Hot Ticket - London
Center Stage
by Kevin Spacey
As the newest major player in English theater, Kevin Spacey raises the
curtain on the drama that drives London
I
first came to London as a child, when my family stayed at a small
bed-and-breakfast called the Gower House in central London. One morning, I
sat in the window of its breakfast room looking out across the street at a
five-story Georgian building buzzing with activity. My mother told me that
this was the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, one of the world's great acting
schools. I remember a staircase leading up to imposing wooden
stoop. They
seemed to stare back and beckon. I was captivated by the young actors and
actresses mingling outside, smokiing cigarettes and looking mysterious, and
though I was only eight years old, I already knew I wanted to be one of
them.
Thirty
years later, in 1998, I was driving in my Jeep to the Old Vic to perform in
The Iceman Cometh when something caught my attention. My foot hit the
brakes,
and there they were - those same lions. I was on Gower Street.
I
hadn't remembered where RADA was or even where my family had stayed during
our trips to London, but as I looked across the street, I saw the window of
that breakfast room and it all came flooding back. Of course, the lions
aren't quite as grand as I remembered, but then most actors aren't quite as
mysterious as they seem once you see them up
close.
So
my first recollections of London begin in the heart of the city, and writing
about them got me thinking about distance and what it takes to get from here
to there. My father's first trip to London was as a soldier in the U.S. Army
during World War II. He was based here and fell in love with the city and
with England, largely for what he viewed as its aristocratic way of life. My
mother also loved things British and was a lifelong member of the Charles
Dickens Society. Most of her vacations were spent in England to meet up with
other Dickens devotees at their annual conferences.
After
we three children came along, my parents saved up their pennies to introduce
us to this faraway world, and our family trips to Britain began when I was
about six. Although my earliest memories of these vacations have dimmed, I
do still have some vivid recollections. One is of a trip to Scotland that
was my first time on a train. I was fascinated at seeing the countryside
whizzing by at such speed, and have had a love of locomotives ever since.
Another time, our parents took us to the Tower of London, which I remember
finding more frightening than fascinating. But it was not nearly as scary as
the rat that ran across my mother's shoe while we were eating in an Indian
restaurant in the West End one night. It was years before I was able to
enjoy Indian food again.
My
parents also had a love of the theater, and they began to take the three of
us to plays at a very young age. I know that on one of our trips we saw a
production at the Old Vic, but I cannot recall what it was. Decades later,
when The Iceman Cometh transferred from the Almeida
Theatre in North London to the Old Vic, it was as if I had found a stage
made for me.
The
theater has always been my primary allegiance, and it was at the Old Vic
that I had done my most challenging work. On a rainy night not long after my
epiphany on Gower Street, I sat in a small park across from the theater and
decided that this was the place I wanted to call my theatrical home. After
all, somebody had to help save it from being converted into a disco or a
lapdancing club-a distinct possibility a few years ago - so I signed on as
artistic director. Perhaps one day I'll come across an old program in the
theater's archives and the memory of the play I saw with my parents will
return, just as it did with those lions.
The
history of the Old Vic is one of the most glamorous in theater lore. Built
in 1818, it was bombed in World War II, and its roof has never fully been
repaired (rain still drips into buckets in the attic). But it was the home
of the National Theatre for 13 seasons, ten of them under the artistic
directorship of Laurence Olivier, and was where John Gielgud made his debut
in the 1920s, Judi Dench in the 1960s, and where Ralph Richardson, Richard
Burton, Maggie Smith, Peter
O'Toole, and Olivier had their greatest triumphs.
It
is also the theater I am fondest of performing in. Acoustically you won't
find better, and there's something mysterious about the building itself.
Actors have often remarked on feeling that theaters have their ghosts. But
in the case of the Vic, they are not the haunting, scary kind a child might
sense at the Tower of London; they are welcoming and embracing. Perhaps so
many famous and respected artists have trod its boards that their talent and
even their spirits radiate today. Given the success the theater has had this
year with Trevor Nunn's stunning production of Hamlet, it's clear
that the Old Vic is not bad for audiences, either.
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