Robert would have laughed

I met Robert Marsden in 1965 and I said farewell to him at his funeral in 2007. We hit it off immediately, though he was an actor twenty years my senior. The things we laughed at were immediately discovered to be similar. Over many years, I dropped in at his flat in Frognal Court off the Finchley Road. “We don’t run out of things to talk about” I remember him saying. And to laugh about. I chose the title above from something I wrote to him once, quoting the curtain line of that (sadly unfashionable) play “Richard of Bordeaux”.

I seldom saw Robert onstage — in fact his career was curtailed by increasing blindness. I don’t want to dwell on that, to define by disability. He played the piano a good deal, and I have a tape of him singing to it. He made many musical settings of verses. And he gave solo recitals, I have met actors who first encountered him that way. Above all, he was a great teacher — at RADA and elsewhere.

His time with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the ‘sixties was effectively his latest stage work. But I won’t outline Robert’s career. There is a full entry on Wikipedia, which is informative and easy to find. As so often happens, others have come along with the same name.

Robert was doing television when I was a boy, and I found that I had seen him in “Treasure Island”. More astonishingly, that in an early period of my childhood, he had been the sinister Man in the Bowler Hat in a serialisation of Erich Kastner’s “Emil and the Detectives”.

By the time I knew him he could no longer broadcast because of his eyesight. There were occasional repeats, but it was before the days of ‘catch up’. I once dropped him a postcard in verse beginning “A party date on Sunday evening meant I had to miss/The repeat from radio’s earlier days of ‘In Parenthesis’ [the notable World War One play]”. Our friendship thrived on this sort of tongue-in-cheek humour.

It did not occur to me at the time that in benefitting from his specialised advice I was sneaking private acting lessons from a professional. Certain moments from our conversations stay in my mind. “Oh, actors don’t do the same thing every night” he remarked once. I found this revealing. It is not to be misunderstood! Neither Robert nor I would approve of wilful unpredictability. But freedom within an agreed and prepared framework is different. This is easier to distinguish in its results than in talking about the theory, of course.

Another time he told me to summarise in two words the passage I was delivering. I did not take him quite literally, and I waffled. He made me sum it up in two words, and this clarified my ideas.

A third moment that comes back to me is a comic one. I was asking his opinion on an audition speech from “The Devils”. Grandier is facing execution. “There will be pain” I began solemnly. “WEOWW!” squawked a cat in the yard — and neither of us could carry on for some minutes.

I have said enough, about someone who was important in my life. Robert’s own life was not always fortunate — which generalisation is the sort of conventionalism he might have mocked me for. His career was naturally truncated by the loss of his sight, though he carried on bravely. His marriage had ended in divorce. And his last years were shadowed by dementia after a series of strokes. But I honour him as a great influence in my own life, as an actor and as myself.