Yes... and no

Hugh Hebert, Guardian, January 9 1982

FOR A fellow who's been successful and praised as one of the most arrogant creatures invented by television since Alt Garnett, Nigel Hawthorne turns a surprisingly vulnerable face to all inquiries.

Going before the camera as Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister, gives him the major jitters. Pounding the narrow stage of the Young Vic merely confirms the old opinion, acting is no job for adults, what am I doing here, dressing up, pat-a-pancake on the face.

"Really, I feel I'd like to get out — direct, write, or make films. I've lost the appetite I used to have for the theatre. I sometimes think that it's a horrendous profession, it scares the daylights out of me."

How to face several hundred people who have paid good money to he entertained, so deliver? "Yes, in a way, I have a dreadful reluctance... a defiance. I don't know why I should, which makes it rather like the Christians going out in front of the Romans."

At the moment he is going out nightly, not a Christian in the Colosseum, but a man with a large TV label round his neck, in previews at the Young Vic of John Mortimer's Casebook, which opens on Wednesday. Mortimer has added two new playlets to his one-act courtroom comedy The Dock Brief, which provides the centrepiece.

The Dock Brief, Mortimer's first West End play (1958) was, in Hawthorne's terms, "the bait," the hit that brought him and John Alderton to this small arena in the hope of rekindling a modest theatrical lamp near the dark Old Vic.

The barrister in the play - the first sketch for Rumpole - has been waiting for years for this chance to shine in court, and the hopes of the young man are pinned, naively, to him: "It's mostly about failure, in the older and the younger man, and about the marvellous bond that develops between them."

Even a failed lawyer has a certain weight when he puts on his wig - if not Sir Humphrey's real power. Hawthorne's two most recent film parts (neither seen here yet) have a vein of authority, even if only the moral kind - by a Russian dissident in Clint Eastwood's Firefox, and King Abdullah, no less, in Ingrid Bergman's film about Golda Meir. Not typecasting. exactly, but none of these characters is going to succumb to a touch of the vapours.

By his own avowal, Hawthorne has to he nursed through playing the super-confident, Establishment heavyweight Appleby with the aid of his colleagues, "and a pair of walking sticks." Despite that - and leaving aside the belief that all good acting is compensation for some gap in the actor's personality - Hawthorne looks and sounds as if he might indeed wield authority.

The flattish, owl-round face with an owl-sharp nose and owl-arched brows that he uses so effectively to undermine his Minister's confidence: they form a memorable, patrician image that made him for years one of those immediately recognised, what's-his-name actors.

As long ago as 1967, he played Roy Jenkins, that other, political owl, in Mrs Wilson's Diary at the Criterion. The following year, he was Prince Albert in Edward Bond's Early Morning at the Royal Court, a play that he thought very funny in the script, and was sad to see turned serious on the stage. He has the easy bearing and the tone of public school and Oxbridge, though he went to neither.

His university was Cape Town: his father, a Coventry doctor, had emigrated to South Africa when Nigel was only three. And it was in Cape Town, at the beginning of the Fifties, that he started acting professionally.

If that's the word: actors there, and then, he says, behaved very badly. "They drank, they swore, they farted, because they knew they wouldn't be kicked out of the company: there were so few people who could replace them. I got very toffeenosed about this, and said 1 wouldn't stay." And anyway, to make any real progress as an actor, he had to come to England.

In the early Sixties, he finally settled in England, and his visits to Cape Town since have been rare. He was there in November, the first time for 13 years, as anonymous as ever because the BBC doesn't sell its series to South Africa, to be greeted with the cry: "Why don't you come back here, and do something useful?" And with the other cry, "Everything is changing, look at what blacks are allowed to do now," except that to Hawthorne the changes are mere cosmetics, the basic attitudes more entrenched than ever.

"People say, Why don't you get Equity to do something about the television programmes? But while they've got apartheid, Equity won't let people work there, and I support that. But the South Africans resent being isolated."

He is still sometimes asked to go and do plays there, but has always said no. "Maybe if I could find a play that would make them sit up - not about South Africa, but something that would make them think..."

He's never found that yet, though he did find a play that enabled him to bring a bit of Afrikanerdom to Sheffield during his spell there in the early Seventies. He directed Edward Bond's Black Mass, which is about apartheid, and arranged for some of the playgoers to be given white or coloured tickets alternately. Before the play started, an actor, dressed as a policeman, would get on stage, ask for house lights, tell all those with coloured tickets they must go to the pen reserved for them, right at the back.

The bars were divided in two: glasses and reasonable comfort for white tickets, paper cups and mock-hovel conditions for the coloured.

He is writing a television play about South Africa at the moment. Not about apartheid, but about what he noted again in November, the extent to which the English who go there remain distinct, unabsorbed. "My mother had been there fifty years, but she still speaks of England as home. You go into her sitting room, and you would think it was a room in England."

He wants to do more writing, has a couple of TV plays already sold, others on the rounds, but acting is his bread and he is offered half a dozen parts a week. He is pondering invitations to a classic serial for BBC, a production of Bond's Lear, the possibility of Privates on Parade on Broadway, if Jim Dale can get it together.

He has been on the upper slopes of his profession for a long time - since, say, The Philanthropist in 1973. But as so often, it was a television series, Yes, Minister, that hauled him to the top. Not that Hawthorne minds that - he enjoys television acting, as opposed to other kinds, once the fright is over.

But it brings the danger of over-exposure, the mummer's equivalent of frostbite when marooned on some peak-viewing summit. Danger without much profit. "In America, with the sort of money they earn, you could do Yes, Minister, and retire. Here you've just got to keep working. The series is only two months out of my life, and it's BBC salary.

"Anyway, I'm 52, now, and I reckon I've got quite a few years left, and I've got all that experience, all that... technique, I suppose, and it's marvellous to be able to make use of it.

"It wasn't till I was in my forties that I started to admit my vulnerabilities - what I looked like, what I sounded like, what I was. But as soon as I admitted that, people started to use me." For decades, almost, he used to go annually to the RSC auditions, and annually was rejected: he very much wanted to be a classical actor.

Then, in 1977, he was cast as the mad puritan Major Flack in the RSC's production of Privates on Parade, which was a huge success. After the first night, Trevor Nunn embraced him and cried: "You must come to Stratford."

"I could barely look at him. I felt like saying, I've been trying to come to Stratford for the past twenty years, but you wouldn't have me." Clenched teeth, clenched fists as he replays the scene. But I suspect that first time round, he smiled, a very diplomatic bag smile.