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Alan Bates, the Choosy
Star
Illustrated London
News No. 6817, Volume 256
March 28, 1970
NEXT autumn London will see the
film version of "Joe Egg,"
a comedy about the parents of a spastic child.
How will cinemagoeers respond?
Alan Bates, who plays the father, talked to Michael Billington.
 Alan Bates is a fascinating actor. Very much
a part of the Finney-O'Toole generation, he has managed, through
careful selection, to be involved in many of the most exciting
new movements in theatre and cinema over the last 15 years. He
played Cliff, Jimmy Porter's Horatio-like chum, in the original
Royal Court production of "Look Back in Anger;" he
was Mick in the Arts Theatre production of "The Caretaker"
long before Harold Pinter had become a fashionable or popular
writer; his first cinematic starring role was in "A Kind
of Loving," which not only marked John Schlesinger's directorial
debut but was also one of the films that set the British cinema
of the 60s on the path of unsentimental realism; and more recently
he played Rupert Birkin in "Women in Love," a film
which confirmed that our native cinema can handle sexual themes
with the same intelligent candour as any other country in the
world. It comes as no surprise therefore to find that Mr Bates
is currently playing the schoolteacher-husband in the film of
Peter Nichols's "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg."
| Unbearable Burden |
  People who didn't see the London
stage production in 1967 tend to be slightly wary of the subject
matter and its treatment. How, they ask, could you have a play
about a spastic child that was funny? Isn't that the height
of insensitivity? Quite the reverse. As the film's producer,
David Deutsch, succinctly puts it: "Bri and Sheila (the
couple with the spastic child) are not joking about the
situation: they're joking to relieve the situation." For
them it is the only way to cope with the unbearable burden over
endless days and endless years. They christen the child Joe Egg,
imagine all kinds of characters for her, invest the situation
with a number of very funny jokes. If that they laugh, 'tis that
they may not weep.
I asked Bates how he began to
work on a part that inevitably lies outside the range of his
own experience. Did he do a lot of research? "I go into
everything that's available. In this case I saw a lot of film
of spastic children, talked to doctors and nurses, discussed
the situation with the author. In the end, though, you have to
take the people as they're written on the page. There's no clear-cut,
scientific method that takes you right into the heart of a character."
 Does
he think cinema audiences will be reluctant to take a film on
this theme? Is there a barrier of prejudice that one has to conquer?
"There damned well ought not to be. In the end one can only
come up with the corny old line that you can't shut your eyes
to this sort of thing. What the film does is bring the subject
into perspective and show how people with a handicapped child
learn to cope with the problem. The horror and the shock is over
for the characters. Peter Nichols is also showing how the husband
and wife talk to each other through the child and keep their
lines of communication open this way."
Zooming back into Bates's past,
I wondered if he'd grown up in a theatrical atmosphere
not least because of that undisguised relish for acting he brings
to all his work on stage or screen. In fact his family was arts-conscious
rather than specifically theatrical. His mother and father were
both profoundly musical and his great-grandfather even had his
own band Bates's Band it was called though where
it played and what sort of music he is not too clear on. As a
teenager he himself was an avid filmgoer and used to go a lot
to Derby Rep: he vividly recalls seeing both John Osborne and
John Dexter performing in Anastasia though he jokingly
admits they weren't terribly good.
| Dermination |
The really
formative influence, one gathers, was RADA where he found himself
in one of the most remarkable groups of students ever to have
come out of a British drama school: his exact contemporaries
included Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, John Stride,
Roy Kinnear, Brian Bedford, Ronald Fraser, Bryan Pringle, Derrek
Nesbitt, James Booth, Virginia Stride and the late, much-lamented
Virginia Maskell. The sense of competition, he says, was enormous.
And he reckons his own particular failure in a crucial end-of-term
show gave him exactly the determination to succeed, the resolve
never to repeat the experience, that he so badly needed.
 What
strikes one about his subsequent career is the astonishing accuracy
of his instinct. When playing at the Court in "Look Back
in Anger" he turned down a seven-year contract with the
Rank Organisation because he preferred liberty to financial security.
And offered a choice between playing Hotspur on television and
doing a play called "The Caretaker" by an author whose
only previous full-length work ("The Birthday Party")
had folded after a week, he cannily chose the latter. It's that
sort of intelligent decision that makes the difference between
a merely successful actor and a star (a word Bates would hate,
incidentally).
Gordon Craig, I recalled, once
said that the ideal actor would be one who possessed both a rich
nature and a powerful brain. Did Bates agree? "Well, intelligence
is no good without imagination and instinct. I'd say you need
a fifty-fifty balance. It's no good giving a fantastic performance
in something utterly trashy, and I have in fact worked with actors
who've had tremendous natural incandescence but not the intelligence
to direct their talent. I was lucky, though, in that I found
early on a set of values and reasons for taking particular parts."
When it comes to discussing matters
of technique Bates is a shade wary. He quotes a dictum of Edith
Evans that there are those of us who talk and those of us who
do it. He is also suspicious of too much analysis of all the
whys and wherefores of acting a point he illustrates by
an anecdote about a visit he paid to the Actors Studio in New
York. He heard Lee Strasberg, one of the high priests of the
Method, asking the observers to comment on what the students
were doing: that was fine. "Then," says Bates, "one
girl got up and did something that was absolutely stunning and
marvellous. Strasberg then went up to her and spent the next
two hours getting her to analyse in detail what she'd done and
why she'd done it. If I'd been her, I don't think I'd have been
able to act again for another five years."
  
Curiously,
the last three films we've seen Bates in "Far From
the Madding Crowd," "The Fixer," and "Women
In Love," have all been adaptations of novels. Is
it difficult to play a character who already exists in another
form and about whom the audience may have preconceptions? It
depends," says Bates. "It wasn't too bad with the Hardy,
or "The Fixer" where Malamud based the character on
a real person and then fictionalized his time in gaol. But it
was more difficult with the Lawrence because one was really playing
the author. Coming from Derbyshire, I'd known Lawrence's books
most of my life, had read biographies and even a chapter of "Women
in Love" that he'd finally discarded. But although I kept
referring back to the book all the time and always had it around,
I still think in the end one's got to use one's freedom as an
actor. In any part there's got to be five per cent that's purely
you. Otherwise acting is not creative, merely interpretive."
Bates presents the actor's viewpoint
sanely and articulately. Returning to "Joe Egg," however,
I am still intrigued to know how such an essentially "theatrical"
play will come across on the screen. The producer, David Deutsch,
explains that Peter Nichols has done his own screenplay, that
they have dropped the idea of letting the hero talk direct to
the audience and remembering how artificial the device
seemed in "Alfie" one can only be grateful and
that when the husband goes spinning off into his loony fantasies
the camera will show him against his imagined background: in
other words when he assumes the role of dotty Viennese psychiatrist
we shall see him in the context of an authentic consulting room.
| Taste Barrier |
 This still, however, leaves the
question of the taste barrier. Are cinema audiences as ready
as theatre audiences to take such a rigorously unsentimental
treatment of a subject the cinema has always handled with kid
gloves? "There is a barrier," admits Deutsch. "But
it's more emphatic with people of an older generation. I suspect
that young people are able to look on humanity's face, scars
and all, with a greater openness and fewer preconceptions. Fortunately
a large proportion of the audience is young it's the middle-aged,
perhaps, who come with fixed attitudes. There are preconceptions
about this particular story, but what one must stress is that
the comedy is not an indication of indifference towards the subject
it's there because two people are trying to live with it."
Audacious films do get made; they
don't always get widely shown. Will this one? Deutsch puts his
faith in the fact that good business in the West End will decide.
As he says, if you'd explained a year ago to exhibitors up and
down the country that you had a film about a motor-bike odyssey
across America starring Peter Fonda, they wouldn't exactly have
leapt about with enthusiasm. But once a film has proved its popularity
during its initial run, you have difficulty in shaking people
off.
If the cinema-going public can
treat "Joe Egg" on its merits and not shy away because
it handles a difficult subject without mawkishness or false sentiment,
then it will be a very healthy sign. "Give the public what
it wants," used to be the old shobiz philosophy. But give
the public a little more than it expects as many films
have done in recent years and one will often be surprised
at the intelligence and enthusiasm of their response. |||
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