A World of My Own (10 page)

In January 1984 I went to see a classic play called
The Game of Croquet
. I had a seat in the front row of the stalls and I felt a little nervous because a few days before in the opening scene Paul Scofield, who played the leading role, had inadvertently sliced a croquet ball into the stalls and blooded a spectator in one eye. However on this night nothing unfortunate happened. I found myself listening to a very interesting dialogue. The play was about three students who for final exams had to go to the house of an old academic and attend a party where each would be judged on his behaviour. One of the three was obviously very shy. The academic proved to be most friendly, and he seemed to be helping the shy one through his paces—helping him in fact to grow up and become adult. The dialogue ran easily and amusingly. I felt as though I were making it up myself.

In May 1965 I was closely involved in the production of a blank-verse historical play with Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I found them both more agreeable than I had expected, and Taylor more beautiful than I had thought, and a better actress.

The play was presented, for the first time, in the open air in Canterbury with the cathedral in the background. Burton made the opening speech before the appearance of a half-mad king—Henry VI?—played by my friend Alec Guinness. Guinness missed his cue and Burton covered up for him by improvising a verse referring to ‘the recesses of this cavernous tent.’ The audience laughed sympathetically when they realized what he was at, while Guinness looked around and said, ‘I dried up.’

I was furious. I had the feeling he was behaving like this through jealousy of Burton, and I leant forward from my front seat and said, ‘You swine.’ He looked at me with injured surprise. Burton was unperturbed, but the performance for that night was off.

The opening was postponed till the following night. It was hoped that the critics would wait in Canterbury, but the next night the seats were all empty. Guinness played with his part in his hand, and although a television camera was there Burton treated the occasion like a rehearsal, interrupting the other players. A disaster!

Later in 1965 I was engaged in making a film with Peter Glenville, from an original story set in Mexico in the nineteenth century. Peter wanted to go riding with me and he had found a small black horse for me, but I don’t care for riding and I let him practise alone, riding in circles.

We arrived at the point in the script where an innocent hero, Drew, in company of a man called Houghton, is being pursued by sheriffs after a bank robbery. They rest their horses for a moment by one of those branching cacti known in Mexico as a ‘candelabra’. Peter thought this presented an unnecessary difficulty, but I assured him that making a film about Mexico without showing a cactus was like filming Paris without the Eiffel Tower. He would only have to go a few miles south of Mexico City before finding such cacti.

The character Drew would see the candelabra and quote a nursery rhyme to Houghton, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head,’ and at that moment the sheriffs’ posse would appear on the horizon.

I was asked to act the part of a priest who committed suicide at Mass, in a play to be performed in a small theatre in North Africa, but I was given no dialogue and the script gave no explanation of my actions.

I decided to extemporize.

A priest was preaching when I came on the scene. He told the audience that not only were the consecrated water and wine holy, but also ‘the implements’ of the Mass, the chalice and paten. I called out that I didn’t care a damn about these objects. ‘I am a priest and I am killing myself, God, because you have ceased to love me.’

Next day I went into the town and asked two Africans if I had succeeded in shocking the audience. They assured me that the people were very shocked indeed, and were still talking about it. Incidentally, they told me that Saint Augustine had lived in this town.

I was taking a walk in the West End with Randolph Churchill when he suggested that I help him to write
a film script about his father. The danger, I told him, was banality. I had an idea for an original treatment of the subject, with the title
A Great Man
. The story would be about minor fictitious characters, showing how their lives were changed by certain emotional points in Churchill’s life—VE Day, for example, and his last sickness. He liked the idea and told me he would try to get the Queen’s co-operation.

I was commissioned to direct a film of one of Ibsen’s plays, and I had done no homework. I had thought of no camera angles, cuts, etc. Ralph Richardson was to star in it, and someone had warned me that he intended to get me sacked and humiliated on the first day.

It was Richardson who introduced me to the
équipe
—about twenty men sitting at long tables, having refreshments. I made the mistake of apologizing for my inexperience and they shouted back their mocking agreement. If only I could get through the first day’s shooting, I thought, I’d be able to study the play at night.

A remark of Ralph’s gave me a clue. ‘I want to begin,’ I said, ‘with an exterior shot of your monocle lying on a doorstep. We pan up and see you cursing
from a window above—whatever curses you are in the habit of using.’

But after that promising beginning we began to quarrel. He talked of appealing to his agent. ‘Are you threatening me?’ I said.

‘Yes. I am.’

‘I shan’t appeal to anyone,’ I told him. ‘I shall cut your face open with a riding whip.’

I had been reading a play about Everyman for stage production. At a certain moment he makes his great decision to destroy the world with the help of a nuclear bomb. I felt the scene should be produced more or less on these lines: The moment of his decision must not be melodramatic; it should take the form of quiet and banal dialogue—something the audience would hardly notice—but for the sake of theatrical effect there must be a long pause after the simple lines, and then a great lighting effect, perhaps taking the form of the shadow of an enormous bird.

Carol Reed told me that Peter Ustinov wanted him to direct
King Lear
on the stage. Ustinov would play King Lear. I felt doubtful whether he would be suitable,
though there were parts where I thought he might be very good—as in the scene on the blasted heath.

I was in bed while we were discussing this and Carol warned me that Ustinov was going to bring me my breakfast. He arrived with a sheet over his head, which he removed when he had put down the tray. He had grown a snow-white beard, and it had transformed his face into something gentle, saintly, even sentimental. He began to recite the long passage in which I had thought he would be at his worst—‘Pray you, undo this button.’ To my surprise he was excellent.