Read Online Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton - Free Book Online Page A

of a thin, meagre-looking material, quite wrong for the character. This grandiose and greedy sensualist should surely look as splendid as his verse sounds.
    â€˜Nevertheless Alan Rickman’s performance compensated for this and his curious “mod” hairstyle. A lazy and smug drawl, affected movements and lucid, well-pointed verse-speaking succeeded well for this avaricious yet perversely sensitive booby. He knew how to throw away a line and deliver the famous speech – “I’ll have all my beds blown up, not stuff’d, down is too hard” – without any indulgence in the voice, beautifully.’
    The previous year, Alan played the female role of Grusha in Brecht’s
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
, which was his first introduction to left-wing agit prop or agitational propaganda. ‘He read with assurance, sympathy and complete absence of embarrassment,’ noted Ted Stead, the director of the production, in
The Latymerian
.
    Unfortunately, Alan fell ill and had to be replaced in the second half. He received his first dodgy notice when the late Leonard Sachs – who made his name as the deliriously alliterative Master of Ceremonies in the television variety series
The Good Old Days
and whose son, Robin, was a Latymer Upper pupil – seemed to find Alan just a little too precocious.
    In a
Latymerian
review of a 1963 production of
The Knight Of The Burning Pestle
, Sachs had a somewhat equivocal response to Rickman’s ‘just too arch Humphrey’. Judging by the adjacent photograph, the foppish, confident-looking Rickman must have been hilarious.
    â€˜I used to bump into Alan on the Tube because we lived quite close to each other,’ recalls Robert Cushman. ‘Then I suddenly became aware of him as an actor in the Gild in 1962 when I played Sergeant Musgrave in a rehearsed reading of John Arden’s
Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance
and Alan played Annie the barmaid. He played her as a bedraggled slut, and there was amazing depth, tragedy and irony in his performance. I have this image of him cradling a dead body.
    â€˜He was a charismatic character at school: there was that voice and that authority. I don’t know that I would necessarily have prophesied stardom for him. His individuality was always going to stand him in good stead, though.’
    At the Speech and Musical Festival of 1964, Rickman was commended for having ‘. . . with studied nonchalance extracted every ounce of biting satire from Peacock’s
Portrait of Scythrop
’. He’s been studying nonchalance ever since. And as Grikos in
Cloud Over The Morning
, he won the award at Hammersmith DramaFestival that same year for the best individual performance. The rap over the knuckles from Sachs had done him no harm.
    â€˜I first met Alan when I joined the school in 1962 and he was in the Lower Sixth,’ says Stead, a Cambridge contemporary of David Frost, Corin Redgrave, Margaret Drabble and Derek Jacobi. Ted, who went on to teach at Gravesend Grammar School for Boys, gave Trevor Nunn his first acting job in Dylan Thomas’s
Return Journey
when they were both up at Downing College.
    Above all, Stead remembers Rickman’s confidence, with an ability to camp things up as a schoolboy drag queen that nearly gave the Head of the time a fit of puritanical apoplexy.
    â€˜Alan was in the political panto
Ali Baba And The Seven Dwarfs
. He played the sixth wife of Ali Baba and one of his lines was censored by the headmaster, who was a northern Methodist and insisted it be cut from a family show.
    â€˜It was a line about Alan being the Saturday wife, since Ali Baba had one for every day of the week. Alan had to say “fat or thin, nearly bare, he doesn’t care” of Ali Baba’s taste in women. And he wore a diaphanous costume in a very flamboyant way, quite confidently.’
    Robert Cushman reviewed that production for the spring issue of
The Latymerian
in 1963.