Director's cut: Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Photo David Hou. Courtesy Stratford Festival of Canada.
With a name like Michael Lindsay-Hogg, you expect the theatre and film director to be a character out of P.G. Wodehouse — ‘What ho, old chap,’ ‘Ripping, positively ripping’ and all of that. (His grandfather was an Anglo-Irish baronet with the even more Wodehousian name Sir Lindsay Lindsay-Hogg.) But instead of a booming hunter’s voice, a wince-inducing handshake and a set of tweedy plus-fours, this Lindsay-Hogg has a nasal New York accent, a gentle shake and sports a pair of what look like Goodwill-issue khakis.
He’s come to Stratford this summer to direct his old friend, Amanda Plummer, as Joan of Arc in Jean Anouilh’s play The Lark. Lindsay-Hogg first coached Plummer in the 1981 Broadway production of Agnes of God, which won several Tonys (including one for Plummer). For many directors, Agnes would have marked a high point; for Lindsay-Hogg, it’s way down the list of claims to fame. A glance at his résumé and the people he’s connected with reads like a pop-culture survey of the late 20th century.
The director comes by his American accent naturally, having grown up in New York. His mother, the late actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, came to the States from Ireland to star in Hollywood films (Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory) and Broadway plays (including a Tony-nominated turn in Mass Appeal). Lindsay-Hogg was educated transatlantically at the boarding school Choate in Connecticut and Oxford, and got his start in theatre helping out family friend Orson Welles on a play in Dublin. (The physical resemblance between Welles and Lindsay-Hogg has periodically given rise to rumours that Lindsay-Hogg is the legend’s son, rumours Lindsay-Hogg has always hotly denied.)
He then landed a job at the quintessential English 1960s music television show Ready, Steady, Go!, filming (and befriending) the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Animals. Towards the close of the decade, Paul McCartney asked Lindsay-Hogg to record the making of what turned out to be the Fab Four’s last album; the resulting film, Let it Be, became one of the key documents of an ending era.
Lindsay-Hogg has continued to film music since, shooting Simon and Garfunkel’s almost equally epochal 1981 Concert in Central Park, Mick Jagger at the Tokyo Dome, and Neil Young in Berlin. He has made feature films with John Malkovich, Andie MacDowell and Matt Dillon, and the miniseries Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons.
Despite all that, Lindsay-Hogg has always kept his hand in the theatre. He has filmed all of Samuel Beckett’s plays and many of Tom Stoppard’s; at the height of the AIDS crisis, he directed Larry Kramer’s hard-hitting AIDS play The Normal Heart at New York’s Public Theatre. We sat him down in the Eaton members lounge at Stratford’s Festival Theatre to talk about his life, his career and his celebrated chums.
Q: What was your first
experience in the theatre?
A: I loved the
theatre world always, from when
I was very young, attending my
mother’s rehearsals. My teenaged
years were not ones I’d revisit,
ever. I couldn’t read until I
was about nine, so I was a bit
behind in school, and then I was
very heavy set. In baseball, I
only got two hits in four years.
I had this sense that maybe the theatre might take me in. I felt a little less out of place there. When I was 16 and 17, in the summers, I worked at the Stratford Festival in Connecticut as an actor, playing sentries and carrying spears. I had one line per season. Then, I worked as an actor and assistant to Orson Welles for a production of Chimes at Midnight in Belfast and Dublin — a play he later turned into a movie. He got me hooked on smoking cigars. I didn’t earn much money, a few pounds a week, and he used to give me a good Cuban from time to time. My acting years were pretty lean — I wasn’t any good at it, really.
A: I was working at this English production company, not doing much, because I’d exaggerated my past experience when I applied, and when they found out, well, they didn’t have me doing much. But then there was this rock ’n’ roll show called Ready, Steady, Go! and I made it my business that whenever the producer of the show came out of his office, he tripped over me. I pestered him and I badgered him.
 Zoo TV: The Animals perform in the Ready, Steady, Go! television studio. Photo Express Newspapers/Getty Images. |
Q: What was it like to
work on the show?
A: It was an extraordinary
show, because it seemed to capture
the real spirit of those extraordinary
years, the middle 1960s, when
the English music scene was exploding.
On the show, we had the Kinks,
the Hollies, the Rolling Stones,
the Beatles, the Who, the Yardbirds,
the Animals. England was coming
out of what one observer called
the black-and-white of the ’50s
into the technicolour of the
’60s. There was rationing for a
long time in 1950s England, which
was still a very conservative society;
your clothes had to be a certain
way, the class system was very
entrenched. When rock ’n’ roll
came, it seemed to promise to
change all of that, to herald the
revolution.
In my first two weeks running the show during the regular director’s vacation, who did I have? Dusty Springfield and Roy Orbison, Pretty Things. Then, the week after the regular director came back, I noticed that the Animals and the Rolling Stones were scheduled to appear, and I begged and pleaded and cajoled to be able to do it. I’d always loved the Animals, and I’d seen the Stones and been astounded by Jagger. I went to the producer again and said, “Please let me do one more show,” and he said, “OK.” I found out some ways of shooting them, things to do with the zoom, sort of pulsing it. It looked catchy. As a result of that, then they let me do the show full-time.
A: The bands didn’t like appearing on any of the television plug shows, because it was a hassle for them, and they were getting mobbed. So the ones who were powerful, the Beatles, the Stones and the Who, decided they were going to make their own clips. That way, they wouldn’t have to turn up for the shows, and [could] send them off to the television stations all over the world.
One of the first ones I did was Jumping Jack Flash for the Rolling Stones; I did two versions — the one where they wear make-up is better. And they liked it a lot, which did wonders for my street cred. Then I did a little film with the Who, where they played inept safecrackers to a Happy Jack song. This was one of the early music films in which the bands were not just singing, in which a story was being told. I tried to convince Brian Epstein to let me do what later got called a story video for Paperback Writer, but he just wanted the Beatles playing and singing.
A: At first I was scared by them. Only 18 months before, I’d been working as a floor manager at an Irish television station, listening to them on the radio, and then suddenly I was in the room with them. So I felt very shy. The degree of celebrity and world fame that they had — unless you were there at the time it’s hard to comprehend the scale. When they first went to the States, President Kennedy had just been killed in late 1963, and the Americans were so eager for any kind of happiness, anything that could lift them out of their national depression, so they fell in love, became besotted, with the Beatles. They had such joie de vivre, they just made a huge hit.
But one of the consequences of that fame was that touring became a nightmare – and the screaming got so loud that you couldn’t hear the music they were playing in the concerts.
A: Initially, it was going to be a television special. We thought about doing it in North Africa, or maybe going back to the Cavern [the nightclub in Liverpool where they got their start]. But then George Harrison, who was never particularly in favour of filming anything, he quit, and the only way he’d come back was if we didn’t do a TV special. So, instead, we went to the Apple studios in London; just really to make footage to promote the album. A lot of people try to claim credit for the concert on the roof, but it was my idea. I wanted it all to be heading somewhere. And so that was the last time they ever played together to any kind of an audience. You always hear about farewell tours, but for them that was it. And the world was desperate for them to stay together; you couldn’t imagine these magical people divorcing. But there was no reason for it. They’d been together a long time and they were heading in different directions.
A: I’d met Amanda at a party in New York at her mother Tammy Grimes’ house. Amanda must have been 20; she was at college. I first met her again when she came to read for Agnes of God. There were a lot of good girls at that time in New York, but Amanda had a quality which was very different and startling. Although lots of the girls auditioned for it, she was it the moment we saw her.
 Plum role: Amanda Plummer plays Joan of Arc in Stratford's production of The Lark. Photo David Hou. Courtesy Stratford Festival of Canada. |
Q: What startled you?
A: There are a lot
of good actors around, but she is
able to be in touch with emotional
depths, which seem to go a very long
way down. She also commits entirely
to what she’s doing — her focus is like that of a brain
surgeon. It’s not that good actors don’t concentrate
and pay attention, but she takes everything even a
little bit further, really like a brain surgeon, with
that kind of keenness not to let anything escape her.
A: Normal Heart was one of the greatest experiences any of us connected with the original production ever had. We have a bond that can never really be broken. [Writer] Larry Kramer had been looking for a director for quite a while and he couldn’t find anyone who wanted to do it. First of all it was a long, dense play and secondly, it was about AIDS. It was early days. The disease hadn’t yet come to people’s attention in the straight world for a lot of reasons the play talks about — the New York Times was pretending it didn’t exist and health services of New York were trying to ignore it. When the straight world learned about it, they were panicked by it. A combination of lack of knowledge, disinterest and fear was going around, so no one wanted to touch the play.
Three out of the eight men in the cast later died of AIDS. It was the first great AIDS play and it came at a time when society was about to start really listening. All the people in the production, especially the gay men, were living it, as well as acting it.
A: Very nicely, I hope. We’ve set it in France at the close of World War II, which makes sense, because France was occupied back in Joan of Arc’s day. They were also looking for a saviour at the end of WWII. I know this sounds like hyperbole, but Amanda is really the Babe Ruth of acting — except he weighed about 250 pounds and she’s about 11 pounds. And she’s bringing her customary intensity to preparing the role.
The Lark opens Aug. 11, with previews from July 31, at Stratford’s Festival Theatre. It runs until Oct. 29.
Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.
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