The cast contained many strong and gifted actors but there was a collision of acting styles. Some had come from the Bill Gaskill Royal Court tradition; others from the Peter Hall Royal Shakespeare Company way of doing things. I also sensed a rivalry among the younger men vying for Glenda’s attention. Jonathan Pryce and Jack Shepherd were openly contemptuous of James Villiers, a gentleman of the Old School, with perfect manners and a plummy, posh speaking voice. James refused to battle for a place on the stage; he felt it would be beneath him to push himself forward. He fell for Glenda in a big way; he was always susceptible to female charms and couldn’t resist buying her a pair of flared jeans one day. His then wife, Patricia Donovan, was my dresser.
It didn’t help that I was nervous of Glenda Jackson, a star actress with a formidable reputation. My impression was that she liked people to be frightened of her. At the best of times, Glenda has little patience and no humility. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I admit I behaved foolishly and I was certainly made to suffer later as a result. She was horrid to me. I didn’t like her but I acknowledge her considerable gifts — she has given great performances. Occasionally she hits those heights, but she didn’t in The White Devil. I believe she knew that she was rubbish, which made her even nastier. Although it wasn’t just her — everybody involved behaved badly.
The White Devil contains incest and murder and cruelty expressed in magnificent poetry, and Michael was all at sea. His production wandered between various epochs — it was neither a costume drama, nor was it a contemporary reimagining. There was no focus or particularity to it, because although we were dressed in modern clothes and smoking cigarettes, we carried old-fashioned pistols and Jacobean swords. Even getting onto the stage was hard: there was a revolving door stage left resembling a New York hotel entrance. It’s easy to get stuck in a revolving door, especially when carrying a sword. It seems for some time, in other productions, Michael had wanted to use revolving doors; now he took his chance.
It’s never a good idea to take a production out of its location or period: a play is set in a time and place for a reason. Occasionally it can work: Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo + Juliet is an example, but this was a mishmash — a hideous hodgepodge of absurdity. And we knew it. I remember Patrick Magee getting so infuriated at just how awful it was, that he slammed his hand into the brick wall of the rehearsal room, tearing it badly on a nail, and ending up having to go to hospital.
The rehearsals rapidly became acrimonious. There was no generosity, no sense of collaboration or of comradeship in the cast, just competition and rancour: they were fights, they weren’t rehearsals. Every day was like that. Nobody wanted to come into work. Glenda may have thought she was giving a good performance, but no one else did. She and I had a falling out; I cannot remember what it was about: I called her a cow, and she called me an amateur. I think she won that one!
It became ever clearer that we were in the middle of disaster. On the day of the opening night, Glenda called an impromptu meeting with the girls — all the women’s dressing rooms were on one side of the stage and the male dressing rooms were on the other. Once we were gathered in Glenda’s dressing room, she said, ‘Look, I don’t want to open the show tonight. I don’t think it’s ready and if we open when it’s not ready, we’re not doing ourselves a favour. Do you all agree?’ We did. Glenda then went to see Michael, who called a full company meeting. All the women were keen to delay, all the men wanted to go ahead. Jack Shepherd summed up the male view: ‘This putting it off is not a good idea. I want to get it under my belt.’ His part was huge, as Flamineo drives the plot and he saw the attempted postponement as a female conspiracy. He was anxious to do the play, psychologically ready to tackle it. It was put to a vote; and Michael, determined not to upset Glenda, made the casting vote ruling to cancel.
I was the Equity deputy (equivalent to shop steward) on the production, so Michael told me to go to Andy Phillips, the lighting designer and one of the producers (who happened to be Glenda’s boyfriend) and tell him about the company vote; the wheels were set in motion for the cancellation of the performance. Boards were placed outside the theatre and the press was informed.
We were all devastated: not just about the first night, but at the open division in the company, which the voting procedure had exacerbated. A small, disconsolate group of women went to La Barca, a local Italian restaurant, to have supper. When Jack Shepherd walked in and saw me, he said loudly, ‘You cunt!’ The whole restaurant went silent. I was shocked, not by the word but by the venom in his voice. At the time, I was terribly upset. I’d always liked Jack; we’d had previous great success in The Girls of Slender Means. Now I realise it came from his frustration and misery at having the moment of final resolution removed, as he saw it, unfairly. It was a ‘coitus interruptus’. And you know how nasty men can be when that happens.
The next night we opened. During the curtain call as we were taking our bows, André Previn, who was in the audience, got up and shouted, ‘Rubbish!’
In a change to Webster’s original text, I was allowed to live at the end of the play (Edward Bond’s idea) but it was harder by far to face the other kind of ‘dying’. It is agony to go on stage every night and know that your work is poor.
Unsurprisingly, we got terrible notices and consequently the audiences stayed away. The whole production had been set up to test the waters for a new permanent company, along the lines of the RSC, doing classical and modern plays to a high standard. It was the flagship venture for Bullfinch Productions. But with the theatre more than half empty every evening, it was clear that the law of the box office had spoken and the show would have to come off. Bullfinch Productions decided they must keep the show running to save face and offered the cast a 30 per cent wage cut. A percentage wage cut favours the higher-paid members of the company — when you’re only earning £50 a week, as I was, a 30 per cent cut is a substantial amount. Glenda was earning £350 a week, so it was considerably less of a financial blow for her.
There are strict rules about wage cuts, because they change contracts already signed with the employee. Equity called the crucial meeting where the wage cut would be discussed and voted upon. Only Equity members of the company were allowed to attend. I made a passionate speech against the proposaclass="underline" ‘You can’t ask people to take wage cuts. After all, we still have to pay our rent and pay our electricity bills in full, and you don’t say to the electricity company, «Can you make a thirty per cent cut to my bill?» Actors are being made expendable. And it’s wrong.’
It turned out that Glenda had concealed that she was actually a member of the production company, Bullfinch Productions. She had been involved in setting up the show and employing cast members. Therefore, she had no right to attend the company meeting. But she did, and knew exactly how everyone had voted, although Equity told us that the management would never know who voted against a pay cut. A book was presented for us to sign and express our choice — to accept or not. It was one of the few occasions when I was deeply ashamed of my Union.