The awkward art of acting English Robert Bathurst
Diffidence, restraint, over-politeness... Robert Bathurst, the modern master of playing Englishmen, salutes the craft of his heroes
This is a very broad commission – to discuss the acting of Englishness. Rather than ring up the Editor and ask him to narrow the definition a bit, I’ll make a guess that what we’re tackling here is the unfashionable end of the market: the portrayal of middle- and upper-class, white, male characters whose emotional range is limited to restraint, embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, fear of intimacy, self-deprecation, hypocrisy, modesty, courtesy, deception, fair play, sarcasm, understatement, fence-sitting, fuss-avoiding, over-politeness, conformism and a searching for the happy medium in all things.
It’s a rich seam, full of subtlety. The actor of Englishness must get all of the above into the line ‘I do beg your pardon.’
The finest exponents of this style of acting, historically, often were from very different backgrounds from the characters they played. Part of an actor’s impetus to Toff It Up A Bit in their off-stage persona came from within the profession itself.
Henry Irving lobbied vigorously for his knighthood, awarded in 1895. In accepting the honour, he said that it had elevated the acting profession’s respectability, giving long-overdue recognition of its place in society and at last actors could be accepted at Court, when for centuries they’d had the social status of vagrants and criminals.
Aside from the vainglory Irving may have enjoyed, he did have a point – though it is questionable why anyone thinks an actor should be given a gong. The profession, especially today, gets recognition enough and a K doesn’t make you a better actor. Most honour citations for actors should read ‘For services to their career’.
Despite Irving’s ennoblement, the acting profession remained insecure. In the 1930s, an actor in a play in London could be reprimanded by the management and threatened with suspension if seen walking in the West End without gloves and a hat; this criminal slovenliness let down the reputation of their profession.
This meant that actors of the 1930s and later generations had a strict imperative, financial and for professional advancement, to play the game. George
Bernard Shaw railed at the curse of ‘society-struck actors’, aping the upper classes in their off-stage lives.
The litany of actors who come to mind as being the epitome of Englishness are a colourful parade of, mostly, Burlington Berties whose ambition was spurred on by distressed gentility, real or threatened.
Lawrence Olivier was the son of a peripatetic vicar; the sublime Leslie Howard was from a Hungarian Jewish and Prussian immigrant family. Robert Donat, Rex Harrison and Charles Laughton, likewise, had backgrounds far removed from the Kensington and Mayfair lives they portrayed on film.
This lies at the heart of what it takes to do the job and how good they were at it.
How much of the actor is on show? How much is real? The answer is: none of it – not consciously. This goes against the perception that actors are just playing themselves, something encouraged by PR agents and, often, actors, to make them sound more interesting, as though they and the character they play are one and the same. How many more ghastly profiles do we have to wade through where an actor talks about their process and how they felt performing the part?
Noël Coward was dead against this artistic embodiment – what he called ‘the modern trend, [in which] you have to be in the mood, and feel it’. He said, ‘You cannot afford to feel it when you are playing eight performances a week and you’re going to give the public their money’s worth.’
It’s this robust showmanship as described by Coward, a pragmatic, technical toughness, that belies the sometimes loose, languid diffidence on which some actors successfully traded.
David Niven, George Sanders, John Le Mesurier, Patrick Macnee, Robert Morley and David Tomlinson; you wouldn’t want to cross them by saying that they didn’t care and were just playing themselves. They knew exactly what they were doing and what value they could give to a line of dialogue.
Some actors knew where they stood in the market and resisted all offers to veer away from it. Kenneth More was courted by Peter Hall to play in a Shakespeare production. He refused; he felt that the audience didn’t want to see him stray from the sort of part they were familiar with him doing. It was also a canny way of maintaining his profile as a star, settling on an image and polishing it for ever.
Another scrapper who oozed upperclass, English suavity, and stuck at it for his whole career, was Finchley-born
Terry-thomas. He was a type, always, but a type in a pickle. He combined beautifully and in an extreme fashion the playing of a high-status character with a low-status predicament. Cartoon-like in its execution, maybe, but always with its own truth.
My favourite exchange is in the film Too Many Crooks, where he’s kidnapped, tied to a chair and blindfolded by George Cole, who is blowing cheap cigar smoke over him and pretending he is an international criminal. Terry-thomas elides his three-part response into one swift sentence: ‘International criminal? What’s that you’re smoking, a Congo rat? Who’s your accountant?’
Another enjoyable, wily performer, who, when choosing roles, stuck to his guns and always pointed them in the same direction, was Wilfred Hyde-white. He knew exactly what he was doing while seeming to make no effort. He is quoted in Moray Watson’s memoir as saying, ‘I went to the RADA, and learned two things. One is: I can’t act. The other is: it doesn’t matter.’
All these actors, along with many others including Alec Guinness, Trevor Howard and Jack Hawkins, shared one underrated quality: you could hear what they said. It is a taboo in some circles now to say that an actor is inaudible; I’ve worked with directors who are too scared to say so or too cloth-eared to notice. I once filmed some dialogue with an actor who was standing about four feet from me but the only way I knew it was my cue was that his lips stopped moving. Consonants are not elitist: discuss. See also, for great, audible actors, Michael Hordern, Peter Cushing and Denholm Elliott.
My acting heroes described here are all dead. There are many others alive today who play Englishness with deftness and subtlety, underscoring what they do with weight and surprise. It seems to be a diktat of modern drama that no such characters are to have any redeeming human qualities. But there are ways to subvert that and it’s always possible to sneak some interest into the part when the guards aren’t looking.
Englishness, as defined here, might be coded, sly and dishonest, but those qualities make for stories both richly comic and understatedly desperate. That is why it will not go away, whatever the high priests of the arts decree. It may die with the final generation to enjoy irony, cruelty, euphemism and disguise of emotion.
Good riddance to Englishness, those high priests will cry – but there’s some great fun to be had along the way.