Leonard Rossiter’s manic physicality was a revelation in British theatre | Theatre

I first noticed Leonard Rossiter as Fred Halfway in David Turner’s play Semi-Indifferent on the Belgrade, Coventry in 1963 and it was a revelation. Olivier had performed the identical function in London with a low-key realism. Rossiter, who just like the character had labored in insurance coverage, offered us with a manic Midlands Machiavel. The stiff-jointed legs shot out like pistons, the arms revolved like a berserk windmill, the eyes had a tough basilisk stare. This was the sort of bodily expressive performing you not often noticed in British theatre at the moment.

Fame solely hit Rossiter together with his sensational efficiency in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Opening in Glasgow in 1967, Michael Blakemore’s manufacturing took two years to achieve London, the place Brecht was considered box-office poison. However Brecht’s play, which equates the Nazi occasion with Chicago gangsters and sees Hitler as a demonic thug, presents one of many nice star elements, which Rossiter seized with avidity.

What he dropped at it was his present for the grotesque and his potential to strike an ideal steadiness between the menacing and the absurd. Rossiter’s entrance, which concerned a dramatic leap by a round, circus-like display, was rendered comedian by the best way bits of paper clung obstinately to his tooth. This was the prelude to a efficiency wherein ferocity and farce have been by no means far aside. Requested to go away a restaurant by a pin-striped capitalist, Rossiter’s head spiralled up like that of a cobra about to strike earlier than he raised his top-heavy hat in exaggerated politeness.

The excessive level got here within the scene the place Arturo takes classes in deportment from a veteran Shakespearean actor. Instructed to stroll on the factors of his toes, Rossiter shot out his legs in an embryonic goose-step. Informed to face together with his fingers neutrally folded in entrance of him, he seized his crotch with rabid depth. When taught easy methods to sit, he essayed a Roman-history model gesture of authority which he realised was extra spectacular if the arm was unbent, thus reaching the primary ever Nazi salute. It was a superb piece of performing and I used to be fascinated, on the one event I interviewed Rossiter, when he informed me that, whereas he was grateful for the function, he loathed Brecht politically.

The paradox is that Rossiter was, in some methods, the dwelling embodiment of Brecht’s perception that “the actor should make himself noticed standing between the spectator and the textual content”. You noticed that when he performed the tramp in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1972. The place Donald Pleasence, who originated the function, gave a naturalistic efficiency and was sufficiently believable to exit on the streets begging once they filmed the play in Hackney, Rossiter vividly offered the character as a workshy dropout and born fantasist endlessly dreaming of attending to Sidcup.

That final level was a key to Rossiter’s performing: he had a selected genius for taking part in characters within the grip of an idée fixe. In Michael Frayn’s Make and Break (1980), he was a workaholic salesman completely sure to his commerce: he even scrutinised Beethoven document sleeves and Buddhist pamphlets as in the event that they have been firm steadiness sheets. And in his final ever efficiency as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot (1984), he gave a definitive research of a dementedly obsessive sleuth: as he eliminated his hat to show he was a grasp of disguise, his eyes had the mad gleam of a police-force Walter Mitty.

Even his bedsit landlord, Rigsby, in TV’s Rising Damp was a person completely haunted by sexual frustration. Whether or not he was enjoying monsters or supposedly peculiar males, Rossiter had an unrivalled capability for suggesting {that a} contact of mania makes the entire world kin.