Elegy to artistry
In bringing Thomas Bernhard’s ‘hymn to the theatre’ to Edinburgh, director Tom Cairns is giving his audience an insight into his own inner workings, f inds Susan Mansfield
I’VE BEEN talking to Peter Eyre and Tom Cairns for about 20 minutes at a pavement café in London’s Bloomsbury when a woman approaches our table. “It’s Grotowksi you want,” she says, “if you want to know about acting.” She smiles helpfully and hurries away, unaware she has just, on the basis of overheard snatches of conversation, recommended a book on acting theory to one of the country’s most eminent actors and a highly acclaimed director. Eyre gives a big philosophical shrug: “It’s Bloomsbury,” he says. “They’re intellectuals around here.” I’ve just been watching them in rehearsals for
Minetti, by Thomas Bernhard, which will premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival tonight. The work of the Austrian playwright, who was also an acclaimed novelist, is little performed in this country. Minetti is a great, angry, hymn to the theatre, and this version has been adapted by Eyre and Cairns with the hope of raising his profile in the English-speaking world.
Eyre is in the title role, an ageing actor waiting in a hotel lobby in Ostend for a meeting with a director who has promised to orchestrate his comeback in a production of King Lear. It’s New Year’s Eve, and as a storm rages outside, the play itself becomes Lear-like, a fallen man railing against life who finds a fragile acceptance of his limitations.
They run it a bit at a time, with Cairns stopping to have discussions with Eyre or one of the other actors about what the character might do, asking: “What do you think?” “How does that feel?” He says this is how he prefers to work. “I know I can learn from the actor as much as I hope he can learn
What attracted me to it was because it was about an artist … I could relate to it
from me. I’m not trying to be holy about it, I have very strong ideas about what I like and don’t like, but it’s important to me there’s a collaboration.”
Eyre was already a fan of Bernhard’s work, having seen several productions in Europe, when a translator friend suggested he might have a go at
Minetti. He went through his considerable contacts book – in a 50-year career on stage and screen he was worked with most of the greats, including Trevor Nunn, Jonathan Miller and Michael Grandage. “I thought about every director in England, and I thought, ‘Tom Cairns might like Thomas Bernhard’. So went to meet with Tom. I felt terribly embarrassed. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this play, I think it’s very interesting, it’s by this Austrian writer, I don’t know whether you know him…’ And he said, ‘Thomas Bernhard, I love him!’ So we went on from there.”
Cairns, a versatile director who is acclaimed in theatre, opera and film, came to Minetti rehearsals from opening a new production of Verdi’s La
Traviata at Glyndebourne. “It’s a chalk and cheese moment in my life,” he says. He started in theatre as a designer and is also designing Minetti. He says he found Bernhard’s passion for the theatre resonated with him. “I found his work challenged me and I relished that, I enjoyed being challenged in a way that doesn’t always happen. I liked the fact that he was able to talk about the big issues.
“I suppose what attracted me to it was because it was about an artist, and because I’m trying in my life to be an artist, I could relate to it, it got under my skin. I understood the passion of those arguments, because I felt those passions myself sometimes. It made me understand myself a bit
better as an artist.” Minetti is a play about the theatre and the hardships a man suffers by refusing to compromise in his work.
Eyre says the voice in it – perhaps in all Bernhard’s work – is his own. “He’s always writing about a solitary individual, usually a writer or artist, who is struggling to do something in a society that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of time for that sort of thing. There’s a line in the play where he says, ‘Artists spend their lives trying to do something nobody understands, but we carry on regardless until we die’. I think that’s very much his thing.”
Bernhard, who died in 1989, has been described as one of the greatest writers working in German in the 20th century. He has the reputation of being an iconoclastic, difficult figure, shaped by a difficult childhood and a bout of tuberculosis as a young man which crushed his hopes of becoming an opera singer. His work for the theatre is uncompromising. His play Heldenplatz, which compared racism in Austria to the Hitler regime, opened under police guard in 1988 after threats of a riot. He won numerous prizes – and usually used his acceptance address to offend the awards body.
But Eyre says he was also a master of absurd humour. “One doesn’t want to make him sound like he’s just bad-tempered. I’ve watched several television interviews with him, and you expect him to be a rather strange man, but he’s a rather good-looking guy with a lot of hair, he’s very polite, very courteous. He just thinks most things are shit, that’s the bottom line.”
Minetti is unusual in that the majority of the text is carried by a single character (“I wish someone else would speak,” Eyre sighs when I mention this), but it also requires a sizeable supporting cast. Cairns has cast three other professional actors who are on stage for much of the play, and a team of 14 young actors from Rada and New York’s Juilliard School will play the other parts. Eyre says: “As you get older as an actor your choices are more limited in terms of very interesting roles, especially on television, you end up as somebody’s uncle in two scenes. It’s a great part for an older actor.
“In this play because he hasn’t acted for a long time, I’ve seen that happen with so many actors. When actors don’t act, they lose their sense of self very, very easily.
“Most actors think they’re only human beings in some way when they actually have a job. It’s madness, the whole way the theatre takes you over when you are in a role, it becomes your reality. It makes you realise what a strange thing, what an odd thing it is to be an actor.”
It’s madness, the whole way the theatre takes you over
Minetti, Royal Lyceum Theatre, tonight until 18 August, 8pm; tomorrow, 2:30pm. www.eif.co.uk/ minetti.