This Much Is True

In 2009 I was cast in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame directed by Simon McBurney (of Théâtre de Complicité) at the Duchess Theatre in London. It’s a one-act play with just four characters, and I was the only woman. Mark Rylance was Hamm; I was playing Nell, Hamm’s mother; and Tom Hickey, an Irish actor, was playing Nagg, husband of Nell and father of Hamm. Richard Briers was going to play Clov, Hamm’s servant. I don’t know why, but Richard dropped out after the first rehearsal and Simon McBurney took over the role.

Our first meeting for the read-through was enormously cordial, but I felt uneasy. Mark Rylance is one of the greatest actors in the world. He’s not ‘grand’; he is approachable, loves a laugh, listens attentively and is generous with praise. I was nervous of working with him, I knew he would spot my ignorance and ineptitude. But he made me feel at ease because he shared his own anxiety. And when you feel that you’re fellow-travellers, the panic subsides and the creation can begin. Simon too, has that gift of instant democracy. It is a blessing.

The problem was that I had always thought Beckett was a waste of time and I didn’t have a clue what he was on about. For a start, for most of this play I would be wedged in a dustbin. I really wanted to work with Simon and Mark, however, so when I was offered the role of Nell, I accepted like a shot — and then I panicked. I didn’t have a clue about how to play this part. I sat there at the read-through in dread. In the end, I just came out with it: I told Simon that I felt completely at sea — I couldn’t understand where we were; how and why were we in dustbins? (I still haven’t fathomed that one, admittedly.) I said that he was going to have to tell me how to play my role, and, luckily for me, he did. I was also a bit nervous about the Irishness of my character. I’m good at accents, but a bad Irish accent is an embarrassment. So, rather than launch into full ‘Oirish’, I decided that I would simply have a suggestion of Irishness. It was carefully done, measured out, so it was perfectly obvious that I wasn’t Irish, but at least nobody had occasion to accuse me of a bogus brogue.

It was unlike any other rehearsal process I’ve ever experienced. For the first week or more, we didn’t attend to the text at all: we just played physical games. I had been brought up in a different way — you start and finish with The Text; but Simon had us playing football, and catch. In fact, I had seldom been so physical out of bed, and I was the one who barely moved: I kept saying I’d go in goal.

We also spent a lot of time improvising and playing status games, where Mark, Tom and I would take turns coming into the room, and we had to show our status: who’s up and who’s down, who’s the boss and who’s the poor underling. If it’s used skilfully, that kind of exercise can be enlightening and, happily, on this occasion, with Simon’s direction, it was. It can also, however, be a total waste of time. For example, if a director says, ‘Be an ostrich’, or ‘Be more brown,’ (that was actually said to me) I know it’s not going to work. I belong to a more conventional school of acting; I’m with Sir Noël Coward, who said, ‘Learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’

But more than anything, rehearsals come to life when we connect with the other people on stage; something happens when you work together and it’s good — the performance grows, it flowers. The moment of creation should be honourably shared, when no one is trying to be more important or take the eye, because we make the moment together. I don’t understand why Laurence Olivier said to his fellow performers: ‘Don’t look at me.’ How do you work with someone if you can’t look at them? As I said, on stage, every glance, every moment, is telling me something and I must be ready to receive it.

I have worked with actors who tend towards a less generous, less democratic approach to the art, or the work, or whatever one calls the job that we do. They keep moving while someone else is talking. Start knitting in the middle of someone else’s speech, noisily open a letter, or start sweeping. Quite wrong: if it’s someone else’s moment, you have to allow it; you have to pass the baton, and unfortunately some actors don’t like doing that. A good director enforces baton-handovers.