| Su twitter ho trovato un riferimento a un articolo su Alan uscito in occasione dell'Hamlet da lui recitato. E' del 1992 ma non mi pare che sia già stato postato, almeno in questa sezione. E' piuttosto lungo ma a una prima veloce lettura (a cui ne seguirà una mooolto più attenta e particolareggiata  ) non mi è dispiaciuto. THEATRE / The Prince of Darkness: A wickedly good actor, Alan Rickman has made a virtue of villainous parts from a debauched French aristo to a German terrorist. Now, as he takes on Hamlet, we will see whether, like other great Danes, he has that within which passeth show
ALLISON PEARSON Sunday 30 August 1992'WE'LL start with a couple of Latin terms . . .' It is 1985, and in Les Liaisons Dangereuses the Vicomte de Valmont is giving a teenage girl a classical education in sex. It is a cold-blooded seduction pressed home with the utmost civility of expression. Everyone in the audience is watching Valmont, they can't help it: he is bad, this man, but he is worryingly interesting. He prowls the stage like a big cat luxuriating in his own body. The beautiful, languorous voice coddles his words into a passing impression of tenderness before letting them go with a dying fall. He smiles at the girl, but only with his mouth: the eyes are quite dead. This is what wickedness looks like: a place beyond morality where the body and its desires are working overtime. The heart has rusted to dust, corroded by irony and loathing.
It was one of the great performances of the last decade. Lindsay Duncan, who played the Marquise, the Vicomte's co-voluptuary, remembers the effect he had: 'A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.'
Seven years later Rickman is preparing to play Hamlet. He looks to have come a long way: Hollywood adores him (three of his films were in the top ten last year - Robin Hood, Close My Eyes, and Truly Madly Deeply) and people who know about these things are calling him the most important actor of his generation, but the imprint of villainy is still on him like an evil eye. He rages against it to the point where it has been on a list of banned questions: there is so much more to him, he's an actor, he can play anyone. But still they ask him to play the same role over and over: the icebox lizard, the guy in the big black coat and shades who would blow away the world without blinking.
A Hollywood scout spotted Rickman playing Valmont on Broadway, and he was hired to play Hans Gruber, the terrorist leader in Die Hard. The film was a vehicle for Bruce Willis, but Rickman drove off with it. His entrance, like that of a Shakespearean duke's, is loaded with moment. Alarums within] A group of heavies surge towards the camera; suddenly they part, and there he is - the long pewter coat, hands in pockets, tongue-in-chic. He addresses the hostages with an open Filofax and closes it afterwards like a Bible, pleased with his Satanic sermon. While Willis as Detective McClane was shinning down lift-shafts in his sweaty vest, Rickman was fastidiously killing hostages: 'You're nothing but a common thief,' Bonnie Bedelia shrieks at him. And he scuttles across the floor to her like Antony Sher's Richard III, baring his teeth: 'I am an exceptional thief, Mrs McClane.' It is the first crack in the ice: if you're going to be evil, you might as well be the best.
One bad guy led to another. Last year Rickman was Sheriff of Nottingham to Kevin Costner's sappy greenwood hero in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The subtitle could have been written for Rickman, who stole the film from Costner by turning the Sheriff into a balletic psychopath, the barking offspring of Frank Zappa and a Dobermann pinscher. The comedy came from Rickman's playing off Python content against an arch high style. The Los Angeles Daily News said he saved the film, ad-libbing through a script creaking with political correctness: 'Cancel the leavings for lepers and orphans] No more merciful beheadings. And call off Chrisss-tmass]' There were familiar weapons from the Rickman armoury and some new strings to the beau: the half-closing of the hooded hazel eyes in moments of savage ennui, the sibilant irritation: 'Not now,' he rasps at someone as he tries to penetrate a reluctant Maid Marion. 'I tried to make him certifiable and funny,' Rickman said later. He certainly caused moral confusion at previews, where audiences cheered him. Costner was not best pleased and cut Rickman's scenes, reputedly shooting 17 more close-ups of himself. To no avail. The best lacked all conviction and the worst was full of passionate intensity. Costner gave it everything he'd got, leaving you wanting nothing: Rickman, who always holds something back, had us dangling from every snarl.
In Bob Roberts, Tim Robbins's withering satire on an American election, released here on 11 September, Rickman is Lukas Hart III, the sharkish campaign manager staring malevolently at the world through a pair of smoky glasses. Rickman gives him a menace that comes from doing nothing, from a pathological watchfulness. Howard Davies, who directed Liaisons, says: 'Alan has a fantastic stillness, he stops and in that moment of contemplation can convey that there are an infinite number of options. That is the sense of danger.'
RICKMAN was born in Acton, west London, in 1947, the second of four children of Irish- Welsh parents. His father, who was a painter and decorator, died of cancer when Alan was eight, leaving 'a devastating sense of grief' and very little money. Rickman says he was born a card-carrying member of the Labour Party. It wasn't radical posturing that led him to appear in the party's broadcast on the eve of the general election. Rima Horton, his partner of 20 years and an economics lecturer, was the Labour candidate in Chelsea. When he talks now about his own bankability, how much he got paid for Die Hard, he will pull himself up in mid-sentence and say how barmy it is to be talking about such sums when you think about unemployed people with children. And he can still make Thatcher a four-letter word.
At the age of 11, Rickman won a scholarship to Latimer Upper School, later going on to study graphic design at Chelsea College. He set up a design business with a few friends and a lot of Letraset in Soho, but his mind wasn't in it. In 1973, aged 26, he tried for Rada. The audition, which featured the first Rickman villain - Richard III - won him a scholarship. Then it was into the long slog of rep and some fine performances at the Bush and Hampstead in plays by Dusty Hughes and Snoo Wilson. One Christmas he played a squirrel in panto. You suspect it was not his finest hour.
In 1979, Rickman had an unhappy stint with the RSC and left saying he wanted to 'learn how to talk to other actors on stage rather than bark at them'. In 1981, he was Trigorin in the Royal Court's Seagull. Christopher Hampton, author of Liaisons Dangereuses, remembers: 'When he walked on I thought he's much too young, but he was so convincing as a writer. There was a pain in the performance which was about having given up hope of being great and accepting second best.'
Jonathan Powell, now controller of BBC1, was also there and cast Rickman in his Barchester Chronicles. One reviewer noted that in awesome company (Donald Pleasence, Nigel Hawthorne, Geraldine McEwan), the best performance was given by 'an unknown - Alan Rickman'. Rickman wasn't born to play Obadiah Slope, Trollope's slithy tove of a cleric, but he became him through inspired physical invention. In black frock-coat and hat he looked like an upended cockroach, his hands clasped in front of him in an attitude of unyielding piety. It would be impossible to read the book now and not see Rickman: that tight, strange walk that seemed to go sideways, the upper lip curling back to reveal the teeth in a half-smile half-snarl, the divine smugness. And the voice, plangent as the Warden's cello, swelling with indignation or sliding into humbug humility: 'That is certainly my view, bishop, for what that is worth . . .' David Giles, the director, says Slope was the hardest part 'because it comes nearest to caricature. Alan gave it a snaky sexiness which made it real.' Giles had already spotted the quality that was to make Rickman the most compelling British screen actor since James Mason: 'The interior life was so fierce, he was really frightening.'
I was supposed to be interviewing Alan Rickman, but he cancelled, saying that he didn't feel he had anything to say. Which was a shame, but not a surprise. Of all actors he is the most contemptuous of interview blather. But he has plenty to say about his work when it counts. Howard Davies once told a magazine that actors needed to find a trait they could love in a character. 'Alan rang up furious. He sets out by exploring the pathology of character. He cuts them open and looks for what makes them weak or bad or violent.' Hampton remembers Rickman had 'very strong views about how to play Valmont which fortunately turned out to be extremely sensible.' A lot of the contributions he made were physical details. 'He insisted on having his frock-coat unrealistically long and wearing a beard, because he had this image of what Valmont looked like.' Something Rickman invented in rehearsal became part of the play. 'Before the rape scene, he runs his hand the whole length of the girl's body about six inches away from it - it was a simple idea which combined menace and sensuality. But it had a connoisseur's touch.'
A troubling eroticism still marks Rickman out. Stephen Poliakoff, who wrote the part of the cuckolded husband in Close My Eyes for him, says: 'Alone of English actors he has a combination of great sex appeal and danger.' Geraldine McEwan, about to play Gertrude to Rickman's Hamlet, says: 'It's not to do with that dreadful word fancying. It's a mesmeric quality; a refined, subtle intelligence in total concentration.' She's right about mesmerising, but there is a dreadful amount of fancying. The RSC still fields calls from 'weak-kneed women' wanting to know about Rickman.
So where does he go from here? Much depends on his own scruples: he would be a rich man if he didn't constantly reject trash movies with 'unsound messages'. After reading for White Nights, he quoted Dorothy Parker: 'This is not a script to be tossed lightly away. It should be hurled with great force.' His strengths are obvious; if there is a question- mark it is over his range. The only person who would say a word against him wondered whether he wasn't a lazy actor, whether he could let go of that louche, droll persona, and if there was anything underneath. Hampton offers an answer. He recalls a screen test Rickman did for David Lean's proposed Nostromo, playing the Hamlet-like role of an intellectual who can't face up to action and kills himself. 'We ran all the tests and Lean said: 'Your friend, he's the only one who's any good. He has an extraordinary presence.' ' Similar stories suggest that the only limitation Rickman faces is in the imagination of casting directors.
'NO living actor is better equipped for Hamlet. On him the right sadness sits, and also the right spleen; his gait is a prowl over quicksands and he can freeze a word with an irony at once mournful and deadly.' Thus Kenneth Tynan on Paul Scofield in 1955, but the same sense of anticipation surrounds Rickman in 1992. There was no money for advertising, but 90 per cent of the seats are sold. Georgian director Robert Sturua has a fine cast - McEwan, Michael Byrne, David Burke - but there is no doubt who everyone wants to see. Qualities that have made Rickman a most sublime, smiling villain are oddly apt for the torn hero. You can imagine watching him watching Gertrude watching the players. The threat of something about to go very badly out of control. And, in the years to come Macbeth perhaps, Iago certainly, if he can stomach another villain.
We can't be sure what kind of Hamlet Rickman will be. Whatever he does, he won't be a common Hamlet. He will be an exceptional Hamlet, Mrs McClane.
'Hamlet' previews at the Riverside (081-748 3354) from 9 Sept. Opens 15 Sept-10 Oct, then tours to Bradford, Nottingham, Barrow in Furness. 'Bob Roberts' opens in London on 11 Sept and goes on nationwide release on 9 Oct.
From: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...ow-1543373.html |
