Remembering Bernard Kay

Margarete Forsyth

Delivered at Bernard’s funeral, 21 January 2015

I met Bernard in November 1989, at a restaurant near Les Miserables to persuade him to take on the title role in my production of Brecht’s Galileo at the Young Vic Studio. I was rather nervous, as I was a relative newcomer to the theatre and he an experienced actor with a name. My husband Julian took me to the restaurant and said “When you are done — in half an hour or so — come and tell me how it went, before my show goes up.”

Four hours and as many glasses of wine later Julian came to find us. Bernard and I hadn’t stopped talking and I felt I had known him for years. Of course he had at some time during that evening agreed to play Galileo and of course I was a little nervous again before the first rehearsal, as his theatre CV was as long as mine was short. I had also heard through the theatre grapevine that he could be a “difficult actor” opinionated, headstrong and argumentative. I needn’t have worried. He made me feel completely at ease and I enjoyed every minute of rehearsal with him. Of course we debated, argued, disagreed, fought over the interpretation of lines, but it was always in the cause of serving the text, finding the right interpretation, making things “real” and clear to the audience. And at the end of each rehearsal, we would go out for a drink together and start debating about the play and his part all over again. I learnt more about acting from him in those rehearsal weeks than from almost anybody else, and he gave me the confidence to go on working as a director for the next 20 years.

Bernard took acting very seriously, it was his life, but he never took himself too seriously and was always extremely modest about his achievements. When we put together the biographies for the Galileo programme at the Young Vic, he insisted on putting in the following about him:

“Bernard Kay trained up the road at the Old Vic Theatre School. Bravest/stupidest claim to notoriety: learned, rehearsed and played Macbeth in twenty hours at the Old Nottingham Playhouse. (Well the world was young.) Jobbed around from Crossroads to Olivier’s Titus Andronicus via Dr Who and Dr Zhivago. Still waiting to be bored by the business.”

Vicar General in The Nun
Of course he stole all the notices for his brilliant performance and I was fortunate enough to work with him on another five productions at the Greenwich Studio Theatre. They were all profit-share, so no money spinners, but when I once asked him why he did it all this for no money he said: “I love working on these strange foreign shows of yours, because all the actors you get, seem to be interested in putting across the play, rather than themselves”. For Bernard “the play was always the thing” and acting was his life.

When I was diagnosed with throat cancer I could not work as a director for a long time, but we kept on meeting up on a regular basis when I was not in hospital, mainly in the Charing Cross Hotel restaurant, as Bernard loved going out and the place was quiet. This was essential for our communication. We were a right pair: Bernard was deaf in his left ear and I could only whisper. But that did not stop our debates about life, love, politics, death and of course as always theatre. I filled notebook after notebook with questions and comments and he would answer in his wonderful deep voice and tell me stories of his life for many hours and as many glasses of wine.

We dreamed of doing King Lear together, but that was not to be.

As for all of us, it was a shock to me when he decided to take his last bow, not because I did not understand it — I totally did — but because I now feel this big gap in my life.

When I had my first operation in a German hospital Bernard sent me a huge bunch of flowers with a note saying “All is forgiven. Please come back!” I don’t think the German nurses understood why I laughed so much.

Jeronimus in Erasmus Montanus
And something inside me is shouting: “Please come back, my dearest friend! What will I do without our talks, our wonderful evening meals, our laughter and sometime our tears together.” But I know that Bernard would have not liked to crawl out of this world but stride out of consciously and with his head held high. He was always a strong man, who did things with a bang and not a whimper. And I always loved and admired him for this.

In Brecht’s Galileo the Pope says something about Galileo that in my view sums up the special man Bernard was too:

He enjoys himself in more ways than any man I have ever met. His thinking springs from sensuality. Give him an old wine or a new idea, and he cannot say no.”

After The Life of Galileo, Bernard went on to act in the following Greenwich Studio Theatre productions by Margarete Forsyth: