When Immortals strode the stage

THE OTHER night after the performance of Chimes at Midnight, Sir Alec Guinness came backstage to say hello. It is astonishing and touching that in his eighties he still finds the theatre fascinating, and is often to be seen padding into the stalls at a West End matinee, sometimes braving the wilder shores of the avant-garde. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.

His presence at Chichester was galvanising, not so much because of his manner, which is unfailingly gracious and charming - courtly, even - but because of what he represents. He is, for actors, one of the Immortals. Whether from experience or by repute, we all know and revere performances he has given across six decades.

The Immortals form a very small club. There is an even more senior Immortal, Sir John Gielgud, and a somewhat junior one, Paul Scofield. Are they the Last of the Immortals? They probably are.

It is worth pondering the situation. The glories of the British theatre have rested on three factors: training, experience and tradition - all undermined. Guinness is particularly plugged into the tradition, having been a protege of Gielgud's; Gielgud, in fact, sponsored him to go to drama school.

He quickly established himself as a uniquely interesting character actor of a new and highly original kind, relying on none of the usual repertoire of voices and noses, but somehow transforming from within, making himself as it seemed a different actor for each new role. He gave a revolutionary performance of the part of Hamlet in a modern-dress production by Tyrone Guthrie. He was part of possibly the most extraordinary team of actors ever assembled in a British theatre, the Old Vic company of the Thirties and mid- Forties. His fellow players included Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Joyce Redman, Margaret Leighton, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans.

It was this generation that dominated the theatre through the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. It was, you might say, a thespocentric theatre: actors were the starting point of the work and very often its final destination. The establishment of the Royal Court, the writers' theatre, was a conscious revolt against this, though many of those leading actors - Guinness, Ashcroft, Olivier - were quick to appear there; it had been founded, after all, by one of the key members of the Old Vic, George Devine.

With the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, many of the pre-war generation were absorbed into these organisations, committing themselves to the establishment of real ensembles comparable to the Comedie Francaise and the Berliner Ensemble. This was the world in which I grew up, where the principle of subsidy had finally been acknowledged, a seeming new dawn for acting and the theatre.

The dawn came, and it was good; but by high noon something unexpected seemed to have happened. Despite the development from within the ranks of remarkable talents - (at random) Mike Gambon, Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi at the National Theatre, Alan Howard, Helen Mirren, Janet Suzman at the RSC - there was little sense of the exceptional excitement that had attended the work of the actors of the previous generation.

When those actors attempted something in that line - Olivier his Othello and Shylock, Gielgud his Oedipus, Redgrave his Uncle Vanya, Ashcroft her Winnie in Happy Days - there was the same old sense of something truly important, unforgettable, revealed; but when the subsequent generation attempted these roles, there was something missing. Clearly this was nothing to do with absence of talent or intelligence; on the contrary, there had never been such thought and conceptual ingenuity. Perhaps there was too much.

James Bridie, berating Flora Robson for her Old Vic Lady Macbeth (opposite Charles Laughton in 1934), had written to her that she should steer clear of psychology, "in which you are an amateur. Your job," he told her, "is to flick Lady Macbeth through your soul." This sense of being in the presence, not of an interpretation, but of a primal force, was elusive, and somehow actors seemed to lose the belief that they were doing something fundamentally important by playing these parts. The theatre was a place where you paid your dues, but not where the earth truly moved. You were down there on a visit; it was not where you lived.

We all feel this, all of us who appear on stage. It is, to continue a parallel from last week's column, very like the church of today. God is still there, presumably; but instead of answering an inherent appetite, those of us who work in both church and theatre are desperately trying to create the appetite, signalling and waving. It is an odd mind-set.