In 1975, Warren Mitchell and I, playing father and son, were rehearsing a scene from Moss, a BBC Play for Today, by Bernard Kops. During a black comedy moment, I had to mouth off in a horribly lairy manner to Warren, who was lying on a bed semi-comatose with guilt and grief. He sat up, started laughing in the middle of it, and, when the director Philip Saville asked him why, blurted out: “Him … He’s just like me when I was a young actor.”
It was an affectionate moment and one that was to pay big dividends for me just a few years later when the National Theatre announced the revival of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman, with Warren playing the great tragic hero Willy Loman.
Without my knowing, Warren had suggested me to the director, Michael Rudman, for the part of Loman’s troubled eldest son Biff. I was summoned to the National to read the part with Rudman, which went well enough for us to go to his office where he telephoned Warren at home and asked if he would come in right away and read with me. I heard his familiar voice crackling through the earpiece in unmistakable fashion. “Right away? You’ll be lucky, I’m having my fucking lunch.” “Alright, when can you get here?” “When I arrive.” He hung up. “He’ll be here within the hour,” said Michael.
We fell into the scenes as if we had been rehearsing them for weeks and, during one of them, Michael called out: “All right Stephen, that’s enough.” I looked over at him in confusion. “You’ve got the part.”
Warren was chuckling, but also very emotional. He knew what this meant for me, just as he knew what it meant for him to be playing Willy Loman. We all had a famous, happy and successful run in Rudman’s fine production. Arthur Miller came over from Connecticut to work with us and on meeting Warren for the first time in the stalls of the Lyttleton Theatre remarked: “Amazing. You’re exactly how I always imagined Willy to be.”
The show became one of the National’s all-time winners with Warren deservedly carrying off every major theatre acting award going, including the coveted Laurence Olivier award. Rudman and I were also nominated for one of those, but lost out. Warren wandered back to our table brandishing his award in one hand and a flute of fizz in the other. He took one look at our faces and proclaimed, in a glass-shattering voice: “What’s the matter with you two, can’t you even win a fucking award?”
