THE DEVIL IN MR RICKMAN

By Jane Edwardes

(Time Out, Apr 1986)

Forget the book. Forget the film. This is Theatre! Alan Rickman is talking about the new production of 'Mephisto' in which he plays the actor Hendrick Hofgen whose pursuit of success at all costs drives him into the chilling embrace of the Nazis. It's Saturday lunchtime and he has just finished rehearsals at the Barbican, a place he seems doomed never to leave. He looks scruffy in a fashionably actorish sort of way, with straggly hair, not at all like the bullish Klaus M. Brandauer in the not-to-be-mentioned film. Yet after his triumph as the Vicomte de Valmont in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Rickman is on of the hottest properties in town - a consequence of playing one of the coldest of bastards. He says he returned to the RSC in order to try something bigger and in casting him as Hofgen, director Adrian Noble has certainly given him that opportunity.

'Mephisto' was originally adapted from Klaus Mann's novel byArlane Mnounchkine, France's answer to Joan Littlewood, whose production of '1789' revitalized the Roundhouse in the '70's. Hendrick Hofgen was modeled on the German actor Gustav Grundgens who married Mann's sister, apparently a truly ghastly marriage entered into from sheer opportunism. 'Mephisto' was Mann's revenge. Rickman claims that the play is better than the novel or the film because it doesn't concentrate entirely on one character but on the whole company and how each one of them is affected by and responds to the rise of Nazi power in Germany.

'The text', Rickman says, 'is constantly trampolining itself forward and saying this is about now, not just about the Nazis. Can you say I am only an actor if the pursuit of that aim allows you to push everyone and everything else aside?' Did he find it disturbing to play an actor? 'It's very strange, like a constant succession of mirrors being shoved in front of one's face. Almost the whole of the play is set on various stages, so I am constantly doing things onstage that I have just done offstage.It's as though the dross of our lives is being turned into something for the audience to watch. By the end of the play the proscenium arch has shifted from the back of the stage to the front with the audience playing itself. But what resonance it will have in the Barbican is hard to say.'

As actors, Hofgen and Rickman could not be more different. Rickman, who lives with a woman actively involved in politics, has no time for actors who are only there for their own self- gratification. He is constantly questioning why he is an actor and does not settle for the easy response that it's what he does best.

Born on an Acton council estate, Rickman has ironically played a constant stream of aristocrats. 'My mother was Welsh and my father was Irish and I can speak both accents like a native, yet in my whole career I have never been asked to.' His father, a factory worker, died when he was young and his mother had to struggle to bring up four children on her own. Rickman's gravelly, uppercrust accent was acquired at Latymers School in Hammersmith, to which he won a scholarship. He left to go to the Chelsea College of Art as Drama school wasn't considered the sensible thing to do at 18.' One year at the Royal College of Art and another of those instincts told him to leave but it was not until he was 26 that he dropped his application to RADA into a letter box and changed his life.

If art college gave him a strong visual approach to theatre, he is also notable for his ability to take risks. The audience at 'Les Liaisons' seemed to be holding its breath as cherished moral values were lightly tossed around the stage from character to character. 'I always wanted the play to have the same effect as the book and I knew I had to seduce, 200 people in the audience as well as the women in the play. The quality of stillness and silence was a measure of how far we had succeeded. We had to draw people into us and then hit them with the play.' At times Rickman is so quiet that he even got letters from people in the front row saying that they couldn't hear him.

But will Rickman manage to seduce 800 when the play transfers to the West End? 'I always thought that Shakespeare had the right idea about acting at the end of "The Tempest" when he binds Caliban to him and lets Ariel go. It's a question of harnessing your physical resources and letting the spirit go. English actors have all sorts of pluses but sometimes they don't even know how to walk across the stage. An American dancer once said that "it's a question of capturing the energy on its impulsive exit through the body." 'While I mull over this typically intractable American statement, Rickman rescues me. 'But of course that's very abstract. The most important thing we can do is to tell a story.' Sometimes the directors and designers swamp the story by losing the actors in their grand designs. But Rickman thinks the actors are fighting back. 'I tell you there's something straining at the leash in British theatre today. Things are changing even here in this very building. There's an awful lot of energy around but I don't know quite who is going to get to the tape first.' I know who I would put my money on.

 

 

 

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