Love is Where it Falls by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

11

After a long period out of England, Aziz decided to come back for a short stay when I was about to open in The Relapse at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, some two years after The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthasar B. He was sweet and quietly charming, but very minor key, swathed about with sadness, somehow distant, not so much in his manner as in spirit. He seemed faded, like a fabric over-exposed to the light. ‘We passed a hazy happy day,’ I wrote to Peggy the day he arrived back. ‘Since then, he’s been in a bit of a trance. Overwhelmed by being at a first night of mine again after all these years, overwhelmed to be in the flat again, overwhelmed at how it’s changed. We had lunch today with my aunt and mother – which is the definition of overwhelming. He’s sleeping it off at the moment. He can’t face his friends here, much as he wants to see them, because they’ve got so much to show for the time since he last saw them – scripts, films, children – and he has nothing. He’s at a standstill.’ New drugs (lithium) had finally stabilised him, but the stability they brought bored him. He was not even interestingly neurotic to himself any more. His life, up till now a helter-skelter ride between heaven and hell, had become very flat, and he went back to Geneva to resume a life which consisted of visits to the psychoanalyst, to the cinema, and to certain rather miserable clubs where, very late at night and under the influence of enough Carlsberg Special, he would rediscover some of the teasing, suggestive vivacity which had so characterised him in the past. At such times, he managed, for a brief while, to find himself interesting, but by morning, this proved unsustainable. Most of his days were spent recording and painstakingly editing together on video his matchless collection of cartoons. It was the only genre with which he now seemed comfortable, scrutinising the adventures of its anthropomorphic heroes, its cunning mice, fiendish cats, cheeky rabbits and guntoting dogs with intense concentration, as if the clue to his existence lay in these stories. Sometimes, on my visits to Geneva, we would watch them together, and these were times of great closeness, but we never said anything about them, not a word.

At the beginning of 1984, I started rehearsing Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot at the Watford Palace Theatre, translating my admiration for Charles Laughton into a misguided desire to play one of his most famous stage roles, Tony Perelli, openly based on Al Capone. Peggy was astonished that I should want to play such an old war-horse, and gravely warned me, not for the first time, that ‘you can never be better than your play,’ a fundamental tenet of hers, which if not absolutely true, certainly proved to be the case here. Laughton was better than the play, and had electrified his audiences by taking every blood-thirsty line deeply seriously.

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