Article from The Saturday Review, January/February 1986
Submitted by Gadfly

Informal Dance

By Jan Stuart

Charles Dance looks like he was born in Dad’s bedroom slippers. Not the floppy rubber drugstore thongs, but the soft, scuffed leather pair from Burberry that have been lovingly preserved in clouds of talcum powder. This may be due in part to his appearance: the Dagwood-red hair, the Brighton-blue eyes, the straight, assertive jaw and the skyward frame tall enough to reach the collected plays of Shaw that undoubtedly perch on his top shelf.

More evocative than the physique, however, is the demeanor: an unforced but generous humor, mixed with an almost apologetic awareness of his capabilities. Through a deceptively self-effacing gaze, he reveals a causal authority and confidence, relaxing one with the knowledge that, in a tight spot, Dad will come through.

Compare this with the characters that have brought Dance to prominence. It is hard to imagine Sgt. Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown” or Raymond Brock in Plenty as Dads. Fathers, maybe. They both go through such bloody gyrations trying to unbutton themselves from the stiff-upper-lip strait jackets that confine their peers; but they have inhaled too much of the same spray starch of class consciousness.

While paranoia does not, admittedly, fit the classic mold of Dad afflictions, the hypersensitivity may be traced to a childhood quite remote from the Oxbridge assembly line that gave us the British Raj or the diplomatic corps.

Charles Dance was born in 1946 in the Midlands of Worcestershire to a working class mother who polished stoves and brass plates from the age of fourteen and married slightly above her station to an engineer. ("His family didn’t want anything to do with her, so I don’t know much about him, except that he painted some rather nice watercolors and used to do musical recitations.")

His father died when Charles was four, so his mother married the lodger and moved her family off to Devon, where she became head cook to an aristocratic family. They lived happily enough in a little tithe cottage by the sea. "The sea is very important to me. If I don’t go near it once or twice a year I get very peculiar. It’s something about the tide." Mother labored and nursed Charles’s ailing stepfather till he died, whereupon she retired and packed off to recover from two years of sickbed duty. She got no further than the bus station, where she dropped dead.

Charles responded to this transiency with an artistic sensibility and a dreadful stammer that didn’t disappear till he was nineteen. He attended art school with vague intentions of becoming a graphic designer. But mainly, left to his own devices, he became a long-maned child of the sixties and a rabble-rouser. There were the inevitable run-ins with the law.

He smiles devilishly at the memory, then pulls back guiltily. "I think I made an awful mess of things during the latter part of my adolescence. My mother was appalled, coming as she did from the east end of London, which contains a very moral, Tory-voting people. I can remember a whole mob of us gate-crashing a party, and I was charged with ‘unruly behavior likely to cause a breach of peace, section five of public order of 1836’ and fined £20 with £50 costs. I never told her anything about it until she read it in the paper. She behaved as if I had one foot leading to the gallows."

At art school in Leicester, Dance was active in the drama club and through it met two retired, eccentric, classically theatre-trained gentlemen. Martin Burkhardt and Leonard Bennett were a quirky pair with colorful histories from the Berliner Ensemble and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. According to Dance, "What they didn’t know about acting wasn’t worth knowing." He told them that he couldn’t afford drama school and would they teach him? "They looked at me and said they didn’t think there was much they could do but they would try -- and it would be a bloody long job."

There are strong whiffs of Pygmalion to the story of Charles Dance’s dramatic education. "They were the most extraordinary men I ever met. Totally out of their time. They lived in this remote cottage -- you couldn’t find it even with a map -- where they kept five goats from which they would take milk and make butter and cheese. They grew their own vegetables and Martin would make bread. They even drank their cider out of caramoor cups. And there was no electricity; the home was lit with oil.

"They were very strict, and I had a lot of catching up to do. I started to devour Shakespeare. I would go to see Leonard about three evenings a week and we’d work in a room in the back of a pub. It cost me two pints of beer a lesson. I’d see Martin on Sundays and paid him by tending the garden. It was six months before they allowed me into that cottage sanctum of theirs, and eighteen months before I could call them by their Christian names. I could never, never be late, and if I wasn’t able to come I was to phone at least two days in advance.

"During this time I worked as a construction worker, a plumber’s mate -- all sorts of silly things just to get some money. One day I dropped a concrete block on my foot and broke my leg, so I couldn’t drive the ten miles to see them. When I phoned Martin up, he said (Dance affects a stern, imperious voice), ‘Go to a library, boy, and get the complete works of Shaw and read it all before you see me again!’ So in ten weeks I plowed my way through all of George Bernard Shaw. I was twenty-two when I met them and stayed with them till I was twenty-four. During that time they became my fathers."

Dance’s warm if unsentimental education came to an end when his two surrogate parents brought him to London and left him there with a single admonishment: "If you are ever out of work, don’t get a job as a bartender. Get a job inside a theatre! It doesn’t matter if you are selling tickets, programs, ice cream, dressing actors, shifting scenery. Be inside a theatre because there is so much you don’t know about actors and how they think." Within a short time, Dance was dutifully dressing the entire male chorus of Fiddler on the Roof and Canterbury Tales, which led to acting in weekly repertory companies of increasing merit until, finally, in 1975 he was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Beginning with small parts, he was soon playing the title roles in Coriolanus and Henry V. He also appeared frequently on British television, including a role in an original David (Plenty) Hare BBC-TV drama, Dreams of Leaving.

One of the many legacies of Leonard and Martin is Dance’s unusual capacity to listen, both inside and outside a role. While Guy Perron and Raymond Brock are both brooding observers, Dance is adamant about separating himself from his roles. "Raymond Brock is the most annoying character I’d ever played. I could find so few areas in him that I had any sympathy for. I certainly wouldn’t have behaved that way -- I would have seen trouble coming a long time before he did."

Tuning in to Sgt. Perron’s observational powers was more gratifying. "When we were filming in India, I would go out and roam the back alleys and streets and go on adventures with my camera and purposefully get lost. I’d wander out at dusk, which is quite exciting because the braziers are being lit. And you find yourself in somebody’s backyard and sometimes you are welcome and sometimes you are not."

As Dance reminisces about his passages through India, his eyes reflect a dreamy, brazier-bright hue, betraying a nostalgia for the uncertainty and mischief of a wayward youth. When asked about his current family status, the spell breaks. "Oh, wife, children, mortgage, the whole catastrophe," he blurts sardonically, and quickly adds, "That’s a line from Zorba the Greek, a musical I once did."

Without as much as a pause for oxygen, Dance exhales a bemused catalog of the 'catastrophe': "My wife and I met in art school and we’ve been married for fifteen years but I’ve known her for twenty years and I have a son called Oliver who is eleven and a daughter Rebecca who is four and we live in a Victorian terraced house in the north of London with original fireplace and plaster work and stripped pine and all the usual things and a typical postage stamp-sized London garden with an apple tree and a lilac tree and a pond with a frog and nine goldfish in it and a cat called Johnson because we used to live next to a man with a dog called Boswell."

If there is any regret or ennui underscoring this breathless ode to domestic banality, it is nullified by the ebullience of his delivery and a dead-giveaway, self-mocking smile. If anything, it reveals a peace, a contented sense of continuity and alignment, not with the barely-remembered, watercoloring dad and the mom who voted Tory till her last breath in the bus stop, but rather the two country gentlemen who reveled in their garden and goats and collections of Shaw and Shakespeare.

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© 1986 Jan Stuart for The Saturday Review