I wanted to die. I was terrified. I did know the part, but I nearly shat myself. Then I thought, ‘Come on, you’re a professional.’ I stopped shaking and started thinking fast. I said, ‘Right, I had better run through the music.’ They offered me Ba’s dressing room with the star on the door, but I wanted my own surroundings. Vanessa came to my dressing room as I was getting dressed and said, ‘Miriam, what would you like me to do? I’m here to help; just tell me anything you need.’ I asked her if we could run through the songs (never my strong suit), and we did. She was and is the loveliest person, a superb colleague, a generous company member. I raced through the songs and checked the costume still fitted, all the time muttering the lines to myself as my dresser buttoned me in.
Standing in the wings just before the curtain went up, I heard that awful groan when the front-of-house manager announced that Barbara was indisposed and her understudy would take on the role. I thought, ‘Fuck it. I’ve got to show them. They’ve paid! I’ve got to give them something.’ And I did — I don’t know how I did it, but I did whatever I had to do.
The audience is always told that an understudy is making their first appearance in a role. At the curtain call, Vanessa led me forward to take my own bow. She also brought a bottle of champagne to my dressing room at the end of the evening. Vanessa is like that; she takes people for meals, she cooks — she’s a proper mother of a company. It’s true that her politics frighten some people — not me. I know she’s not an antisemite, that she has a heart of gold and a shrewd head. Ba loved Vanessa: ‘I know she talks posh and all that, but she’s really nice!’
I did the show for the two performances. On the following Monday, when Barbara came back, she came to my dressing room and said, ‘I heard you was really good the other night, Miriam. I better watch myself with you. I’m not going off again and no mistake.’ And she never did.
Through the years I met Ba again — we were both friends of Kenneth Williams — and she was always warm and loving to me. She had an innocence and a vitality which was irresistible and when she died recently, I wept. I felt, along with the rest of England, that I had lost a friend. Her husband, Scott Mitchell, truly loved her and took care of her. At last, she found the man she deserved.
Looking back, I don’t think it was a very good show. I phoned my friend in Canada, Robert Cushman, who is a critic and was at Cambridge with me. I knew he’d tell me honestly; he did. But the show sold well, it was enormous fun to be in; and at last, I was a working actress in the West End.
When a Play Goes Wrong: The White Devil
Sometimes a production goes wrong and nothing can fix it. In interviews, if I’m ever asked about my worst-ever professional experience, without any hesitation or deviation, I say: John Webster’s The White Devil at the Old Vic with Glenda Jackson in 1976.
It started promisingly. When my agent told me about the job, I leapt at it. This was a rarely performed classic from one of the greats of Jacobean drama; there was a staggering cast and we would be playing at the Old Vic. The Old Vic is a theatre steeped in theatrical history, especially for classical productions. It housed the National Theatre for twelve years until the concrete structure on the South Bank had been built. Our production was the first to take over the Old Vic after its departure.
The White Devil (or, to give it its full original title), The White Divel; or, The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano. With The Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian Curtizan, is a difficult and strange revenge tragedy, which was first published and performed in 1612. I knew the play from Cambridge but had completely forgotten it. Webster’s best known work is The Duchess of Malfi; but both plays are violent and complicated. With actors like Glenda Jackson, Jonathan Pryce, Jack Shepherd, Madge Ryan, James Villiers, Patrick Magee and Frances de la Tour, I was joining a cast to die for, and so in the beginning I was thrilled.
I was playing Zanche the Moor (later I would come to call her ‘Zanche the Less’), servant to Glenda Jackson’s Vittoria Corombona. I steal money from Vittoria and betray her brother Flamineo to my new lover and things go downhill from there. I was the black devil to her white. I regret to admit that I was ‘blacked up’ for this role, the second time I’d done so; ten years previously, I was Mammy Pleasant in The Cat and the Canary at Leicester Rep.[13]
Mammy Pleasant’s accent wasn’t in my repertoire and rather than listen to a tape (the usual actor’s route), I decided to accost a West Indian lady in Leicester market. I went up to a friendly-looking woman at a vegetable stall and said ‘Excuse me.’ She looked up, ‘Yes?’
‘I’m an actress and I’m playing a West Indian part in the next play at the Mercury Theatre. Would you be kind enough to give me some lessons in your accent?’
She raised her eyebrows, ‘What accent?’
That was tricky. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to sound Jamaican. Are you Jamaican?’
‘Yes, I am Jamaican.’
‘Would you let me bring the text to your house? It would just be an hour or so. I’ll pay you.’
‘Pay me for TALKING?! No. Just come.’ And I spent a couple of hours with her, learning to sound like a voodoo queen. The line that still rings through my head is: ‘I see spirits all around you.’
Back to The White Devil. The director was Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the illegitimate son of Orson Welles. Michael is a charming man, and now we are friends on Facebook after all these years, but Michael thought that it was enough to get a fabulous cast together: he didn’t have a vision for the play. He’d come from television, directing Ready Steady Go! where improvisation was key. Perhaps he thought that when these actors stepped onto the stage, the performance would generate itself. He is definitely a non-interventionist director. Well, it’s not like that in theatre. You can’t just throw people onto a stage and expect them to make it work. Sure enough, it proved a catastrophe of unparalleled horror from slow start to ignominious finish.
I’ve talked to other cast members about our experience. Not all hated it as I did. Tom Chadbon had a wonderful time; and it’s important for me to say so, because my own misery obscured my vision of the wider truth. Adam Godley, aged eleven, played Giovanni, the child prince. He shared the role with Jonathan Scott-Taylor (following Equity rules about child performers). It was his first job and he stole the notices. He remembers Patrick Magee giving him racing tips and treating him like a grown-up. He loved talking to the old stage doorkeeper and once missed an entrance because of it. Glenda fixed him with a steely glare: ‘Don’t worry, but don’t EVER do it again!’ He never did, and went on to become a distinguished actor, to be seen again on Broadway in The Lehman Trilogy.
The rehearsal room at the Old Vic is right at the top of the building. It has a glass roof and 1976 was the hottest summer on record. Everyone boiled, we poured with sweat all day; the physical discomfort was intense; somehow that spilled over into the rehearsal process. (Adam remembers Glenda buying everyone ice creams and lollies to counteract the extreme heat we were suffering. Maybe she missed me out on her run to the ice cream van.) There was bad feeling from the beginning. The mood was unpleasant and rivalry and discord amongst the cast members sporadically bubbled over in little moments of irritation and nastiness. Jonathan Pryce was particularly combative and scornful if anyone made mistakes. He patrolled the set like a shark, eating up errors from other cast members, although Tom Chadbon remembers Jonathan being larky and fun, enjoying one of the longest corpses (which, in the business, means laughing so much on stage that you can’t speak your lines) he’d ever experienced.
13
Almost as bad as blacking up, in a film called