Alan Bates returns — in triumph

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 21

Alan Bates returns — in triumph

The recent successful revival in London of John Osborne’s “A Patriot For Me” — banned when it was first produced in the West End in 1965 — was momentous for two other reasons. It signified the return to the London stage of Alan Bates after an absence of 10 years (his performance was acclaimed by the critics) and it renewed the actor’s partnership with the playwright — Bates played Cliff Lewis in the original production of Osborne’s “Look Back In Anger.”

The London theatre scene rarely arouses controversy these days, but when an 18-year-old play by one of Britain’s more unconventional playwrights was revived in August there was a definite air of anticipation. For not only had John Osborne’s “A Patriot For Me” shocked London audiences when it was first staged in 1965, but the revival marked the return to the West End of Alan Bates, one of the country’s most popular actors. Appearing in London for the first time in 10 years, Bates played the part of Alfred Redl, an Austrian staff officer blackmailed by the Russians for his homosexuality in the years leading up to the First World War.

Based on a real-life figure whose spying activities helped to topple the already ailing Austro-Hungar-ian Empire, the play’s depiction of decadent Viennese society outraged London’s moral guardians when it

was first produced. The Lord Chamberlain, whose job it was to censor plays until this function was abolished in 1968, banned the production for its alleged “obscenity.” Without doubt, “A Patriot For Me” is theatre on a grand scale, lasting three hours and including 23 scenes and a cast of more than 100. But the most gruelling part is that of Redl himself. He is constantly on stage and ages in the course of the evening from an ambitious young lieutenant to a hardened and hedonistic colonel of counterintelligence. In place of the outcry that greeted the play’s mid-1960s premiere, the new production was warmly received by London’s theatre goers, with Bates universally acclaimed for his portrayal of Redl. There was also a gentle irony in the fact that the chosen venue for this revival was the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket. It was

because of a controversial play produced there in the eighteenth century that the government of the day gave the Lord Chamberlain censoring powers in the first place. Bates is no stranger to Osborne. Their friendship goes back to Bates’s boyhood in Derbyshire, when he used to admire Osborne, then an unknown actor at the Derby Playhouse. Alan Bates was born in 1934 in the small Derbyshire village of Alestree. He was at first encouraged by his parents to become a concert pianist, but by the age of 11 he had firmly decided that his vocation was acting. Speech lessons replaced piano lessons, and his parents’ initial misgivings disappeared when he won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. National service in the Royal Air Force meant that his stage debut

was delayed until he was 21, when he joined a repertory company in Coventry. By the end of the year, however, he had moved to the English Stage Company in London which promoted the “new realism” in British theatre. He found himself rehearsing the part of Cliff Lewis for a new play by the young Osborne, “Look Back in Anger.” Now regarded as a modern classic, “Look Back in Anger” caught a certain mood of rebelliousness and futility in post-Second World War Britain. It established the reputations of Bates and Osborne as well as the Royal Court Theatre, where later the first abortive attempt to stage “A Patriot For Me” was made.

Subsequent successes, followed by a special Edinburgh Festival award, brought the young actor to the attention of Harold Pinter, who was looking for somebody with Bates’s sardonic qualities to appear in “The Caretaker,” a moody tale about two eccentric brothers who take in a passing vagrant. His film debut came in 1960 when he costarred with Laurence Olivier in Osborne’s “The Entertainer.”

With more than 20 films behind him, as well as numerous television and stage credits it might be thought that Bates had reached the pinnacle of his profession. But he admits a certain longing to do' more work in the classics. He played Richard 111 in the annual Stratford Shakespeare season in Canada, and in the early 19705, gave a much praised performance as Hamlet in Cambridge.

He is probably best known around the world for his films, which have attracted a wide cult following. The international success of “Georgie Girl” in 1966 brought him to world attention. In the same year he appeared as a Scottish soldier in Phillippe de Broca’s surreal anti-war comedy, “Le Roi des Coeurs.” In 1982 two more films featuring Bates appeared — “The Return of the Soldier,” based on a Rebecca West story, and “The Wicked Lady.”

He has a reputation for being a shy, almost retiring man with an admiration for actors such as Gerard Depardieu and Marlon Brando. He is very much in the same mould as an actor slightly outside the official establishment.

As he once put it: “I have been carried upwards oh the new wave of English writers, that is, kitchen sinks and psychology.”

By

MICHAEL LEWIS

London Press Service