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The Seagull, Interview
"Alan Bates:
No false images"
by Sheridan Morley,
from the London Times, 11 August 1976
WHEN ALAN BATES reaches the Duke of York's tonight as Trigorin
in The Seagull it will be in a Derby Playhouse production that was one week
to be found on the stage of the old Rex Cinema in Wilmslow and
the next following The Rupert Bear Show (afternoons only)
on to the stage of the Alexandra in Birmingham.
  Bates's
decision to play at Derby was not solely motivated by a kind
of personal sense of devolution: Derby (or to be strictly accurate
Allestree) was where he was born on February 17, 1934, and where
he last played in a 1945 school production.
"I thought it was about time
I went back, and when Mark Woolgar who runs the new Playhouse
there invited me and said he was keen to do The Seagull,
Trigorin it was. People always expect an older man, But Trigorin's
supposedly between 38 and 43 in the text, and I'd already played
Konstantin on the stage when I was more his kind of age.
"People in Derby may have
been expecting me to come back in a more starry, showy part and
the local press was vastly less enthusiastic than the national
papers. But we've a strong company and when the offer of a short
London season came up it seemed idiotic not to take it."
After he left Gray's Otherwise
Engaged (which continues with Michael Gambon at the Queen's)
earlier this year Bates went straight into the television production
of Pinter's The Collection (with Laurence Olivier and
Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell) and from there to Derby. Gray
to Pinter to Chekhov inside six months might suggest a series
of sizable dramatic leaps until one remembers that Bates has
done it before: he was after all in the first production of The
Caretaker and jut before Butley he was Vershinin in
Olivier's Three Sisters. But was he, I wondered, uneasy
about bringing The Seagull into London so soon after Lindsay
Anderson's highly acclaimed Lyric production with Joan Plowright
and Peter McEnery last autumn?
"Not really -- I've never
understood that curious five-year rule which in the old days
meant you couldn't revive a classic if there'd been a recent
production in the West End, and it looks pretty dead now anyway:
look how many productions of Twelfth Night and Romeo
and Juliet are around this year in major theatres. Every
month, maybe every week, the London audience changes, and especially
in the summer you get a public which is unlikely to have been
wandering up and down Shaftesbury Avenue all last winter.
"At Derby we started out
with no preconceived ideas about how The Seagull should
be done except that we wanted it simple and fresh and immediate
rather than stylized or romanticized. And, having worked there,
I'm keen to go back -- maybe for a season. This year they've
been playing to more than 75 per cent capacity which is well
above the national average, and obviously I'm glad that there's
a chance for their work to be seen in London."
 Bates
has no plans beyond The Seagull, though on his present
form he's unlikely to be out of work for long. Now 42, he comes
of the Finney-O'Toole generation (or do they come of his?) and
was indeed at RADA with them both in the
mid 1950s. Like them, he's managed to miss very little of what's
been happening in both cinema and theatre over the past two decades
-- apart from The Caretaker Bates was in the original
Royal Court production of Look Back in Anger, while in
the cinema he starred in Schlesinger's first feature film, A
Kind of Loving, as well as in such later classics as Zorba
the Greek, Losey's The Go-Between and Ken Russell's
Women in Love. Happily married with twin sons, he remains
a quintessentially private man with a deep horror of showbiz
ritual:
"I don't seek publicity,
nor do I much like it -- I've always been terribly aware of the
false image that a few bad articles can create, and of the effect
that image can have on a career. When I was starting out as an
actor I felt intensely vulnerable and uncertain of who I was
or where I was going; for that reason I didn't much want to talk
about myself. Now I mind it less, though I still think the work
is more important than all the chat about it."
His early success at the Court
led to the offer of a lucrative seven-year film contract, which
Bates unhesitatingly rejected:
 "I
just didn't want that much work in films without the freedom
of choice. Looking back I'm amazed I had the resistance, but
I'm glad I did, because the films I eventually made on a freelance
basis, films like The Entertainer and Whistle Down
the Wind, were much more valuable in career terms than a
long-term contract would have been. What films teach you is to
trust in your own personality, but if you stay in them too long
you lose the pace and rhythm of the live theatre. Directors?
Well, I suppose Lindsay Anderson has taught me more than most:
he showed me that acting wasn't to do with power games or insecurity
or trying to prove things. It's to do with knowing yourself,
not trying to hide behind disguises. The only answer is to play
the parts you really like and have the courage of your own taste.
The only valid tests are 'Is it good?' and "Does it interest
me?'
"It always sounds ridiculous
for an actor to say he has a difficult life: compared to someone
working on a farm or down the mines we have a very cushy time.
But to succeed as an actor you do make sacrifices of a kind:
you stiffen your nature, you learn disciplines and you come to
look for different rewards. But if it's all you can or want to
do, then that's it." |||
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