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"I reveled in every minute of 'Butley.' Alan Bates's performance is superlative.".

Clive Barnes
NY Times

t h e a t r e

Butley, by Simon Gray
(title role) 31 October 72, Morosco Theatre
directed by James Hammerstein
Alan Bates was awarded the Antoinette Perry Award
(Best Actor in a Play) on 25 March 73

'HE'S THE SORT of man who just takes others, twists them around, spits them out and throws them away. I'm very sympathetic towards him now, even though he's really such a pig to everybody.'
Alan Bates is talking about Butley as if the man in question had just walked out of the door. In fact, Butley is an invention of the playwright Simon Gray and Bates has been involved with the character on and off for the past eighteen months -- a university professor with a blistering line in repartee, who is losing control of both his personal life and his work. It's virtually a one-man show, witty, sardonic and rancorous, and Bates has already played it for a six month season in London last year. He's now doing it again at the Morosco Theatre in New York.
An interview isn't something Alan Bates particularly enjoys; he hates labeling, either by those who employ him as an actor or by those who try to write about him. He's reticent about his private life, and the fact that he has a wife and twin boys is rarely mentioned. But once he can be persuaded to sit down and talk, he's very lucid about his work. Now 38, he's at a peak in his career, much in demand for both theatre and movies. In the gap between "Butley" in London and "Butley" in New York, he's been in France and Morocco making a second film for John Frankenheimer; the first was "The Fixer," for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

He likes to work in both media, but switching causes problems. "Films teach you to trust yourself and your own personality. The theatre gives you confidence," he says. Before he appeared in "Butley," he played Hamlet in London. Some of the reviews were a little patronizing. "The critics seemed to have a 'very good considering he's a film actor' attitude. But only two years before that I'd been Richard III at Stratford, Ontario and I was trained as a classical actor." It was probably his appearance in "Look Back in Anger" in London and New York in the mid-fifties that made the critics think of him as "modern" rather than "classical." "When one actually does a 'classical' role, they won't accept that you are speaking verse reasonably well.
"For Hamlet I had to find so many things inside myself, to stretch myself so much, that I was in a flexible state, an expansive frame of mind, although perhaps that particular Hamlet wasn't everything I'd like it to have been. But it released something in me, a kind of freedom for other things, so that when I first worked on "Butley," I didn't have to struggle to get myself going, in the way that I might have had to straight after a film, which is such a different tempo and dimension. Butley, after all, is a very full-blooded, outgoing part, too. And it's something you can only do for a fairly short time, mostly because it's physically very exhausting; you're on stage the whole time."

"I've actually changed my feelings about Butley since the beginning. I've always felt he was marvelous to play, but I haven't always liked him. I've been amused by him, entertained, but I feel much more kindly towards him now. He has a compulsive, destructive thing born out of his own frustrations and inadequacies. He abuses everyone around him, insults them, tries to ruin everything for them and doesn't succeed at any point, except for making them suffer a kind of humiliation which they are aware of, but from which they can walk away and aren't really destroyed by. He loses and they don't. He thinks that he has damaged them but they're still intact. While he seems to be destroying everyone around him, he's really strengthening them by encouraging them to turn their backs on him. To play him well, it's not necessary to like him. I don't absolutely have to be in sympathy with the character, only with the idea."

Harold Pinter directed "Butley" in London, and Alan Bates has been associated with him frequently over the years, though never before in the director/actor relationship. Bates played Mick in "The Caretaker" in London and New York and then again when it was filmed. He says he hasn't always understood Pinter's work, yet there has always been something in it which struck a chord inside him. "I first came across it with "The Caretaker" and didn't know what I was reading at all because the phraseology was so unusual. Yet I knew instinctively who that person was and how to play him. Then again, the film script for "The Go-Between" was marvelously economical, yet one knew everything. The essence of a relationship was preserved even if an incident was cut out. It was completely crystallized and clear.
"I found him marvelous as a director, though I think these things are very personal. You get on with certain directors and not with others. It's to do with circumstances and what stage you're all at, but for me at that moment he was as right as Lindsay Anderson had been with a play by David Storey I did called "In Celebration." I found they both had a capacity to understand the psyche of each person. They don't get panicked by time; they create an atmosphere of trust both in you and in the play and if they see an actor going off on the wrong track, they let them go on it and get themselves off it rather than force them off it. It works for me because I don't really like being told what to do, and I like to do something first before anyone starts commenting on it.
"On the film of "The Go-Between" I found the same sensitivity with the director, Joseph Losey. He did something very interesting that may seem to be at odds with what I've just said, because he'd written a sort of essay, or his ideas on each character. So before you'd even met Losey, or went into it at all, you knew how he'd thought about it. This may have been worked out in association with Harold Pinter, I don't know. I thought that was terrific. You could have got out beforehand if you hadn't agreed with it!"

"I don't know what theatre audiences in New York are like now, but the last time I played in front of them, they were great. They're very theatre oriented and they seemed to be there to enjoy it. After three months they get a bit harder to please and a bit harder to get through to. The fact that I've only agreed to do a three month run of "Butley" at the moment isn't anything to do with that, though! It's just that I can't bear long runs!"

Mark Shivas in Playbill Magazine, Vol 9, November 1972, Issue 11.

MR LANE, a native of Jersey City, N.J., says his passion for acting started at an early age.
"My oldest brother took me to see my first Broadway show. I was about 11 years old. And I thought, `That's what I'm going to do when I grow up.' That first play was called 'Black Comedy.' Then my brother took me to see a matinee performance of 'Butley 'with Alan Bates. I remember being shocked that Bates had to do the performance again.
"My brother said, 'You know, he'll have to go back to the theater and do it again in the evening.' And I thought, `How can he do that? How can he go through all that again?' "

©1997 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved Amy Selwyn / Associated Press Writer, It was the Gore that attracted Nathan Lane to `Mouse Hunt'., The Dallas Morning News, 12-30-1997, pp 2C.

PETER ANSORGE: You dedicate "Butley" to the staff and students of Queen Mary College, London -- where you are in fact a teacher of English. In view of Butley's intense disillusionment with university life is this dedication meant to be ironic?

SIMON GRAY: It's meant to be jocular. But I do sometimes suspect that there's something innately dangerous in the teaching of English when the teacher is not primarily an academic. For instance I hope there's enough in "Butley" to show that at one time he must have been a marvelous teacher. If his energy and sharpness had been directed towards a text, for example, he would have become a much less destructive person. One would have liked to have heard him in his early twenties on, say, Shakespeare or even Eliot. But literary criticism is not a sufficient activity for a man who can never come to terms with himself or control his relations with others. There's bound to be a revolt from literature as inadequate for what Butley so desperately needs -- the revolt would express itself in the most anarchic way. I think that every teacher, even an Edna, must occasionally shudder at the idea of talking to a student about "Coriolanus" or Chaucer when all you want is your fag and cup of coffee.

ANSORGE: As the director, what was Harold Pinter's contribution to the making of "Butley?"

GRAY: Pinter's contribution was enormous -- as indeed was the contribution of everyone connected with the production. But what Pinter brought to the rehearsals was an effortless authority with the actors, who were I think immensely grateful for it, a scrupulous concern for the text, and a sure and delicate sense of the theatricality of the play. And what he brought to our pre-London week in Oxford and the nerve-wracking period before we opened at the Criterion was a positively creative serenity. I think we were marvelously lucky to have had him direct us.

ANSORGE: Were many cuts made during rehearsals?

GRAY: We both knew long before rehearsals began that the play was too long. But we decided to wait before we cut it until rehearsals had started up. During the first week of rehearsals I sat with the script and a pencil making cuts as we rehearsed. It was really a very tense situation but we went on making substantial cuts. At Oxford we decided to cut a long explanatory scene in which Butley and Joey really state their feelings about each other Joey says 'I'm not ashamed to get ahead' to which Butley replies that there is nothing left to get ahead in 'except the past and that thins out as the years go by'. There's a definition of each other's nature on both sides which I felt made a strong scene. But on Wednesday night at Oxford, it suddenly struck us that it was all so unnecessary. The characters would never have been so explicit about their relationships. On Thursday morning we cut that scene. As a result some people said that they couldn't make out whether the relation between Butley and Joey was clearly homosexual.

ANSORGE: Is "Butley" a homosexual play?

GRAY: No, it was never written as that at all. I don't in fact know what the word 'homosexual' properly means. If one uses the word homosexual simply for someone who prefers sleeping with men to sleeping with women then there are two clear homosexuals in the play: Joey and Reg. Butley, I would have thought, doesn't like sleeping with men.
Butley and Joey's kind of relation seems to me an extremely common one in English life. Whether or not one of the partners is homosexual, there is a strong emotional attachment which is frequently blurred over with a word like friendship. There are friendships which can be as intense, possessive and passionate as that without necessarily being sexual -- or sexual in such a complex way that the word homosexual seems to me meaningless as a definition. Some relationships between men are frequently more important in their lives than those which they often assume are dominant -- with their wives, girl friends or mistresses. It happens a lot between boys of about 15 or 16. You get a kind of dominant, joking, rather cruel interdependence between a stronger and weaker partner. The irony s that often later in life it's the weaker partner who becomes successful. Perhaps something goes rotten in the stronger partner's life. Some men carry on the ability for such relationships quite far into their lives. That's what's happened between Butley and Joey. Surely you don't always want to possess somebody physically in order to be jealous if they are taken from you. You might want to possess them in other ways.

ANSORGE: Teachers seem to have cropped up as the main protagonist in several recent plays. Apart from "Butley, one thinks of Peter Nichols' "Joe Egg,," Storey's "Arnold Middleton," and Christopher Hampton's "Philanthropist." Do you regard this as a coincidence or as something more significant?

GRAY: I think there's almost a new class -- he teacher class. Teaching is such a curios profession. It involves people's feelings in one way or another even if the feelings are of frustration and rage -- that this is what your life has become. Being a teacher is a continuous mask... Butley uses life as his theatre. He's a very theatrical personality. But Butley has taken his mask off and says, 'Face it -- this is what I fell all the time' -- about teaching at least. Often teachers never take their masks off -- they become the teacher at home or in their private relationships...

ANSORGE: Has the success of "Butley made you want to give up teaching?

GRAY: I suppose I could give it up. But teaching is so deeply a habit with me that I'm not sure if I could face life without it. The day when I discover, like Butley, that I can't bear to teach -- I'll know it's time to stop. |||