his own Lancashire roots. To my delight, and the amusement of those around us, Michael actually gave us a ‘Wilton’ moment there and then, in the ‘Bell’. I can still see his hand wiping itself around that amiable, elastic face as he uttered the famous Rob Wilton opening lines as heard on the wireless, as we called it then.

‘The day war broke out, my Missus said to me, “What are you going to do about it?” “About what?” I said. “The war,” she said. “I don’t know. I didn’t start it…’

And so on. We all wished he had gone on. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, he never got to play his fellow-Lancastrian, and I regret it to this day. Not only would it have been a striking piece of theatre, it would have been an important entry in the Solo book. However, while we were talking of that, he said,

‘Why don’t you write a book about us?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘A book about actors, ordinary actors who spend their lives in the theatre. Not the stars, the big boys, the celebrities, they can write their own books.

‘Or have them written for them,’ I put in. ‘Half the Amazonian rain forest has been given over to books about acting.’

‘Or a touch of the bios,’ added Michael. ‘Everybody’s done that. No, I mean something about the kind of performer we both know. Quiet and ordinary off stage, but ‘on’ they give a performance that’s right on the button. Bloody good actors, all of them, yet nobody knows them. They might not have made a name for themselves, but they made a living. And had a good life of it. The old-time rep performer, the everyman actor. Know what I mean?’

I knew exactly what he meant. We had so much in common, Michael and I. Both working-class, big-city, grammar-school boys who, to their surprise, found theatre, or did theatre find us? Michael came from that English Glasgow called Liverpool and I came from the Scottish Liverpool called Glasgow. However, we both knew the repertory actor type well. They’re almost gone now, swallowed up by television and a few days in a film now and then, but once upon a time they were the backbone of every decent theatre company in the country. And there were lots of theatres then. They’re forgotten now, of course, but that doesn’t matter, the actors who played in them, week in week out, had their hour, you might say. and you can bet they grabbed it.

Each of us knew, too, the last of the great and glorious, repertory days in British theatre. A new production every three weeks, audiences packed with typists and school teachers (nurses free on Monday nights, pensioners on Saturday matinees). Great classical plays with huge casts supplemented by students and local amateurs and crowds at the stage door. All of this was pre-TV, of course, and pre-Bingo, it was another kind of theatre in a different time. We were both fortunate to know this golden age of greasepaint before the shadow of home entertainment fell over it. Yes, I knew exactly the kind of actor he was talking about. They were English colonists who brought the West End to every provincial theatre in the country and converted so many to the stage. These missionaries in motley weren’t stars but they shone brightly with what is still called talent.

Michael and I talked of men like these and wondered where their kind was in the technological climate of contemporary theatre. Of course, actors of the type like the pre-television practitioners are still there. Great actors, like great footballers and great singers, emerge in every generation. That’s a fact of cultural evolution, and no one can be other than of their time, but, Janus-like, the great ones, as all real artists, look back to previous eras and, simultaneously, to future generations.

Our talk that day was along these lines, a pleasant mixture of recollection, observation and appreciation of the gods of our youth. Deep down, as Michael pointed out, they were ordinary flesh and blood men who stood up to be counted when it mattered – when the houselights went down and the stage lights went up. In our early days, we had stood behind these actors as virtual extras in the nightly ritual, watching them as they took us, as well as the audience, to Parnassus. At just the right moment, they seemed able to reach up and touch the stars.

We thought, this is what it must be like to be an actor. It was hard to remember that just that morning the same men were in tweed jackets or turtle-neck jerseys, sitting in a broken-down armchair in the green room with a cigarette in one hand, a pen in the other and the day’s crossword on their knee. They knew at all times, that however little distance they may get in their chosen trade, they would get far enough to survive in a reasonable degree of comfort.

As we talked the minutes flew. We each quoted our instances and gave our examples as yet another beer went down and another cigarette was lit. We came to the agreement that the chorister, acolyte, vagabond, mountebank, buffoon, stroller, travelling gypsy having been with us now, under any or all of these titles, for nearly 3,000 years, should be remembered. The actor was actor whatever his time. He was of all time and his story should be told.

By this time, our lunch at home was getting cold but the actors we were talking about grew taller and more magnificent with every word and the actresses more beautiful and beguiling. Even the incidents mentioned were becoming funnier. Like Edmund Keane, who, on being castigated by a Glasgow audience for being drunk at a matinee of one of the histories, swayed down to the footlights and boomed out, ‘If you think I’m drunk, wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham!’

Or the Method actor who went to extremes in preparation for every part. When cast as Long John Silver in Treasure Island he insisted that he should have a green parrot.

‘I’ve only got a yellow one,’ said the pet shop man. ‘Wouldn’t that do?’

‘No. It must be green,’ replied the actor.

‘Well, come back in a week and I’ll have your green parrot.’

‘Good.’

‘Right. I’ll have it here for you next Monday. OK?’

‘Next Monday?’ asked the actor.

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s no good.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m having my leg amputated that day.’

The stories went on, until, just a little unsteadily, we rose to go. The last toast was given by Michael, ‘To the Unknown Actor, ‘ he said, emptying his glass.

‘Hear! Hear!’ I said, doing likewise. Then I asked him,

‘What about the Unknown Actress?

Michael thought for a moment, then grinned. ‘We’re all one under the greasepaint, don’t you think? Anyway, who was it said, “Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress?”’

‘Wasn’t it Dorothy Parker?’

And that was it. We put our glasses down on the bar with a satisfied clunk and moved to the door past the waving hands of the remaining customers.

As we moved to the car, Michael said, ‘And by the way, we don’t want another act-tract either. We’ve been preached at this morning already.’

‘As you say, Michael.’

At the time of writing, it is 20 years since that lovely Sunday morning but the book Michael and I talked about is now in your hands. It is offered now as a tribute to the unknown artist-artisan-actor, who, in every theatre, everywhere, is humanity’s spokesperson, acting for all of us, then and now, and continues to do so, serving the drama which in the theatre is the living repository of everybody’s heritage.

Why this is so is the mystery these pages will attempt to fathom.

Prologue

‘when, by a generous public’s kind acclaim

that dearest need is granted, honest fame;

where here your favour is the actor’s lot

not even the man in private life forgot’

Spoken by William Woods at his benefit night at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, 16 April 1787

‘EARLY DOORS’ IS SOMETIMES used as a euphemism for actors who died young. Early doors were the admittance to the gallery and the cheaper seats well before curtain up allowing them to make the long climb to the Gods. This then was taken to apply to young actors who made their way to God prematurely, hence, ‘early doors’. In this case, however, the title serves to indicate a kind of Preface, an opportunity to expand on what kind of book this is meant to be, and for whom it is intended.