Evening Standard, Friday 18 February 2000
by Suzie MacKenzie

LIFE FORCE, energy, obduracy are the words that best describe the acting of Alan Bates. Which is why he is so good at playing Chekhov, people who do nothing, like his Gaev in Michael Cacoyannis's new and stylish film of "The Cherry Orchard "- languor, a forlorn ineffectualness, being just on the flip side of a passionate embrace of life.
It is also why Bates is a definitive Antony, opposite Frances de la Tour's equally definitive Cleopatra - the fallen hero, the man who loses everything but who, as Bates says, "is not a loser". A man defiant in the face of destiny, a man who grapples with his grief.
And which, finally, is why Bates's reading of Thomas Hardy's poems later this month will be so poignant and apt. Hardy, whose love poems to his dead wife - an effusion of feeling too late to change anything - are the best things he ever wrote. "Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me." That same old sentimentality, until the last great and brutal line. "Thus, I, faltering forward ..."

| A portrait of Bates |

Together these three performances form a portrait of Bates, at this time of his life, aged 65, still endlessly working and wrestling, always wrestling, to balance grief with joy, appetite with loss. It is almost 10 years since his son Tristan died suddenly in Japan at the age of 19, followed some months later by Victoria, his wife of 22 years, leaving Bates and Benedick, Tristan's twin. Too cruel to contemplate. "People ask, how do you cope, and all I can say is that you do." You cope, he says, "Because you don't want it to stop."
Though this is not true of everyone. It is not true of his wife. After their son's death, she developed a wasting disease. "She just started to vanish." I ask him if he thinks she died of grief. "I can't analyse it to that degree. All I can say is that it could have been." Didn't this make him furious? Of course, he says, to see someone walk away from help. "I went nearly mad trying to stop it, but I couldn't. In the end she went away somewhere that I couldn't find her. I didn't know where she was. It was her choice. A hugely brave death."

| A pretty full life |

I ask him if he has ever considered suicide seriously. He says not. "Those things come into your mind, obviously, when you've lost people. If they can go, I can go ... I've had a pretty full life ..." But. "I do believe in living out your own time, unless it's absolutely impossible, which it is for some people." It is, famously, impossible for Antony and Cleopatra, both of whom take their own lives - unable to live without the other. Not that they are ever particularly nice to each other. "Thou wert a bungler ever," Antony flings at her, almost kicking her across the palace floor. And this from the man who later bungles even his own suicide. Two great and noble bunglers.
Is this what true love is, I ask Bates? You know, he says, "I've never believed much in that holding hands kind of love. I've always thought that love is about two different personalities trying to confront life, trying to make sense of their responsibilities, to themselves, to each other, and to the wider society." And if you can manage that, he says, "then that's not bad".
Theirs was not an easy marriage. "We were highly incompatible." They stopped living together when the boys were young, had separate homes, negotiated separate ways of doing things. "But we never divorced. We couldn't let each other go. Sure it was troubled, turbulent. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I loved her and she loved me. I think that can happen, that two people can love each other and not be able to get on at all."

| Not a great one for heroes |

He is not a great one for heroes, Bates says, and he has never believed in a god, but he can't help admiring Antony and even finding something godlike in him. Maybe what appeals so much is his earthbound quality: "Antony is like a big bird, trying to take off into that final flight. In the end he can't make it, the effort is too great but he never gives in."
There is something moving and human in failure, Bates says. It is why we love the people in "The Cherry Orchard" so much. "They are terrific and they are hopeless, and just charming. And you can't believe the way they are behaving." We have to accept change, he says. Their tragedy is that they can't.
And then he says, again apropos of Antony, but he must be talking also of himself: "Antony faces things, he faces despair. He lets himself plunge in order that he can rise up, because sometimes you have to go right down ...You can't come up if you don't."

| A great cup of tea |

But enough of this, Bates says. Too sad. He may be fatalistic but he is funny too. He has a kind of mischievous giggle; at times he looks like a particularly elegant boy. He is generous about colleagues, and makes a great cup of tea. And life is good to him too. Benedick is about to get married to "a lovely woman." He can't wait. And he has himself recently fallen in love.
His philosophy he says is best summed up by a woman he knew years ago. It was when his two boys were small and he had gone to the school to collect them. Walking home with a friend she suddenly turned to him and said. "Isn't it lovely walking along this side of the street. Most people seem to think it's better on the other side. But it isn't." |||

"The Cherry Orchard" is on general release. "Antony and Cleopatra" iz at the Barbican until April. Alan Bates will read from Thomas Hardy at the Purcell Room on 27 February.