1990
Actor and Director, Gavin Richards, currently in Adelaide with the popular comedy show Allo Allo, talks to Murray Bramwell about Alternative Theatre in the UK- where it has been and how it responds to a changed society.
Actors in television often seem to come out of nowhere, magically discovered and hurled into prominence, but this is rarely true. Take Gavin Richards for instance. He is a household name as the amorous Italian Captain in Allo Allo, the old-style Perry and Croft comedy spoof of Secret Army, but he is equally celebrated for his contribution to an explosion of theatrical activity that began in the late 1960’s and continued until the early 1980’s.
Richards grew up in London, studied drama at Bristol University and then moved north to perform with companies such as the Liverpool Rep, the Everyman Theatre and the Bolton Octagon.
“These places were doing very interesting work at that time, trying to build up a new audience. Generally, the working public didn’t go to the theatre and it was through quite a hefty movement of different people doing different kinds of work – community-based shows, left-wing shows, or just plain mad, offbeat shows that a new audience was built, or, at least, contracted and brought into the theatre. That audience is now probably fifty percent of the mainstream theatre following in England.
“A lot of these people became successful in business and in a way changed their colours. That’s certainly what happened in the country as a whole with the rise of Mrs Thatcher. It changed the feelings of the English people- they live in a kind of fear which they never did before. It’s a very different atmosphere . The things we were doing in the Seventies were stimulating and celebratory. They became inappropriate. It was no longer a question of the theatre trying to support a political movement that was already taking place and so a lot of the energy fell away.”
Gavin Richards was closely connected to some of the now legendary alternative theatre initiatives of the early Seventies- the Ken Campbell Roadshow, the 7:84 Company (so named because of the 1966 statistic that 7 percent of the population owned 84 percent of the capital wealth in the UK) and, when 7:84 split to become a Scottish based operation, Richards formed his own company, Belt and Braces.
“There was a huge energy then- everyone wanted to do something but there wasn’t room in the structure for people to fulfil themselves and develop their particular ideas. That’s why so many splits occurred, because the Government wouldn’t fund anybody unless they were autonomous. By ’78 -’79 I was proposing that we amalgamate companies but nobody wanted it. They all wanted to keep their own little empires, they were like tiny baronies.”
“It started with us thinking -`This is a wheeze,’ taking money from the Government and biting the hand that fed us. We had no interest in seeing Government structures maintained. We wanted them all changed and democratised and the arts bodies saw themselves under attack and linked to the Government more and more. Gradually their membership changed and the replacements became more conservative.”
As politics moved to the right, Richards became perturbed with his own political milieu as well. “What happens to socialism is that it becomes a means by which people of very different classes and backgrounds develop the same lingo and make a career for themselves out of it. It doesn’t have much to do with the fight for justice and the fight for freedom. If you have that situation you get the problem of repeating the essential injustice which socialism is supposed to change. You find that Animal Farm is right. Orwell had the guts to say `I’m on your side but we haven’t got all the answers.’ The answers are not provided by any one `-ism’ or ideology.”
“We need to go back to being the artists we should’ve been in the first place. Not that we shouldn’t be concerned with politics- but remembering that the artist is part of the community, constructed by the community to see it from the margin from a thousand different angles. The clown see things from a comic position which must automatically mean an anti-authoritarian one. I think the artist is a sort of clown. However refined the art is, however many millions a painting sells for or whatever. The artist is an outsider who sees things from a different point of view, even though he or she is also an insider who lives a life like anybody else.”
Gavin Richards has gained prominence for his work in film and television, the latter notably in Trevor Griffiths’ Oi for England. But it was the Belt and Braces theatre version of Dario Fo’s radical political comedy, Accidental Death of An Anarchist adapted, directed and starring Richards, which most made his mark. It not only toured widely but played for a long run in London’s West End.
“It was personally very rewarding,” Richards notes drily, “And I was delighted with its success but only for a little while because it became absorbed into the system. Energy in the theatre, as elsewhere, comes from people who have to struggle because of circumstance. When that changes, it becomes a product like soapflakes, Marx on a t-shirt, a slogan on a badge. At that stage it’s over, it’s been absorbed.”
“I think TV and newspapers and the communication media are mainly in the hands of people who feel it is possible to popularise ideas and feelings and they do this the way capitalism generally puts out its ideas, by reducing them to nonsense. I watched a newsflash last night about a shooting on the Gold Coast. The policeman grabbed the gunman and then someone came up and pinched the gunman’s nose. Then it moved to an Australian holiday ad and shots of the Gold Coast and people surfing. All this happens in a split second.”
“You cannot do that. You cannot think seriously about the world when you juxtapose images irresponsibly in that way, in a kind of chaos. All you are saying to a child watching is `nothing matters, kid, nothing is really real. Everything’s equally to do with making you feel good. If you feel good-no worries, no problems.'”
“After Anarchist I decided there was no future for me doing the kind of work I had done before. I wanted to take a break from that. I tried three or four projects, all of which floundered through lack of proper support. They were difficult times. I decided to work as an actor for a while because I happen to be known for that.
“Allo Allo is a good popular comedy and I can do it. I like to do serious stuff too – it’s all part of the job of acting. Priestley once said we all do the thing we do second best- acting is what I do second best. The thing I do best is writing and directing but I’m not allowed to do that because the things which are personally dear to me are not supported by the kind of management structures which exist at the moment.”
Gavin Richards thinks broadly but he is wary of formulaic remedies. I ask whether he thinks comedy is the best path for political theatre at present.”I don’t know the answer. In a journalistic situation like an interview you can end up pontificating. We expect too much of art, we expect too much of everything and yet we don’t look at what is really possible- which is a lot- and how to bring it about. I come back to the importance of the idea of justice. Everyone has a sense of justice, they either move away from it to protect themselves and build up defences or they stand up define their idea of justice.”
“Brecht said justice is like bread, the bread of the mind and soul. That’s the feeling we need to get back to and that stimulates respect for art. There was great disrespect on the left for any kind of art that didn’t have a left wing, right-on political message. It was an appalling feature of the whole thing, and it was divisive. Guys I worked with couldn’t understand how I could read Ernest Mandel and still enjoy listening to Vaughan Williams. There’s nothing wrong with loving your own country and your own country’s music whether it comes from imperialists or anyone else.It’s time to stop labelling everyone and talk about what’s right, what’s just, what’s human, what protects and what’s the best in people.”
“Allo Allo, how things change” The Advertiser, April 14, 1990, p.13.