Roger Rees, artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival
There’s Work to Do
President Schapiro, Dean Roseman, parents and friends, Distinguished Members of the Williams College Class of 2006 —
There’s the good news and then there’s the bad news. Good news first — your professors have shown me your results which are tremendous. Well done. You’ve made it through. However — and here’s the bad news — none of you, during your stay here at Williams, have done so well that you can expect to have the rest of your life off. I confess a tear comes to my eye when I realize, if we had taken all your tuition ... and put it into something really nice like Microsoft ... none of us would ever have to work again ... we could simply endow ...
But that wouldn’t be a very interesting life. And there are all kind of investments....
Which means the real work begins today. Your real work. May I say, it’s amusing to me — and, please God, somewhat amusing to you, too — that Williams would invite an actor to remind you of this. I thought you were bright people? Why ask an actor about work? All an Actor knows is to do what he’s told, and that if he does what he’s told he’ll get paid.
An Actor knows that much. “You want me to say it like that? O.K. Fine.” Yes, Actors — we’re, what we like to call — ‘craftspeople.’ We’re not encouraged or paid to think. That’s alright. Hey, we’re anxious to please, too — if that’s OK?
Here’s a puritan, John Northbrooke in 1577 — his treatise against plays:
Are not almost all places in these our days replenished with jugglers, scoffers, jesters, and players, which may say and do what they list, be it ever so filthy and fleshly?
That was Mr. Northbrooke in 1577.
You see, Ballet Dancers dance every day. Opera Singers sing daily. People following my vocation have nothing to do but study life itself — and where do you begin? At best, we hold the mirror up to whatever we can get hold of, and, it’s a big canvas; understandably, we disappoint on occasion. You try being glamorous yet true, 24/7.
There was a guy playing Richard III in Boston — at his first entrance it was evident to the angry audience that he was somewhat the worse for drink; the disappointed crowd yelled, “You’re dunk — this is a disgrace!” King Richard held up a wavering hand for silence and then answered “You think I’m drunk — wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham!”
It wasn’t legal to bury an actor in Manhattan until 1890 — ere that we were buried in Queens with the Sailors. In the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Glendale, there are 5,000 indigent seamen from 28 nations, and 800 actors — all getting along famously, I’m certain. And, quite right, too; we’re a friendly lot. We have to be, since we know very little and are always out of work. Do you know that’s why Macbeth is an unlucky play for actors? In the 18th century, if you finished up in a new but bad play and that play was poorly received — you and your play would be yanked immediately and replaced with Macbeth — the play that never disappoints. “Not only Shakespeare’s bloodiest play — also his shortest!” as I saw it advertised in California last year.
We complain a bit too much, perhaps, Actors, when we’re out of work; and, when we’re in employment, we’re guilty of bragging we can’t wait for this or that particular engagement, from Tally’s Folly to Twelfth Night, or What You Will, to be over and done with. It’s all pretend, you see — and some of us only exist on stage - it’s not easy to deal with. I drive to a Provincial theater, engaged to play someone’s husband for a couple of weeks, then drive off at the end never to see the woman again. Maybe, I’ll meet her twenty years down the road at an opening somewhere, “I was your wife in Cambridge for two weeks, do you remember?” that sort of thing. We’re not a very sincere lot. We daren’t be. One man in his time plays many parts, so will you blame us if the grass seems ever greener on the other side of the green-room. It’s Nature. Our Nature. Actors flit and flutter about. We’re vain, particular, beautiful, almost godlike creatures and we live for a day. Please don’t reach out to touch us, I warn against doing that. As a sub-species, we’re jealous and back-biting. Shallow, too, as I believe I’m demonstrating this evening.
We’re intuitive — there is that about us. And, in general, actors feel more than they know. I feel you know — this audience here this evening — you know too much, but that’s, of course, my professional opinion. Actors — the better actors — are simple people. Oh, fairly simple, of course. We learn from you and by example. We copy. We imitate. We steal things from you.
I wasn’t educated in any formal sense of the word; I suppose, shall we say I’ve spent my life imitating an educated person. As a young boy, I attended a very frightening South London School, and retreated without delay to the Art Room. My achievement at school? Surviving. Oh, I won a prize in Religious Knowledge, “Divinity” as it was called in those days. “Nebuchadnezzar: Gardener or Tyrant?” sort of thing; “Fishing Techniques on the Sea of Galilee: Spear or Net?" — Discuss.
Up in the Art Room much better prizes were mine in Drawing and Painting. So gifted and so driven by fear of the world outside the Art Room was I, that when encouraged to send examples of my work to the finest Art School in Britain, the Slade School of Fine Art, I did: when accepted by the Slade I received proof positive that I had something artistic to offer the world — on its return every sketch had been stolen from my portfolio; all of them. My portfolio came back empty. I was in. Every year I was at the Slade I expected eventually to find my early works hanging — rather too beautifully framed — in one of my professors’ rooms. Sadly not.
When eventually I became an actor I did so without ever having set foot in a Drama School. As any of you who’ve seen me perform can vouchsafe.
I found my voice when I became an actor — a fine artist is represented by his work — he need say nothing — his paintings, his lithographs speak for him — but an actor has to speak. And speak up, loudly enough to be heard, too. It took a lot of application — learning to speak up for myself.
I spent most of early career at the Royal Shakespeare Company holding a spear in the dark. I’ve just celebrated forty years as an actor; my friend Ben Kingsley and myself joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain some four decades ago; our first parts were as Huntsmen in The Taming of the Shrew, we had no lines; Ben and I went on to play silent, un-lit Huntsmen in almost every Shakespeare play, and for four years we carried spears, shields and Dame Peggy Ashcroft around the stage, learning our trade, night after night, stumbling about, saying nothing. It meant so much to me to be in this great acting company — that on the day I was eventually given a speech, they had to take it back again, as I was far to nervous to say it. Many years later, both Sir Ben as he is now called — and I — still just plain Roger — had served our apprenticeships, and each of us got to play Hamlet. I don’t know if you know this, I was delighted to discover the fact — Hamlet speaks. Quite a lot.
About that “Sir Ben” — I’ll never be knighted, I think, because I love Americans and one American in particular.
Also, I played Prince Charles on a mini-series — “Unhappily Ever After” — I wasn’t very good — I was rather bad. And the royal family will not forgive bad acting. Except, on occasion, their own.
So, is that it, do you think? The actor moves out of the half-light as he takes control of his craft, the spotlight is his to relish and exploit, and then to relinquish, as he retreats, as all of us will, back to the inevitable gloom. Me, for instance, nowadays, somewhat towards the end of my utility as an actor — I find myself being pushed slowly back into the shade; recently I tend to be offered parts in movies playing badly lit lawyers.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Is probably a better way to put it.
I must be forty years older than most of you — I was born at the end of the World War. The Second World War. It was a different time. We didn’t speak up. We were encouraged to be good and honest and to keep the peace. To know our place. Britain still had an Empire. I learned later in life what a cruel Empire it had been, but in those innocent days I was still part of the conspiracy.
A side bar —
My mother hearing a flying bomb stall above our South London home in 1945 grabbed six-month old me from my pram and hid us in the cellar while the bomb destroyed the street above our heads. Later my father righted the baby carriage to find it riven with shards of glass. We had no indoor plumbing, no heat except from a fire, and only rudimentary electricity. This was London, not very long ago. But here I am talking to you.
And last week, I was back in London for an event after which I shook hands with Prince Charles — and he’d shaken hands, as a boy, with Winston Churchill — who’d shaken hands with someone who’d shaken hands with Queen Victoria, shall we say — and so on and so backwards — trace it back — I bet we’ve all shaken hands with Shakespeare.
To himself, the Bard of Avon was not the Bard of Avon - he was a guy who worked hard. A man — who could have worn a pair of sneakers or Levi’s, and certainly one who sported a smile or frown about the way the world wagged in his day. Ever since the first caveman moved a rock from one end of his cave to the other — we’re here in the long line of workers. We can join in or we needn’t. And while, in the long run, it doesn’t seem to matter very much, I suggest that it’ll matter very much to you whether or no you do something meaningful with the rest of your days.
As I said, the world doesn’t care. In this “I’ve got something and I don’t care if you haven’t” world of ours — it appears having things and cozying up to them is quite enough to get by. Position, money, stuff — those things. Almost all some people need to get by nowadays is confidence. Paris Hilton — pretty lady — is all confidence. She said the other day that she was thinking of retiring. The interviewer asked her, “From what?"
Why be finished — where’s the fun in that? Great cities are never finished. Nothing sits. Except your dog; and look how anxious he is to get on with things. I’m pretty certain - no matter how sharp the lens — there’s never been a still photograph. To me — perfection is a moving point. I like the pursuit. I want to sprint after perfection till I run out of breath. Why be here else? To retire? “From what?”
What have we a chance of getting so right in our lives that we should retire? I feel — at my time of life — very like Oliver Twist in the workhouse — I feel like saying, “Please, sir, can I have some more?"
Yes, I’m older than you — let’s not go on about it. Do you have to keep bringing that up? But I’m nearer to you than Dickens or Shakespeare. And they — take all the poetry away — were just men — who worked. Hard. In times when to “Cut and paste” you needed scissors and glue. And when, come evening, and the light faded, one waited twelve hours for its return.
Fair warning: People won’t like it when you say you’re going to work hard. It’ll irritate them. It’s much like dieting or giving up booze — you announce you want to work hard, I warrant you, someone is very soon after going to offer you a big-assed piece of cheesecake. I know it.
I want to tell you about two young girls, who met each other almost a hundred years ago. One of the girls was my grandmother. I never knew my grandfather, and only when I was twenty-one or so, and my Gran was eighty or so, did I realized that the ancient gardener, Jack, her constant companion, was the man she had run away from my grandfather to be with. Nothing was ever spoken, but I could see it in their eyes.
Born at the end of the nineteenth century, Mabel Lavinia, my grandmother, was a country girl, never educated, but because she had managed to find a job as a parlor maid in a large country house, when she was fifteen, she was much envied; think of a Merchant Ivory movie. Without the stars. While working very hard in a very large and imposing house, my grandmother began an unprecedented friendship with the daughter of the rich and aristocratic family who lived there. These two very different young women, my grandmother, and the daughter of the house, Elizabeth Rudd, remained dear friends all their lives.
When Elizabeth was your age, her brother, Kenneth, was killed in France in 1917 during the first World War; later, she told me how she and her mother had to go up to Cambridge University to clear out his rooms; and how this tragedy had such a profound effect on her life, that she never married.
My grandmother worked all her life, slaved, sort of, and after she passed, Elizabeth, who had become a respected Justice of the Peace, looked out for me in many ways, and was very supportive of my career. Just before she died, she met my life partner, Rick, and I was pleased about that. She bequeathed me an old Chippendale desk at which she wrote me many letters over the years. It’s in our home in New York. The desk has many secret drawers. One day while cleaning the desk I opened a compartment that I had never noticed before, and found a poem. The Poet was a man called Babcock. Maltbie Davenport Babcock — from the Monty Pythonesque name I assumed he was an eccentric Scotsman, but in truth he was the pastor of the Brick Church in Lower Manhattan from 1900 to 1901 — just one year — he died, not very much later, working hard for his particular God, in the Holy Land. Maltbie had a reputation for writing hymns and inspirational poems.
Miss Rudd, my hardworking grandmother’s friend and companion, hid the poem away in the desk because it meant something to her, she saw in the death of her brother and the passing of her friend some pattern, perhaps. Maybe Elizabeth Rudd, justice of the peace, sitting one evening in Herefordshire, put the poem in the desk so that we could hear it today, and honor its sentiment.
Things can come pretty well full circle if you’ve no idea what you’re doing. One religion calls it Karma — I call it having no idea what you’re doing.
Let it all go, that it might come back. Work like crazy. Bend with the wind. Embrace change. Welcome obstacles. Work like crazy. Know nothing. Be bad sometimes. Never grow brittle. Never finish. Work like crazy.
Here’s Maltbie Davenport Babcock’s poem — and it’s for you
We are not here to play, to dream, to drift
We have work to do and loads to lift.
Shun not the struggle face it. ’Tis God’s gift.
Say not the days are evil — who’s to blame?
And fold the hands and acquiesce — O, shame!
Stand up, speak out, and bravely in God’s name.
It matters not how deep entrenched the wrong.
How hard the battle goes, the day how long,
Faint not, fight on! Tomorrow comes the song.
Distinguished Class of 2006 — ‘Tomorrow comes the song’.
June 3, 2006