God and I: Thelma Holt

IN A RECENT interview in The Guardian you said that every morning you light candles for your actors in Brompton Oratory and every night pray to St. Anthony of Padua for the success of your production. Why do you put your trust in this particular Saint?
As a child, I was very much influenced by my mother’s trust in this Saint, and it never occurred to me that I need to look elsewhere. Saint Anthony appealed to me as a little girl as the statue looked handsome. However, I found as I got older Saint Anthony was enormously comforting for me. Whenever I felt I needed help, I got it; and I still get it. Sometimes I don’t get what I want, but I do pray every day. When I don’t get what I want, I get the strength to deal with not getting it, and that makes me feel very good and very positive.

Have you ever personally been to Padua?
I’ve been to Padua twice. I have seen Saint Anthony’s relics in his beautiful Basilica, I’ve been to Mass and received Communion. There are things about Padua that cannot help but affect an artist. The light in Padua is extremely beautiful and warm and embracing. I don’t ever imagine not being able to visit Padua again.

When you were in the Basilica, what did you experience being there with Saint Anthony for the first time?
I felt enormous warmth, a freedom. Being in the Basilica was like being in the open air. It is a place where you feel nearer to goodness To use more modern terms, the vibrations are very strong, very real, if you wish to receive them. It may well be that in these days you don’t have the time, but I would recommend to anybody who goes into the Basilica, to take a few minutes, quietly on their own, not asking for anything, not expecting to experience anything, but just sitting calmly and you will, remarkably, you will. The second time I was there I took an Anglican friend who’d never been to a Catholic church before, and she said to me, What a wonderful feeling of peace!

You are one of the leading figures of the British theatre. How did your love for the stage start?
As a child I had a great love of going to Mass. I would like to say this was because of being a good Catholic or of strong Christian beliefs, but it was not so. The Mass is extremely appealing to the theatrical in me. When I was little, it’s well-remembered that I wished to be a priest! At four you don’t recognise gender problems. I know now that the reason I wanted to be a priest was that he had the biggest role and the best frock! [she laughs] Of course I did not become a priest but at a very early age I would conduct services in our own garden. Alas I have to confess that the thing I liked to conduct was the thing I had never actually seen, it was a service for the dead. I was very good at having my own Requiem Mass and alas the person I pretended to bury was my sister who was eleven years older than me and in very good health indeed! Fortunately, my parents were quite sophisticated and understood that I had gone for what I found most exciting.

Has your faith helped you in your profession?
I have found throughout my life and I must be serious now, that I have chosen a very hard profession, I’ve chosen a very stressful position. For the first 20 years I was an actress and I wanted to be a producer, and there are very few women producers, perhaps they are too sensible. I find that my faith is a mainstay for that. It’s very hard today to find people who will believe that, believe you when you say it. I used to be a little sensitive about saying it once, but I’m not now. Far more things go wrong in our profession than go right and you need something as back-up when that happens, you need an insurance policy. I think you can only believe very, very strongly in yourself if you have something else bigger than you to believe in. To have faith does require a quantum leap, a huge leap, because there are many things that cannot be explained.

The Guardian described you as A maverick impresario, [a woman whose] business acumen is combined with trademark eccentricity to bring the best of the world theatre to Britain. How did that come about?
After the Second World War, we were very much an island race and had an island mentality. The first time I saw the Soviets was when I saw a company of Russian actors. I realised that they were like us. A door can be kept open by artists, and I fell in love with international work. When I was building a small theatre I started inviting foreign companies in and it got bigger and bigger. If you have an opportunity to observe others, I find that it is enormously productive for your own work and you broaden your faith in art.

Your latest production is Semi-monde, a play which Noel Coward wrote in the 1920s. How do you think this play relates to the present day world?
It takes place in the cocktail bar in the Ritz hotel in Paris prior to the Second World War and it relates to today in that it creates the most beautiful picture of an old world that no longer exists, in which many of their preoccupations were similar to ours today. They speak differently, they have more clearly identified manners and a way of making the world go round. Initially you think, they are superficial greedy people, but they’re not; there is nothing evil in any of them, they’re sad and they don’t see that the future is going to change. Just a decade after this play, the world changed and has never been the same since. I believe that it is absolutely essential that we know our history and I feel very satisfied that so many young people have come and said ‘What a world! What an interesting world and look what happened after.’ So in this way I feel it has a resonance for today.

Do you think that something is happening now and that the world will be quite changed in a few years?
Science has to come to terms with the fact that you have to make a huge leap of faith to believe in quantum technology. For instance, less than 100 years ago, if you had told somebody that they would have pictures in their living room by satellite or you had put a man on the moon, they would have said that you were crazy. The world is changing rapidly and values are changing rapidly.

In many parts of the world the theatre is in crisis but in London it is very much alive. Do you think that this is a unique situation or do you think the theatre is and can be very much alive?
I believe the theatre is very much alive everywhere. I think the theatre reflects the preoccupations of the people more than any other art form because it is language-based. We know from experience that in countries where there have been huge problems, in countries where democracies have been threatened, people have been writing plays. Wherever it is language-based it will stay; it is alive.

You have met and worked with a wide variety of people from the world stage. Who are the personalities that have had the greatest influence on you?
In my own country, Sir Peter Hall who I had the privilege of working with, both in The National Theatre and after we both resigned from The National. He had an enormous influence on my work, the disciplines I learnt from Peter affect me today. The first director I went into partnership with, Charles Marowitz, an American, taught me that nothing was impossible, and Peter Brook, of course, made me proud of the British theatre and has inspired me to tread on untrodden ground. However, the major influences in my theatrical life have not come from my home country but from overseas. Yukio Ninagawa, whose work I love, proves that language need not make art inaccessible. He has found ways of illustrating his work. His Macbeth is finer than any production I have seen in my own country; it was magnificent, he has a wonderful understanding of Shakespeare. Some of Zeffirelli’s work has been very, very influential. I think the most exciting production I did at The National Theatre was Peter Stein’s The Hairy Ape, the American play by Eugene O’Neill, which was a revelation. So it is rather wonderful to work with all these people.

The modern theatre grew from religious ceremonies and the religious theatre was very influential during the Middle Ages and even afterwards. Do you think religious theatre has a continuing role in society today?
It has a continuing role but maybe not in quite the same way. The Jesuits for instance encouraged theatre very much indeed, and it comes as a surprise to people sometimes that the Church would encourage theatre. I think the Church is wily enough to know that the theatre could be used for wonderful propaganda purposes! People are encouraged to experience life through theatre so I think that continues.

Who is God for you?
God is my father; it’s as simple as that. God can do things that I can’t. God is my comfort. I cannot imagine a world without God, and every day miracles happen that we do not recognise. Miracles don’t have to be big, we don’t have to see someone walking on water to recognise a miracle. The fact that you can actually enjoy a sunrise having seen it so often is a minor miracle. God is a presence of goodness and clearly one of mercy. If we are to believe God made the earth then we are to believe He could destroy it. He’s chosen not to and has been quite patient.

You believe in the power of prayer. Is there any experience in your life that brought this home to you?
Yes, a personal experience. I was in Cairo with a relative when the six-day war started and she had a very serious accident. The young Egyptian doctor panicked and he could not find a pulse. I did not panic on that occasion, I behaved very calmly. They thought she was dead, but I insisted on taking her to the Anglo-American hospital in a taxi as there wasn’t an ambulance. I also told the man to take off his tie to put it round an artery that had been cut. There was very little hope, and it was very chaotic. The nursing sister took me to a little chapel with a little altar and a statue of the Virgin Mary. She didn’t know I was Catholic, she didn’t even know I was a Christian, she just gave me somewhere to sit. I sat in the chapel and I prayed, and I knew five minutes after I got there that she was going to live. And she did!

Thinking about the future, are there any dreams you hope to achieve?
Yes indeed. I hope to do another big Shakespeare production, possibly one of his late works with my Japanese director and I would like again to have a multi-national cast. There are a couple of Ibsen’s plays I want to do. I would also like very much to do another Coward play called Cavalcade and to have a retrospective of some of his short plays. I don’t think I’ve got enough time to do all the work I want to do unless there is another miracle!