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THE BATES MALT
Was it only 60 years ago when Alan Bates became an icon for high school and college drama majors? Though his first movie role was in Olivier’s 1960 The Entertainer, the real swooning began with 1964’s Zorba the Greek and stayed steady through Georgy Girl, the cult classic King of Hearts, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Fixer and culminated in Women in Love. The influence of his style—amorphous, disquietingly genteel, suggestible—could be seen in every class, tryout and in just about every play: always the Bates clones in woolly, romanticized beards, and almost always the imitators were not fat but chunky solid and practicing pretenders of D.H. Lawrence. (They “read” the master but never quite got him until years later.) Didn’t much matter: Bates as Rupert captured the essence of Lawrence’s early priesthood of love, his belief, despite social obstacles, there could be purity in it. But by 1971, in Simon Gray’s Butley, which I saw Bates perform on the London stage, something changed. At first glance, one could dismiss the prissified mannerisms, defend them as part of the character. They weren’t uncomfortably overt—in fact, they were highly entertaining—yet not long after I left the theatre, I became nagged by them. When we see fine actors on stage, without the protections of retakes filming provide, we often get more than a performance, we get the real person overshadowing the part they’re playing. Bates went on to win a Tony for the Broadway run of Butley, and the American Film Theatre experiment brought it to screen. As if to balance the mild limps and swishes, Bates re-iconned himself as the (booze-bloated?) lover to skinny unappetizing Jill Clayburgh in the terrible An Unmarried Woman, but soon enough the mannerisms returned. And they stayed: as Diaghilev in Nijinsky, as spy Guy Burgess in John Schlesinger’s An Englishman Abroad, as the ghoulish effete mortician in A Prayer for the Dying, and, in what is his last major role, as a dipso playwright in the BBC production of Simon Gray’s 1992 semi-autobiographical Unnatural Pursuits, in which he’s wonderful in the way only the British seem to know how to be wonderful at—playing souces who move into our hearts in spite of the disdain we regard drunks these days. Reminiscent of Michael Caine in Educating Rita, Bates, a chimney stack puffing out Marlboros, a guzzler of Glenfiddich and white wines, his fingers thickly stubby and the flab under his chin hanging past a lost Adam’s apple, is sounding more like Dudley Moore than ever, and his gait might be on loan from George Wendt. The coxcomb, though less dandified, is still there: at the beginning, carrying a print shopping bag for his malt scotch and glasses, and later, in L.A., holding tight his brown bag filled with booze, he’s gone beyond being the male Maggie Smith, he’s a West End straight Capote. The portrait does have a composite quality about it—even Butley and of course Gray himself weave in and out—but once Bates starts singing, in a voice that surprises the happy hell of out us because it’s unexpectedly sonorous in the tradition of musical theatre, Hamish Partt becomes his own malted creation. We become instantly elated, energized, tickled by the sheer courage it had to take for Bates to burst into song. Listening to the numbers—“Here Am I—I’m the Author,” “For the First Time, For the Last Time,” “A G.D. Monster Hit,” written by Robert Lockhart, with Gray most likely polishing the lyrics—and enjoying the bravura Bates and the other performers deliver, there’s regret this inner-workings-of-the-theatre-stuff isn’t, in fact, a musical. If not as integrated as smoothly as they would be in a musical, the songs spring from Gray’s material, they carry along the themes of the moments they come out of. Despite feature articles suggesting otherwise, Unnatural Pursuits isn’t another All About Eve, but it wouldn’t be wrong to have more behind-the-scenes revelations about the theatre. (No complaint over the criticism Gray offers up about Dallas, however: when Bates takes a gander at the city, he utters “God, what a dump!”) There’s a very funny bit when, in New York, we lip-read a black cabbie soundlessly screaming out obscenities to an Asian. And the honest ending won’t please the judgmentally sober. What will please just about everyone else is Alan Bates in one of the best roles of his career. Before his own death, there had been tragedy—having lost his wife and one of twin sons—but the shade of melancholy he pulls down over his Hamish isn’t used to get us to feel any sympathy for him. If he had, neither the character nor the ending would work. Watching Bates here, listening to him and John Mahoney sing, impossibilities spring to mind: the two of them might have triumphed in My Fair Lady. Directed by Christopher Morahan (who co-helmed The Jewel in the Crown). Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER (Revised 7/2018) All Rights Reserved.
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