2-3 April 1986
| RICKMAN: the power of the middleman. Picture by Martin Argles |
LAN RICKMAN concedes that heavy metal fans and theatre audiences are
often worlds apart. Perhaps this shouldn't be the case. Rickman refers back
to a few years to when he was performing in Man Is Man at Bristol's
Little Theatre. Having taken his final bow to the discreet Brechtian audience,
he took a look in the next door hall where Thin Lizzy was performing.
"I just opened
the door and was thrown back by the high-octane excitement that was going
on on that stage. And you thought now just a minute... I'm not trying to
be a rock group and we don't have to have people watching us waving scarves
in the air and jumping up and down. But there's got to be a version of that
excitement, otherwise theatre is a waste of time."
Excitement is hard
to come by. Rickman says he's found it in Peter Brook's work, and at Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre
du Soleil on the outskirts of Paris. Having seen Henry IV there,
and more recently her play on Cambodia, The Terrible But Unfinished History
of Norodom Sihanouk, Rickman registered the experience of "an entire
audience actively involved in the story unfolding in front of them,"
and of feeling "parts of you being activated while you're watching
it that seem only to be activated when you go to wonderful theatre."
This is the reason he's glad now
to be doing something of Mnouchkine's. He opens as Hendrik Höfgen in
her version of Klaus Mann's Mephisto at the Barbican tomorrow. Adrian Noble directs this new translation by
Timberlake Wertenbaker.
A translation faithful to Mnouchkine, says Noble, who describes the play
in her words, as a "historie exemplaire."
Doing Les Liaisons Dangereuses Rickman sometimes felt "a lack of breathing in the
audience"--a version perhaps of his own excitement at Mnouchkine's
theatre. In the RSC's production of Christopher Hampton's dramatisation
of the Laclos novel, Rickman played the morally bankrupt Vicomte de Valmonte
[sic] with superb, sexy, dissolute languor, plus a brilliant sense of timing
and feeling such that it was tempting to say perhaps it was a professional
turning point for him. Not a suggestion he relishes--all acting is cumulative.
He shrugs, "With a part like that you'd be a fool not to use it."
Rickman sees his
part as Höfgen as being about "how big a trough you can dig for
yourself" should you be blinded by hideous, meaningless ambition. Mnouchkine's
work requires a somewhat heightened form of acting, he says. She provides
more of an over than a sub-text, requiring a fairly direct and energised
style.
When Mephisto,
the story of an actor's gradual corruption in Nazi Germany, was performed
at the Theatre du Soleil in 1979, it caused quite an uproar. More than 200,000
saw the play, seated with stages around them so they could turn from Hamburg
to Berlin with a mere swivel.
One of the reasons
perhaps for the play's impact may have been that the novel (written in 1936)
was still embalmed in litigation and banned in Germany. It didn't appear
legally there until 1981. Istvan
Szabo's film adaptation was the same year. Thus
the story of Mephisto--now well documented--was until comparatively recently
a tale one had to burrow for under bookstalls by the Seine to find illegal
German translations.
It was like seeking
out a Nabakov or a Genet, but the reason for the prohibition was libel rather
than indecency--the character of Hendrik Höfgen is extremely close
to the German actor Gustaf
Gruendgens. Mann's brother-in-law, and known for his role as Mephisto
in Goethe's Faust.
Despite allegations
of Nazi associations, Gruendgens remained an actor of significance in post-war
Germany until his suicide in 1963. It was his adopted son who brought the
libel action.
Klaus Mann committed
suicide in a Cannes hotel in 1949, aged 43. A contributory factor may well
have been his failure to get Mephisto published in post-war Germany.
Mnouchkine's play opens with a voice speaking a letter of rejection from
a publisher to Mann followed by Mann's bitter reply. And indeed one of the
last letters Mann wrote before his death was a savage indictment to a publisher
who had reneged on his promise to publish the novel.
Rickman is reluctant
to be weighed down by autobiographical associations. Having read the novel,
Mann's autobiography The Turning Point, history books and having seen the
movie, he says one should assemble the information, but then "throw
it over your shoulder and just do it."
The process is
not dissimilar, he says, from confronting a speech like the Seven Ages of
Man from As You Like It (also directed by Noble). "It's one
of the most famous speeches in the world and you can't pretend it isn't--in
a way, it's got neon lights around it and it doesn't spring naturally. So
therefore it needs a sort of artifice. Gradually over the year I hope I've
started to find a balance between keeping it as part of the scene but also
giving it what it was asking for."
Mephisto, the play differs from the movie, says Adrian Noble, because
it is not a biopic, but a play which concentrates on an ensemble, a community
of actors, representing different forms of choice under extreme situations."
Each scene requires particular qualities of energy and focus of political
debate on stage which is rare in the English tradition. It's thrilling to
work on because it requires a new vocabulary with which to tackle it and
different routes to achieve an end," says Noble.
Does the production
offer parallels with other societies, Britain maybe? (unemployment figures
chart the text and there are references to dead elms). Noble and Rickman
both say the information lies within the text and it is up to the audience
to decide whether it's relevant. "Here's the raw material of how change
happened in a society when people said this couldn't happen. But that's
no reason not to keep looking at how a sequence of events can occur in a
supposedly free country," says Rickman.
What have been
turning points in Rickman's life? The most important, he says, was his decision,
aged 26, to renounce a career as a Soho-based graphic designer and go to
Rada. Another was to leave Stratford seven years ago after only a year there
(playing in The Tempest, Captain Swing, Antony
and Cleopatra).
He then worked
at the Royal Court, the Bush, and Hampstead
Theatre Club in plays like Dusty Hughes's Commitments
and Bad Language, Snoo Wilson's The Grass Widow, Aphra Benn's
The Lucky Chance.
If acting
is a cumulative experience, Rickman sees a visit to Russia with The Brothers
Karamazov as important. It was an extraordinary time, culminating in
a performance in a 7th century church in Thilisi, with the four players
singing Ode To Joy and climbing into this strange steeple on a hilltop.
While there he saw a lot of theatre, including an Estonian theatre company
doing Edward Bond's Bingo in Moscow.
If the character
Höfgen ends the play with the words, "I'm only an actor,"
the actor Rickman would disagree. "I'm only an agent, a middle-man.
But a very powerful one because you can influence and alter help or subvert
or encourage or expand what the author is trying to say."
Scripts or texts
which cartoon serious issues and characters, with politically unsound messages
which don't help anyone, should be avoided with a barge-pole, Rickman says.
He cited White Nights which he read for. For such work he quotes Dorothy
Parker, "This is not a script to be tossed lightly aside, it should
be hurled with great force."
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