Auditions

      It is eleven o’clock on a December morning and three actresses, clutching Shakespeare texts, are sitting on draughty benches just inside the stage door of a West end theatre, carefully ignoring each other like patients in a doctor’s waiting room.  The stage doorkeeper, unusually talkative for one of his profession, is trying to break the ice.  ‘Oh, yes,’ he repeats, ‘I’ve seen them all come and go here.  Sir Ralph Richardson, all of them.’  The girls acknowledge him without enthusiasm.  They are preoccupied.  In a few minutes they will be auditioning for the part of Ophelia in Hamlet.
      One by one they are led down the chilly passages to the womb-like darkness at the back of the stage.  Somewhere out in the blackened auditorium sits the artistic director of the Prospect Theater Company, Toby Robertson, his fellow director, Timothy West, and other invisible advisers.  From where you stand, blinded by spotlights on the front of a stage that stretches emptily away in every direction, you can see nothing of the theatre beyond the second row of blank stalls.  It is a platform in a vacuum.  Standing on it you might be disembodied, floating in space.
      ‘Good morning!’ calls Toby Robertson’s voice out of the darkness. ‘You are, let’s see . . . ah, yes.  What are you going to do for us?’  The first actress reads Ophelia’s speech to Polonius, describing Hamlet’s madness—‘My lord, I have been so affrighted’.  The words are apt.  She comes to the end of it with the leaves of the book in her hand trembling visibly in the lights.
      There is a whispered consultation.  Then:  ‘We want you to go on.  Can you do something more?’  With a look of terrified enthusiasm she says brightly:  ‘Right!  I’ll do the mad scene!’  ‘Good.  Will you do the song?  It’s up to you, of course.’  Timothy West’s voice cues her in from the outer darkness:  ‘How do you, pretty lady?’  She takes a deep breath and does the song.
      She, like the others, is there because her agent was telephoned and asked if he had anyone to suggest for Ophelia in a nine-month engagement next year, and to play as cast in other plays in the repertory.  By the time she reaches ‘Good night, ladies’, at the end of the mad scene, the unseen watchers have probably decided whether she should be offered the nine months.  But they will give nothing away.  ‘Right.  Good.  Thank you very much for coming along.  We’ll talk to Ken’ (her agent).  In the passage on the way to the stage door, she passes the next candidate coming down.
      One of the succession of Ophelias explains solemnly that she proposes to play her literally paralyzed with grief.  One proudly discards the book and then looks as though she wishes she hadn’t.  Another asks if she can take off her shoes.  ‘Throw yourself on the floor, for all I care,’ says the voice out front.  At the end of the morning the stage doorkeeper is still reminiscing to his changing audience of three:  ‘Yes, we’ve seen them all here.  Sir John Gielgud now, I know him very well . . .’
      After the Ophelias come the prospective Laertes, the Horatios the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns.  Auditions run for two or three weeks.  A West End theatre has been hired for the purpose during daytime hours.  They can use the stage until five o’clock.
      Nobody embarks on a production of Hamlet without having cast the Dane, the King and Queen, probably Polonius, perhaps the Ghost and First Player (roles which are generally doubled by the same actor).  The rest are filled by auditions of invited actors reading for specific parts and some by general auditions which may be advertised in The Stage, the profession’s weekly newspaper. In this case the company keeps a register of all those who have applied to work for it in the past year—170 strong—and very honorably invites them all along to be seen.  It is a time-consuming courtesy—not many of these are likely to prove useful.  In five days, only 25 people emerged who might do.
      All kinds of actors apply for Shakespeare auditions, some from steady jobs in the subsidized companies like the National and the Royal Shakespeare, some who are currently in pantomime or Oh! Calcutta!, or, more usually, in nothing.  Many bring ambitious pieces they have specially prepared for auditions only.
      ‘All right, then, give me your Henry.’  They give their Henry or their Richard, their Edmund or their Hotspur, and sometimes a character part with heavy accent and quirky walk.  Some positively bound about the stage in a totally unsuitable manner for a minor part.  One says boldly, ‘I’m going to go the whole hog and do “To be or not to be”’—undeterred by the fact that he would probably be the first Indian to play the part in this country.  No one is humiliated by being stopped in the middle, though there is the occasional reproof—‘I’m getting absolutely nothing from inside.  You mustn’t waste my time—or yours.’
      There is a marked disparity between their ambitions and the parts likely to be on offer.  One day every other actor seems to be doing Cassius, the next day Henry V, but the parts to be filled are likely to be inconspicuous courtiers like Voltimand or Cornelius, or possibly Osric or Fortinbras.
      Why go through this long-drawn-out and wearing procedure?  ‘You can talk to somebody in a room about a part for hours,’ explains Toby Robertson, ‘but when they get up there and use their body and their voice it may just be hopeless and it’s the only way to find that out.
      They are looking for qualities of voice, the ability to speak verse and physical presence on the bare stage.  ‘It’s a great mistake to move around a lot,” says Timothy West.  ‘The most useful thing to demonstrate is that you can do a six-line messenger speech and hold an audience of 1000 without shouting or waving your arms.   The people we want have also got to be versatile and not mind doing a lot of slave work in several small parts for very little money.  An actor can make much more money sitting at home waiting to do a few days telly.  With us you get a pretty good classical training.  You have to choose.  But I suspect that 70 percent of the people we want will turn down either the parts on offer or the money.’
      Why, then, are there so many hopefuls competing for anything that is going on the poorly rewarded stage?  The reason is that though money may be made in small parts on television or in films, reputations are not.  The stage is still the place for that.  Casting directors in television still look for their stars among actors of proved experience and reputation in the theatre.
      In the third week, the actors marked P (for Possible) on the director’s sheet are recalled and auditioned again.  They are invited to play scenes with the leading actors, Derek Jacobi (Hamlet) or Timothy West (Claudius).  This is unusual.  ‘I don’t like doing it because everyone is so tense and self-conscious,’ says Derek Jacobi.  ‘I hated doing auditions in my time.  But occasionally with someone you get the feeling—yes, I’d like to act with them.’
      On this occasion he finds an Ophelia.  With each of the finalists he plays the ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene with all the stops out.  The Ophelia who reacts most capably to being scolded, assaulted, even thrown to the floor, is Suzanne Bertish, an unconventional actress of 25 whom Toby Robertson had been impressed by when she was playing, of all things, a blind Jewish lady of 95 in Woyzeck at Glasgow.  She is already in a play and has taken a couple of hours off from rehearsals to attend.  ‘It’s very different applying for a part when you are in work rather than out of it,’ she says afterwards.  ‘Other people were far more excited when I heard I’d got it than I was.’     

The Director

      Touring companies have traditionally been run by actor-managers from the days when Shakespeare worked for the Burbages.  Now it is the day of the director-manager.  In most subsidized companies, from the National and the Royal Shakespeare to the large provincial repertories, directors are supreme.
      Toby Robertson ultimately is the Prospect company.  As its artistic director it is he who is finally responsible for the choice of plays (and of other directors to direct those he does not handle himself), for picking his ensemble of actors for the season, for deciding where and when to tour.
      To make the programme work is the task of the general manager and his staff, and there is a board of directors overseeing the whole complex operation.  But the success or failure of the year’s work rests ultimately on the shoulders of the artistic director.
      Inevitably he is something of an autocrat.  Inevitably the company members have, as one actor put it, a love-hate relationship with him.  It was always so, in the days of Irving or Kean or, at the Old Vic itself, Lilian Baylis or Tyrone Guthrie.  The theater does not work well as a democracy or under committee rule.
      Toby Robertson has been running Prospect for twelve years and has nurtured it from being a summer-seasons-only company to the leading touring theatre in the country, with an international reputation.
      The year which this book describes was a very exceptional one for Prospect.  It was the year in which a marriage took place between Prospect as a company and the Old Vic theatre, with all its illustrious theatrical ghosts, to create Prospect At The Old Vic—a touring company with its own home theater.  For the first time in its life, the company did not have to break up at the end of each season.  It became a continuous entity, playing from one year into the next.
      Despite all these organizational distractions, the director’s first priority is to get the plays on.  The year’s five productions are being staged:  Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, both directed by Toby Robertson himself, Shaw’s ­­­­­St. Joan and Dryden’s version of the Antony and Cleopatra story, All for Love.  Besides these there is an experimental production, part dance, part drama, called War Music, based in part on Homer’s Iliad.
      The productions cover a spread of centuries and styles and not all, of course, attract full houses.  Actors are cast for their suitability not for one part but for a ‘line’ of parts through the repertory.  Timothy West, for example, plays Claudius in Hamlet, Enobarbus in Antony and the Narrator in War Music; Robert Eddison the Inquisitor in St. Joan, the Soothsayer in Antony and, later in the season, the Ghost in Hamlet.