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 t h e a t r e

Alan Bates, David Storey, Lindsay Anderson. Photo by Tim O'Sullivan

NEXT WEEK the sign on the Royal National Theatre's flashing billboard will look as though it has come from a time warp. 'Alan Bates' it will say, 'appearing in David Storey's new play STAGES. Directed by Lindsay Anderson.' This is the team that helped transform British theatre in the 1960s: Bates appeared in Look Back in Anger, Anderson was artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre during its most revolutionary phase, and Storey brought a breath of northern working-class life to the West End. As long ago as 1969, all three collaborated on Storey's play "In Celebration," but to the suggestion that this might represent something of an old devils' reunion, each reacted characteristically.
Alan Bates narrowed his blue-grey eyes and exclaimed, 'I certainly hope not.' David Storey gazed steadily back, and replied carefully, 'I don't think that that is the case.' 'Bullshit,' said Lindsay Anderson, simply.
Nonetheless, it is evident that they share some common bond. This is the ninth play in which Anderson and Storey have collaborated, and the third ("Life Class" was the other) that all three have done together. Yet for all their vast experience, both separately and as a team, it is fair to say nothing has presented a challenge quite like "Stages." Not only is the play written in spare, poetic language, but its central character, a middle-aged artist looking back on his career and an all-consuming love, is hovering on the brink of madness. Even Alan Bates, whose remarkable career -- spanning four decades, 30 plays and as many film and television roles -- has given him a taste for characters 'out of step with the world', found himself agonising in early rehearsals over the right course to steer between realism and fantasy.
'It's a very concentrated play,' he muttered, 'and there's a very precise line to find, and at the moment...' his voice died away. He brushed his black hair off his forehead and drew breath: 'But the signs are there, they're there, and so long as I don't blow up...'

'[Anderson] loves actors and enjoys what they do,' Alan Bates said. 'And if he is acerbic, it is done with enormous humour and wit.' He speaks from long experience. When he began work on "In Celebration," he already had an unusually varied string of credits, including much praised performances in the original productions of "Look Back in Anger" and Pinter's "The Caretaker," and was surprised to find himself gently reined in by the director.
'I think I'd got myself to the point where I was a little bit all over the place,' he admitted. 'Lindsay was a great leveller, a great discourager of excess and affectation. He came at a very good time, when I needed to be challenged.'
In the years since "In Celebration," Bates has achieved the extraordinary feat of becoming a box-office star in cinema and television as well as on stage, with a reputation as an actor prepared to take risks. Whether wrestling naked in "Women in Love" or submerging himself in the moral corruption of Guy Burgess and Colonel Redl in Osborne's "A Patriot for Me," he has welcomed the chance to live dangerously.
'You can't afford to lose the sense of excitement,' he said, 'and it's fun to play difficult characters, people who are on the edge, who are out of step with the world, perhaps because they're not quite coping, or because they can't be bothered. I find that interesting.'
...'Alan has an instinctive understanding of David and his work,' Anderson pointed out. 'That's why I wanted him for this part. It makes everything easier because there's so much you don't have to explain.'

There is a certain irony in hearing yesterday's revolutionaries sounding like today's old guard, but it is clear that it is the times, not they, that have changed. They remain as uncompromising as ever.
"Stages," Anderson insists, is about love; an obsessional, all-consuming love, says Bates; it is, Storey proposes, about what might be described as an idealised love.
It is also about the sacrifice artists make for their art.

---

THE SOURCE of any artistic impulse is in itself a mystery. Yet David Storey's starkly observed portrait of an artist in extremis leaves us as close to the core of this eternal enigma as almost anything I have hitherto seen on any stage. He delivers a painful portrait -- some suggest a self-portrait -- of a man at the very edge of his creative and emotional rationale. A man who, at the height of his fame as a painter and writer, finds himself going slowly mad.

Not, as Storey himself explains in one of his own poems, mad 'as the axeman or the drunk is mad / But as a climber slipping his last hold might fall ...'
Here we see Alan Bates, giving one of the great performances of this or any other year, gradually releasing his grip on reality. However, in doing so he discovers the pain, the guilt and the black self-doubt which probably has fuelled his art throughout. The intrinsic beauty of the performance, of the writing, of the whole production, is that he takes us step-by-step with him on this slow descent among the ghosts of his own past.
It is in part a cold confessional and a passionately illustrated case history. With each turn in his emotional landscape we are forced to readjust our own focus on him. Bates paces the stage like some large, bulky bear. By turns locked into the depressive symptoms of his own illness and taking animated flights of fantasy. We understand completely how such a man could have become isolated to a degree where his loved ones, including the wife who deserted him, came to have him sectioned under the Mental Health Act. And it is all too clear that they are gathering once more to assess his last hopes of recovery.
Lindsay Anderson directs with a masterly touch, highlighting the poetic quality of the text by treating the piece as hauntingly and hypnotically as a minuet played in a minor key. Four women in the artist's life present themselves during the short, unbroken action. Each one tries to re-establish his hold on the present; each merely inflames his desire to retreat into the recesses of his past.
All four are performed with deeply-felt understanding -- daughter, ex-wife, psychiatrist, and icon-mistress (Gabrielle Lloyd, Marjorie Yates, Joanna David and Rosemary Martin, respectively). To attempt to describe the details of this would be to destroy the several dramatic surprises the narrative yields. Suffice it to say mr Bates's torment is not, as we first suspect, entirely the cliched embarassment of a successful creative son for the suffering of his working-class parents.
Nor is it even just a metaphor -- as Storey at one point suggests -- for the loss of the creative drive in pictures, books and plays which marked the first half of the 20th century and of which, arguably, Storey and his contemporaries were a last flowering.
That is there; but there is also much, much more.

Stages on the road to isolation
by Benedict Nightingale

...When Bates talks of his father, or the old Yorkshire, or living in a garret in London, or an alcoholic mistress who committed suicide, he effortlessly holds the stage and our attention; and when he turns to Isabella, as his mother-in-law was called, it is with a quiet tenderness of which I for one had not hitherto thought him capable.

Storey's wounded Northerner award
by Irving Wardle

...Fenchurch pours his confession of secret love into the ear of a sympathetic neighbour (Rosemary Martin) who apparently metamorphoses into his dead beloved. Or perhaps not.
However unprepared, this climax at least moves Alan Bates beyond the secure confines of morose regret and defensive irony. I did not know he had such passion in him. And its impact is reinforced by the fastidious deliberation of Lindsay Anderson's direction, in which the placing of a chair, or the crossing of a leg, counts as a significant event. The set, by Anderson's long-time partner Jocelyn Herbert, consists of a bare, beige room which simultaneously supplies a neutral background and a sense of fatality.

Storey reaches the final Stages
by Peter Hepple

...Under Lindsay Anderson's sensitive direction, Alan Bates gives one of his most notable performances as a man deep in melancholy reduced to a kind of artistic pottering about, unable to connect with the worlds of the present and the past and destined to slide, despite all entreaties, into inevitable mental decline.

Colouring in the background
by Paul Taylor

...Alan Bates excellently captures all the nuances of this complicated man. There's the melancholy mock-whimsicality (all ironic flourishes of the head and sardonic beetling brows) which give a superior disguise to biting self-hatred. (Characteristically pooh-poohing the psychiatrist on whom he has depended, he remarks that "she'd have treated Christ with anti-depressants".) There's the quietly desperate man who pads about his room like a dazed, disoriented bear and the volatile romantic who, the more he is urged to consider his present needs, heads off into a febrile fantasy-recreation of the past, madly projecting his love for other women onto the willing red-head next door (Rosemary Martin).
A delicate chamber piece, the play is also an echo-chamber of themes from Storey's earlier work, especially the difficulty of reconciling working class roots with a career as an intellectual and artist. At times, the preoccupations of "In Celebration" seem to be married to the poetic manner of "Home"...