The National finally opened its production of Brecht’s Mother Courage on Friday night, a week later than originally anticipated after preview problems, as I previously reported here. I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and I wish I could report that it was worth the wait, but there’s an awful lot of waiting to be done as Fiona Shaw trundles that infernal cart around the battlefields of Europe. At least the first preview audience, released at the interval as the show hadn’t been fully teched, had a mostly lucky escape.
At a press conference last week, Nick Hytner admitted that the show had taken longer to get ready than it should have, and declared it was both “bad and wrong”, and took the rap for it, too: “In the end, we bear responsibility.” That admission takes courage, and it’s good to see the buck stopping somewhere.
But it was another story of courage and dignity that took my breath away last night, when I saw the compressed trilogy of Bette Bourne’s living autobiography, A Life in Three Act, presented on stage at Soho Theatre, in recreations of a series of chats he did with Mark Ravenhill that was first seen in Edinburgh over the summer.
Bourne, now nearly 70, has been an astonishing part of the living, breathing history of the Gay Liberation movement in the U.K, and just as gay life has moved into the mainstream, so has he, too, becoming an actor with the RSC, National and Donmar, not to mention his several collaborations with fellow queer artist Neil Bartlett at Lyric Hammersmith and elsewhere; but he remains defiant to the last and still stands up to be counted almost everywhere he goes, wearing make-up as part of his everyday costume even as he shops on the Portobello Road.
But in the published script for the show - in a bit actually cut out of last night’s trilogy — he makes it clear that even he is sometimes prepared to compromise: talking of going to an audition at the Donmar for Michael Grandage’s production of The Vortex (Grandage’s first as artistic director there), he says, “I knew they weren’t going to book me with lipstick and I wanted the part very much. So I didn’t wear lipstick, I got dressed up as the character. It was slight betrayal of myself, but I got the job and then on the first day I was there in my full slap and Michael said, ‘Bette’s the only actor I know who comes into the theatre who takes his make-up off and then puts it on again when he’s leaving.”
He’s a man who has set out his stall to be different; he’s surely the natural inheritor of Quentin Crisp’s status as the “stately homo of England” now, and even draws a comparison himself: “I don’t do full drag now. Unless it’s for a part. Now I’m more a sort of disciple of Quentin Crisp…. He said that everyone said to him, ‘Oh you just want to be noticed’, which I recognised in myself and he said, ‘I want to be recognised as a queer.’… I like to be visible, I like people. Yeah, I like to be noticed.”
But more than that, he stands up to be counted. And we couldn’t fail to notice the supreme style and grace with which he carried himself last night. He may declare, “I’m a queen. And I love flouncing as much as the next queen,” but give me this demonstration of honest flouncing over the effortful swaggering of Fiona Shaw any day.
The key difference is that Bette Bourne is living a life; Shaw seems to be living a series of lies, at least in her performance as Mother Courage; I never felt engaged with her sequential traumas for a minute. And while Mother Courage famously has a mute daughter Katrin, Bourne surrounded himself, in his celebrated drag combo Bloolips, by characters that included Diva Dan, who was profoundly deaf - but which didn’t stop him from being profoundly funny.
Beneath the flamboyance, Bourne has always been a truthful actor; and last night we saw an account of what made and shaped him. And his influence stretches far further than you’d think: in the late James Kirkwood’s wonderful 1989 book “Diary of a Mad Playwright” that goes behind-the-scenes of the unfolding disasters of a pre-Broadway touring try-out of a play he’d written called Legends that starred Mary Martin and Carol Channing, he recalled that veteran director Mike Nichols had originally suggested doing it with Harvey Fierstein and Bette Bloolips, and he notes regretfully, “I suddenly wished I’d gone along with [it]… It could not have turned out any crazier than the way it was now.”
It’s one of the great backstage theatre books of all time: at one point, Mary Martin - equipped with a hearing piece to prompt her on her lines, a la Richard Dreyfuss in Complicit at the Old Vic at the start of the year - starts “receiving taxicab dispatch calls in her ear”. Apparently, “the frequencies got all mixed up and she was getting calls to send out taxis”. But the best bit is that it couldn’t be fixed - and so they had to take it out. And, without the security blanket, so gets through the whole of the second act with hardly a hitch, and vows to abandon it as a result. What a pity that Kevin Spacey couldn’t have rigged up a similar deal with the taxi dispatchers at Waterloo…
I too found the Bette Bourne evening inspiring, but I question whether or not you're being fair to Fiona Shaw. Each performance is brave in its own way and while you're quick to say that Ms Shaw is presenting us with a series of lies, I would say she's giving us a version of Brecht's truth, not her own. That's what a great actress does - she is the vehicle for the author's intention. And what is acting after all but lying for a living? Bette Bourne is her own author and is playing herself and she discloses what she chooses to disclose - it's in her control ( and not even Mr Ravenhill's). Ms Shaw is at the mercy of a classic play, a deeply morally complex role and a production that is as frustrating as it is illuminating. But she is one of our finer actresses and to dismiss her performance in such a way is , I think, churlish. Could you pull that damn wagon around the stage? Could Bette Bourne?
"what is acting after all but lying for a living?" - Telling the truth for a living. Its fascination is that it's so completely both at once.