BATES
ARCHIVE

News
In Memoriam

SPOTLIGHTS

Knighthood
American
Film Theatre
Fifties TV
Al Hirschfeld

FEATURES

Biography
Timeline
Photo Gallery
Actors Centre
Piffle
Ephemera

ARCHIVE

Theatre
Film
Television
Audio
Interviews
Writing

 t h e a t r e

NEVER before have I heard the two vital words 'Kill Claudio' greeted in this spirited play with such gales of laughter from the audience. Beatrice's whiplash reply to Benedick's plea to be allowed to prove his worth, is the moment when the banter between these two is chilled by the cruel treatment meted out to Beatrice's cousin Hero. Such mindless guffawing tipped the subsequent complicated plots and misunderstandings out of gear. But that said, there were compensations in Elijah Moshinsky's production.
This is not only an entertaining play but a witty one and Felicity Kendal sharpens her claws delightfully as the confirmed spinster jousting with the confirmed bachelor Benedick ,who gives back as good as he gets. It is because this early light-hearted wrangling is evenly matched that Beatrice's venomous change of heart is breath-taking. So far, Felicity Kendal's Beatrice has shown no more than the witty high spirits of a woman 'born under a dancing star'. She even calls Benedick to supper with a wolf whistle! Now Benedick too must show tougher mettle and Alan Bates, a mature, stocky lover, takes up the challenge. Despite his consternation at finding himself 'horribly in love,' he shows with ease the different sides of Benedick's character.
As a team the company works well together. Nicky Henson a jokey Don Pedro, Frank Thornton a suitably teetering Leonato and poor Karen Ascoe's accident-prone Hero weepy, as required.
Dogberry and his Night Watch comics, (who should have sent this audience into paroxysms) failed to broaden their humour enough although Peter Sallis's Dogberry is fussily effective.

Reviewer: Rosemary Say

AFTERNOON TEA is just long enough for Alan Bates. Hardly has the pot been drained before he has slipped quietly and gratefully away, back to the private world of his dressing-room at London's Strand Theatre, where he is appearing as Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" [left]. There he will take off his blazer, lay his head down and for half an hour before the evening performance, sleep the sleep of a devoted man.
"Every single night of performance is grueling, trying ... satisfying," he says. "And I thrive on it."
Alan Bates is the most serious of actors. "You don't get where he is today," says Felicity Kendal, who plays opposite him in "Much Ado," "without being serious."
He was a serious boy. An eldest child (he has two brothers), he was thoughtful and self-contained, wary of crowds, and a stranger to most of the joys offered by the Herbert Strutt Grammar School, Belper, Derbyshire. He was forbidden to sit the School Certificate mathematics examination lest he spoil the school's reputation.
"Although I was very self-conscious about school plays I was drawn to them and found myself always doing them. It became a way of curing self-consciousness and shyness. I suddenly thought, God, I've got to do this. I saw it as a way of expressing myself, and I found I was quite good at it. There's nothing like being good at something to make you decide what to do with your life."
Bates' subsequent achievements reveal a record of quite-goodness that makes him one of the most quite-good actors in the world. He is now 55, and has the calm presence of one who knows what he loves. He thought carefully when asked whether there were any holes in his life. "I wouldn't say there were, but there is always something missing, even if you have everything: like a relationship which may come and go, or a sense of satisfaction in your work and suddenly you haven't got it. There are always some gaps of some kind."

He is still handsome, though his square face has rounded a little at the edges and today is a little ruffled from nodding off in the taxi, for which he apologises politely. He is amiable and talks in fluent bursts, but appears to have weighed carefully what he is saying, giving the impression of a contemplative nature. Like a lot of shy people, Bates can charm at will, affecting vulnerability.
He is endearingly reluctant to reveal his age. "It stops people offering you a job. It's terrible because I look 42 and somebody might be thinking of offering me a job now."
Age has accented the sweetness in his nature and dulled the suspicion of aggression that used to lurk near the surface, which might have had something to do with his own capacity for fierce temper.
When pressed, he says he thinks he is emotional. Certainly his emotions sometimes surprise him, and can overtake him when listening to music, which he does a lot, or looking at a painting or performance. "Anything can suddenly move you."
Artists occasionally achieve a purity of expression which he calls incandescence. "I wouldn't dare claim that I've ever been there. There certainly are moments that take you completely out of yourself to a point where afterwards you say to yourself, I am not sure where I've been. You're trying to go as far as you can and experience this other person as much as possible. Mostly you perform well and you perform properly and you can be fine and moving, but there are those rare moments when you've lost your consciousness and you're away."
He was never an angry young man. His reaction to middle-class complacency was a lot more muted than most of his generation. He was outspokenly critical about his own comfortable upbringing and hated privilege. The special star treatment he received made him acutely uncomfortable.

His bourgeois childhood was a secure and loving one, however, and he talks of his family warmly. He lived in a rock solid, middle-class Midlands home which his father, an insurance broker, built himself and planted round with trees. His great-grandfather had a band called Bates' Band. He has no idea what kind of music the band played, but assumes it shows an artistic streak running through the family. His two brothers paint, and his father played classical cello. When he showed an interest in the theatre at the age of 11, his parents encouraged him. At RADA he found himself among a vintage crop of fledgling actors, including Peter Bowles, Tom Courtenay, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, John Stride, Brian Bedford and Roy Kinnear. By 1969 the press was hailing him 'number one pin-up boy of British TV,' and was delighted when a TV play starring Bates, "Three On a Gas Ring" -- about young love in Chelsea, was the first ever banned by the ITA. But it was baffled by Bates' lack of fashionable impudence. He told reporters he was itching for a role in which he didn't have to wear jeans and could get a decent haircut. Bates' bachelor existence, despite his increasing bankability, lacked flashy accessories. The only apparent extravagance was a Saab sports car -- flyaway blonde with a double-barreled surname conspicuously absent from the passenger seat..
Sensationally out of his jeans by 1969, Bates titillated Fleet Street unreasonably by wrestling naked with Oliver Reed in "Women in Love." He was the first fully frontal male nude in British cinema, a distinction that rudely contrasted with his discreetly conventional marriage the next year to secretary Victoria Ward [right, c 1970]. He shielded his wife, and the twin baby boys (Benedick and Tristan) she bore him, carefully from view at their house in St John's Wood, London. The public love affair is between Bates and his work.
He once said: "Actors are famous for the other people they are." This is not strictly true, though he would like to believe it applies to him. The ritual ennoblement of the star is anathema and 45 minutes over tea is exactly how much interview he is prepared to tolerate for the sake of publicising a project: in this case his new film "We Think the World of You," [left] a bravely non-commercial production by young director Colin Gregg about a tug-of-love between two homosexual lovers and a dog, based on an autobiographical novel by J. R. Ackerley.
Though it provides no watershed role for Bates it couples him with Gary Oldman, a young actor whose talent and energy recall an earlier Bates, the more so as the film is set in the Fifties when Bates himself started acting.
Colin Gregg first worked with him eight years ago, when he took a long shot and invited Bates to appear in his 1980 TV version of D. H. Lawrence's "The Trespasser." "Alan has taught me the most of any actor. If he was absolutely predictable he'd still be terrific, but he surprised me in every single scene of "We Think the World of You."
Bates has a reputation for backing fringe projects, both in cinema and theatre. While in America performing John Osborne's "A Patriot For Me," he turned down a major contract for a series of Hollywood films and returned to England to appear in Strindberg's "Dance of Death" at London's small Riverside Studios, for 150 UKP a week. He has never been anybody's property, hot or otherwise.

"I have always tried not to be influenced by money for its own sake, though occasionally I have had to do stuff for money to pay school fees or taxes and so on. At the moment I have to make some to cover certain responsibilities, but I don't want it to influence the quality of what I do.
"I have never stayed in America and done two things in succession. I have the feeling that perhaps if I did, I'd be trapped and lose my freedom. The trap is very easy and very seductive to fall into. I fear that if they do want you, they take you over; though I love it that they keep asking."
Instinct and a shrewd critical intelligence have served Bates well. He first came to public notice in 1956, playing Cliff, [right, with Mary Ure] the second male lead in the Royal Court production of John Osborne's passionate condemnation of the English class system, "Look Back in Anger." Bates was one of a new breed of gritty young actors who came on stage without a tennis racket in hand and plum in mouth. Four years later he turned down a plump TV offer to appear in a shoestring stage production of "The Caretaker" by an author called Harold Pinter, whose only previous full-length play, "The Birthday Party," had folded after a week. Then came his first major film role in John Schlesinger's "A Kind of Loving," one of a string of Sixties films to introduce social realism to British cinema. "I choose parts carefully. Mostly things which interest or teach me. Occasionally I go against my instincts because I think I need the money, or think it will be fun, or it has some quirk that appeals. Occasionally I wish I hadn't done it.
"I've turned down a lot of Hollywood work. Frankly I didn't like the stuff I was offered, though actually a lot of it was no worse than some of the TV I've done here. It's a matter of allocating time, which is precious. From one point of view I should have accepted some of them in order to be seen more as a film actor, but when you're offered plays like "Richard III" [left] or "Butley" on stage, there's no comparison with pappy film scripts.
"I'd like the films I do to be the one or two in 10 that are good. Michael Caine is a totally different kettle of fish because he does not want to be in the theatre. If you do want to be in the theatre, your whole attitude has to be different. You have to give up half of your time. You make that choice early on, according to who you are."
Bates will soon take one of the smallest yet most demanding roles of his career. He will appear at the Edinburgh Festival this year with his one-man show based, curiously, on the theme of fire [right]. It was originally a one-off production commissioned by Salisbury Cathedral, but was so successful it was taken up by a commercial manager.
"It's very frightening being on stage alone, but very satisfying. In the end you enjoy it. I suppose I've evolved a way of using nerves. You have to talk to yourself very seriously for 10 minutes before you go on. Then you just have to hang on and be very controlled. After about 10 minutes it's all over. It takes a long time to discipline yourself to this state. When you are much younger you can go on and hope for the best, or have a drink and find that you can't do it at all. In "Butley" and "A Patriot For Me" the curtain came up and in both cases something went wrong technically, and it cured me of nerves. In those circumstances, any indulgent fears have to go by the board. Once you've experienced that you don't have to make things go wrong, but if you remember the state it put you in, you can use it again."
Bates is a loner, always emphatically out of step with fashion, while never out of fashion himself. It is one of the ingredients of his appeal. He is his own man and he makes his roles his own too. If the role he wants and the artistic reward he knows he can get is in a sideshow, that's where he'll play. He is a devoted man. Our theatre is richer for that. |||