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h e a t r e
Life Support Interview
Alan Bates has made his career
look a little too effortless
it's not the anguished stuff that knighthoods are made of, says
SIMON FANSHAWE.
But Seriously!
Bates: 'When terrible things happen in your
life, your priorities are changed --
not sharply, but subtly and slowly.'
It must be a nightmare being
theatrical crumpet because, as an actor, nobody ever takes you
seriously. Alan Bates left Rada at a charmed moment in British
theatre. In 1956, at the age of 22, he played Cliff in the original
production of Look Back in Anger. Since then he has been
closely associated with Osborne, Pinter, Storey, Gray and Bennett.
He created roles in The Caretaker, Butley, A Patriot for Me
and Life Class. He even dipped into Shakespeare for a
swift Petruchio and a Hamlet. But he is too good-looking to win
any real credit. Perhaps it's because he took his clothes off
in the film of Women in Love, or perhaps his style simply
doesn't shout about what he does.
 Despite the wildness of his looks and the
power of his presence particularly in his sensitive-men-of-the-soil
phase in the early 1960s in the right role he is a subtle
actor. Equally, in the wrong role, he is excessive and wonderfully
bad. Those roles were "short detours from something that
actually matters", he says with a laugh.
He probably also suffered from being one
of theatrical triplets. He doesn't have the monastic intensity
of Tom Courtenay, whom you imagine to live his life on a hard
bed in a cold cell, or the working-class heroism of Albert Finney,
who must surely have led a trade union insurrection somewhere
in the north at some time. Bates has beauty instead; men are
rarely so sensitively sexual. In the way that some fat people
can be light on their feet, Bates is masculine yet extremely
delicate.
Courtenay and Finney will always be endowed
by critics and audiences with the aura of achievement. They suffer
properly for their art and have done enough of the classics to
warrant the eventual theatrical knighthood or the blue plaque.
Yet Bates has an ease about him, a physical charm and a lightness
of touch that deflects this kind of serious assessment. In Britain,
if you don't appear to be making an effort, nobody is ever going
to think you have gravitas. And if you play as much in the commercial
theatre as he has done, you definitely won't be taken seriously.
Bates is about to embark on another West
End show, Life Support, his 11th collaboration with the
playwright Simon Gray, directed by Harold Pinter. So he is reluctantly
talking to the press.
Standing there in his agent's office, he
resembles a prep-school boy waiting for the headmaster. He doesn't
like being interviewed. However, once we establish that we have
met before, he relaxes. "I used to be almost silent in these
things; now I ramble stupidly on. But I'm strange about doing
them before the show because I like people to discover it without
being told before they get there."
We make a pact not to give away the plot
because the play is about the discovery of truth unpredictable
and not particularly obvious truth. The reality of the characters'
relationships is revealed in exchanges between a well-known travel
writer and accomplished embellisher of the uneventful Bates
as "JG" and his brother, his agent and a doctor.
They are all standing over the body of his wife, who is lying
in a coma, and JG is desperate to revive her.
"JG has chanced through life, taken
the easy route, but been canny enough to turn it into something
successful. It's a play about confronting all that fakery. It's
about guilt, too."
Because Bates and Gray have worked so much
together, you're tempted to assume that this was written for
Bates. Bates says not: Gray offered it to him. You're also tempted
to make the probably crass assumption that it is in some way
about Bates. This is because in 1992 his wife Victoria died in
Sardinia after an illness, refusing medicinal help, relying on
nature and, most significantly, alone and absent from him. The
wife in the play is agonisingly present yet absent. I didn't
mention this for fear of trespassing.
Bates did, though.
"I responded to the play instinctively.
I read it through and loved it. I had no doubt about it. I was
waiting to see what identification I had with it. One is grief,
I suppose, which I've been through. That's the principal one."
Grief has played an enormous part in his life. Two years before
his wife died, his son Tristan, one of twins, died of a freak
asthma attack.
"This play has been an exorcism. Is
that the right word? No, I mean catharsis. Exorcism means emptying
churches, doesn't it? And that's not something to be resisted
at all. If these things have happened in your life, you can't
just push them away."
The play is also about how you take people
for granted. JG knows how desperately his life depends on his
wife, though he's always resisted that. "Yes," Bates
says, "when people are alive they can be horrible to each
other and let each other down, but that doesn't mean they don't
love each other. You remember all the good things when they're
gone, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that . .
. as long as you keep your feet on the ground."
He talks with warmth about his wife and son.
"There are people who don't go. They are part of your everyday
life and I welcome that." What he regrets most for his son
is that he was "a potential". "He is someone who
did everything only once, who never had the chance to develop."
This has inevitably affected Bates: he can't
pinpoint the effect it has had on his work, but it has changed
his ambition.
"I had pure ambition," he says.
"But when terrible things happen in your life, your priorities
are changed not sharply, but subtly and slowly. You think
about somebody like Tristan and think he would probably have
been an extremely good actor. I've already had 40 years and if
he wasn't allowed that, why should I have any more?
"And then you think, hey, wait a minute:
he was one of the main inspirations of my life. I'm going to
do it for him."
Bates says all this unsentimentally and unanalytically.
It struck me as he talked that perhaps the reason he usually
holds back is not that he doesn't want to explain, it's that
he can't explain. He once said that you can't talk about acting,
you can only talk around it. He is no rationaliser. Consequently,
his career has taken no particular path.
"I don't have a calendar," as he
puts it. He takes work on a hunch and he had a great launching
pad. "The 1960s and 1970s gave me a standing that I've lived
off," he says. Thus he has been able to choose what he does
although "not always wisely", he adds, alluding
presumably to some of his schlockier films such as Royal Flash.
Throughout his career he has made an enviable association with
new writing but, after an acclaimed Master Builder directed
by Peter Hall, might he start to head towards the classics? He
is 63, after all.
"I'm glad you had a note of astonishment
in your voice about my age," he says without missing a beat.
"That's certainly not out of the question. It's just about
sorting it out with the right people and then having a go. Now
or never, really, isn't it?" Absolutely. But "having
a go"? This is art, Alan. They'll never take you seriously
if you say things like that. Think of Tom and Albert, and suffer.
Life Support opens at the Aldwych
on Tuesday.
The Sunday Times, 3
August 1997, by Simon Fanshawe, photograph by Sally Soames
Copyright 1997 The Times Newspapers Limited. Used with permission.
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