The dressing room of the lead actor in a newly opened hit show is a special
place. The serried flowers and the army of cards are nothing to the bright
whiff of job satisfaction that spreads through the star’s private quarters.
How much more special when the dressing room is occupied, after years away
from the front line, by a great actor playing a great role written for
Laurence Olivier, in a theatre that his lordship once commanded, in a play
set during a Middle East crisis and now celebrating its 50th birthday in the
midst of another. Such is the case with The Entertainer, now starring Robert
Lindsay as Archie Rice at the Old Vic.
“I thought I was going to lose my nerve on the first night,” says Lindsay, an
actor who has always been good at playing panic without ever seeming likely
to succumb to it. “I’ve never been frightened before on stage, never. I came
out and I was staring at Joan Plowright, sitting in the box. This is the
play she and Olivier met on. Vivien Leigh used to come and watch them
rehearse. Joan came backstage, and she was in tears. She was just saying how
wonderful it is, knowing the play has come back to life.”
It certainly has. And so, in a way, has its star. Before the press night of
the golden-anniversary revival of John Osborne’s play, Lindsay rousingly
addressed the rest of the company. “It doesn’t matter,” he told them,
meaning the judgment of the critics. “We’re having a go,” he might have
added, to quote the tawdry mantra of the bigoted, philandering, small-town
music-hall dinosaur he plays with mesmerising skill.
It doesn’t matter, and it does. The Broadway producers, who look to London
for their serious theatre, will have been instantly on the phone to the Old
Vic’s artistic director, Kevin Spacey, already in New York in the theatre’s
production of A Moon for the Misbegotten. Lindsay has not worked on the
Great White Way since he won a Tony for Me and My Girl. That was in 1987.
There have been great stage performances since — as Richard III, as Henry II
in Becket, as Fagin in Oliver! (his second Olivier award) — but apart from a
limited run in Nick Dear’s Power at the National’s 300-seat Cottesloe four
years ago, he has stuck to a decision, taken a decade ago, to play away from
home.
“The last thing I did of any measure of importance was Richard III,” he
explains. “We did a national tour, then almost a year in the Savoy Theatre —
which was gruelling. It’s the biggest role in the canon. I made a conscious
effort to say, ‘Right, I need a job that will pay me decent money that I
will get some enjoyment from.’ And I decided to just do tellies.” A new
young family had something to do with the choice. (It may also explain his
youthful demeanour, aged 57, not to mention his perennial trimness.) If not
quite up to the standard of GBH (1991) and Jake’s Progress (1995), both
written for him by Alan Bleasdale, the “tellies” he has chosen have not been
done entirely on a Faustian basis. Lindsay has twice played Tony Blair in
scripts by Alastair Beaton — A Very Social Secretary and, calling more
darkly on his gift for portraying loss of control, The Trial of Tony Blair.
Last year, he was the only actor to appear in both of Stephen Poliakoff’s
linked dramas, Friends & Crocodiles and Gideon’s Daughter. He was a
splendid Fagin, this time without the songs, in Bleasdale’s adaptation of
Oliver Twist. And for seven years, the BBC sitcom My Family was a likeable
showcase.
Yet, however good some of it has been, it hasn’t been enough to alleviate his
disillusionment. “Television is a very easy life if you can get in there.
And it’s ultimately very frustrating. Everything is last minute: last-minute
cast, cobbled-together scripts, get it in the can for Kick Bollock Scramble
Productions Ltd.”
No wonder Lindsay has returned to the stage as if coming up for air. Theatre,
as he light-footedly demonstrates as the cane-swinging Archie Rice, is what
he does best. “I’ve realised now it’s the only thing I do well. I’m not very
good at tellies and films because I like to be expansive. And I think that’s
probably why the past 10 years have been hard. There have been times when my
wife has said, ‘Robert, don’t do it anymore if you don’t want to. We don’t
need a tennis court.’”
It is difficult to put a finger on the source of Lindsay’s unique appeal. The
son of a Derbyshire carpenter (who was also a committed unionist), he was
born in 1949, and so belongs to the same generation as Antony Sher and
Jeremy Irons. Somehow, it’s impossible to imagine him on the same stage or
screen. But it would be too simple to say he’s a song-and-dance man, because
that type doesn’t get to play Hamlet. It’s certainly never how he thought of
himself. Although his mother taught him to dance in the intervals of bingo
nights in Ilkeston, he did no singing or dancing at Rada. He made his debut
only after playing football one afternoon in Exeter. “Me and Johnnie Nettles
went in for a tackle, and he came out with a broken leg. He was playing the
lead in The Boyfriend. And I had to go on. I did the rest of the run.” He
was soon taking over from David Essex in Godspell. His turn as a thwarted
suburban trot in television’s Citizen Smith soon followed.
It was leaning on a lamppost, however, and doing the Lambeth Walk in Me and
My Girl that defined Lindsay as a copper-bottomed star in whom charm and
talent equally abound. He played the role for three years and relished every
minute. “When I was on Broadway, the director, Mike Ockrent, said to me, ‘If
you invent any more business, you’ll disappear up your own arse.’ That was
his note to me. ‘You’ve put 10 minutes on the show.’ I was like a lunatic.”
In the light of which, his Archie Rice was somehow preordained. “A lot of
people say, ‘You are made for this role.’ I don’t know what it is. What is
it?” Olivier himself saw it when he went to see Me and My Girl. “In the
dressing room after, we talked about Archie Rice and compared it to the
comic turn I was doing. Quite spontaneously, he said, ‘You should try that
one day.’” He insists this wasn’t some sort of pontifical blessing, but
Olivier was not always so generous with younger actors. Lindsay presumably
lines up behind Olivier in his famous advice to Dustin Hoffman and, by
implication, all method actors: “Why don’t you just act?” “Totally,” says
Lindsay. “I’ve worked with a few of those. I’m not very aware of what I do.
I don’t analyse things.”
There is another link in the chain connecting him to Archie. After his return
from New York, Lindsay was summoned — albeit fruitlessly — to meet Osborne
in his club. “He was sitting in this huge, leather wing-back thing, with a
whisky. A real country gent: brogues and thick socks and a waistcoat. I
thought, ‘This is the angry young man at the Garrick.’ Every time I
mentioned a name, he said, ‘Oh, f***ing hopeless.’ He fell asleep on me.
There was a lovely moment when the maître d’ came, took the whisky out of
his hand and said, ‘Mr Osborne is taking his nap now, Mr Lindsay.’” He never
found out what Osborne wanted to discuss.
It was David Hare who last year invited Lindsay to take part in a rehearsed
reading of The Entertainer as part of the Royal Court’s50th-birthday
celebrations. “I was determined to grab the moment.As soon as we sat down
with David that Friday morning, I went, ‘Wow, this is just unbelievable’ —
the complexity of emotions and the turns of mood and the way people need
each other and hate each other. I thought, ‘Osborne just understands what
living’s like.’” His performance, complete with songs, patter and shtick,
was rapturously received. When it emerged that the Old Vic had the rights to
the play, Hare duly encouraged Lindsay to ring Spacey.
After “one of the best rehearsal periods I’ve ever had on any job”, in the
first preview, Lindsay had a Proustian rush as he capered on to do Archie’s
first routine. “One night, when the warm-up man didn’t turn up before a
recording of Citizen Smith, the producer said, ‘Why don’t you talk to the
audience?’ I went down a storm. Next thing, I couldn’t remember the lines.
It was the same thing in the first preview of this. There was screaming,
there was shouting out, and every time I asked a question, the audience
would answer.
They’d cheer, they’d clap. Sean [Holmes, the director] said, ‘Don’t ever let
them do that again. They’re not controlling you. You’re controlling them.’”
The Entertainer is at the Old Vic, SE1
