Don Warrington: ‘If I were starting out today, I’d certainly go to America’

Nobody is claiming that the struggle is over and the battle has been won, but one may be justified in saying that any young British Asian or Afro-Caribbean actor now entering the profession has many more role models among the growing band of successful non-white performers. Idris Elba, Adrian Lester, David Harewood and Paterson Joseph are only four of an increasingly high-profile generation of black British male actors successfully consolidating a career either in the UK or in America.

Such signs of progress, however incremental, must raise a wry smile in the minds of the previous generation of black performers who fought for greater exposure in a much less sympathetic climate. Take Don Warrington, who has just opened in the title role of King Lear in a co-production between Talawa, the Royal Exchange and the Birmingham Rep. Forty years ago, fresh out of drama school, he was one of four gifted performers who tucked into Eric Chappell’s laugh-a-minute script and made Rising Damp an instant television classic. The series remains a hit 40 years on and one can watch Warrington and see how he more than held his own against such expert scene-stealers as Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour and Richard Beckinsale, all three superb comic practitioners.

Rossiter, a demanding personality, played seedy landlord Rigsby with perpetual designs on the virtue of fluty-voiced Miss Jones (De la Tour). Beckinsale, an immensely popular performer who died tragically young, divided his time between Rising Damp and the immortal Porridge as Ronnie Barker’s unworldly protege. This was a quality cast in which Warrington, somewhat to his surprise, found himself a linchpin. He was, after all, a graduate of the Drama Centre where, in Warrington’s words, “we were prepared for a theatre that didn’t yet exist”. Having an early success in a situation comedy was not, one feels, on the agenda.

“I think that one result of the training we received was that the world of the theatre was no big surprise to me. They said that we should go out into the world and create the theatre that they wanted to happen,” he says.

Rising Damp had started out as The Banana Box, a play first seen at the Hampstead Theatre. Its transformation into a long-running ITV sitcom came as a complete surprise to Warrington and possibly still causes him to raise a quizzical eyebrow. He has been quoted as saying that early success can be as much a curse as a blessing, ensuring that the actor is forever remembered for one role and one series. In Rossiter, he had another teacher who didn’t believe in second best.

“I remember it as very hard work. Leonard was very rigorous and he expected everybody to have the same commitment to the job as he did. What we were trying to do was give the characters both truth and depth. We always felt that the audience had to believe in the characters and in their relationships for the show to be funny. Leonard had very high standards, which made for some concentrated rehearsals. But we also laughed a lot when things were going well,” says Warrington.

Modern audiences may wince a little at some of the gags given to Rigsby to address to Philip, Warrington’s character, which cross the line of modern sensibilities. Yet Warrington considers that Rigsby’s racist preconceptions did lead to a healthier climate. He draws a distinction between Rigsby in Rising Damp and the character of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, whose popularity may have been due to sections of the audience endorsing Garnett’s bigotry.

“I think one of the reasons Rising Damp has survived is due to the situations in which Rigsby, a white man, is taught a lesson by Philip, a black man. In Till Death Us Do Part it was Alf’s white daughter and her white husband who outwitted him. And having Philip as a character in such a popular series did educate audiences into realising that there was greater diversity among black people as well.”

Four decades later, and somewhat to his surprise, one feels, Warrington, an actor of considerable weight and repute, finds himself moving from playing the guilt-ridden patriarch in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons for Talawa to the current production of King Lear. The offer to play Shakespeare’s troubled monarch came completely out of the blue.

“The idea of playing King Lear wasn’t anywhere on my radar,” he reveals. “I didn’t think it was even a possibility. If there is such a thing as a classical theatre actor, I don’t think that I have ever been one. But after I’d done All My Sons, Sarah Frankcom of the Royal Exchange came up to me and asked if I would think about playing King Lear. I was very surprised.”

Warrington has a likeably dry, laconic wit, which he uses as a scalpel, mainly against himself. For all its emotional intensity and the special demands it places on the actor, King Lear continues to provide a largely irresistible challenge to the actor and a therapeutic experience for the audience. With a fortnight to run before the first performance, how was Warrington, a fit-looking 63 year-old, coping with all that Lear throws at an actor?

“The part is as hard to play as they say – harder, if anything,” he observes. “It’s a very tough nut to crack, although as Gielgud is supposed to have said, a lightly weighted Cordelia certainly helps. If there were an easy way to play Lear, I’d be looking for it.”

The image of Warrington chosen for the promotional  literature shows a bullet-headed, shaven-haired, bearded  military man. This is King Lear as an ageing warrior.

“I don’t think that Lear is a well man. I feel he resists the fact that he is so close to death,” says Warrington. “His mind is going and, within that condition, he is prone to fantasy in the literal as well as the psychological sense. I think Lear has been a vibrant king, a man of action who acts rather than thinks. He’s a once-decisive character who has come to the end of his powers intellectually.

“I also have the impression that it isn’t the first time he has asked his daughters to declare publicly the depth of their love for him. He has a clear expectation of the response he’ll get, and when it is not forthcoming he has an irrational response. Lear’s sense of proportion has gone. It’s emotionally demanding the way he begins to take on the world, as in the storm scene. In a sense, of course, the storm is within him as well as all around him. Lear can handle the external storm but it’s the internal one that he cannot control. The scene is vocally very demanding but one finds a way of doing it.”

Had Warrington seen other Lears in his time? “My first Lear was Eric Porter at the Old Vic. I remember that I couldn’t understand how or why I should feel such sympathy for such an unpleasant man. More recently, I saw Simon Russell Beale in Sam Mendes’ production at the National. By then I had a kind of detachment towards the show because I knew there would come a day when I’d be playing the part myself. So I thought I’d better do it and said yes to Sarah. Was I cajoled into it? I tend to get cajoled into everything I do.”

Lear’s world invariably seems primordial, barely civilised. “Lear’s universe is a brutal one,” agrees Warrington. “These are tough people who live in tough times. They live in the elements. They are not protected from them as we are today, and it gives the characters an element of ruthlessness. The play makes us look at ourselves, although I feel it does end on a note of hope. Something like a light comes on with Lear’s death, and it is the new generation that is left, in the person of Edgar, to pick up the pieces.”

As a self-confessed non-classical stage actor, will he master Shakespeare’s language? “That’s for others to judge,” retorts Warrington. “If I have any doubts, I have a director to consult and I try to respect what I’m saying. There is something in those words of Shakespeare’s that enables him to describe us to ourselves in a remarkably concise way.”

Warrington is happier downplaying his achievements rather than boosting them. Yet he was something of a lone presence  in the unreconstructed television industry of the 1970s.

“Was I a pioneer?” Warrington considers. “Hardly. I certainly don’t think of myself as one. At the same time, some of us often believed we were the only black actors around. It took me years to stop checking if there was anybody else who looked like me whenever I walked into a rehearsal room. The MBE I accepted because my mother would have loved it, had she not died a year or so before it was announced. I don’t think that it’s the fault of the theatre that there is so little diversity. It is society’s problem.”

Warrington applauds the enterprise of the young black British actors who have received a warmer welcome across the Atlantic.

“If I were a young actor today, I’d certainly go off to America,” he says. “It is a global business, after all, and you have to go where the work is. Every job is a new challenge to me and with every job, we start from scratch. At least, I do.”

Continues…

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Q&A: Don Warrington

What was your first non-theatre job? I worked in a shoe shop. I was not a good salesman.

What was your first professional theatre job? The Banana Box at Hampstead Theatre.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? What the business is like.

Who or what was your biggest influence? Marlon Brando.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Try to enjoy them.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been? I’d have been a doctor or a carpenter.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions? No.

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After the trials and tribulations of King Lear, Warrington will move on to a less arduous engagement, perhaps, in the shape of the next series of Death in Paradise, BBC1’s sun-kissed Caribbean whodunnit.

He was born in Trinidad but he and a brother were sent by their mother to Britain after the early death of their father, a Trinidadian politician. From the Caribbean sunshine, the boys were transported to Tyneside, where the canny lads learned how to fit in and become proper Geordies. After more than 50 years, the memory of these early days in the North East is still fresh.

“Of course, I missed my father but I accepted the fact that other people had fathers whereas I didn’t,” he recalls. “My chief memory of the time is not so much the greyness of everything but how dull it was. I’d grown up with the light and the vivid colours of Trinidad and we had tropical forests to explore. Children are very adaptable, however. And at school you wanted to be part of the gang and you looked for ways of fitting in, such as football. I didn’t become an actor in order to fit in, however. Why try to fit in with a society that doesn’t hold the profession in great esteem?”

Warrington decided to become an actor at a surprisingly early age. “What excited me about acting was the glamour,” he says. “By glamour, I don’t mean fame but the ability to connect with an audience and create huge emotion within it. So the urge to act became my little secret and it didn’t seem that attainable in any case. I turned up at the local rep in Newcastle and I wrote to RADA for an audition. I was still too young for RADA – they told me to wait until I was 18. I’d met actors who’d trained at the Drama Centre and they interested me. They appeared to be very sophisticated and confident, and I didn’t really feel I fitted in. I still don’t. Training at the Drama Centre was certainly educational; it was a very tough school.”

Instrumental in his decision to become an actor was seeing Marlon Brando in the 1954 film On the Waterfront. It made an enormous impression on the young Warrington.

“I was struck by the emotional beauty of what he did. He had such a lightness of touch. Here was a man who was absolutely in tune with his instincts. One could almost see through him and I realised at the time that here was a phenomenal actor. He led the way and for most actors he still represents the greatest. It is impossible to watch Brando on screen and not be spellbound by his charisma, by his emotional connection and by the absolute truth of his work. I just wish I could have a minute of what he had. That would be nice.”

Between the ending of Rising Damp and this production of King Lear, there have been the inevitable quiet patches, with the consolation of featuring as a regular Grumpy Old Man and of whirling his partner around the studio floor in BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing.

“I don’t talk much about ‘career’. I think that life is rather whatever you happen to be doing at the time, and I’m happy to go from one job to the next,” he says. “Of course, there have been spells out of work but I’m here and I’m still doing it. I deal with the problems as they come in. I like the newness of my job and I like to see what each day brings. I’m also optimistic that things for black actors will improve, but the business is not yet a level-playing field and I’ll do what I can to make things change.”

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CV: Don Warrington

Born: 1952, Trinidad
Training: Drama Centre, London
Landmark productions:
Television:  Rising Damp (1974-78), C.A.T.S. Eyes (1985-87), Grumpy Old Men (2003-06), Death in Paradise (2011-). Film: Voltimand in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996). Theatre: Elmina’s Kitchen, (National Theatre, 2003; Garrick Theatre, 2005), Statement of Regret, National Theatre (2007), All My Sons, Manchester Royal Exchange (2013), Driving Miss Daisy, tour (2012-13), King Lear, Royal Exchange (2016)
Awards: MBE in the 2008 Birthday Honours
Agent: Sam Boyd at Creative Artists Management

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King Lear continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, until May 7

Read The Stage review here