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 t h e a t r e

I'VE WORKED FOUR times in New York in the theater," says British actor Alan Bates.
"But isn't it funny how your memory goes? Everything feels like it happened five years ago. When I read in the paper that I hadn't been on a stage here in 25 years, it gave me a terrible shock!"
This is a kinder, gentler Bates than the fiery young actor who scalded stages on the West End in the late 1950s with plays like John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" and Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker." Or the one who cavorted with "Zorba the Greek" or struggled with moral questions in "Georgy Girl" on film. Or the actor who won a Tony Award in 1973 on Broadway in Simon Gray's "Butley." In fact, "Butley" was Bates' last trek across the footlights here - until now.
Bates' new project is "The Unexpected Man," which opens tonight at the Promenade. It is a two-character play that also stars Eileen Atkins and was a major hit in London, with Michael Gambon in the role Bates now has. "Man" is an oddly romantic drama about a woman who finds herself sharing a train compartment with a well-known author she has admired for years. It was written by Yasmina Reza, whose three-character play, "Art," also transferred here from the London stage and won a Tony two seasons ago.

"When I read this play," Bates says, "I liked it so much - the language of it, the ideas, the compactness of it. And I always have wanted to work with Eileen. We've known each other for years and often talked about it. We even thought one time of doing 'Romeo and Juliet' together back when it was just remotely possible we could. But then it became something of a joke, and every time we'd meet, we'd look at each other and say, 'Well, the offer hasn't come in yet.' "At this point in time," he says with a grin, "if we're ever going to do it, I think we'll have to do it on the radio. "But then this opportunity came up and I said why not? The play's a love story of a certain kind, not the usual euphoric kind, but still fascinating. It's a very, very complex, intimate and interesting sort of a meeting of two minds," he says.
Bates, 66, showed acting talent early. He was 17 when the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art accepted him, although he had to wait two years before enrolling - he was drafted, and served two years in the Royal Air Force. In Great Company But when he did enter the school, it was a time when some exceptional British actors were emerging: Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole, Roy Kinnear, Peter Bowles, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay, Oliver Reed. Women like Glenda Jackson, Rosemary Harris and Joan Plowright also were beginning to be noticed. It was a very heady time.

"We were a very lucky generation," he says quietly. "It was a time when young writers were just beginning to make their marks as well, writing parts for young people. We all had chances to do significant work.
"It was very exciting. You knew you were in the middle of something. And it was very competitive also, as you can imagine." He made his London stage debut in "The Mulberry Bush" in 1956, but Bates made his name in '60s movies like 1962's "A Kind of Loving," among the first of the "kitchen sink" dramas. The film was directed by John Schlesinger, and was the beginning of a long association that also produced "Far From the Madding Crowd" in 1967.
Bates was nominated for an Oscar for 1968's "The Fixer." When he's not on a New York stage or in a Hollywood studio, Bates, a widower with an 18-year-old son who's also an actor, lives outside London, and loves tending his garden. "You know," he says wistfully, "people often ask me what I'd do if I wasn't an actor. I've thought about it, and I think I would probably like to have been a gardener." |||

photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

New York Times Interview, Sunday, 15 October:
"Unlike 'Art,' 'The Unexpected Man,' which is set on a train, does not allow its two characters to speak directly to each other until the final moments. With that in mind,
The New York Times invited Eileen Atkins and Alan Bates to talk, over lunch in London late last month, about their lives as actors. They were joined by Matt Wolf, the London theater critic for Variety..." [To read the interview, click on the link above.]

Yasmina Reza was five when she discovered she was not going to live for ever. 'I thought it was a piece of luck to be alive, a kind of distinction - like a medal. I thought: if life is only a short piece of time, I must live with intensity.' Was she frightened of death? 'No. Not at all.' (She is emphatic: 'No. Not at all' is an absolute and her catchphrase). At eight, she wrote a poem about mortality. It was called 'La Mort et La Vie' and it won a 'little prize'. Could she still remember how it went? 'Of course,' she said in that indignant way - between reassurance and reproof - that French women have. ..."

WHEN HER FOURTH play, ''The Unexpected Man,'' (L'Homme du hasard) opens in London on April 15 in a prestigious RSC production with a dream cast of Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, Reza thinks she will be taken more seriously. The two-character play takes place in a train compartment and consists almost entirely of interior monologues.
Like ''Art'' (90 minutes) it is very short. Reza detests intermissions and tends, economically, to write short for a small cast and a single set. She came to play writing after an unspectacular acting career in which she was lucky enough to work with some of France's finest stage actors. She wrote her first play, ''Conversations apres un enterrement'' (Conversations After a Funeral) at the age of 28 in 1987.
''I didn't have enough confidence in my writing to launch into something literary but I liked things that had a plot, that were lively and sensual, so I wrote for the theater. My acting background was fantastic because I would never have written like that - the silences, the few things said and the many unsaid - if I hadn't had the experience of working with great actors, I saw how they work and to what point playwrights write too much and I think that determined my style.''

Reza is not made, she says, for waiting, which is a large part of the acting profession. And now she sees another advantage in having switched to writing. ''I see the problems for actresses of my age. After you are 30 you are finished, while as a writer I am considered very young.''
Her wry humor, she thinks, is in her genes. -''I am very gay by nature,'' she says, ''but I cannot say I am happy.'' Her father's family, Sephardic Jews, emigrated from Persia to Russia and then to Paris when he was 5. He was an engineer who ended in the shirt business and an impassioned amateur pianist, like his daughter. Her mother came from Budapest and played the violin. Reza is nervously vivacious with a big laugh but her work is informed by nostalgia, rupture, a sense of loss.
''Absolutely,'' she says. The sadness, she thinks, is for a lost world she never knew. When her father died, she felt she had lost not only a friend and accomplice but someone who had ''the folly and humor of a Jew of his time, that ability to laugh at the world and weep three minutes later.''
This winter she brought out ''Hammerklavier'' (Albin Michel), a series of sketches about her friends, her two children and above all her father. She looks on the very affecting book as a photo album, a snapshot of, say, her father bursting with pride in 1987 because his daughter's first play has been produced and accosting the former prime minister, Raymond Barre, outside the Brasserie Lipp to tell him the good news.
While Yasmina wishes the earth would swallow her, Barre courteously pretends to have heard of her and when her father praises Barre's love of music and starts humming a bit of Mozart (K.516), Barre joins in and for a few minutes the two men sing together on the Rue de Rennes, then shake hands and take their leave. ''My father could do that to people, he could make a minister sing in the street, very naturally and very well.''

With ''Hammerklavier'' Reza says she is being seen for the first time as a literary writer. She was quite cross at those critics who, praising ''Art,'' praised it as first-rate middlebrow comedy, the word middlebrow being about as bad as you can get in France. Does it bother her not to be considered an intellectual?
''I think there is a double answer. Yes it bothers me - the part of me that is the most trifling. That is to say, I would like to be seen as the summit of intelligence and intellectuality, so I am cross. On the other hand, deep down I don't give a damn. I know what I do, I know what I want, I know what I want to say. I know that 'The Unexpected Man' absolutely cannot be seen as boulevard comedy, but my silly side is cross.''
She is convinced that one can say the deepest things simply. ''But you must be careful or you will be taken for middlebrow.'' So that really did hurt you? ''The most pointless wounds are the deepest,'' she replies, laughing. Despite her vivacity she is clearly thin-skinned: In ''Hammerklavier'' she writes that she identifies with those who have been abandoned.
''I think that we are always abandoned in life, every day by something, someone. I think that moving through life means being abandoned, and abandoning. I have a lot of sympathy for those who are alone. I understand them. I feel very alone although I am not the slightest bit alone.''
The melancholy of ''Hammerklavier'' was being composed during the worldwide triumph of ''Art.''
''It's odd because I wrote that book during my moment of glory. Glory, success, one doesn't metamorphose, one stays what one is.'' Glory she sees as fugitive and absurd. And it's a curse to see it like that because I am incapable of taking advantage of it. I am an idiot not to be able to enjoy it without knowing how absurd it is.''
But she is not so foolish as to see her success as nothing. ''It's not nothing, and you know why? Because one says to oneself what would it be like if there hadn't been this? That's what I say to myself when I am thinking about the absurd side. I could have just been writing in a corner and stuffing pages in a drawer, and that would surely be awful.'' |||