Zoe Caldwell

I Will Be Cleopatra

An excerpt

With my face scrubbed clean of all makeup except the brown around my eyes and my freshly washed hair pulled into a tight ponytail, I set off for the great day, the first rehearsal of the Union Theatre Repertory Company. My entrance did not bode well, as I arrived ten minutes late—for the last time in my life. John Sumner gave me such a dressing-down and made everyone—front of house, backstage crew, costume department, the whole company—sit silently for ten minutes. Then he said, "Now we can begin." The silent humiliation was excruciating.

Today I arrive at the theatre three hours before curtain, which is a bit excessive, but it shows how well I learn.

There are many different forms of repertory. Weekly repertory, fortnightly repertory, and the big regional theatres where as many as three or four plays are rehearsed and fed into the season: the Royal Shakespeare Company; Stratford, Ontario; the National Theatre of Great Britain; and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis are examples of this most important kind of repertory. The Vivian Beaumont, at Lincoln Center in New York, was built to be a repertory company. That is what Robert Whitehead, its original director, intended, but because of ignorance and pride on the part of the board, that dream was never fulfilled. Fortnightly rep means you open a play on Monday night. Tuesday morning you read the next play and start to rehearse, playing one play at night, rehearsing another during the day. After two weeks, on Sunday night you dress rehearse and open again on Monday. One year without a break—you have to be fit.

My life of after-school classes and work had been preparing me for this experience. I was not one day out of work for two years. All young actors should be so lucky. Every two weeks a new part, a different play, and John Sumner, who knew what he was doing, ruled. I never thought of his age. I just knew that he knew the way and I'd better follow. Never did any company member ask to play a particular role and there were no leading players. You played what you were given no matter how large, no matter how small. You were a company member and served the company. That was your job. If you were sixty years too young for the part, you found out what it felt to be sixty years older. We performed every playwright, including Shakespeare, Shaw, Sheridan, Miller, Coward, Williams, although no Australian playwright. Once a season we did a revue with songs and dances and sketches. It was an Australian company with young talented actors and old talented actors and no one could pull rank. It could have made a marvelous country actually, everybody being used and important but not too important. It was, in fact, my country, my world. To go to work every day and earn your living doing what you know how to do is very powerful.

The men in the company were paid eleven pounds a week, the women ten. This was the early 1950s. I still lived at home, paid rent, and whenever a couch or lamp or chair or bed or a curtain was missing, it was because it was needed at the theatre, onstage. Dad often said he loved going to the Union Theatre to see his furniture.

At twenty, I was fully employed, doing what made me free. My dad had, at last, sold the Willys and bought a secondhand white Peugeot, which I drove too quickly and a little dangerously, but I'd been driving since I was sixteen and felt sure behind the wheel. By now, my brother was married with two kids. Mum was still working at Holeproof because it made her feel free to spend money on the house, Dad, the grandchildren, and herself—and suddenly I wanted a baby! I bought a very feminine maternity top and put a small pillow at my waist, and in my lunch break, went into the grand shops along Collins Street and looked at baby clothes. I knew I wasn't pregnant, but I had the strongest urge to have a baby. Maybe if I pretended and acted the part well enough, the longing would go away. I told Mum. Eventually Dad said, "Zoe, I hear you want a baby. Why not try a dog?"

"A dog!!!"

"Well not a dog," said Mum. "A brand-new puppy from a kennel and you will select it and buy it and get up in the night to feed it and walk it and train it and bathe it and neither your father nor I will have anything to do with it."

And that's what I did. And it wasn't easy because I was a working mother, but Thomas Seymour Mendip, a reddish gold, long-haired cocker spaniel, cured me of my maternal longing for a good ten years.

The Thomas Seymour was in honor of the Thomas in The Young Elizabeth, by Jennette Dowling and Francis Letton, and Thomas Mendip was in honor of the Thomas in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning. I had played Elizabeth and was now preparing to play Jennet Jourdemayne, when someone gave me a 78 recording of the glorious John Gielgud/Pamela Brown/Richard Burton production. For the only time in my life, I decided to deny myself completely and simply imitate Pamela Brown, who was a wondrously sensual, important English actress in her middle thirties, with a voice the color of stout.

Well, you can imagine how dumb that was: my twenty-year-old body with Pamela Brown's voice—just the voice, I hadn't even seen her play it. Macabre really, and I was rightly and soundly trounced.

Actors, like painters, copy a little of the actors they admire until they become a composite of all they have chosen to be like and step out in their own skins, their own voices, and are themselves. That is why it is so important that there are many actors, different actors, for the young actor to see and copy and discard. That's what happens in life—same in the theatre.

When I first saw Alfred Lunt in The Visit in London in 1960, I was stunned to see a truly great actor use his eyes and hands in a gesture that was central to Laurence Olivier. Olivier used it in every part and young actors would imitate the gesture to sort of send him up. There was Lunt, a much older, great actor copying Larry. Then I heard that Laurence Olivier had toured with the Lunts when he was a very young actor, playing a small part.

The Union Theatre Rep's first season was, surprisingly, successful. We played fifteen plays in thirty-one weeks and began to attract a loyal audience, one that discovered that seeing the same actors playing different parts every two weeks brought a whole new dimension to their theatregoing. We had a week's vacation and then returned to rehearse for a tour of provincial towns in Victoria.

Copyright © 2001 Zoe Caldwell. All rights reserved.