This Much Is True

I went and stood by the looming totem pole. In a few moments, Mrs Cohen came out. She gave me a long look and said, ‘Good morning, I understand you want to see the Gertrude Stein portrait. Follow me.’ I followed her through the museum from one end to the other, along corridors, through galleries. We came to the elevator. We got in and went down, down, down, all the way to the sub-basement, where they store the pictures not on display. And, again, we walked from one end of the gallery to the other.

I turned a corner and there, leaning against the wall, was Gertrude Stein. She was looking straight at me. The power of the painting is immense; the pose was one I was to adopt for the play: leaning forward, hands on her knees, with a thoughtful gaze — that’s how the show opened. You could not escape the eyes, there was a kindness in them I hadn’t expected. I shall never forget the experience of seeing her there, ‘looking as if she were alive’, as Robert Browning said in his poem, ‘My Last Duchess’.

Now I was ready to be Gertrude.

As anyone who’s been to the Edinburgh Fringe will attest, it’s no picnic. The competition is immense, the fight to put up posters bitter and sometimes violent. The theatre wasn’t ready when we arrived; actually, it was not even built. Scaffolding poles were on the floor; the posters we had sent weeks before were lying in the office, undistributed. So we all had to go fly-posting, desperately seeking publicity, chatting to strangers, handing out the flyers.

Sonia checked the booking in the Fringe Office. ‘What’re the bookings like for Gertrude Stein and a Companion?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you’ve sold six,’ the lady said encouragingly.

‘For the first night?’ Sonia asked.

‘No, for the entire run!’

The first night was half-empty, but the next day our fantastic reviews came out. From then on, it was a triumphant sell-out, winning a Fringe First Award, then a transfer in January to the Bush Theatre in London and another transfer in April to the Hampstead Theatre; both theatres sold every seat for every performance.

The Sydney Festival then invited Sonia and me to do the show for the tenth anniversary festival in 1986, again to sell-out audiences and glorious critical acclaim. Sonia won the Green Room Award for Best Direction. We opened in Sydney at the Belvoir St Theatre. That’s where I first met Geoffrey Rush, who’s become a good friend. (I played Peter Sellers’s mother — Geoffrey played Peter — in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in 2004.) We then opened in Melbourne after the Sydney run, and had a similar triumph at the Universal Theatre, Fitzroy.

Buoyed by the play’s reception Down Under, Sonia and I decided to take Gertrude Stein and a Companion to America, during the summer and early autumn of 1986, on a campus tour where we played only to university audiences. We had hoped to play in professional theatres, but two women, who should have known better, stopped us.

Lucille Lortel in New York and Blanche Marvin in London had snatched Sonia’s script idea and presented their own mangled version of the play at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York in January 1986. The only good thing to come out of their machinations was that I hired an excellent lawyer, the late David Latham, to protect our campus tour — yes, they tried to shut that down as well, even attempting to bring in Actors’ Equity to stop us. (Years later, Sonia’s daughter, Rachael, joined David’s firm and went on to become a distinguished entertainment lawyer herself.) Ms Lortel died in 1999; if Ms Marvin is still alive, I hope she will never attempt to send me Christmas cards again, for two reasons: we’re both Jewish, and I loathe her. The Colorado College was our first American destination. The idea was that we would teach a semester in theatre studies (Women in English Theatre) and perform Gertrude Stein and a Companion at the end.

I enjoyed teaching, but Colorado College seemed to be full of rich, stupid kids on drugs. I found that irritating, so I opened by laying down the law. I said, ‘Now, in class you will not be necking with each other. You will be paying attention to me and to Natasha when we are speaking, and you will write an essay and hand it in without this nonsense of computers.’ (I’m a computer person now, but I wasn’t then.) They accepted my strictures, and I was quite popular in the end. Those young Americans were completely different from their English counterparts. How privileged they were, all with wealthy parents; like Australians physically, but they lacked the toughness of the Australian youth. They were flabby, both mentally and physically — big and blue-eyed, but soft and lazy. I had no time for laziness, then or now. I won’t have it.