Memories from Martin Best

What a long way we go back. That’s my first thought. 1963 it was, when Tony was playing Lockit in Peter Wood’s production of the Beggar’s Opera for the RSC. It was in that experience that I first started to acquire my practical musicianship and stagecraft. I watched, listened and digested in rehearsal, and cannot forget the time when Tony was fed the contents of a prop bottle by, I think, Virginia McKenna, not realising that the contents hadn’t actually been checked. His reaction was, like so many of Tony’s reactions, understated but vivid – which is why I remember it today.

Then, in 1965, I joined the RSC as permanent member of the musical part of the ensemble, and I will never forget the feeling I had on being told, by John Barton, that I was to re-arrange the music for the Hollow Crown and play the Angel Gabriel in the Second Shepherds’ play, as well as compose the music for it. Tony was going to be one of the Wise Men; and he was going also to be part of the Hollow Crown cast. We performed that new version for the first time in the Conference Hall in the summer of 1966. I was terrified, but not so much so that I was unable to appreciate again Tony’s ability to understate to the maximum effect. His Henry VIII was so perfect, and so true. As he swept the pen to one side to get rid of imaginary drops of ink, as he paused to add the afterthought of ‘and heart’ to the earthy reality of ‘body’, the person who was Henry came to life in all his humour and cruelty. When he bent his knees ever so slightly to underline Walpole’s statement that ‘the guards were magnificent’, you caught an immediate sense of the man and his period: military, Regency, and utterly English.

I went on to do more performances of the Hollow Crown than almost anyone else, and became something of a connoisseur of how these remarkable vignettes coincided with the personalities of the performers. The thing about Tony was that he was always fresh and vital in his line of characters; he was always poetic, by which I mean that it was always clear that his poetic values guided him to the truth of the weight, period and style of the text; and he was always unerringly economic.

The same was true of his Polonius to David Warner’s Hamlet, which I was able to observe as one of the musicians. His cry of ‘you talk like a green girl’ to Ophelia seemed to summon up the whole of Polonius’ nature, and I hear it now as I write, clear as when he did it in 1965. Only Tony could do it quite like that, because it projected the kind of Pooterish assumed authority which Tony could mimic so perfectly, and which Polonius surely possesses. Tony was not called The Established for nothing. He understood about the backroom boy’s interests, the spy’s priorities, and the courtier’s sources of irony. Of all the Poloniuses one is likely to see, Tony’s is a benchmark.

Then Tony gave me one of the great opportunities of my life, to go to Exeter and create, with Robin Phillips, a new version of the Beggar’s Opera for the Northcott Theatre. This was in 1968, and comprised the loveliest of all the experiences I have ever had in the theatre. The theatre itself was perfection, the company was outstandingly happy, and the houses were always full. Tony gave his Lockit again, and every performance we looked forward to him singing ‘What gudgeons are we men’ in his inimitable faux cockney and his instinctive sense of musical humour. It was just the way he did it that made you laugh, and delight in it. It was perfect.
And it was Tony who gave me that chance to develop as a writer and musical director in the theatre; to prove myself in uncharted territory. When the run was over I was bereft. It was one of the happiest times of my life, and our daughter, born during rehearsals, is called Lucy so as to keep it alive in our family memory. I went on to two more versions of the Beggars’ Opera, each one grounded in that early experience made possible by Tony – one at Chichester, and one for the National Youth Music Theatre.

Tony was always a great appreciator of people and their talent and their performances. Reviewers have remarked that he was a supporting actor, without recognising fully the nature of that support. Tony had a deeply educated understanding of text; a profound influence on any play he was in that sprang from his holistic understanding of its structure; and an ability to make a unique mark with the utmost judgement.

And he was a good mate, a good friend, and of course I’ll miss him, dear old Established. He will be up there now, telling them all how he was the first to hear and share the latest gossip (“Oh yes, well of course I was there when the serpent first tempted Eve, and you what really happened….oh? didn’t you know?). He is part of the common currency of those of us who remain. We all think of him, we’ll all remember him, and we are all privileged to have been part of his life, and to have had him in ours, as an artist and as a human being.

Martin Best
28 May 2008