INTO BATTLE AT THE BARBICAN

The Times Newspapers Arts Section on Saturday June 5th 1982.

by Sheridan Morley

Insofar as the first part of Shakespeare's Henry IV belongs to any single actor, that actor is the one playing Hotspur. It is therefore with a sense of more than the usual terror that Timothy Dalton prepares to go into battle for the RSC in the Trevor Nunn production which on June 9th opens that company's long awaited tenancy of the Barbican. Ever since Olivier pulled the focus of Part 1 away from Hal, the conventional wisdom about the play has been that Hotspur is somehow its guest star, fitting flamboyantly but uneasily into the structure of what remain otherwise eminently company plays.

Timothy Dalton has that problem, too. Unlike most of the current RSC team at the Barbican he remains defiantly a star, with an intriguing if variable track record. Few actors of thirty-six can look back on a 15-year career encompassing a film debut at twenty-one as the King of France in Lion in Winter, star turns in Cromwell and Wuthering Heights, a stint in Charlie's Angels, and a role as the sixth of 91-year-old Mae West's husbands in her farewell movie, to say nothing of three classical years with Prospect and another three with the RSC back in the early 1970s. Like O'Toole, who got him the job in Lion in Winter, and like Olivier, whose Wuthering Heights footsteps he followed, Dalton has always lived dangerously on both stage and screen, and a sense of personal danger is maybe what the vast monolith structure of the Barbican now most needs:

"At least there are backstage signposts for the actors here, which is more then the National ever bothered to provide in their first few months, but it's still a huge, impersonal inhuman space which we have somehow got to fill with life. It's a vast area, probably one of the deepest stages in Europe, with a fly tower five storys up from the stage; but John Napier has come up with a Henry IV set which has a sense of structure and above all of texture, so that you want to get your fingers into it, and that might give us some idea of personality."

By rights Dalton should not be at the Barbican at all. He had intended by now to be in the middle of shooting the first Soviet film to be made entirely in the West:

"Michael Powell and I started work last year on the English script of a life of Pavlova which the Russians wanted to make over here. I was going to play the husband who blew all her money, and they've got a great Russian star for Pavlova, and I'd just come home for Christmas to start learning it when Trevor rang and offered Hotspur. So I had a week of soul-searching, decided I really did want to be in at the beginning of the Barbican, and told the Russians. They were very understanding and went out and got James Fox instead. I just hope I made the right decision; it's cost me three hundred thousand dollars."

Making the right decision has not always been a feature of Dalton's career, as anyone who has witnessed his appearance in the current wide screen life of Coco Chanel might agree:

"Yes, well it did seem a good idea at the time. I've always liked the concept of multinational films, and when they sent me the script it was with an absolute promise to rewrite, which innocently I believed. Then I got into the studio in Paris and found they hadn't changed a word of it, and we started from there. After two weeks they did get around to sacking the writer but, as the crew were all either French or Hungarian-Canadian, they didn't know many other authors, so I was despatched to London to find one while they all stood around the set waiting for the action. The only writer I really wanted said he was already having a nervous breakdown and didn't need Chanel as well, so in the meantime the lady playing Chanel and I sat up most of the night trying to get it right and then in came Julian More, who used to write the scenes ten minutes before we had to shoot them. But I have done some very much better films that have ended up with even worse reviews - look at Agatha and Flash Gordon, both hugely under-rated when they first came out. If you worried about the reviews, you'd never do anything as an actor, good, bad, or indifferent."

The son of a Manchester advertising man and one of five children, Dalton comes from a faintly theatrical family in that his grandfather, having started on the halls, took in later life to running the Theatre in Bath:

"He was also one of the very first agents. When he was on tour he used to photograph other acts on the bill with him and then carry the photos from town to town recommending people to theatre managers, who in those days didn't have much idea of what was going on elsewhere."

Dalton himself was one of a select group who travelled down from Manchester in school holidays to join the Michael Croft National Youth Theatre in its vintage years. From there he got to RADA and then the Royal Court in Little Malcolm, and when he was twenty-one (in 1967) he landed The Lion in Winter. Within the next few years he also made Cromwell, Wuthering Height, and Mary Queen of Scots. Putting himself in the Michael York-Malcolm McDowell generation of rising British film stars of a decade ago:

"But then I thought maybe I should get some straight theatre work under my belt, so I stayed away from films for three years, and when I went back they'd forgotten who I was so I had to start out all over again, a much better actor but apparently unemployable. But Ken Hughes, for whom I'd made Cromwell, took me out to California for the Mae West Sextette, which was really bizarre. Every night after shooting we'd go out to eat and she'd read poems she'd written about New York before World War One. She didn't admit to ninety-one so everyone had to pretend she was eighty-seven, and the producers just thought she might be good for a last buck, but in fact she was this highly intelligent lady who'd been working on her own image since 1900 when, on Broadway, she'd seen an old hooker with a sailor on each arm standing in that arms-akimbo posture which then became her trademark."

No longer with Vanessa Redgrave, and never married, Dalton views the future with a cheerful kind of uncertainty:

"If this doesn't work out for me at the Barbican, I can go back to American television with a clear conscience. Do you relize that an extra out there gets a minimum of L400 a week? I've never understood why the English theatre believes its leading actors should get less then the average middle manager of a Nottingham plastics factory. It's not that I need a fortune, but they could double all acting salaries in this country and we'd still be grossly underpaid. It's partly because actors have lost power; directors and writers now control our lives, yet when the lights go up on the stage every night, it's still the actor who is out there on his own. I'm not a terribly good company man. I don't really believe in democracy and shared responsibility and long discussion. I like to get out there and do it, which is maybe why I don't work so much in this country."