by Vighnesh Hampapura
She was a stiff green-eyed cat when I first watched her. Dame Maggie Smith, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was a naïve fourth-grader; I believed that the actor actually had the power to turn into a cat. And even otherwise, she had grabbed my senses because she sounded like my disapproving grandmother. In the years that followed, I sought out her work and even went to watch every interview of hers, each a performance in itself.
Maggie Smith doesn’t have the benefit of conventional beauty. The face is long and bony: nerves dance on it, even in her stillness. Her nostrils flare up and down on command. Eyes, once ideal, are now bulged by an attack of Grave’s disease. Maggie’s genius comes in her use of these unique features: spices to her well-cooked performance.
For a ten-year old me who had been turned down in an acting workshop because I wasn’t endowed with a symmetrical face, encountering this was real motivation. I had been convinced to my bones—for the artiste conducting the auditions had stated without second thoughts—that I could never make it to acting without the glamour, the looks. Popular actors around me only seemed to confirm this notion. In watching Maggie Smith building herself on the imperfections special to her, I thought I too could turn my expressive face, my casual slouch, or my disproportionate teeth, to the benefit of my characters. In the next break, I reapplied to the workshop and worked my way in; my sense of inferiority started waning.
Alas, the battle was only half-won. My middle-class parents with scientific affiliations had the opinion that the stage wasn’t an honourable place. My father likes plays; he likes sitting in the theatre and discussing a production over dinner. But write one, act in one? Not so much. Maybe because he is aware of the sordid lives of certain artistes, confirmed by my grandfather’s meagre income as a part-time playwright. ‘Do you know how well you acted in your Rangayana summer camp?’ he asked me last October, while we were discussing my theatrical journey. He was referring to my experience at the prestigious Rangayana, a state-funded theatre repertoire. I was around eleven and playing the head boatman in a medley of scenes written by our instructors. This wasn’t technically a production, but just the concluding event of the camp. ‘Many people even congratulated me on your performance,’ he admitted. But he cautiously never mentioned theatre again because he didn’t want me to catch the cold. The cold of theatre. Which was probably why when I approached my parents with the prospect of acting in a play in my tenth grade, they weren’t glad. My mother felt it would hamper my studies. It took me some time to convince them that opportunities in theatre had changed, and in any case, theatre would be only an avocation.
Maggie had comparable backgrounds. Her modest working-class family couldn’t provide her the resources to explore her theatrical talent. But neither her father’s beatings, nor her mother’s discouragement stopped her from becoming the esteemed artiste that she is today. At sixteen, her first act opened to stellar reviews. “Stellar” isn’t the word I’d use to describe my first stage presence. A fifteen-year-old whose voice was still cracking, I had played Mark Anthony—from Julius Caesar—and a technical glitch had had me break character and exit the stage. For eight seconds, the honourable Anthony had been parodied! People laughed; I learnt: for one, I should expect setbacks and improvise, and improvise I did, in all productions thereafter.
Later in my life, as I entered eleventh grade to boring sessions that trained for competitive exams, Maggie Smith introduced me to Alan Bennett. All British actors of her time were initiated to the stage through Shakespeare. But unlike Judi Dench or Ian McKellen—who continue to play Shakespearean roles—Maggie slowly moved away from the bard. ‘Shakespeare is not my thing,’ I remember her saying in one of her interviews. Contemporary writers won over. With Alan, she has collaborated thrice—in Private Lives, Bed Among the Lentils and The Lady in the Van—and these have worked best for both of them; Maggie’s raw and revealing performances complement Alan’s quiet and intense observations of the human character, both adding a tinge of sardonic humour that doesn’t negate any gravity .
Any actor should watch Bed Among the Lentils, one of the monologues in the series Talking Heads. Alan Bennett’s monologues seem to revolve around simple themes—religion, sexuality, love, propriety—but they voice that which is unregistered in the daily wash-away of things. In those monologues, I found the strain of some notes that I could sing too; and I wrote some songs: my first script was a small, ten-minute monologue. A ward boy at a local hospital failed by the systems of machinery and people around him, but primarily by himself. Another writer-actor, S. N. Sethuram, has had equal influence on those lines, but the ignition was from Alan (and Maggie); they said: just words could act.
After watching Bed Among the Lentils, my friend remarked, ‘And this was a film! Fifty minutes of one lady and you get everything.’ True; Maggie Smith knows how to capture and preserve our curiosity for the character, Susan. With a bent head and downward gaze, she steadily allows us to perceive every word. An alcoholic wife of a vicar—in a marriage that is no joy—her life revolved around his routine: the church, his “fan-club” that she resents, and episodes of flower-arrangement and communion wine. She finds comfort in the bed of an Indian grocer, but alas, he thinks it must have been shameful for her to find herself in one. She gives a five-second slot for her hunger and heartbreak; and is then back to the stoic Mrs Vicar. We are shaken and wounded, but are also laughing at the witty display of sarcasm. It’s a masterclass in character acting.
Well, her accomplishment in playing diverse roles of imperfect women to perfection is an acting lesson in itself. In Downton Abbey, a TV series, she is an aristocratic snob and conveys with the twitch of her left eyebrow what others take lines to say, while in The Lady in the Van, she is a vagrant, behind whose surly expressions lies a burden of guilt and despair. Both these characters have a Northern-English accent. They’re old. They share sharpness in their speech. The films were shot fairly during the same time. Maggie Smith doesn’t even change her voice. The only visible difference is of the costumes. Yet, she convinces us that she is the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley of Downton in the former, and Margaret Shepherd of Camden Town in the latter, and that they’re very different. She internalises her performance; to lay the highest emphasis on the core of the character and only later on the externals.
This does not mean that Maggie Smith is simply an actor with a bag of tricks, and cannot play roles that require changes in appearance or voice or accent. She has done so, and outstandingly, in many of her older films. In the 1993 version of Suddenly Last Summer, a film based on Tennessee Williams’ play of the same name, Maggie plays Mrs Venable who has an American Southern Accent; while in the film Ladies in Lavender, a lovely little drama about romance and loss, her character Janet has a Cornish dialect. Her acting doesn’t stop with a change of tongue though. She adds the shades of vulnerability and sorrow to the remorseless Mrs. Venable, and her transformation from scoffing at to being empathetic to her old sister’s romantic interest in a young man in Ladies in Lavender is moving. She is an intelligent and consummate actor that way. This gives her supremacy; to attempt to play those characters again would either mean mimicking her or matching her intellectual understanding of the character. It is amazing that all this comes with a natural intensity and makes acting seem like a child’s play. I aspire to this range, smartness and ease.
With these lessons, I have tried to leave my own mark in the college theatre scene in Mysore – and with considerable success – by directing and acting in two plays: Kallara Sante in 2016 and Kivudu Saar Kivudu in 2017.
Maggie Smith represents a place I want to go. Original, old-school and wise. A standard I want to reach; a force I want to embody. I have her poster in my room. Whenever I am in bad spirits, I look at her, and imagine her telling me with a penetrating gaze typical of Maggie, ‘Don’t be a defeatist, my dear. It’s frowned upon in all societies.’ I am ready to face the world, then.
Picture from https://www.flickr.com/
Super writing keep going
Vighnesh
Your intricate linking of your experience as a novice in the theatre and the performance of Maggie makes interesting reading. I feel you should expand your horizons to writing novels and short stories too. Ashoka has been doing a lot by giving you the right ambience to bring out the best author in you. Best wishes.
Read your essay on Maggie and me and enjoyed . I liked your writing and flow of thought. and narration. Keep it up Vighnesh.
Your article, and remembering Maggie’s performance…both are cockle- warming.