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Stage Lightning

In 1987, I was at drama school in Cardiff: by the sea, and all at sea. A swotty, wannabe rebel who’d done well at university, I’d swerved into a one-year acting course where closely argued, thesis-synthesis intellectual habits were useless. More than useless. They were, the gimlet-eyed improvisation teacher said as I gurned and stuttered through her class, a problem.

Thank goodness, then, for Brian Bates. I can’t remember which teacher told us to read his new book, The Way of the Actor (1986). But I can remember the sense of relief when I realized that, despite the icky subtitle – A New Path to Personal Knowledge and Power – it was written by a professor of psychology and had footnotes; this I understood.

Bates’s ideas were intriguing. Using his own interviews with four leading actors – Charlton Heston, Glenda Jackson, Anthony Sher and Liv Ullmann – and excerpts from hundreds of other performers’ interviews and memoirs, he laid out a theory that actors were shamans for the modern world. They were, he said, men and women in touch with their many subconscious selves, what older societies would have called the spirits. More, at a time when it was common currency to be snobbish about actors – they were frivolous, possibly neurotic and, in the male of the species, certainly unmanly – Bates argued that they played a vital role. They acted, literally, as lightning rods to carry and defuse society’s repressed needs and desires.

The book delved at some length into why it is necessary for actors to be outsiders, how charisma is created and perceived, and the ways in which great performers can make huge spaces shrink and seem intimate. But Bates seemed particularly intrigued by the idea of extreme manifestations in performance, when actors become so absorbed in the characters they are playing that they either physically transform in some way, or have out-of-body experiences. In the rushes of The French Lieu

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In 1987, I was at drama school in Cardiff: by the sea, and all at sea. A swotty, wannabe rebel who’d done well at university, I’d swerved into a one-year acting course where closely argued, thesis-synthesis intellectual habits were useless. More than useless. They were, the gimlet-eyed improvisation teacher said as I gurned and stuttered through her class, a problem.

Thank goodness, then, for Brian Bates. I can’t remember which teacher told us to read his new book, The Way of the Actor (1986). But I can remember the sense of relief when I realized that, despite the icky subtitle – A New Path to Personal Knowledge and Power – it was written by a professor of psychology and had footnotes; this I understood. Bates’s ideas were intriguing. Using his own interviews with four leading actors – Charlton Heston, Glenda Jackson, Anthony Sher and Liv Ullmann – and excerpts from hundreds of other performers’ interviews and memoirs, he laid out a theory that actors were shamans for the modern world. They were, he said, men and women in touch with their many subconscious selves, what older societies would have called the spirits. More, at a time when it was common currency to be snobbish about actors – they were frivolous, possibly neurotic and, in the male of the species, certainly unmanly – Bates argued that they played a vital role. They acted, literally, as lightning rods to carry and defuse society’s repressed needs and desires. The book delved at some length into why it is necessary for actors to be outsiders, how charisma is created and perceived, and the ways in which great performers can make huge spaces shrink and seem intimate. But Bates seemed particularly intrigued by the idea of extreme manifestations in performance, when actors become so absorbed in the characters they are playing that they either physically transform in some way, or have out-of-body experiences. In the rushes of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Meryl Streep’s eyes, apparently, change colour from her own grey to the Woman’s deep green; William Hurt reports watching himself perform on stage as if he was sitting at the back of the stalls. Bates is a persuasive writer. At the end of the two nights it took to read the book, I had decided: I was going to be not just an actor, but an actor-as-shaman. In classes, in rehearsals and on stage, I tried very hard to access my inner others, to allow characters to take over and perhaps transform me. It never happened. Stubbornly, my self refused to be anything other than itself. I began to feel Bates had sold me a pup; the path to knowledge and power was actually a cul-de-sac. After a few years stuttering through work as an actress as I had once stuttered through class, I stopped. Eventually I landed a job on the arts desk of a national newspaper, theatre took a back seat, and The Way of the Actor stayed, forgotten, on my bookshelf.

*

Today, I am a journalist who likes to write about actors, and Brian Bates is sort of retired. He lives with his son and grandchildren in East Sussex, where he is working on a screenplay of his first book, The Way of Wyrd, along with a self-help book he’s co-authoring with his good friend John Cleese. We agree to meet in a café at the foot of the defunct West Pier in Brighton. Drinking coffee on a windy terrace, with long white hair blowing into his pale, excitable blue eyes, dressed in a kaftan-like patterned shirt and with large silver rings on his fingers, he looks like nothing so much as an amiable, slightly portly Gandalf. The 1960s was the decade that discovered Tolkien, and Bates might have been conjured up as the perfect product of those unbounded, fantastical years. Brought up in the dull suburbs of England’s Midlands, at 17 he was taken by his family to live in San Francisco. He’s unwilling to discuss his exact age (‘With all the afflictions I’ve had lately, I’ve put that aside’), but it seems he was studying psychology at the University of California at Berkeley just as the hippy movement came into its full, kaleidoscopic flowering. Not, I imagine, coincidentally, it was also when the late American anthropologist Carlos Castaneda began writing his influential and uncertainly factual ‘Don Juan’ books, which claimed to describe drug-enhanced, out-of-body experiences among the tribal shamans of Mexican Yaqui Indians. After perhaps ten years in the US, Bates returned to England to do post-doctoral research at Cambridge, before joining the psychology department of the then new ‒ and determinedly counter-cultural ‒ University of Sussex. He made enough of a splash, teaching courses in unusual states of consciousness, to become Chair of Psychology, but he was bored by all the paperwork, and in the mid-1970s he switched to teaching the psychology of acting to students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. While he was there, he wrote The Way of Wyrd (1983), which he called – perhaps mindful of the ragging Castaneda received from a sceptical press – ‘a work of documentary fiction’. It described an encounter between a Christian scribe and an Anglo-Saxon pagan in sixth-century Britain, and became something of a cult hit. By the mid-1980s, when Bates had spent almost a decade teaching and directing at RADA, The Way of the Actor must have seemed, to his publisher, a natural call. Rereading The Way of the Actor now, Bates’s writing seems, for a professor, surprisingly mass-market. He has a liking for the punchy, one-sentence paragraph, and no fear of marketing: in early chapters his better-thyself mantra about the path to personal knowledge and power makes regular appearances. (I’m still unclear what form that personal power might take; when I ask him in person, he says he hoped the book would encourage people ‘to feel more free about exploring their selves’, which doesn’t entirely help.) He likes to end a chapter with a question, which he promises to answer overleaf, a journalistic trick that herds the reader onwards. But the material from the four interviews he did himself is illuminating, partly because he is exploring as a psychologist the nature of an actor’s experience, and partly, I suspect, because actors are rarely interviewed about anything more challenging than what it was like being in their most recent film, and who they’re sleeping with. You sense how much Sher, Jackson et al. appreciated the seriousness of Bates’s questions, his forensic examination of the fine detail of their craft and the precise nature of their experiences on stage. And Bates clearly loves actors. Discussing them on the page he’s intense and serious; discussing them in person he’s gossipy and animated. When I ask which of the actors at RADA were most open to his ideas of transformation and altered states, he cites a list that includes Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall, Mark Rylance and Sean Bean. Bates wants to tell me about an improvisation class on fairy-tales with Bean at RADA, in which a young Jane Horrocks played a princess. Princess Jane was allowed to choose a horse: ‘I want Sean!’ Then, according to Bates, she ‘rode him about the classroom, slashing at things with her sword, before dismounting and going into a deep sleep. Sean was such a noble, gentle horse. He paced towards her on his hooves, then reached down – you could almost see his long neck stretch out, and his velvety muzzle – and he kissed her . . .’ Bates’s eyes sparkle at the memory. ‘She squealed!’ he says. We discuss Mark Rylance – a favourite student – and specifically Rylance’s interest in ritual and his belief that we are surrounded by spirits. And we talk at some length about Glenda Jackson, whom Bates interviewed when she was at the height of her fame, some years before she turned her back on theatre, slamming a bushel over the blazing light of her talent and choosing instead to become a determined, if unremarkable, politician. Bates hasn’t heard the news that after a twenty-four-year absence she is acting on stage again, playing the title role in King Lear at the Old Vic; when I tell him, he’s delighted she’s back. I’ve read plenty of interviews with Jackson over the years where she has blocked any attempt to get to the bottom of why she stopped acting. Bates, though, in his two long meetings with her, one in her dressing-room, one over dinner, recorded this in his chapter on the risks actors take with their own sanity:

Glenda Jackson, talking to me about the actor’s relationship with the audience, characterizes it as a situation soaked with fear. ‘You risk the whole of yourself – I mean, you do actually take your life in your hands and walk out there to see if that ravening beast is going to snatch it from you or allow you to keep it for a little bit longer. Actors commit so much to the work – it is so important to them, that acting always puts you in a life or death situation.’

Earlier, she tells him ‘the longer you do [acting], the harder it gets, because all you ever really learn are the difficulties of it’. It’s easily the best explication I’ve seen of the fears that drove her to politics: after dealing with the beast in the stalls, Parliament must have seemed a safe option. As the morning slips past, Bates, by increments, starts to interview me. Why do I do what I do? Why write about actors, rather than be an actor? I tell him how fascinated I was by the idea of transformation, but that I was always too analytical to get lost in a character. I say how much I enjoy watching actors and thinking about the fine detail of what it is they’re doing. Much like his book did. As we chat, I realize The Way of the Actor may not have helped me much with acting, but it did help me write. It put me, I say, on my path to personal knowledge and power. He’s delighted by this as, it seems, he is delighted by most things. He kisses me on both cheeks, and leaves, twinkling, to spend the rest of the day with his grandchildren.

*

Did he sell me a pup? Can great actors transform? Bates used footnotes; this is mine. London, 2010. The Apollo Theatre. It’s the final few minutes of Jerusalem, a play that has made its lead actor, Mark Rylance, a star. Rylance’s character – Rooster Byron, an impish figure who claims to have met the great god Pan when walking to Bristol along the M4, and whose home and whole way of life are under threat ‒ is beating faster and faster on a tom-tom, calling out the names of the old gods, in a last desperate attempt to put the modern world on hold. As the tempo of the drum reaches its crescendo, Rylance flings his arms up into the air, throws back his head and whoops. He’s a slight man, but his whole body swells, inflating to two or three times its normal size. His hair sticks out; his face lengthens and contorts, his eyes become huge, round and almost entirely white, like a roughly painted tribal mask. He is terrifying, unreal. Transformed. Blackout. The house lights come up. The audience sits, silent, bathed in the sudden yellow glare. Then there is a whoosh, an outpouring of breath, and a convulsion upwards. Everyone stands on their feet, roaring and clapping and cheering. I am standing with them, but I’m not cheering. I’m thinking, over and over: ‘Brian Bates. Brian Bates. He was right.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Isabel Lloyd 2017


About the contributor

Isabel Lloyd is the international culture editor for Newsweek. She lives in London, and tries to stay permanently in character.

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