The Entertainer

Tony Richardson, 34, is a Yorkshireman who hates things gently. As chief director among the so-called Angry Young Men, he helped Writer John Osborne toss a large red brick through the French doors of conventional English stagecraft, bringing the smell of soot and soft coal into the theater.

He is a tall fellow with fragile hands, a fragile manner, and a coldly unsentimental eye, and he has now come to New York to stage William Inge's forthcoming Natural Affection. This is the story of an unmarried mother (Kim Stanley) whose son returns fro'm reform school, shows raging jealousy toward her lover, and eventually becomes a murderer. Despite its grim outline, Inge can be counted on to have loaded the whole with rich marblings of mawkishness. Richardson can be counted on to melt the mawkishness away.

Discipline of Loneliness. After directing the original London production of Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, Richardson went into partnership with Osborne to form Woodfall Films, whose productions have been the most distinctive in British filmmaking in the last few years: Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Between times, he has staged Osborne's Luther in the West End, directed Laurence Olivier in the stage version of The Entertainer and Joan Plowright in Ionesco's The Chairs. He made Sanctuary for 20th Century-Fox, and remembers Hollywood with the same distaste that Hollywood reserves for him. His current film project is Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. "This is a holiday film," he says, "a lot of colorful, sexy fun. But anyone who says Woodfall has abandoned making serious social films can go to hell."

Of all his plays and movies, Richardson* most closely identifies with the Long Distance Runner. A druggist's son, he was sent to "a terrible, horrible off-white sort of public school" which was evacuated to the Lake District during the war. There discipline slipped away to nought, and Richardson spent much of his time wandering the countryside alone, much like the Borstal boy in the film taking his long training runs.

"I hated all authority," he remembers, and adds that he hopes this essential attitude has never left him. After that school, Oxford was a release. He read English and learned his eventual craft by joining the celebrated Oxford University Dramatic Society.

To achieve in his films a characteristic sense of the toughness and bitterness of Britain's working class, he prefers to shoot in a street or a tenement rather than a studio. He understands actors and how to use them. "Actors are the most civilized, sweet, and well-behaved race of people in the world," he says. "They have an extraordinary emotional ruthlessness too. It's terribly difficult to know where the center of an actor is. They don't quite know who they are. They want to be villain, hero, king and slob all at the same time." He gives them ample room for improvisation when they are working for him. "People are spontaneous and do quick, true little things," he explains. "I can control it afterward in the cut ting room."

Small Ripple. He now describes the term Angry Young Men as "a journalistic label that is meaningless." The writers so described, he says, are actually artists who deal in social protest but do not hack at it; they symbolize no social revolution. "I wish there were a social revolution in England." he says, "but there hasn't been a ripple of one."

There is sometimes a bit of a ripple at home. Richardson is married to Actress Vanessa Redgrave, who makes speeches in Hyde Park and goes on demonstration marches for the ban-the-bomb move ment. Richardson is tolerant but unpersuaded. In his view, "peace is helped by bombs." The mutual-deterrent thesis is "the only realistic way." At the moment, Vanessa has been forced to leave her crusading to others. Her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, is due to be a grandfather before spring.

*He is no kin to British Actor Sir Ralph Richardson.

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