Corin Redgrave, who died just over four years ago, was a remarkable figure, both as an actor and as a political activist. The scion of an exceptional theatrical dynasty, his acting and his writing commanded respect, and his commitment to radical politics was profound, deeply reasoned and hands-on. His relationship to his father, Michael Redgrave, one of the greatest actors this country has ever produced, was complex: he admired and supported him, helping him to write his autobiography; but it was evident that Corin's acting – especially in classical roles – suddenly came into its own after Michael's death. The young whelp was at last free to shine.
And then, when he was giving his memorable Gayev in The Cherry Orchard, he discovered he had inoperable prostate cancer; he underwent chemotherapy, which seemed to hold it at bay, but it produced disturbing physical side effects. He subsequently had a heart scare while preparing to play King Lear, but carried on to triumph in that most exacting of roles; a year later, when he was playing Pericles at the Globe, he had a major heart attack, while delivering a speech in Basildon on behalf of some evicted Travellers. He recovered physically, but never fully mentally; he was a fundamentally changed man. "This morning when I go into the ward," his wife Kika Markham noted in her diary, "Corin smiles at me like the sun in the sky. No inhibitions. From the soul. Naked. Not Corin, not anyone. No civilised grownup could possibly smile like that."
Our Time of Day is Markham's account of the nightmare that engulfed them both, and it is upsetting. Though Redgrave could still speak, his memory was destroyed; its disappearance meant the loss not only of his past, but of theirs. He admits as much to the doctor they see: he knows they were happy, he says, and that he loved Kika, but can't remember their life together. Hearing these devastating words – "what I had always dreaded and feared" – she understands that "both our lives had disappeared … My memories were already shrivelling and dying inside my head. The only way they could be kept alive was by sharing them."
This sort of thing is tragic for anyone, but when it happens to an actor, it takes on a particularly lurid quality because everything becomes a form of theatre. "Lovely to see you," says Redgrave waking up one morning. "Your nose is very nice." "Do you know who I am?" she says. "Of course I know who you are." It's as if, she says, they are reading a script by "someone masquerading as Beckett". When the nurse asks what he would like to eat, he says, "Shotgun". Great line. On another occasion, still in the hospital, in his gown, he becomes upset because he doesn't have his makeup towel or mascara. "When do we start the dress [rehearsal]?" he demands. The theatre is the only remaining reality for him: he tells a fellow patient, Ann, that she needs to check her lines. The play, it appears, is Three Sisters: Redgrave tells her that he doesn't need to look at his lines as he has been understudying the play all his life. He rages at his therapists: "People pay to see me … I am special."
The metatheatrical nightmare continues; King Lear, Shakespeare's supreme account of the breakdown of a mind, threads its way through the book. Redgrave had appeared in the play as a boy, saw his father's famous performance in it, played Lear himself (and wrote about it for this paper, a superb analysis, reproduced in the book, which gives a vivid sense of his intellect in the non-political sphere). He even recorded the play for radio, before doing it at Stratford. He and Markham listen to it together, but it means nothing to him: "Who's written this?" he asks.
As if living out the play, full-blown madness erupts within him; he becomes cantankerous, violent. In an insane parody of his former political position, he believes that Kika and his sister Vanessa are state agents, and demands police protection from them; in the end he is taken into hospital. "It is truly terrible," Markham writes, "to see a distinguished-looking 'civilised' older man crying without restraint in bitterness and sorrow because he cannot understand what is going on or why he is being held prisoner. It must have confirmed all his worst fears."
But this too passes, and he resumes some semblance of normal life. He becomes extraordinarily emotional and rather naive – a long way from the Corin any of us had known. I remember bumping into him at a memorial in the west end. "Simon!" he cried. "One just wants to hug you and hug you and hug you!" "Well that's lucky," I said, "because we're in a theatre, so you can." And he did. From time to time he managed to act: the old skills, the appetite for communication, somehow intact. Standing with me on a platform in Trafalgar Square, the scene of so many protests in which he had been involved, he read a poem with such clarity, such perfection of pitch and phrasing, that it was hard to believe that his mind was in any way impaired.
Markham writes of all this with an immediacy that catches you painfully by the throat, again and again. It is a symphony of sorrows, a chronicle of deaths unforetold – of her mother, Olive Dehn, and of Redgrave's niece Natasha Richardson – against a background of the 7/7 London bombings and world unrest. Understandably, Markham spends a lot of her time in tears – "about to drown in weeping" – but, through it all, she observes with pinpoint precision what is happening.
In the first part of the book, she shows what has been lost – their life together, the one he couldn't remember. It was not exactly a bowl of cherries – full of tensions and nagging sexual suspicions – but their work and shared political passion added up to an intensely lived relationship. She takes the history back further, to their respective childhoods in families of the left, and this section of the book is a stirring evocation of a time when the theatre's radical tradition was at its height – when actors such as Michael Redgrave, Kika's father David Markham, Sybil Thorndike and Peggy Ashcroft fearlessly proclaimed their vision of social justice. "I am a red-hot socialist," said Michael Redgrave; while Kika's father, a gentle anarchist, was imprisoned for a year's hard labour for being a conscientious objector.
This is riveting stuff; no less so is her account of growing up in the newly permissive 60s, a period she describes with a Jean Rhys-like sense of her utter passivity in a series of more or less abusive relationships. Inevitably, though, what dominates the book is the catastrophe that enveloped her. She quotes brilliantly from RD Laing – "we are acting parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception" – but it is another quote (from CS Lewis) that perfectly distils her experience: "The pain I feel is the happiness I had before. That's the deal."
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