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What
is it about Alan Bates and monsters? Whether on film, television
or in the theatre, he has excelled in a wide range of raging
megalomaniacs and splenetic psychotics. They have not  been tempered by age.
In Unnatural Pursuits he was the drunken playwright, Hamish
Partt, who sinks his teeth into the entire American nation; in
The Showman at the Almeida he was the vainglorious actor
destined to tour the pigsties of Austria; and in Sam Shepard's
powerful but disregarded film, Silent Tongue, he was the
alcoholic Irish quack doctor who sells his daughter for a couple
of horses. Now he is about to arrive in the West End as another
kind of monster: Halvard Solness in Peter Hall's production of
Ibsen's The Master Builder [photo, above right]. In a
rare sortie into classical theatre, he has chosen to play a man
who is driven by a ruthless desire to triumph as a master builder,
driven by guilt, paranoia and fear of the young coming up behind
him.
  Having
watched the video of Silent Tongue [left] in the morning,
for which he was praised by some for his performance of Shakespearean
grandeur and condemned by others for going way over the top ('They're
both saying the same thing,' playwright and friend Simon Gray
told him), I was half expecting Bates to be a monster himself,
jealously guarding his privacy. Instead, he throws open the door
to his house in St John's Wood and is as welcoming as he can
be in between a stream of telephone calls from friends. Another
assumption is dashed when he opens a bottle of wine with the
proviso that he will only have one glass, and because of high
blood sugar shouldn't really drink at all.
"There is
a side of me that likes not only playing monsters
but also monstrous-sized parts."
 Finally,
settled and sitting upright in a cane chair, he tackles the appeaI
of bad behaviour, expressing himself as much with his arms (or
rather his elbows) as with his voice: 'Ah, these monsters,' he
says rather camply. 'There is a side of me that likes not only
playing monsters but also monstrous-sized parts. I know there
were other people in the cast, but The Showman [photo,
right] was really one-man show time -- he was just out there
the whole time. I knew The Master Builder was a hard one,
but I didn't realise it was quite so tough. It's a bit of a Lear
or a Hamlet. It's a dark, dark, play and he is ruthless
at times, but you have to feel for him as well. His life is a
tragedy and he can and he does confront himself.'
But what
is the link between Alan Bates and monstrosity? 'I don't think
any of us know whether we are monsters. I suppose we are to certain
people and in certain areas of our life. Perhaps we don't even
know. Or perhaps I enjoy these parts because they are a side
of me that's not expressed. They are just glorious to play and
to try and understand because they are out there in real life,
they don't just appear in plays.'
Bates's
face is ruddier and fuller, but otherwise at 61 he doesn't look
so very different from when he played Birkin in Women in Love
26 years ago and indulged in a spot of nude wrestling with Oliver
Reed in a film first. His career got off to a flying start when
he was asked to do Cliff in Look Back in Anger and later
he defied his agent by playing the taciturn Mick in The Caretaker.
'I didn't
immediately understand the play, but I just knew emotionally
that it was wonderful. After the first night my agent was the
first person to come into my dressing room and he said that I
should never listen to him again.'
"Actors are
not luvvies, they're toughies."
 His choices
haven't always been so wise but he has developed an astonishing
rapport with a generation of British playwrights -- with Pinter,
Storey, Bennett (rather younger than the others) and, above all,
with Simon Gray [below, right]. Bates is even more closely identified
with Gray after playing the latter's alter ego, Hamish Partt
[left]. 'There is a sort of connection somewhere. You respond
to the way they write and they feel that. I feel that Gray is
recording his experiences and turning that into drama, and I
am playing that for him. On top of that he writes dialogue that
is just joyful to say. It's articulate, it's funny, it's witty,
it's outrageous and very troubled at times.'
 Nevertheless
he was shrewd enough to refuse the offer of a part in Cell
Mates when he heard that Stephen Fry had been cast as George
Blake. Bates refrains from criticising the vanishing Fry, but
he clearly feels that Gray should have been aware of their incompatibility.
'I said to Simon, "I am 20 years too old for this man and
I can only get away with it with one of my contemporaries."
He didn't quite see it at the time.'
In his
own petulant account of the production, Gray describes the actor
as being miffed at the decision, but Bates will have none of
it and says their regular meals (does he really drink water with
the bibulous Gray?) have never faltered. If Bates made news by
not appearing in Cell Mates, the reverse was true in the
case of Oliver's Travels, Alan Plater's whimsical cross-Britain
road movie for television. Plater went public just before transmission,
criticising the BBC for its pusillanimity in refusing to cast
Tom Courtenay, for whom the series had been written, and insisting
on Bates whom it considered the bigger draw. Plater went on to
criticise the direction, the music and almost everything else.
This, Bates feels, was a bit rich. 'He didn't like anything,
but there wasn't one hint of self-criticism in all of this,'
he says, pulling a face. 'As I said to Plater, I only did the
piece because I liked it, but it wasn't perfect. I wasn't perfect
to him and he wasn't perfect to me. I think he should either
have withdrawn the piece at the beginning or stuck with it and
kept quiet.'
Unlike
Solness in The Master Builder, who so fears the threat
of the young, Bates has been more generous. He is the patron
of the Actors Centre, and its studio is named after his son, Tristan,
who died at 19 in an asthma attack. Three years later, his wife
also died and Bates submerged himself in his work. Tristan's
identical twin brother, Benedick, was much admired in The
Picture of Dorian Gray at the Lyric Hammersmith. He believes
that actors need sanctuaries like the Centre to keep their creative
juices flowing, to keep them off the streets, and to discover
whether they are really up to it.
When did
he decide that he could make a go of it himself.? 'Funnily enough,
through failing at the end of RADA. I was one of the favourites
but when I was given a chance I absoluteIy blew it. I was so
angry with myself that I was determined that it would never happen
to me again. It was a question of meeting rejection and meeting
lack of acknowledgment -- you either wilt under that or you fight.
You've got to have steel in you somewhere. As Simon Gray says:
"Actors are not luvvies, they're toughies." They should
change the word.'
From reviews of
The Master Builder:
 "Peter Hall directs a fine,
atmospheric production of Ibsen's semi-autobiographical play
about an obsessive architect who falls under the spell of a beautiful
young woman. Alan Bates is strong on sombre brooding..."
-- Charles Spencer reviewing the Haymarket Theatre, West End,
production, Daily Telegraph, 23.x.95
"Alan Bates enters like a lion at twilight. Like all
actors of the very first rank, he stakes out his emotional territory
within minutes but without seeming to do so: he knows he is in
command, and you can tell at once that this is going to be
a great performance. ...Bates's Solness has a brutal glamour
about him. If you're attracted to me, he seems to signal, then
watch out. He is a big, leonine man, but the lion in him is getting
tired of hunting and flexing its muscles. He has a swagger about
him, a preening, smug vigour; but it is fraying at the edges,
as if he were worried that fewer and fewer people will find him
magnetic or submit to his domination. ...Bates plays him with
cruel brilliance, as a man who blathers on about old age and
the threatening ambitions of rising young talent, but who, at
the same time, tips you a confident wink that he can still look
after himself. ...Ibsen, like Shakespeare, is too proud to make
his characters likeable. You understand moral values precisely
through their absence in the characters. If modern tragedy itself
has any moral value, this is it." -- John Peter reviewing
the Haymarket Theatre, West End, production, The Times, 23.x.95.
"Bates's Solness commands
his office and household with a sharp imperiousness. But a Solness
who was merely strong would be insufficient. Bates' s great
accomplishment in this part is to convey the shadows that haunt
the master builder. Solness has put his feelings (and the
feelings of others) aside, in order to become the pure instrument
of his own professional success. But his feelings persist nonetheless,
in a paranoid moodiness that is tinder to the inflammatory attractions
of Hilde. When she batters down his defences and enters his inchoate,
infantile emotional life, he quickly becomes a prisoner of her
fantasized vision of him." -- John Benrose, reviewing
the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto, production, Maclean's,
29.i.96.
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