Not Just a Capulet

Thoughts on Shakespeare
The Observer

‘Why,’ Peter Hall once asked me very rhetorically, ‘should they have to be either Montagues or Capulets?’ He was referring to actors who move from the National Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Company or vice versa. This two-way traffic is more frequent than the image of publicity of either organization would suggest. Not until now, though, has a player managed to work for both simultaneously.

That player is Brenda Bruce, appearing until November at the National as Margery Eyre in The Shoemakers’ Holiday’ but also due to open this week at the Aldwych as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and shortly afterwards at the Warehouse as the Witch in David Rudkin’s Hansel and Gretel. If this display of ambidextrousness has gone largely unnoticed, that is of a piece with Miss Bruce’s whole career. She has never lacked for appreciation, but she has only gradually crept up on us as the best unnamed actress of her generation.

I have to declare a bias. In 1954, when I was taken on what was then the inevitable schoolboy trip to see Peter Pan, she was playing Peter. I have a firm memory of her voice trembling as she thanked us for saving Tinker Bell.

She told me that she got the Peter Pan job very strangely. She was already an established West End player and, like many such, under contract to H.M. Tennent. They put her into a Henry James adaptation. ‘It was my chance to play the leading juvenile and it was the flop of all time. Kenneth Tynan wrote that I was foolishly and determinedly miscast as a radiant American of 18, considering that I’d made a name for myself as being incredibly plain.’

This led to a bizarre competition in the Evening Standard, which ran her photograph over the ringing inquiry, ‘is this the plainest face on the English stage?’ Readers were invited to suggest their own nominees for the title, and they blame known collectively as ‘the urchin girls.’ The Peter Pan management must have decided that any actress whose looks could inspire that kind of furore must at any rate be good for playing a boy.

Miss Bruce survived the Tynan review and the competition, having already surmounted a far more terrifying criticism from her mother, who ‘wanted me to wear frocks and looks pretty,’ but pronounced, after seeing an early performance as Anne Bronte at Birmingham Rep, ‘it’s a pity you look so ugly when you cry.’ ‘I think of it, ‘ she says ‘every show I do.’ Her own word for her face is ‘perky’ and it has led her to a great suspicion of perky characters: the kind for which directors think her obvious casting. She was resistant to the role of Maria in Twelfth Night and ended up playing her staid and stern.

She started very young. ‘Apparently I told my mother when I was three that I was going to be a fairy.’ She trained as a dancer but gave it up at 12 (‘I was hopeless.’) A brisk, soubrettish air has clung to her ever since. At 13 though, she was a chorus-girl (‘complete with chaperone’) in a little review, and in 1936, at the age of 14, she went to Birmingham (‘Barry Jackson was very brave’) and stayed there for three years.

She came to London during the war in Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines and scored her first big success in 1947 at Hammersmith playing Eliza in Pygmalion. The notices were excellent (‘I found the Cockney all too easy,’ says Miss Bruce from Brixton) and a transfer was only prevented by a postcard from the author: ‘Don’t know nuffin’ of Brenda Bruce, don’t want to know nuffin’, am sick of Pygmalion.’ 

She stuck with Shaw, though, appearing in 1951 in the entire canon of his one-act plays. These were directed by her husband, Roy Rich, later head of Southern Television of BBC Light Entertainment. During the Fifties they had their own television chat show, ‘Rich and Rich’, presented in a studio replica of their Bloomsbury flat. ‘If we didn’t already know the people we had on the show, we had them over for several meals. That’s how I learned to cook and Roy had a heart attack. The two of us were news at the time. I was doing lots of West End plays, and I had a weekly column, mainly based on having two children: a very poor man’s Katherine Whitehorn.’

The children were adopted twin girls, and were lated joined by a boy. Because of them she withdrew from the theatre and acted mainly on television. She was nominated TV Actress of the Year in 1962. In that past year, however, she also appeared at the Royal Court as Winnie in the near-monologue of Happy Days and the career of an actress who had come to epitomise a very Fifties kind of sensible glamour began to shift.

In 1964, egged on by her husband, she went to the Aldwych for a single play which stretched into two, then into three. She has been with the RSC on and off ever since.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was her first decisive success; she was the bubbly one, Elizabeth Spriggs the shy one. She had played very little Shakespeare before; she has since gone through the range of available parts, culminating in the Nurse.

Her Stratford years have been marked by professional success and private tragedy. Roy Rich had wanted to return to the theatre, but found it was too late: ‘People practically said “Roy who?”’ Despondent, he decided that they should live outside Stratford and run a ‘little pub’ - one that turned out to have 11 rooms and room for 45 dinner-guests. But with a year he was dead of cancer. She faved ‘a nightmare year’ with the business to run, the children still at school and - what turned out to be her salvation- a full season’s work in the theatre.

Later she married RSC actor Clem McCallin, who she had known since Birmingham days; soon after the marriage her young son, who had always suffered from asthma, died too. She also discovered that her new husband had leukaemia. In 1977 he too died, having worked almost literally up to the last minute. With the last year she has lost both her parents. ‘One copes. I don’t know what I’d have done if I were just a housewife.’

‘She’s suffered enormously,’ says Ron Daniels, who directs both her current RSC plays, ‘and it gives her a tremendous vulnerability on stage. She’s extraordinary to work with, because she combines tremendous helplessness with an absolute sense of knowing what’s right. She’s very protective, very kind- and she stands up to the young ones with great finesse. I wanted a Nurse who wasn’t the conventional type: one representing an active sexuality, a madam rather than a crone.’

She says herself that she wanted to play ‘not a Back to Methuselah original ancient,’ but a substitute mother for Juliet. (She’s played the real one in her time- a strong embittered performance that dominated its production.) As for the the Rudkin play: ‘You don’t get to play a witch that often. It used to frighten us to death to do it. But the children adore it; it’s the 30-year-old dads who pass out.’