I first saw Leonard Rossiter as Fred Midway in David Turner’s play Semi-Detached at the Belgrade, Coventry in 1963 and it was a revelation. Olivier had played the same role in London with a low-key realism. Rossiter, who like the character had worked in insurance, presented 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 hard basilisk stare. This was the kind of physically expressive acting you rarely saw in British theatre at that time.
Fame only hit Rossiter with his sensational performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Opening in Glasgow in 1967, Michael Blakemore’s production took two years to reach London, where Brecht was regarded as box-office poison. But Brecht’s play, which equates the Nazi party with Chicago gangsters and sees Hitler as a demonic thug, offers one of the great star parts, which Rossiter seized with avidity.
What he brought to it was his gift for the grotesque and his ability to strike a perfect balance between the menacing and the absurd. Rossiter’s entrance, which involved a dramatic leap through a circular, circus-like screen, was rendered comic by the way bits of paper clung obstinately to his teeth. This was the prelude to a performance in which ferocity and farce were never far apart. Asked to leave a restaurant by a pin-striped capitalist, Rossiter’s head spiralled up like that of a cobra about to strike before he raised his top-heavy hat in exaggerated politeness.
The high point came in the scene where Arturo takes lessons in deportment from a veteran Shakespearean actor. Instructed to walk on the points of his toes, Rossiter shot out his legs in an embryonic goose-step. Told to stand with his hands neutrally folded in front of him, he seized his crotch with rabid intensity. When taught how to sit, he essayed a Roman-history style gesture of authority which he realised was more impressive if the arm was unbent, thus achieving the first ever Nazi salute. It was a brilliant piece of acting and I was fascinated, on the one occasion I interviewed Rossiter, when he told me that, while he was grateful for the role, he loathed Brecht politically.
The paradox is that Rossiter was, in some ways, the living embodiment of Brecht’s belief that “the actor must make himself observed standing between the spectator and the text”. You saw that when he played the tramp in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1972. Where Donald Pleasence, who originated the role, gave a naturalistic performance and was sufficiently plausible to go out on the streets begging when they filmed the play in Hackney, Rossiter vividly presented the character as a workshy dropout and born fantasist forever dreaming of getting to Sidcup.
That last point was a key to Rossiter’s acting: he had a particular genius for playing characters in the grip of an idée fixe. In Michael Frayn’s Make and Break (1980), he was a workaholic salesman totally bound to his trade: he even scrutinised Beethoven record sleeves and Buddhist pamphlets as if they were company balance sheets. And in his last ever performance as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot (1984), he gave a definitive study of a dementedly obsessive sleuth: as he removed his hat to prove he was a master 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 man permanently haunted by sexual frustration. Whether he was playing monsters or supposedly ordinary men, Rossiter had an unrivalled capacity for suggesting that a touch of mania makes the whole world kin.
