At the Old Vic

Publicity

      No company likes to risk opening a play ‘cold’ in London.  An out-of-town tour is a chance to iron out staging problems—one of them, the trucking on stage of the Queen’s noisy bed, was solved by dispensing with it altogether.  By the time Hamlet returns to its home, the Old Vic, it has spent five weeks on the road, including a gruelling fortnight of one-night stands in Germany with hundreds of miles to coach travel every day.
      Now, back on a familiar stage, the actors should be able to concentrate entirely on their performances and characterization.  They must be at their best because future ‘business’ depends on how critics and audiences react to the first week of performances.
      Hamlet, untypically, opened sold out for three weeks, with an ‘advance’ of £21,000 already in the box office, thanks to the television reputations of Derek Jacobi and Timothy West.  Even the previews were sold out.  It is the custom to invite to these the managers of ticket agencies, large and small, and (shrewdly) the hall porters of major London tourist hotels.  It may all help to build the ‘word of mouth,’ that mysterious factor of personal recommendation which can sometimes save a show even after the newspaper critics have panned or roasted it as a ‘turkey’ or a ‘bomber’—there are many synonyms for a flop but they are no comfort if you are in one.
      Before opening night the publicity office (in this case one hard-worked girl) goes into high gear in attempting to build an audience.  There are two press nights.  The national newspapers’ drama critics and show business correspondents, international papers, Reuters, BBC radio, certain prestigious weekly magazines—these are on the first night list.  The majority of magazines, local papers, and tourist ‘What’s On’ publications are invited to the second night.
      Personal contacts are made to set up interviews with the leading actors (sometimes even the author) on radio and television, or with profile writers, show business and gossip columnists.  There is a photocall at which the company in full costume perform the difficult feat, at 11 o’clock in the morning, of throwing themselves into excerpts from the play and freezing at dramatic moments for a row of blasé photographers.  Production stills by the company’s own photographer are given away.  The rest of them are already up on the boards outside the theatre, soon to be joined, it is hoped, by favorable excerpts from the critics’ notices.  Handbills go out to the ticket agencies and social clubs; coach tour operators are offered reduced ticket prices for party bookings; the educational authority and school drama advisers are encouraged to arrange school visits (Hamlet is always on someone’s examination syllabus).
      Perhaps the biggest factor for success or failure is the ticket agencies, known as ‘the Libraries.’  If interested, they take half the seats in the house, usually the left hand side of the auditorium, while the theatre box office retains the right hand side.  On a typical show, a third of the seats booked in advance will be sold by the libraries, a third by the box office and the remainder will be sold on the doors on the day of performance.
      The first night audience for an unknown play would often be depressingly thin were it not for the giving of complimentary tickets—‘papering the house.’  Obviously there are ‘comps’ for the management’s friends, the ‘angels’ who have put up a share of the production costs (in a commercial theatre), the agents, relatives and friends of the cast (who may get four free seats each allocated to them).  But in this case tickets are like gold dust.

Critics

      The critics are greeted in the foyer by the theatre publicist, Priscilla Yates, given a program and invited to have a drink in a private bar upstairs in the interval.
      First nights generally ‘go up’ at 7 p.m. half an hour early, because morning newspaper deadlines vary from 10:45 to midnight.  Even speedy Hamlet plays for over three hours—overnight  critics can scarcely ever see the duel—and will ‘come down’ about 10:15.  No wonder critics do not often stay to applaud.  If you see a man in an aisle seat, striding out and grabbing his coat, apparently unmoved during an ovation for the cast, he is not expressing displeasure, he is just a critic.
      It is commonly, and wrongly, believed that critics decide together in the interval whether to turn their thumbs up or down on a show, like the Vestal Virgins at a gladiator contest.  This persists in spite of the fact that their notices so often disagree.  In fact there is a strong convention among critics that it is ungentlemanly and never done to speak to one another about that night’s production.
      Though actors owe much to the appreciation of critics—no one ever complained of a good notice—the two species are natural enemies.  It is rare, and unwise, for them to be friends offstage.  Adverse criticism is always hard to forgive.  It is harder still to believe it just, not because actors are so vain but because they are so vulnerable.
      In another two hours the critics will be in their seats and the die will be cast.  How does a director feel at this eleventh hour?  ‘I feel it belongs to the actors now,’ Toby Robertson confesses privately. ‘There are things which will never be quite as I want them.  But you have to work with your actors and, especially, with your Hamlet.  This Hamlet is perhaps a more rational man than I saw originally, but Derek has to find his own interpretation.’
      In a radio interview that day, Derek Jacobi has been saying exactly that:  ‘In the end you can only say that’s how I play Hamlet.’  But he adds that his performance is more aggressive because of his director.
      Both of them are showing the strain in the form of imaginary ailments, inability to eat and sleep, mysterious pains.  ‘My body is saying it doesn’t want to do it,’ says Jacobi .  
      The notices were, as usual, ‘mixed.’  You never get unmitigated compliments, let alone raves, for Hamlet because it is too rich a play, too much a Himalayan peak of a part, for anyone to give the definitive interpretation.
      If Hamlet is a man of action, he will be criticized for not being a philosopher.  He will either be not mad enough, or not sane enough, and so on.  Unorthodox touches—such as this production’s delivery of ‘To be or not to be’ not as a soliloquy but as an intimate confidence to Ophelia—will be praised by some and taken severely to task by others, as ‘not what Shakespeare intended’—as though Shakespeare had left explicit instructions.
      Do actors read their notices?  Leading actors always say they don’t—and there are good reasons not to.  ‘But I heard enough about them to upset me,’ said Derek Jacobi, some months later.  ‘If people come up and tell you not to take any notice of what X or Y said, you know they’ve given you a roasting.  The one I did read insisted that I had got the stresses wrong in certain lines and suggested it was because I did not know what the lines meant.  That was really a bit much, a bit insulting.  It bothers you the next night when you play the lines.  You assume, quite wrongly, that everyone there has read the notice too, and is thinking the same thing.  The only thing to do as an actor is to forget it.’  He obviously hadn’t.  It still rankled.
      Even compliments can be unsettling because they can make the actor self-conscious the next time he plays it.  ‘A lot of effects are unconscious on the actor’s part.  You literally don’t know how you get them.  You come to that place again and you wonder what you did that made them say it was so good.  Then you can easily be lost.’

Overseas

      Repertory, tough and demanding as it is, gives you no time to recuperate.  Fresh or tired, elated or downcast by the first night reception, the very next morning the cast starts work on a new play—Antony and Cleopatra—soon joined by Dryden’s version of the same story, All for Love.
      The strain of playing one Shakespeare play at night after rehearsing another all day is considerable.  Altogether, there are four plays in production, all of them having to be ready within five weeks of one another.  There is not quite enough energy left to work 13 hours a day, and there is a spate of resignations (mostly withdrawn later) among the overworked production staff.
      No one has had a day off, other than Sundays, from March to July.  The new productions are not played in to anyone’s satisfaction.  Some people are feeling the effects of cholera and typhoid injections in preparation for the five-week Middle Eastern tour which follows.  Morale, for a few dangerous weeks, is floundering.
      It is in this overstrained and overtired state that the company has to prepare to take Antony and Cleopatra as well as Hamlet on tour of the Eastern Mediterranean.  The British Council, showing the flag culturally at foreign festivals, fixes and pays for the extremely expensive travel involved, which no company could afford out of its own coffers.
      From the company’s point of view, foreign touring keeps the actors employed for so many weeks of the year, when it might otherwise have to disband for lack of enough touring dates at home.  From the fees paid by foreign festival organizers there may be a modest profit of around £5,000.  From the actors’ point of view there is the attraction of a bit of realization in usually agreeable surroundings.  They are put up at very good hotels and given a daily allowance of £8-£10 in local currency for meals.
      A British Council representative gives a preliminary talk on their role as unofficial ambassadors and recommends prudent behavior, salt tablets, and the removal of Marks and Spencer labels from their underwear before entering an Arab country.  Only the barest of scenery is taken on tour, and two lorries have already set off to drive across Europe with it plus the heaviest furniture and props which cannot go by air.
      At 11:00 on a Saturday night the company finishes its last performance at the Old Vic.  At 8:00 the next morning the actors meet again at London Airport to catch the flight to Istanbul.  The penalty for missing the place is dismissal.  There isn’t another flight till Thursday.