VIII
At the end of July 1978, I went to Taormina in Sicily to help with the Italian pre-publicity for Jubilee. The trip proved as disastrous as I had expected. The film was shown on the last night of the festival at 2.30 a.m.; I left an hour into the film, leaving an audience of nine in the cinema, of whom at least four were asleep. The lonely and isolated days at the festival were brightened up by meeting Paul Morrissey, whose rather awful attempt at ‘Carry On Sherlock Holmes’ was showing. I found it difficult to equate this urbane, besuited New Yorker, who epitomised the Warhol I Interview ‘sell-out’, with that dull and silly film – the canny English gent Holmes must appeal to New York gay snobbism. A party was thrown to close the festival, on the terrace of one of the plushest hotels in the town. I felt out of it, leaning against the balustrade with a perfect view behind my back, ignored by the Italians who had bought Jubilee as they were courting bigger fry. Knowing no one, a mixture of boredom and social unease overwhelmed me. Suddenly Amanda Lear, ‘ITALY’S NO. 1 singing star’, appeared at the door. She spotted me, and walked straight over, rescuing what had started out as a very dull evening.
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Later, in the old Roman theatre built in the hill above the town, packed with an enthusiastic and noisy Sicilian crowd of at least 5,000, Amanda took the stage with a bacchanalian relish that would have pleased the ghosts of the Caesars. In a confetti of flashlights she slithered over fallen columns and tumbled stonework on to the stage, half snake, half leopard, singing her ABC in a deep husky voice. The roar which greeted her nearly put the moon out – the paparazzi broke ranks, tumbled on to the stage, and lying on their backs took photos by flashlight up Amanda’s skirt. She stepped over them, catlike. Whatever your reservations, you couldn’t but be carried away with the immense gusto with which it was done. The audience went wild.
I watched a curious sideline to the event, as a subtle propaganda exercise that the Russians had undertaken was destroyed. They had brought a blonde corn goddess dressed in a lavish emerald-green evening-dress, who until Amanda appeared in her leopard-skin had been the centre of attention. This was a situation which brought obvious satisfaction to her keepers who had guarded her jealously throughout the festival. Amanda won the crowd, Capitalism’s ultimate weapon triumphed. At the end of the film, Morrissey’s Sherlock Holmes, the scatological humour of which met the approval of the arena, all 5,000 of the audience lit candles as the stage lights were lowered and sang a song in the pagan dark to end the night’s entertainment.
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Brandishing knives, forks, whatever came to hand, my mother would stand on the kitchen table and recite long passages of Henry V she had learned at school; Agincourt would be fought against the Germans, while we stood in amazement, staring up at this aproned amazon from a schoolgirl play …
At Kings the Shakespeare text was The Tempest; and afterwards I read it often. At first I made designs for an imaginary production at the Roundhouse, in which most of the theatre space was flooded, with the audience on a magic island of inflatable silver rocks, trampolines, and a huge, banner-like cloak. I talked with John Gielgud about these designs when we worked on the ill-starred production of Don Giovanni. Later, in 1975, I made my first cut-up of the text, in which a mad Prospero, rightly imprisoned by his brother, played all the parts.
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Friday 4 August 1978 – Halton: Late in the afternoon I sat with my sister, Gaye, at my mother’s deathbed. She was totally lucid the whole time. Worried about her appearance, she asked for a mirror, had the photos of my nephews and nieces moved so she could see them, and asked me about Italy, where for the last three months I had been writing the first script for Caravaggio. I described my visit to Capri, a place I knew she loved and which she had visited in 1947 – blue sea, sunshine, beautiful flowers. In my grandfather’s home movie she blinked in the sunlight and smiled into the camera; a title appeared on the screen which introduced you to ‘ever-smiling Betty’. Never once during all the years since did she cease to smile – her detachment from her illness is such that in the last weeks the hospital has employed her as a therapist among the other cancer patients. Last week, when a young priest came, she put scarlet cherries in her ears, and laughing, told him she believed in no life after death; then, troubled lest she’d hurt his feelings, entertained him to tea and made him promise there should be the shortest possible ceremony. He was shattered; as were the nurses, who through the eighteen years of her illness spent in and out of hospital have become some of her closest friends. When I left Halton she said goodbye silently, with a radiant, wistful smile which told me she knew why we were all there … the next morning we rushed back to find her in her death agony. My sister and I took one fragile hand each as her life fluttered away like the proverbial swallows. It was difficult to know whether to speak or not – neither Gaye nor I could believe that after all these years of attentive listening she wouldn’t hear. I asked her if she was comfortable – ‘Are you all right?’ – and she whispered so quietly that maybe I imagined the response: ‘Of course not silly, but you are.’
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I often wonder about the effect of Ma’s eighteen years of illness, borne with such serenity, on myself and my sister. This flashed across my mind as I stood in the municipal crematorium, while the parson read out the briefest of committal services. Ma had asked for no ceremony, but by law you have to have one. The young priest, whom she had joked with and chatted to over a cup of tea about life, not the after life, was visibly moved by her death. He apologised to her for having to read the committal, said he’d make it as brief as possible.
She could never bear to let us see her down – forbade too-frequent visits to the hospital. Never once during the years when her life was in the balance – she must have been in considerable pain, and confusion from the drugs – did a shadow cross her face. She was an enthusiast, and had a vibrant, vivacious manner which made our home the ‘centre’ – all the kids played there, confided in her, and returned long after we left to discuss their problems.
She was also severely practical. Notes were left pinned on the refrigerator announcing food and then SWITCH OFF THE LIGHTS! when we returned home late. She had learned to move quickly and leave the past behind, for little could be carried on our constant removals. And when we arrived at a new home, as we did nearly every eighteen months, she managed to brighten the place up, however ugly it was. She always cooked so that there was an extra place set and friends could stay for lunch; it was never a problem. If I quarrelled with my sister, order was instantly restored: not by reprimand but theatrically – ‘You should hear yourselves’ – and then she’d pick a fight with Dad over something ridiculous, till we all had to laugh. I never heard my parents quarrel: a moment’s irritation at the most, usually over something we had done or failed to do.
At times she seemed to be in another world; but that, I now realise, had been the effect of the huge quantity of drugs she was forced to take. Even this could provide amusement. One night she entertained some rather ‘proper’ friends – the editor of one of the dreaded popular dailies and his wife. She inadvertently poured salad cream over the strawberries in the kitchen. We all dipped in at once as she’d made the moment special by announcing, ‘The first strawberries of the summer’. There was an uncomfortable silence. ‘Oh my God how silly of me,’ she said, and whipped them back into the kitchen to wash them, laughing while we tried to keep straight, grown-up faces.
When Ma died I felt elation: she had been up and about until near the end, had always been so happy with simple and homely things, never regretting anything or envying anyone. She had managed to live her life to the full in a very modest way, and keep to that way to the end. I know she worried a little about the effect her illness was having on us, just as she always worried about our health: ‘Derek, you looked peaky. You don’t eat enough. You must EAT.’ Or, ‘Do not worry about seeing me. It is quite unnecessary. I will be well content to wait till your return from Rome. I am doing all I should and surprising everyone. Writing awful – balanced pad on wobbly book on wobbly knee.’
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Apollo
The handsomest dark-haired kid in his early twenties, American collegiate but Italian, came into the Apollo restaurant with an older, rather elegant and severe woman, with greying black hair brushed back. He had a physical confidence I’ve hardly ever seen.
He sprawled into the window seat; then flashed a smile that would have entranced Garbo as he caught me looking. There was no hesitation or glimmer of embarrassment, as if the admiration was his by right. ‘Come on, look at me’ – he put his arm around the woman’s shoulders slowly and deliberately. The restaurant dissolved as he caught my eye and held it; the seconds ticked past, and I stared back flushed with a cold fear; thirty, forty, fifty of them, such dark and cruel eyes, laughing at me, and those dazzling white teeth … ‘Come on, I fucking dare you.’ Later they left. In my entire life I have never been smiled at like that. I dropped my eyes after a minute that seemed like a night of love.
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Filming Shakespeare, October 1978
The settings of Shakespeare films always clash with the language: spirit turns to icy matter and falls like hail. Shakespeare works best in Russian, where the problem of his language is circumvented. Even Henry V, perhaps the most successful English adaptation, is a stylistic confusion – caught between the artificiality of the medieval miniatures in the Tres Riches Heures, and the damp naturalism of the Irish countryside.
For The Tempest we needed an island of the mind, that opened mysteriously like Chinese boxes: an abstract landscape so that the delicate description in the poetry, full of sound and sweet airs, would not be destroyed by any Martini lagoons. The budget was only £150,000. Britain was the magic isle. I sailed as far away from tropical realism as possible.
The key to a film can be its design – too often left to designers who dress the film in a kind of wrapping, like a doily around a birthday cake. Audiences see nothing beyond the surface, are willingly dazzled by the roses and silver balls; but when design is integrated into the intentional structure, and forms part of the dialectic, the work begins to sing. Ivan the Terrible is the most perfect example. ‘Epic’ has had more than its fair share of icing, but Eisenstein reinforces the humanity and ambiguity of Ivan through design. This integration of design in a film is not only the preserve of ‘high art’. The Wizard of Oz is another perfect example.
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Synchronicity
13 November 1978: I sat on the edge of my seat at lunch with three generations of the Leigh family in the panelled dining-room of Stoneleigh Abbey. Leighs had been having lunch here since the 1540s. The meal was served by the housekeeper Ms Leigh, who had austere silver-braided hair smelling of cloves. Lunch progressed in a strange silence which I attempted to break – but there was no communication between the generations. Afterwards, in the growing darkness of a winter afternoon, old Lord Leigh (who was to die a few months later) led me through the abbey, switching on lights which I then switched off as we left each of the rooms behind. He talked quietly to his ancestors on the walls as though they were still alive – Tudor Leighs and Stuart Leighs, with names like Augusta. One was ostracised for her implication in the Gunpowder Plot. There was Lord Byron, whose picture hung in the Library; Jane Austen, writing in the Green Room; Queen Victoria, on a visit; and then silence … Room followed shadowy room, until we reached the vast and empty Georgian wing, where we were to film. It had phosphorescent greying mirrors, and chandeliers, which, when we later lit them with a hundred or more candles, animated the plaster ceilings in an unexpected way: the gods and goddesses, encrusted on them amongst fruit and flowers, danced in the flickering light.
As I left I noticed a portrait of a young woman in the entrance hall, and asked John Leigh who she was. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen’, for whom The Tempest was performed one winter evening in 1612.
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November, 1978–February, 1979: During November I took out the scissors and cut up the play for the third time.
Having decided on the format of a dream film, one which enabled me to take the greatest possible freedom with the text, I cut away the dead wood (particularly the obsolete comedy) so that the great speeches were concertinaed. Then the play was rearranged and opened up: the theatrical magic had to be replaced.
The endless corridors and lost rooms of Stoneleigh suggested servants, romantic scholars with opium pipes, young girls with dresses spun from gossamer and frosted with shells and feathers. By the time filming was commenced, on 14 February, we were living in another world. The cameras began to turn with the house in darkness, its shutters closed against the blizzards outside.
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Spiders
Film is the wedding of light and matter – an alchemical conjunction. My readings in the Renaissance magi – Dee, Bruno, Paracelsus, Fludd and Cornelius Agrippa – helped to conjure the film of The Tempest. The magical signs that Prospero drew on the walls of his study came either from the Occult Philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa, or are Egyptian hieroglyphs as they were used in the seventeenth century, as the writing of ‘the Adepts’. My seventeenth-century copy of the Occult Philosophy was open on Prospero’s desk – its first English edition. On the floor the artist Simon Reade drew out the magic circles that were blueprints of the pinhole cameras he constructed in his studio next to mine at Butlers Wharf, thereby making a subtle connection. Prospero’s wand was built by Christopher Hobbs in the form of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, which symbolised the unity of spirit and matter.
Heathcote Williams (Prospero) was conversant with this pre-Scientific approach to the physical world, and so we were able to jettison the cruder theatrical magic of the stage for something more refined and developed. When Prospero calls the unwilling Ariel at the beginning of the film, the chandeliers tinkle, a glass overturns and a spider runs under the staff. Ariel is Prospero’s spider and catches his enemies on gossamer threads.
The Shakespeare who spun The Tempest must have known John Dee; and perhaps through Philip Sidney he met Giordano Bruno in the year when he was writing the Cena di Ceneri – the Ash Wednesday supper in the French Ambassador’s house in the Strand. Prospero’s character and predicament certainly reflect these figures, each of whom in his own way fell victim to reaction. John Dee, with the greatest library in England, skrying for the angels Madimi and Uriel (so nearly Ariel) – all of which is recorded in the Angelic Conversations – ended up, in his old age, penniless in Manchester. Bruno was burnt for heresy.
Ten years of reading in these forgotten writers, together with a study of Jung and his disciples proved vital in my approach to both Jubilee and The Tempest. As for the black magic which David Bowie thought I dabbled in like Kenneth Anger, I’ve never been interested in it. I find Crowley’s work dull and rather tedious. Alchemy, the approach of Marcel Duchamp, interests me much more.
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January 1979, London: Yolanda is designing The Tempest. We’ve known each other for twelve years, and are now working together. All she needs to do is transfer the contents of her home in Hamilton Terrace to Stoneleigh. Her house is a treasure trove, absent-mindedly cluttered over every surface. Yolanda moves around it sighing: ‘Oh dear, where did I put the bamboo – Oh, here’s a piece of lace, a shell, a mask.’ She paints wan and ghostly figures in oils, fast, on huge canvases propped precariously in corners. Outside the window the garden is a jungle: an old cherry tree, cascading with white snowy blossom, covers it like a Victorian parasol. There are costumes and masks, mannequins from de Chirico, brushes, books, and branches hanging from the ceiling. She moves like a ballet-dancer, and dresses like one. A touch here and there – she stands forlornly like a doll in a tide of tinsel artefacts.
She works with a few deft strokes to produce collage-like costumes. Miranda’s dress is created in minutes from an old silk wedding veil, feathers and shells. All the while Yolanda sighs – life is so difficult. Mournful, but endlessly resourceful, she rallies her ‘students’, who arrive at the oddest of hours at Butlers Wharf, and organises a chain-gang to make a thousand roses out of silk and satin to decorate the pergolas she has already designed for the ballroom. In the freezing cold, the studio becomes a fairyland.
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‘One Song Welsh’
24 February 1979, Stoneleigh: Elisabeth Welsh arrived in the snow to sing ‘Stormy Weather’. I first heard Lis sing last December at a party with Freddy Ashton, a Ruth Etting song ‘Ten Cents a Dance’. Fred told me all about her, and I decided to ask her to be in the film.
She entranced all the young sailor boys at the marriage party – her singing was an enchantment. Yolanda’s bright-orange dress illuminated her like a fiery moon. In the cold ballroom she worked non-stop through the day, never missing a cue; and still had the energy to entertain everyone at the dinner-table in the refectory. Single-handed, she replaced Iris, Ceres and Juno … Lis told us that she hated leaving England because here the newspapers always announce the age of murderers and film stars. She picked up a copy of the Mirror and confirmed it. ‘One song Welsh’, as she called herself, had one song in The Tempest and true to form she stopped the show.
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Miranda
Toyah’s bravado and vitality carry her through: on film she transforms like a chameleon – the dumpy Mad of Jubilee, in her fatigues, is hardly recognisable as the ethereal Miranda with the wicked chuckle. Her slight lisp gives her voice character. She’s a born performer who plays her roles, including that of pop star, with deadly accuracy.
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Prospero
Heathcote/Prospero sleeps somewhere deep in the abbey in his shabby frock-coat and waistcoat of scarab buttons. He appears, rats in his hair, to devise new games and entertainments, his efforts fuelled by the Bulmer’s Cider which Simon buys each day. We have brief discussions about his role, and he shyly produces lines he feels I should keep – ‘Lest the blind mole hear a footfall’. He develops a cold which gives his voice a gravelly resonance. One night, at dinner, he says, ‘I’ve been entertaining you lot far too long – if no one entertains me within one minute I’m going to piss all over you.’ Then he jumps on the long refectory table and starts to pee a cider torrent. We dive for cover. Heathcote is embarrassed, and apologises – more to himself than us. He has a wild anarchic gentleness, and is the genius of oblique strategies. He breathes fire and bends keys, not to startle, but to test divine possibility. He is an ideal Prospero, performs sympathetic magic, destroys the poetry and finds the meaning. I’ve rarely heard lines spoken with such clarity – ‘and my Zenith doth depend upon a most auspicious star’. These words are spoken softly, not bawled across the footlights. How Shakespeare would have loved the cinema!
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Rushes
The first day’s rushes are disappointing; Peter Middleton, who has lit all three of my films, feels it and so do I. It’s often like this, we remind ourselves, until the work settles down. We decide to let shadows invade – the lighting is too bright, too television. Gradually the rushes become more spectacular, the boundaries disappear. Each evening we eagerly watch them, and if they fail to turn up there is gloomy disappointment, as watching them is the perfect end to a hard day’s work.
The Tempest, Miranda (Toyah Wilcox) (Photo: Bridget Holm)
Without Peter there would have been no films. He has gradually encouraged me, given me confidence and helped me find my feet. A large part of me is still the reclusive painter, who breaks out with over-enthusiasm; this is tempered by Peter’s technical precision, the long pauses while he lights hold me in check, and the combination produces results. The film is constructed extremely simply with masters, mid-shots, and close-ups. The camera hardly ever goes on a wander. This is deliberate, as I’ve noticed that if one deals with unconventional subject-matter, experimental camera work can push a film over into incoherence. What works at the Co-op and in the Super 8 films does not necessarily work within the format of the feature film, on a large scale.
In The Tempest we paint pictures, frame each static shot and allow the play to unfold in them as within a proscenium arch.
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The butterflies ‘psyche’ hibernate in the folds of the tattered silk curtains, a faded green washed out by a hundred summers. They were proudly hung for Queen Victoria’s visit. As the lights warm up the empty rooms the peacocks and tortoiseshells wake up, thinking spring has arrived. There is a sudden brilliant flash of colour in the middle of a shot. Drowsy and easy to catch, we put them in jam-jars and ferry them to colder rooms. Today I picked the first snowdrops and put them on the mantlepiece; they are there to reflect Miranda’s waking into maturity in the film.
John Leigh and one of his groundsmen bring in some of the richly gilded Venetian chairs that once furnished the house. Heathcote waylays him. ‘Do you know the origin of your name?’ John Leigh looks puzzled. ‘STONE LEA – STONE LEY: standing stones and leylines. Very ancient, very important to know your origins.’
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Karl Johnson
… and who is that angel Ariel? Fettered and chained to Prospero, he flits through the air and the salt deep, flaming amazement. Our Prospero is young and healthy, the first time he has been cast that way; beside him Ariel seems wan, world-weary. It’s a subtle reversal of the accepted order. Most of the lines are there: ‘Do you love me master no?’ – we’ve cut that out as with my reputation they’d expect it. Karl plays his part deadpan. He’s in the most modern of our costumes, which are a chronology of the 350 years of the play’s existence, like the patina on old bronze. A workman with kid gloves, he could be teasing together the parts of a computer in a dust-free factory. His voice is drained, hollow-eyed he acts with just the faint hope of a smile. When he escapes at the end – ‘Merrily merrily shall I live now’ – he sings with such melancholic wistfulness, and disappears to the heartbeat of swans’ wings.
Karl picks his guitar in the evening, talks of his brother, and acts with a reticence that covers passion. At the end of the filming he asks Heathcote to release him. For a moment even Heathcote does not understand the request is in earnest.
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When you call ‘Action’ there is nothing more to do, everyone else is hard at work. You are the bystander, and at ‘Cut’ you can sense if the take has worked – the reaction of the crew and cast is usually unanimous if something has gone wrong. The first take is invariably the best; after that, each take seems a reproduction, an attempt to recapture the essence. My direction might seem slapdash, as nothing is decided beforehand – ‘I flow with the glue,’ as Heathcote says. In a big film you can pay to get the image in the mind on to film, a laborious process that can lose the life of the work on the way, but with small resources you allow the work to take its own course. Setting up a film like this you form a magic circle, like King Arthur. Once the circle is complete it is impossible, fatal, to attempt to break it.
When Neil Cunningham, who played Sebastian, said The Tempest was a party, he could not have paid me a greater compliment, as in all my work I’ve tried to make the working experience enjoyable. For me that is much more important than the end-product. The only audience I worry about is my collaborators on the film; everything, and everyone else, is outside the circle. Cinema audiences interest me no more than the tide of humanity that passes each day under my window in Charing Cross Road – I wish them well. Provided the cast approve of the finished result, find the experience of making the film a joy, I’m happy and wish for nothing more. This is the secret of making small films; text and idea are definitely not fixed – FLOW WITH THE GLUE. This separates my work from the British television and features industry, where the people who make the films, directors and technicians, are paid in an hierarchical order, and brought together for money, not by a community of interest. Their work is adopted and adapted; they’ve never put pen to paper to find out who they are, what they should be doing. Even the brightest of critics confuse the issues. For me only film-makers who initiate and write their own work are of any value. In Britain, directors who work in this way can be counted on one hand, and hardly any of them have been fortunate enough to make features. All the rest is ‘veneer’, reproduction which ranges from the visually ugly vacuity of Brideshead, to Chariots of Fire, a damp British Triumph of the Will. Their instigators are placemen with large public personae, covering a void.
It might seem obvious that work should be undertaken with spirit. In Italy or France this attitude to film neatly balances the other, but everything here is against it: the career men of the TV companies; the gold-diggers of Wardour Street; the unions with their ‘left-wing’ politics and reactionary attitudes to life and work, their protectionism and ill-defined and therefore corrupt systems of entry; Equity with its tedious theatre actors who destroy life on film and who view the ‘film’ for money before scuttling back to the National Theatre for ‘Art”s sake. But having said that, who can blame them? For a tally of English film ‘product’ (property and product – he’s bankable, ‘weigh yourself in devalued fivers my boy’) shows NO LIFE or vitality and NO LOVE.
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A wild anger bubbles away like magma below the surface. I check it. Burroughs said that sometimes he was possessed by the evil spirit – I understand the feeling: a dizzy surge in the blood, the heart beats faster, the eyes turn inwards. The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. The concept of forgiveness in The Tempest attracted me; it’s a rare enough quality and almost absent in our world. To know who your enemies are, but to accept them for what they are, befriend them, and plan for a happier future is something we sorely need. After the chill wind that blew through Jubilee came the warmth that invaded The Tempest; happy days rounded the cycle of three films.
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16 March 1979, Bamburgh: Throughout our four weeks of filming at Stoneleigh there was deep snow. During that whole time I never left the house but lived in the candlelit twilight of glistening mirrors, surrounded by people in masquerade. Neil said that the four weeks were a party given by a great eighteenth-century magnate like Beckford, our evenings occupied by Heathcote’s fire-eating and Orlando’s songs, performances of The Immortalist and Simon’s guitar. We left the old house in a blizzard and travelled north through the snowdrifts to York, where we were stuck for a day as all the roads were closed by drifts and thousands of abandoned cars. At Bamburgh, which we reached by several diversions after a twelve-hour drive, the blizzard began again. That evening I went for a walk along the sands, with the snow howling in sheets off the waves, and the castle looming black through the great white plumes which vortexed around the cliffs; the foam from the surf blew through the darkness, the sea pitch-black. I walked with apprehension, for the ice seemed to be encroaching on all sides. In the days that followed we had to sweep the sand dunes free of the snow; and David Meyer (Ferdinand) had to dive into the icy sea to emerge naked from the waves.
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The Tempest, Caliban (Jack Birkett) and Sycorax (Claire Davenport) (Photo: Bridget Holm)
Orlando
Jack Birkett (who played Borgia Ginz in Jubilee, and now Caliban in The Tempest) kept up everyone’s spirits: he played ‘I spy’ in the car, sang music-hall numbers in the evenings, and clumped around in his clogs armed with a tape-recorder from which he learned his part. We rehearsed slowly, arm in arm, often no more than twice, and he always hit the mark. His laughter echoed through Stoneleigh. ‘This island’s mine by Sycorax, my muvver’ in his North Country brogue brought spontaneous applause from the crew. He ate the raw eggs with a wicked relish, and every so often sat in the corner in a fit of melancholy. It is seventeen years since he went blind, but during that time has turned himself into a great harlequin. Later, we went to see the film together at the NFT. When the lights came up at the end he said, ‘It looks ravishing Derek.’
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The exterior scenes of the film were difficult, the weather atrocious. Jack had a deadline to return to his work in Italy, the sun came out fitfully, we were already delayed by a week and had five days in which to finish our work. We stared for hours, anxiously waiting for a break in the clouds. In the event we finished the shoot, but with the barest minimum of material, which made for difficulties in the editing.
The blue filters worked. I was desperately anxious that the exteriors should not look real, and chose the dunes at Bamburgh for their lack of features. Without trees or other landmarks they could have been anywhere, and we deliberately reduced the castle to a silhouette that could have been cut out of paper.
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The Tempest obsesses me. I would like to make it again, would be happy to make it three times. A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well, but that will wait as the resources needed are greater. The Russians have done the Lear and Hamlet, but the Dream waits to be put on film; Nijinska’s fairies are not to be beaten but the play was lost by Reinhardt. The masque also seems to have been lost, not only in the English theatre (Lindsay Kemp is in exile) but also in everyday life – it’s such a vital element and so distrusted by chapel and Eng. Lit. The Tempest is a masque; what it lacks, in the theatre productions I’ve seen, is a sense of fun. You wouldn’t subject a sixteen-year-old at her wedding to an indigestible evening. Whatever is buried in the play, the surface must glitter and entertain. If a sense of enjoyment could be restored to the work, half our problems would be resolved and the other half seem more easily dealt with.
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14 August 1979, Butlers Wharf: Alasdair arrived at Blitz ashen-faced at 1.30 in the morning to tell me the warehouse was burning. Within minutes we were down there on his bike. Three floors of the building had already been gutted, down to our studio roof, and the building was surrounded by a mass of hoses pumping water on to the flames. We sat, faces drawn, on the river wall through the whole night with spectators from the neighbourhood. Jean Marc, who has lived and worked at Butlers for the last two years, was missing but the firemen assured me they had searched the building with breathing apparatus and found no one in it. He arrived at 9.30, and on the verge of tears the two of us tramped up the stairs against a cascade of oily water to find a sodden, smoke-stained ruin. By some miracle Jean Marc’s polythene darkroom had collapsed over a metal cabinet in which he stored his negatives – this was all he saved of two years’ work. Peter Logan lost everything … there was no insurance. So the ten years of warehouses along the Thames came to an abrupt end; and with it an entire style of life that had enabled me to paint, and to make the Super 8 films.
Ten years before, in August 1968, Peter Logan and I moved into the old corset factory at the end of Blackfriars bridge in Upper Ground. The rent was £2.50 a week. This was the first New York-style loft building that any of our friends had in London. That winter we froze. But when Ken Russell walked into the building I’m certain he gave me the job of designing The Devils as much because of that environment as for my drawings. In 1970, when Upper Ground was demolished, we moved to Bankside, which became the most beautiful living-space in London as the money pouring in from The Devils enabled me to convert it. At Bankside there were film shows and poetry readings and parties. For Christmas 1970 we built a table the length of the room and sat forty people down to a three-course meal cooked by Peter on improvised calor stoves. The tables were banked with scented white narcissus from Covent Garden, and a ‘walky-talky’ telephone connected either end. At the end of the meal, joints wrapped in the American flag were served with the coffee, and then we played charades behind a beautiful collaged curtain, a Rousseau Garden of Eden that Andrew Logan had made on transparent polythene. Fred Ashton and I kicked off as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
Life in the warehouse brought fun and laughter into our lives with a thousand events. People camped out, swung or slept in the white hammock suspended across the room. Andrew kissed a thousand home-grown celebrities, and once Katy Hepburn came to tea.
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27 August 1979, Edinburgh: An audience of over two thousand watched the first showing of The Tempest at the festival. I sat at the back of the auditorium on the edge of my seat. To my relief very few people left. The sailors’ dance, which Stuart Hopps had choreographed in a couple of mornings with a few dancers, brought an incredulous burst of laughter and applause, and Elisabeth’s ‘Stormy Weather’ capped it as a show-stopper, before the film plunged back into darkness with Ariel’s ‘Where the bee sucks …’
The reaction to the film in America was very different. Many saw it as deliberately wilful, and the New York Times mounted an attack which destroyed it in the cinemas there. In such a fragmented culture messing with Will Shakespeare is not allowed. The Anglo-Saxon tradition has to be defended; and putting my scissors in was like an axe-blow to the last redwood.
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