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Jennifer
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Date Posted: 19:22:43 02/16/02 Sat
Those dorks at The Times put in all this fancy stuff to prevent their articles from having copyable URLs, so fair use be damned, here's a much better article:
February 11, 2002
Exile back on main street
by Benedict Nightingale
Theatre: Ex-RSC star David Warner has finally conquered his stage fright to return to the West End
Call him Rip Van Warner. Think of him as the bright star that suddenly disappeared from our telescopes, or the young meteor that inexplicably vanished into a black hole, or even the theatrical knight who never happened. In 1972 the 31-year-old David Warner played the title role in a West End version of I, Claudius, developed a serious case of stage fright, abandoned the theatre for the next 30 years, and is now, to his own astonishment, returning to the London boards in a play called The Feast of Snails. He’s 60 but, he says, feels barely older than when he left us: 32, maybe, or 33.
We met in a pub, where he drank alcohol-free beer, and an Indian restaurant, where he cheerfully noshed chicken danshak. And that was fitting, for he’s far from the sort of man who would hold court in the Ivy or shop in Jermyn Street. In his old jumper, corduroys and specs, he cuts an affable, utterly unpretentious figure. You sense the diffidence and the vulnerability that made him the actor he was and surely still is. You also wonder if those very qualities don’t explain his strange professional odyssey.
Though he’s loath to admit it, even quoting a review that described him as “a demented retard”, his 1965 Hamlet was a key event in the history of the RSC and, indeed, the postwar British theatre. True, traditionalists were appalled; but the young and the open-minded flocked to Peter Hall’s production. What they saw was a very 1960s figure: a dishevelled student prince, an awkward post-adolescent in search of an identity and, according to the critic Ronald Bryden, an actor who gave “marvellous new life” to a painfully familiar character.
Characteristically, Warner couldn’t believe it when he was offered the role. Princes, he thought, were supposed to be good-looking, sturdy, sexy and dynamic, not gawky, gangling and 6ft 2in. He even asked Hall to write on a piece of paper that he wanted him as and not in Hamlet. But then he’d earlier assumed that he was auditioning for the part of Henry VI’s understudy, not the king himself, before he was cast in another legendary RSC production, The Wars of the Roses. At that time he regarded himself as ignorant, unsophisticated, “not worthy”: “People think if you can play Hamlet you’re a Shakespeare scholar. Well, I was struggling through Enid Blyton.”
Even by Warner’s standards of modesty, that’s quite an exaggeration. Nevertheless, he wasn’t exactly a credit to his school in Leamington Spa or to his entrepreneur father. He was bad at games, convinced himself he was stupid, failed all his O levels, and was then reduced to selling newspapers. But he had an increasingly lively second life that roughly dated from seeing Oliver Twist and Great Expectations on the screen, and being astounded to discover that, thanks to make-up, skill and magic, an actor called Alec Guinness could be both the monster Fagin and the spritely Herbert Pocket.
A shrewd teacher cast him as Lady Macbeth and Shylock in school plays, and he joined an amateur group in Leamington, while making regular trips to the rep at nearby Coventry and the famous theatre at Stratford. There Warner saw Paul Robeson’s Othello, Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona and young actors , such as Alan Howard and Ian Holm, whom he was to get to know well. Whenever he could, he wangled his way behind the scenes, and, on one memorable day, on to the Stratford stage itself: “I remember it was covered with straw for Lear or The Dream. I never dreamt I’d one day be acting there myself.”
That dream seemed even more remote when, just before Warner went to London to audition for RADA, his father got a letter from his local drama coach saying he was sure to fail. Actually, he got in, but found himself cast there mainly as old men and butlers and resigned himself to a career of small parts. That prospect seemed even likelier when he dried on the second line of his audition for Olivier’s new National Theatre and walked off saying “sorry”. But then he landed a tiny role in the RSC’s London production of David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come, and suddenly he found himself in Stratford, embarrassed to be playing leading roles while some of the actors who had inspired him were playing smaller ones.
It was a heady time. Film directors such as Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz wanted him for their films, the latter making him a national name by casting him as the comically crazed, gorilla-loving title character in Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment. But trouble, never far off, came when he was preparing to play the village simpleton in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. A fall from a window that he still can’t explain — “I’ve never taken drugs or been suicidal” — left him with shattered feet. He had to learn to walk again: which is why he appears in the film as an invalid. A physical disease he’s loath to discuss — “a Dennis Potter sort of thing” — then laid him low. And though the early 1970s brought him leading stage roles in Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice and David Hare’s Great Exhibition, he felt more and more insecure, “nervous because I was nervous”. That was compounded when he ran into a fellow graduate from RADA, who pointed at Warner’s name, which was above the title of I, Claudius on Shaftesbury Avenue, and rudely asked him who the f*** he thought he was: “It wasn’t a sudden, dramatic thing, my stage-fright. I started feeling really uncomfortable in the theatre. I didn’t want to be on stage. I didn’t even want to be in the audience. I suppose it was a phobia.”
He told no one, even his agent, about that phobia. Instead, he made vague excuses when he was offered stage roles and let people think he had “gone Hollywood”. And after making some decent films, among them a version of Ibsen’s Doll’s House with Jane Fonda, he actually decamped to California, where his American wife’s family lived. And there he worked obscurely, slaking his residual workaholism with what he wryly calls “meths”, meaning pretty much any rubbish he was offered: villains with English accents, including a nasty manservant in Titanic, or sci-fi creatures, including a Klingon with a head swathed in latex. But in the early 1990s he performed in some radio plays before a live LA audience, then did a public poetry reading with Helen Mirren, and began quietly to ponder a return to the stage. And last year there came an offer to play Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara. Warner protested that he was far too thin for the portly munitions magnate, but the director, Daniel Sullivan, refused to be put off. The actor appeared on Broadway, felt relaxed and got super reviews: “It was a miracle. The angels said, ‘OK, David, we will give you a break this time.’ The fog cleared and I remembered why I was an actor. I rediscovered something I thought I’d lost for ever.”
Warner admits that he’ll have the normal flutterings in the stomach
at the first night of Olaf Olafsson’s Feast of Snails, in which he plays “a sort of thin Falstaff, a really extroverted, outgoing person, totally unlike me”; but at rehearsals he was feeling as much at ease as he did in New York last year. What seems to worry him more is that people may think it an awful cheek to come straight into the West End in a leading role after 30 years absence, “but perhaps that’s my paranoia”. He’s also well aware that no one under 45 is likely to have heard of him.
So in some ways he’s still the self-effacing, self-doubting Warner who persuaded the RSC to publish quotes from bad as well as good reviews in the programme when his Hamlet transferred from Stratford to London, and then tried hard to prevent the producers of I, Claudius from advertising his name so prominently. But there’s change too.
Warner knows he’ll never play Romeo, but he also feels there are still solid parts he could tackle in the theatre: “After all, didn’t Sarah Bernhardt play Hamlet when she was 70 and had one leg?” He’s joking, of course, but not wholly joking. He would seriously like to keep working on stages large and little as well as screens big and small. He is, he says, at last able to see his life and career in terms of glasses that are half-full rather than half-empty: “I’m still alive, I’m still in the game, I’m still working, I’m still here.”
The Feast of Snails is in preview and opens on February 18 at the Lyric, London W1 (020-7494 5045)
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