Complete Works, Volume III Read Free

No, they can still hear me. Hit it, hit it. He got above the noise. I played Edgar in Lear only a few times with him before I left the company. At the centre of his performance was a terrible loss, desolation, silence. He didn't think about doing it, he just got there. He did it and got there.
    His wife, Marjorie, was his structure and support. She organised the tours, supervised all business arrangements, sat in the box office, kept the cast in order, ran the wardrobe, sewed, looked after Mac, was his dresser, gave him his whiskey. She was tough, critical, cultivated, devoted. Her spirit and belief constituted the backbone of the company. There would have been no company without her.
    Ireland wasn't golden always, but it was golden sometimes and in 1950 it was, all in all, a golden age for me and for others. The people came down to see him. Mac travelled by car, and sometimes some of us did too. But other times we went on the lorry with the flats and props, and going into Randon or Clough-jordan would find the town empty, asleep, men sitting upright in dark bars, cowpads, mud, smell of peat, wood, old clothes. We'd find digs; wash basin and jug, tea, black pudding, and off to the hall, set up a stage on trestle tables, a few rostra, a few drapes, costumes out of the hampers, set up shop, and at night play, not always but mostly, to a packed house (where had they come from?); people who listened, and who waited to see him, having seen him before, and been brought up on him.
    Mac wasn't any kind of dreamer. He was remote from the Celtic Twilight. He kept a close eye on the box office receipts. He was sharp about money, was as depressed as anyone else when business was bad. Where there was any kind of company disagreement he proved elusive. He distanced himself easily from unwelcome problems. Mrs Mac dealt with those. Mac was never ‘a darling actor of the old school’. He was a working man. He respected his occupation and never stopped learning about it, from himself and from others.
    For those who cared for him and admired him there must remain one great regret; that for reasons I do not understand, he last played in England, at Stratford, in 1933. The loser was the English theatre.
    Mac wasn't ‘childlike’ in temperament, as some have said. He was evasive, proud, affectionate, mischievous, shrewd, merry, cynical, sad, and could be callous. But he was never sour or self-pitying. His life was the stage. Life with a big L came a bad second. He had no patience with what he considered a world of petty sufferings, however important they might seem to the bearer. He was completely unsentimental. Gossip delighted him, and particularly sexual gossip. He moved with great flexibility and amusement through Catholic Ireland, greatly attracted by the ritual of the Church. He loved to speak of the mummy of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett in Drogheda ‘with a lovely amber spot on its face’. He mixed freely with priests and nuns, went to Mass, sometimes, but despised the religious atrophy, rigidity and complacency with which he was confronted. He mixed with the priests partly because he enjoyed their company, partly because his livelihood depended upon them. He was a realist. But he possessed a true liberality of spirit. He was humble. He was a devout anti-puritan. He was a very great piss-taker. He was a great actor and we who worked with him were the luckiest people in the world and loved him.

The Homecoming

     
    THE HOMECOMING was first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre on 3 June, 1965, with the following cast:
    MAX , a man of seventy
Paul Rogers
L ENNY, a man in his early thirties
Ian Holm
SAM, a man of sixty-three
John Normington
JOEY, a man in his middle twenties
Terence Rigby
TEDDY, a man in his middle thirties
Michael Bryant
RUTH , a woman in her early thirties
Vivien Merchant
Directed by Peter Hall
    The play was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Alexander H. Cohen at the Music Box