It comes out after a few drinks with Leonard Rossiter that he is disappointed that no one, so far, has regarded him as a really big name in the theatre. He is now playing Hitler in Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Saville in London where he sweats and sulks and rants his way through two and a half hours during which Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and associates are portrayed as Sicilian gangsters cornering the cauliflower protection rackets of Chicago and Cicero. It is a manic and stylised performance which has been much praised by the critics. But the production is two years old, and has already been seen at Glasgow, at the Edinburgh festival, and at Nottingham. No one took much notice of it until it came to London; and does the same performance in the same production, Mr Rossiter wants to know, suddenly become different and better just because it has come to the West End?
It very nearly never came at all. As Mr Rossiter explains things, the play has one of the most off-putting titles ever devised and many people can’t pronounce Ui, which should be like Oo-ee; [he] Rossiter was not really a big name; Brecht is always death in London anyway; and the play needs a cast of 40. The cast was almost the last straw but eventually Michael White, the London impresario, brought Ui to the Saville where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations.
The Saville’s local pub is the Marquis of Granby in Cambridge Circus, but Mr Rossiter refuses to go there because one night he overheard a barmaid telling customers they didn’t want to go and see those nasty Hitler plays they were putting on these days instead of lovely Danny. Mr Rossiter has also taken it to heart that one of the stagehands came and told him he had a bet the play would be off after four weeks. At the moment it is doing decently, though the big cast means it has to take £3,500 a week before showing a profit.
The part is a natural for Mr Rossiter. He does not imitate Hitler. He lampoons the man’s insane energy, making it credible that this hoodlum became Reich Chancellor. He is particularly proud of the goose-step sequence, which he devised one evening prancing round a hotel bedroom in Glasgow. Hitler, having engaged a ham actor to teach him how to make an entrance, is ludicrously failing to imitate the actor’s springing steps, but then breaks into the inspired gait of the goose step. Mr Rossiter says he is good at madmen: a favourite part of his is the tramp, Davies, in Pinter’s Caretaker.
In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter, who says it is a natural sweater. For Hitler’s early days they found two shapeless demob suits, but the first and more hideous has had to be abandoned because he sweated so much it rotted the fabric. Since most actors get on the stage in strange ways, Mr Rossiter’s entry was usual. He could not afford to go to university, so he worked as an insurance inspector for Commercial Union, and then met a girl called Ida. He was so little interested in the theatre that when she played in amateur dramatics he waited for her outside, until she taunted him into playing a gallant flight lieutenant in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path. He took elocution lessons from an LRAM to get rid of his Liverpool accent; he wrote to 10 repertory companies and two replied, and so he went to Preston Rep for £4 10s a week to walk on in The Gay Dog, which was about a whippet. He was then 26, and that was 16 years ago.
He became assistant stage manager, and then acted at Bristol in Sheridan and Shaw and as Cicely Suet in a production of Dick Whittington, opposite Jessie Matthews as Fairy Filthy Floss. He was Corvino in Volpone for the Oxford Playhouse, and Pastor Menders in Ghosts at Stratford East.
But he earns three-quarters of his living from television and films. In 1961 he played in nine episodes of Z-Cars as a chief inspector, and says it is extraordinary how people never forget it. In films he plays doubtful characters like reporters or double agents. In two weeks filming a small part he can make say £600, which is as much as he got from the three provincial productions of Arturo Ui. Even in London now he is acting for £50 a week; only after the sixth week does he get a percentage of the take.
What now? Mr Rossiter does not expect the play to go to Broadway because Christopher Plummer did it there three or four years ago and people came out saying it was a gangster play and so what, they’d seen better by Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Nor does Mr Rossiter think be is ever going to be offered big film leads. He thinks he has not the looks. But he hopes that the next time some producer and director are casting a West End play they won’t mention his name and say not quite big enough, won’t bring them in at the box office. He reckons that if you can do it once, you can do it again.