The reality of humour

Clare Colvin, THE TIMES, July 17 1983

Nigel Hawthorne has just completed his final stint as Permanent Secretary to the Department of Administrative Affairs in the BBC television series Yes Minister. Now he is not sure he enjoys the feeling the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican headquarters seems to engender in some of its actors of being a "glorified civil servant". He has joined the company to play Orgon in Christopher Hampton's new translation of Moliere's Tartuffe, directed by Bill Alexander, which opens at the Pit tomorrow. It will not be farcical.

"In the past, audiences have been very suspicious about French plays, and the translators truncated Moliere's long and complicated speeches to make them acceptable to English ears", says Hawthorne. "We were concerned that the production should be a genuine version, rather than taking the original idea and turning it into a funny play: it is not in rhyming couplets but blank verse, in order to keep it as near as possible to Moliere's words.

"The basic of good comedy is truth, so the more real the situation is, the funnier. You don't need arbitrary business and jokes. Underneath there is an extraordinary emotional situation, in which Orgon, an ordinary middle-class family man, has invited into his house a religious nut, who is also a conman. The more he is warned, the more obstinate he becomes that the man should remain in their lives. When the moment of realization does arrive, it is almost too painful to watch."

Tartuffe is designed to run in repertoire with Bulgakov's Moliere. which is transferring from the Other Place at Stratford. The Bulgakov play shows Tartuffe as a contributory factor in Moliere's own downfall and draws parallels to the artist in any repressive society. Antony Sher, who plays the title roles in both plays, is a compatriot of Hawthorne from South Africa. They lived within four miles of each other in Cape Town, though they rarely talk about it because they feel estranged from the country. Hawthorne recently returned there to find, despite window-dressing, the feeling of hopelessness worse than ever.

It was not the political situation, so much as the need to be an actor, which first brought Hawthorne to England. He worked with Joan Littlewood in the latter days of her time at Stratford East when she was beginning to get disenchanted. Although the magic was there, so was "the other side, which was depressingly careless and recklessly bad, yet the way she worked and thought remained with me". He became involved in Royal Court productions, as Prince Albert in Early Morning, the last Edward Bond play to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain, in other Bond plays, Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse arid John Osborne's A Sense of Detachment.

However, acclaim really arrived in the Seventies for performances in Michael Frayn's Clouds, in which he was a supposedly hard-nosed reporter on a facility trip to Cuba, and Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade as Major Flack, the bone-headed commander who lectures the troops on godliness while the Japanese advance on Singapore. He was not in the film of the play - an understandable decision, he says, as at the time of casting it was John Cleese's name that raised the money. But it would have been nice to have been told before it was actually announced in the newspapers.

After Tartuffe. plans are undecided. There will only be another Yes Minister if the writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, feel that they can find a new way of approaching the series, bearing in mind that they have made all the jokes they can about the present situation. It has been a critical and popular success, but neither author wants to go over old ground again.

Now in his mid-fifties, Hawthorne is beginning to question whether he wants to remain in the theatre. which he finds less to his taste than filming. "I keep asking what I am doing dressing up every night, and it all seems a bit silly. I enjoy working for the camera because you are not stuck with it night after night. You don't have to have constant loyalty to it. You can do it once and you don't even have to watch it. I used to love my theatre days. the magic and make-up and pretending, but suddenly these things seem a little empty. and you wonder what you are doing it for. It is like waking up after a nice dream and thinking, now it's daylight I can see through it."