BALANCING ACTS

Abstract

3 R B A L A N C I N G A C T S N I C H O L A S H Y T N E R In a National Theatre rehearsal room, Michael Gambon has been wrestling for three days with Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art. Michael has given many prodigious performances at the National, most recently as Falsta√ in Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays, though there were occasional memory lapses which he covered with Elizabethan rhubarb. I had a couple of letters complaining that my production had made Sir Michael incomprehensible, to which I replied politely, although he’s a famous hoaxer so he may have written them himself. One of them compared him with suspicious pomposity to that admirable Shakespearean and model of clarity, Simon Russell Beale. He now seems much less confident than he was as Falsta√. He’s playing an old actor who is struggling with the part of the poet W. H. Auden to Alex Jennings’s Benjamin Britten in a play about Auden and Britten within a play about a theater company putting on the same play. Alex has an almost mystical faith in the great tradition of British acting, so he’s urging Michael on. With them onstage is Frances de la Tour, who in the face of life’s absurdities has an eyebrow permanently raised and a voice permanently tuned to deadpan. She’s playing a stage manager, and I’m sure that she can nurse Michael through anything that goes o√-piste. 4 H Y T N E R Y But at the moment he can barely get to the end of a sentence. And then, suddenly, the blood drains from him. He staggers, and falls into a chair. We call for help, an oxygen tank is hurried into the room, then a stretcher. Michael is wheeled out, the oxygen mask over his face. One of the stage managers goes with him in the ambulance to St. Thomas’s Hospital. As he’s carried into the A&E [Accidents and Emergencies], she asks him whether there’s any message he’d like her to take back to the rehearsal room. ‘‘Don’t worry about those bastards,’’ he says. ‘‘They’re already on the phone to Simon Russell Beale.’’ And as he speaks, I’m with Alan Bennett and the rest of the company recasting the part. Simon Russell Beale is doing something else, probably making a documentary about Renaissance choral music: he is as erudite as he is audible. So he’s not in the running. But once we know that nothing serious has happened to Michael, we barely have a thought for him. We’re in the canteen, overlooking the river. Tourist boats glide under Waterloo Bridge, and glum o≈ce workers stare at computer screens in the building next door, while we make a list of actors who are available for the part, all of them distinguished, none of them immune to our brutal assessments of their suitability. By the end of the day, Michael has been advised to withdraw from the play, and I’ve called Richard Gri≈ths, an actor renowned for his delicacy and wit, but also for his immense girth. Alan has already written lines to justify the casting of a fat actor in the part of Auden, who, although dissolute, was not even plump. You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise. And you’re pulled constantly in di√erent directions. So although you want the actor who plays W. H. Auden to be as much like W. H. Auden as possible, you know that the play will work best with an actor who can remember what the playwright wrote. You know that what works generally trumps all other considerations , and you also know that if you care only about what works, you’ll end up with something slick but meretricious. You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced, and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets. You want playwrights to write exactly the plays they want to write. You also want what they write to reflect your own image of what...