AT THE age of nine, Corin Redgrave met Kenneth Tynan, whose diaries he performed at Stratford last year and revives at the Arts Theatre from next week. The critic, then an ambitious 21-year-old, was brazenly introducing himself to anyone he thought influential. Redgrave’s shy but undeniably famous father Michael was high on the hit list.
“I opened the front door,” Redgrave recalls, “and there was a man in crimson trousers. That was extraordinary in 1948 because everyone’s trousers were dun brown, grey or sap green at most. If you wore crimson trousers you were outré in the extreme. My father just sat there rather silent and amazed at this young man who seemed to know everything and want to know everybody.”
Redgrave’s next contact with the critic was curious, too. He admired his dazzling prose but resented the unfavourable comparisons he was making between Michael Redgrave’s supposedly intellectual acting and Laurence Olivier’s more visceral work. And when Tynan slated a family friend’s first play, the 15-year-old Redgrave wrote him the most ferocious letter he could muster, only to get a polite reply, commending his passionate feelings. And the next year, in a week without professional openings, Tynan gave the boy what he recalls as a “very glowing, flattering review” when he appeared as Romeo with an amateur group.
Half a century on, though, it seems surprising that Redgrave should successfully play someone who fully justified his second name, Peacock. Yet the severe image he acquired as a left-wing activist in the 1970s and 1980s doesn’t tell the truth about the man or his acting. In person he comes across as generous and considerate and on stage as remarkably versatile.
Recent roles have varied from the withered schoolmaster in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version to the sleazy comedian in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, Anthony Blunt in his own one-man play about the mandarin spy to the flamboyant Captain Brazen in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer at the Garrick in Lichfield. For me, one of the joys of the past decade has been observing Redgrave rising from the ashes of a promising career to become one of our finest, most commanding, actors.
I especially remember a performance that stunned us with its power in 1998, that of the monstrous prison warden in Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales, but Redgrave himself dates his professional resurrection from his Rosmer in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at the Young Vic six years earlier. I described this as “striking”, “warm”, “an authentically troubled presence”, but some of my colleagues were less enthusiastic. “You often can’t say such things with certainty, but this time I knew the performance was good,” Redgrave recalls. “But the reviews were quite extraordinarily rude, as if to say: you’ve been away a long time and a good thing too.”
He admits that his political preoccupations in the Thatcher era led him to neglect everything from his family life to his career, with the result that many roles passed him by. But he suspects that this wasn’t the whole story. Why, he wonders, could Peter Hall write in his diaries that a Tory minister had said, “You aren’t going to employ Corin Redgrave, are you?” Why did the BBC shun him for 23 years before giving him the role of Angelo in Measure for Measure in 1994? Indeed, he felt fully accepted only when Nightingales required him to be as grim as some people thought him.
“Everyone carries a certain aura, and if your aura is that you have strong opinions on politics, religion, ethics or whatever, it’s difficult for people to see you otherwise. But I see no reason why someone can’t be a good actor with reactionary or revolutionary opinions.”
Winning over the Stratford and West End public in his recent stint as Lear for the RSC certainly suggests the world now agrees with that. After all, it’s perhaps the greatest role yet written and surely the most taxing. “It uses up more of you emotionally, spiritually, physically, than any part I’ve encountered,” Redgrave says. “It’s like you set out in a boat that’s only just seaworthy, which is your own body and understanding and so on, and you are picked up in this maelstrom and dashed against the rocks and battered to smithereens and little bits of you emerge as driftwood.”
On the face of it, Tynan couldn’t be more different and, when Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers suggested that they adapt the diaries for him, Redgrave resisted. He disliked the sado-masochistic passages and wondered if the play wouldn’t be too episodic: “You know, talking about a cup of coffee one day and Meyerhold the next. But it’s like a quilt. If you observe it long enough, a pattern emerges. After a while I thought that this is a really important attempt by a man to make sense of his life, as all great diarists do. It’ s as if they come before the bar of their own consciences and account for themselves.”
Redgrave still isn’t mad about Tynan’s obsession with the famous but after rereading his work he found himself liking, admiring and wishing he had known him better. The critic, he felt, wrote about the theatre as if it mattered to the nation’s health. He had a belief in cultural values that became unfashionable after his death in 1980: “I think he’d be a fish out of water now.”
So what next for Redgrave? Well, he’s a man who believes in serendipity yet has been underemployed enough to feel anxious if his diary isn’t filled months ahead. “There’s great joy in doing things that are gloriously irrelevant, but one wants to feel there’s a reason for a play. It sounds stuffy, but one wants to feel one is doing something that’s genuinely adding to the commonweal.”
He has not abjured politics, believing that human rights are becoming the century’s great issue. Indeed, he’s helping to found a new party, Peace and Progress, which may put up a candidate or two in the coming election. But he has plenty of professional hopes and plans: maybe the title character in Pericles at the Globe, maybe a London revival of The Browning Version, maybe performances of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the accompaniment of Bach’s cello sonatas.
Other possible projects include Nelson’s adaptation of W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction and David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s novel Wittgenstein’s Poker, about the philosopher’s battle with Karl Popper.
But when we met, another role was on Redgrave’s mind. He was, he confessed, feeling seriously sad about the impending closure of King Lear, which happened on Saturday: “It’s not a part actors get the chance to play two or three times, as they did in the old days. I’d love to do it again.”
- Tynan runs from Feb 17-March 26 at the Arts, WC2 (020-7836 3334)
