LA meets Dr Who
Finding
theatre in unfamiliar places is a good sport so although I’d gone to Gallifrey
One’s February Dr Who convention in Los Angeles for the fan in me that has
loved science fiction ever since H G Wells’ lot and Radio BBC’s Journey Into
Space in the 1950s, I kind of hoped that there would be some theatre pay offs.
I like the stories actors and directors tell about their experiences and can
listen to the yarns and legends all day.
Top
this off with some side gallops into Los Angeles proper to get a glimpse of
Hollywood and to have a go at the two Getty museums all complicated by the time it
takes to get around such a spread out town and you can see why I did not quite
manage to follow up on a chance to see an experimental Richard III (which had
had mixed reviews). That I also managed to have a glimpse of President Obama
flying past Santa Monica pier in a helicopter phalanx while I was paying homage
to Ray Bradbury, the tents of Cirque du Soleil and the end of Route 66 (where a
busker was singing Here’s to You, Mrs Robinson) was just plain luck.
In
Hollywood the acting starts as you come up out of the train station down the
road from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. There’s all these people dressed as
everything from Captain Jack Sparrow to Darth Vader and his Imperial Storm
Troopers. Their job is to get you to tip them for having your photo taken with
them and to make it just that bit more difficult to find Jean Harlow’s foot and
hand prints that you’ve promised to find for your 100 year old mother outside Grauman’s.
‘She’s just up from Elizabeth Taylor’, says the man in the kiosk and so she is.
Tiny feet, tiny hands and dead at 26 from renal failure, much to the sorrow of
fans like my father who wrote to her, got a signed photo back but lost it in
the numerous moonlight flits round the Cross in Sydney when the rent couldn’t
be paid.
Actually
all of the talent seems to have been tiny. I am spruiked into Grauman’s Chinese
Theatre by a young Pom offering short tours of the inside (came out to break
into Hollywood… well, he’s gotten as far as Grauman’s…) The film costumes on
display in the foyer of Grauman’s don’t go above a size 10 and come to think of
it the hands and feet in the cement outside are all on the small side too. Even
John Wayne’s boots don’t have heft – R2D2’s footprints look bigger.
(Later
on, back at Gallifrey One, Paul McGann (Doctor Number Eight, The Monocled
Mutineer, Withnail and I) also turns out to be physically tinier than his
performances would ever indicate. He has a superb singing voice that would go
down a treat at the National Folk Festival.)
Inside
Grauman’s it is all red and gold and restored Chinoiserie from the 1920s.
That’s not as tinselly as it sounds. Between the wall paintings worked on by
performers like Key Luke (a long CV but you might best remember him as the old
bloke who passes on the gremlins in Gremlins with a warning) and Xavier Cougat
and the silk house tabs and the Chinese gods and the dragons woven into the
carpets this theatre that started out as a home to the old silent films has a
gorgeous ambiance for film and live performance.
Outside
they are getting ready for the Oscars, techie heaven with people in black with
mobile phones, lights going up, the street blocked off, the seating going in
for the red carpet entrance and a huge sweeping gold curtain set into the
archway of the Kodak Theatre. Snapping away with a digital filmless ‘point and
shoot’, I am not unaware of the ironies of the name.
Next
door is the greatest of follies. I live near to a video shop that actually
carries a copy of D.W.Griffith’s Intolerance but I hadn’t realised that the set
for the Babylonian section was left up long enough to become a landmark and
that the shopping mall next to the Kodak has been constructed as a kind of a
homage to it. This means mad Babylonian architectural elements and elephants
trumpeting from the ramparts. Encouraging quotations from those who ‘made it’
are immortalised on the pavements. You can walk in and view the HOLLYWOOD sign
on the faraway hills from a great height or downstairs next to a sculpture of a
huge couch – the ultimate casting couch upon which tourists can now cast
themselves for pictures.
You
can take one of those topless double deckers for a do it yourself hop on hop
off tour. So I do that, being hopelessly out of time for anything else, and we
rampage around Hollywood, spotting Hollywood High with its paintings of alumni
like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, the old LA police department which was the
exterior of Kane’s castle in Citizen Kane and resonant places like the La Brea
Tar Pits. I end up eating at a Singaporean place in the Farmers Market where
they actually seem to have heard of real food. As it gets dark I manage a snap
of the Paramount parking lot’s outdoor sky screen which features in Star Trek
IV and in The Ten Commandments when the Red Sea is being parted, get a glimpse
of the cemetery where Rudolf Valentino is buried and see all lit up above the
city the Griffith Observatory where James Dean carries on like a two bob watch
in Rebel Without a Cause. We also glimpse a demo on Hollywood Boulevard on
behalf of the Syrians, passed by Snow White and The Flash who are walking the
other way, talking on mobile phones, apparently undisturbed.
Next
to this the corridors of the Marriott Hotel, thronging with Daleks and people
dressed in TARDIS costumes, are positively sedate. I don’t have a costume to
put on but I’ve failed to arrive in America with a haircut and so I’m wearing a
Harris Tweed flat cap and a bright red Thai silk scarf so I won’t disappear in
a crowd of 3000 fans. A genial older bloke setting up for autographs hails me
and says, ‘I like your hat!’ It’s the charming Richard Franklin, the slightly
tragic Captain Mike Yates from Second Doctor Jon Pertwee's era.
But
it’s the origins of the show in the 1960s that draw me and there’s William
Russell, one of the first companions ever, now in his late 80s. Courtly and
bemused by American teenage fans who stand in the queue muttering ‘What am I
going to say to Ian Chesterton?’, he’s done stage and film and television, the
Ghost in Hamlet with the RSC at Stratford, opened the New Globe in London in
Henry V, has a son (Alfie Enoch) in the Harry Potter films and has a passion
for teaching young actors stage work and Shakespeare. (He says ‘I like your
hat’ too, which makes my weekend.)
Maureen
O’Brien, another early First Doctor William Hartnell companion (Vikki) who has
also had a long stage and TV career as well as being a crime novelist, has a
fascinating conversation with me, not about liking the hat or the Zarbi or
being chased around Nero’s Rome but about the lovely complexities of As You Like
It and playing Rosalind despite it being traditionally the part that goes to a
tall woman.
Michael
Troughton (son of Patrick, the Second Doctor, and an actor himself) is signing
copies of his biography of his father and that’s got more actor stories in it.
Respected director Waris Hussein, the East Indian from Lucknow who directed An
Unearthly Child, the very first episode of all, is gently describing the
circumstances that led to Dr Who being born.
(1963 and change was about, even at the
BBC. The show’s creator, Sydney Newman, was Canadian, Hussein, despite an
English education, was seen as Indian, Anthony Coburn, writer of that first
episode, was Australian and producer Verity Lambert was a woman. And Australian
Ron Grainer composed the theme tune which was then arranged by BBC
Radiophonic’s Delia Derbyshire. True, they’d been thrown a job that no one else
much wanted but look what came of this combination of colonials and females.)
Daphne
Ashbrook (companion Dr Grace Holloway in the 1996 McGann Dr Who TV movie) turns
out to have actually done David Williamson’s The Coming of Stork in Los
Angeles, for which the cast had to learn an Australian accent. I laugh out loud
at the ironies of all those elocution lessons in the 50s and 60s that were
supposed to rid my generation of women of such a thing when she admires the way
I speak.
All
of this is bloody wonderful but the unexpected bonus comes when I wander over
to an older bloke who has a raft of pictures on a table of him in every kind of
role from the Civil War to a Klingon prison governor and a rather kindly
looking Vulcan.
‘I
LOVE your hat!’ he says and he’s got my attention.
I
don’t immediately register that he’s the older Canton Everett Delaware III in Dr Who’s The Impossible
Astronaut and that the bloke nearby who, on hearing my accent, begins to talk
about how good the Dr Who orchestral concert that just ran in Melbourne was, is
his son Mark, and the younger Canton Everett Delaware III. (Fancy me having to
scramble to keep up in Dr Who territory…) Aha. Penny drops. We are talking to
W. Morgan Sheppard, Anglo-Irish, face with the wandering of the world upon it,
trained at RADA, worked with Peter Brook and Grotowski, played in Pinter’s The
Caretaker (‘Horrible characters…horrible...’) and was in the RSC’s Australian
tour…
‘1970? Adelaide Festival?’ I ask.
Saw Judi Dench in Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale,
I did, and never forgot her voice with that expressive break in it. Nor the
bear that pursues Antigonus when, caught between the fires of his wife and his
king, he abandons a baby on a sea shore…
It was a bit like that moment in Oedipus when the
shepherd says ‘Here stands your baby boy’ except it wasn’t tragic. Here was
that Antigonus (and also Antonio from Twelfth Night), calling out to passing
Daleks and Tom Bakers, ‘She
remembers! She remembers!’ and going on to remember himself how as Antigonus he
would look across the stage at Brenda Bruce’s Paulina and say to himself ‘I
love her, she’s so lovely…’ and how that became the drive for the character.
I extend the story by telling him that I’ve just done that
very scene with a group of Thai performers in a workshop on Shakespeare in
Makhampom’s Chiang Dao theatre north of Chiang Mai and we part with a signed
picture of him as the scholarly Vulcan elder because there isn’t one there of
Antigonus and somehow this one seems to have the proper gravitas. And that all
does not even begin to touch on his knowing the story of Paul Robeson singing
to the workers at Sydney Opera House and how that resonated later with singer
John McLaughlin who was singing in Sydney when an old bloke in the front row
requested Joe Hill and it turned out he’d been an electrician on the building
of the Opera House and a car drew up and a big black man got out of it and said
‘I won’t be able to come back and sing here when it’s finished but I’ll give
you a really good concert’ and he sang Joe Hill to the workers and it was Paul
Robeson…*
I had a go at both the Getty museums and they were
quite wonderful, what with the reconstructed Roman theatre in the Getty Villa
and the way the bigger Getty museum crouches on top of a ridge overlooking Los
Angeles and divides your attention between the art and the views of a city on
the shore that will be chaos if a tsunami ever arrives. I rode the buses and
the trains and listened to Spanish being spoken and saw how this city is not
all glamour and gold curtains. But I reckon it was the actors’ tales that made
the trip.
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| William Russell (Ian Chesterton) and The Hat. |
By Alanna Maclean
