Peter Bowles Walks Off
That smooth, unruffled actor Peter Bowles suprised the Chichester Minerva audiences at the weekend by walking off the stage fifteen minutes into The Waltz of Toreadors saying that he had to go and look after his cat. The rest of the performance was cancelled, but at least pussy got her bowl of milk.
Bowles being Bowles, the exit would have been perfectly timed. Unlike that of the Irish actor Alan Devlin who, a few years ago, walked off the stage in a frightful muddle, saying “**** this for a game of soldiers, I’m off to the pub.” One can sympathise with this attitude quite often in the theatre, but it’s not very helpful to the rest of the cast.
Walking off is fairly rare, much rarer than it might be, given that actors are highly strung beasts, whatever the emotional exterior, and audiences are usually either badly behaved, badly dressed or just somnolently indifferent to their work.
Nicol Williamson walked off the stage quite often when he was playing Hamlet in the 1960s, an example followed twenty years later by Daniel Day-Lewis in the same role at the National. Day-Lewis was overcome with apparitions of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, instead of his stage father, Claudius. All very confusing.
But at least these actors got there in the first place. Wilfrid Lawson, the famous character actor, once took Richard Burton and Liz Taylor to see Peer Gynt at the Old Vic. He sat in the theatre with them for the first few acts as he was playing the Button Moulder and didn’t appear till the fifth.
After a well-oiled lunch and several visits to the pub next doot, Lawson returned to his seat with the Burtons after the fourth act and half-way through the fifth, leant across to Richard and said, “This is a good bit, this is where I come on…” He sat back and waited for his own entrance, a wonderful example of the Brechtian alienation effect in acting.