The troubled Royal Shakespeare Company has a new Coriolanus at the Barbican from next Tuesday and, given this tale of
immense pride coming before a fall, there are doubtless those
who will see in Shakespeare's history some kind of ghastly metaphor for the present RSC difficulties which have forced their
impending departure from the City for the whole of next winter.
But the chances are that Charles Dance wilI give the Company its last pre-closure London hit: the 43-year-old stage and screen star is back in the role he first played at Stratford a decade ago, when he was understudying Alan Howard as one of the least noblest Romans of them all and only played the part for a couple of performances in Paris on a post-Stratford tour. Since then, of course, a lot has happened to Dance, not least Jewel in the Crown, the film of Plenty (in which he starred opposite Meryl Streep) and, most recently, a television filming of Phantom of the Opera, for which he received a reported $1 million, thereby enabling him to return to the comparative poverty of a Shakespearian pay packet. Like Jeremy Irons, Dance belongs to a Brideshead generation of golden-boy actors who came to prominence on television in the early Eighties, but were then more careful than some and avoided seduction by Hollywood, or losing their footing in the live, classical theatre – which alone can guarantee ihe kind of long-lasting Gielgud career which Dance has admitted he covets. It is not that Dance is necessarily going to prove the greatest Coriolanus of his generation, though his scar-faced interpretation was impressive enough when first seen at Stratford last autumn and will have grown in stature during a winter season in Newcastle. But his willingness to tackle the role on stage, indeed to subsidise it by the telly Phantom, suggests a healthy respect for making regular assaults on the Shakespearian cliff-faces, rather than settling for the softer life amid ihe foothills of yet another Hollywood mini-series. Like Alan Howard before htm and like Laurence Olivier who, all of 30 years ago, set the Stratford/Coriolanus standard by which all others this century have to be judged (a performance he climaxed by falling backwards in death to dangle by one ankle from a 30-foot parapet). Dance is that welcome rarity, a truly dangerous actor whose performance can, on a good night, crackle with the genuine electricity of stage stardom. “Coriolanus is the mountain top. Olivier played it 30 years ago at Stratford and that is a great deal to live up to,” he says. The son of a civil engineer who died when he was only four and of a mother who worked in a Lyons' Corner House and who died, tragically, of a heart attack on Victoria Station the day thatt her boy landed his first starring film role in Plenty, Dance grew up on the edge of Dartmoor. He was a nervous child and suffered from both a stammer and dyslexia. He left school at 16, found work as a window-dresser and a plumber's mate before encountering, in a pub in Plymouth, a couple of retired actors who were to coach him in the business of being theatrical. Dance got his first backstage job as a dresser on a tour of Fiddler on the Roof, but by 1972 he'd made his debut as an actor in rep at Colwyn Bay and then had to wait a mere 15 years for the “overnight” stardom of Jewel in the Crown. Married for 20 years to an artist he met while both were Plymouth teenagers, he lives with her, two young children and a determination to keep life private. “I don't believe that journalists should be part of your life: all an actor has to prove is his acting,” he says. A certain amount of his recent career has been in Bondage, first as a villain in The Spy Who Loved Me and then as Bond's creator lan Fleming, in a peculiarly terrible recent television biography: but he never even auditioned for the 007 role that went to his near-contemporary, Timothy Dalton, and still keeps a healthy distance from that kind of mega-stardom, despite such Hollywood hits as White Mischief and Pascali's Island. His time with the RSC is likely to be limited to this summer's season at the Barbican, after which he plans to return to the cinema or television, if only to keep up with school fees and the mortgage on the farm. “I'd like to tackle lago in Othello and I've a Hamlet up my sleeve – not that Shakespeare is ever easy. You have to train for him like an Olympic athlete.” It seems Dance will prove to be a long-distance man rather than a sprinter, not least because he has going for him a useful quality, that of the perpetual outsider. Since his earliest days he had stayed away from the permanent contracts of a company player, preferring to go in for one show at a time and to keep his distance. It is, in the end, precisely that distance which makes him so right for Coriolanus, another great outsider. |