CLIVE FRANCIS

Throughout the ages, actors have had to put up with any number of disturbances, whether it be stones, rotten, stinking produce or the dreaded mobile. I witnessed Kevin Spacey pacing the stage during his brilliant Clarence Darrow at the Old Vic while a phone rang continuously, until he snapped: ‘If you don’t answer that, I will!"

Many actors have had similar experiences, myself included. I sat next to a man who actually answered his phone with the immortal line: "Can’t talk now, I’m watching a play." On one occasion the late, lamented Richard Griffiths asked a woman to leave the theatre after her phone rang for the third time, adding that the audience would be quite justified in suing her. Patti LuPone got so fed up one night during Shows for Days on Broadway that she marched into the stalls, grabbed the offender's phone and confiscated it backstage.

But it's not only phones that have driven actors to confront their audience openly: incessant giggling and talking have done so as well. More recently, Ken Stott famously halted a performance of A View from the Bridge after being driven to distraction by the noise of youngsters, eventually having them removed. Nicol Williamson once told a party of schoolgirls in the middle of Hamlet to "shut up and listen", threatening to start his performance all over again unless all chattering ceased "forthwith".

The only time I found myself halting a performance was during Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, at Chichester in 1976. During a rather tender love scene with Susan Hampshire, a gentleman, obviously the worse for drink, stood up and began shouting at what I can only assume was his wife. The noise became so intolerable that I had no compunction but to ask if the gentleman in question could be removed from the auditorium, at the same time apologising to the audience, who greeted my intervention with an immediate burst of applause; after which I could do no wrong for the rest of the evening.

Mind, rowdy audiences have always had a place in history. Charles Dickens attended Samuel Phelp’s opening night of Macbeth in 1844, and recalls watching "amidst the usual hideous medley of fights, catcalls, shrieks, howls, oaths, obscenities, apples, oranges, biscuits and pipes. Pints of beer were carried through the dense crowd at all stages while fish was fried at the entrance doors".

If it’s not phones that is the mainstay of our grief, or chomping, talking or latecomers etc etc, then we can always fall back on the good old English cough, which, if not controlled, can become strangely contagious, floating around the theatre like a Mexican wave.

Ralph Richardson once considered the art of acting as "preventing your audience from coughing all evening" and James Agate once observed that nobody went to the theatre unless he or she was strumming along to their own catarrhs. The American actor John Barrymore was so incensed by the constant bronchial hysteria during his performance of Hamlet that he came on for Act II carrying a large fish, which he hurled into the audience, crying: "Here, you damned walruses, busy yourselves with that for the rest the play."

What about booing, which began its life during the annual festival of Dionysia in Athens – a practice, I’m glad to say, that has fallen out of fashion with audiences these days.

The only time I experienced it was when the Gallery First Nighters' decided to boo during the curtain call of my first West End play, There’s a Girl in My Soup, in 1966. They booed with such relish that it provoked the stalls (who were politely applauding at the time) to retaliate by booing them, until it was impossible to know who was booing whom. Anyway, it didn’t matter as the play went on to become the longest-running comedy in the history of the West End.

Let me conclude by saying that actors down through the centuries have had to suffer interruptions, criticism, condemnation and abuse since time immemorial. After all, it was only 400 years ago that we were openly referred to as rogues, vagabonds and the scum of the earth, and if caught performing without a licence could have been grievously whipped and burned "through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about". It wasn’t until Henry Irving received his knighthood for services to the theatre in 1895 that the actor became acceptable.

But that was all a long time ago. After all, this is the 21st century. So please, "no more cakes and ale", phone ringing, texting, sweet wrappers and the like, but make it possible for each and every one of us to enjoy the experience of theatre in peace, allowing everyone "gently to hear and kindly to judge, our play".

“One of my bugbears is that drama schools don’t give students a grounding in the history of acting. If you go to art college or music college you’re taught about what’s gone before, but not in drama schools. I’ve even suggested to Edward Kemp [principal] at RADA that they devote an hour a week to the history of drama and acting. I believe it is important to understand your heritage, how styles of acting have changed, the parallels between old and new styles. We’re all moving into a great big family of acting, and to not know who your ancestors were seems to me crazy and short-sighted.”

Another thing you’re unlikely to learn at drama school is how to deal with unemployment. Again, it is an area in which Francis has been unusually resourceful.

“I went to see a clairvoyant when I was feeling particularly low,” he says, “and she asked me if I’d ever thought of writing. I replied that I couldn’t even spell, let alone write. Some time later I was appearing in Giles Havergal’s adaptation of Travels With My Aunt, and I was so impressed with what Giles had done with Graham Greene’s book that I went home and took The Hound of the Baskervilles off the bookshelf, flicked through it, and thought ‘Right, I’ll have a go’ ”.

That was the start of his second string career as an adapter of classic texts. He followed Hound of the Baskervilles with Three Men in a Boat, Our Man in Havana, The Lavender Hill Mob, Ben Travers’ Thark, and his own solo performance of A Christmas Carol, which he has done every festive season since 2000. Every festive season, that is, until the upcoming one.

This year, he will be ensconced at the Playhouse Theatre, London, playing the patriarchal Arthur Birling in the latest revival of An Inspector Calls, Stephen Daldry’s clever reinvention of J.B. Priestley’s mystery-cum-socialist-polemic about an affluent Edwardian family called to account for their casual indifference to the fate of a girl they all regarded as their social inferior.

Though previously unacquainted with the play, Francis appeared in a 1980 London production of Dangerous Corner when he got to meet Priestley on the first night. “He was coaxed up on to the stage at the end of the performance and we all met him backstage afterwards. My recollection is he was charming and funny and self-effacing.

“I think when Stephen [Daldry] suggested doing An Inspector Calls at the National, Richard Eyre was extremely sceptical about it but gave Stephen six months to work on it with the designer Ian MacNeil. They took it apart and put it back together again. It’s now played all over the world and the play has been a GCSE text for years. I think we’re even doing some schools matinees at the Playhouse.”
Francis himself is no stranger to deconstructing classic texts and reassembling them in his own image.

One of the positive by-products of a truncated education is that he has always been a voracious reader and hungry for knowledge. “I felt inferior to properly educated people for years and I’ve always worked very hard on scripts to make sure I knew exactly what the author was saying. I’ve read nearly all Dickens several times, which is an education in itself.”

A self-confessed workaholic, Francis always has umpteen projects on the go, and shows no sign of slowing down. Three of his adaptations – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Our Man in Havana and Susan Hill’s The Small Hand – will be going on the road next year, and a new show about Dickens and the theatre is awaiting a try-out, with Francis himself as the great man. “He was a frustrated actor and he poured all his love for the theatre into his writings. It pops up all over the place. Many of his best characters are virtually variety turns.
“Even though they can be quite lonely, I love doing solo shows. I sometimes recite them to myself on long train journeys, just to keep my hand in. The other passengers must think I’m a bit barmy.”
He can also be seen as the ruthless Lord Salisbury in the new Netflix series The Crown, directed by Daldry.

The third string to the actor’s bow is, of course, his brilliant theatrical caricatures, which have adorned biographies of Gielgud and Guinness, among others, as well as being collected into a book, Laugh Lines, published by Hodder and Stoughton.

“I’m so lucky to be able to do the three things I love most – acting, writing and drawing – with a modicum of success. Even when I was growing up as a kid in Eastbourne I used to have a sketchbook with me at all times. When you think about it, character acting and caricature are quite closely related.”

CV: Clive Francis
Born: 1946, Ealing, London
Training: RADA, 1964-66
Career highlights: Theatre: A Christmas Carol (2000), 84 Charing Cross Road (2015)
TV: Entertaining Mr Sloane (1968), Sense and Sensibility (1971), Poldark (1975), The Piglet Files (1990), The Crown (2016)
Film: Mr Turner (2014)
Agent: Simon Beresford

Clives caricatures can be seen and purchased at www.clivefranciscaricaturist.com
An Inspector Calls is at the Playhouse Theatre, London, from November 10, 2016 to February 4, 2017