Don Warrington: Rigsby's a racist - but that's not the real issue - Telegraph
Theatre
Don Warrington: Rigsby's a racist - but that's not the real issue
Don Warrington, star of the TV show Rising Damp, chats to Dominic Cavendish about    directing the stage version, and about fame and racism in Britain.
Don Warrington will direct the return of Rising Damp. Photo: Martin Pope
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When Don Warrington got a call asking him whether he wanted to direct Rising Damp on stage – exactly 40 years after he himself starred in the stage-play that resulted in one of the best-loved sitcoms of all time – he laughed.
“This came as a complete surprise,” he explains, sitting in the rehearsal rooms at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory , amid a mock-up of the boarding-house that helped both define the show and sum up the grotty, ungentrified Seventies.
“I was on tour with Driving Miss Daisy, and my agent rang to say there was an offer for me to direct Rising Damp. The idea just made me burst out laughing. There’s a neatness about it. I can see that. I asked my agent to read the script – she later rang back and said, 'I spent 90 happy minutes laughing away.' I thought, OK – then it must be alright. So I decided to say yes.”
It’s impossible to overstate how unfussed Warrington seems to be about Rising Damp being reborn, with himself – one of the enduringly popular show’s four principal actors (two of whom, of course, are long dead) – at the helm. “I don’t know whether there’s an appetite out there for it,” he admits, and even adds: “I said to myself 'Would I go and see it?’ I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.”
In conversation, he displays the same leisurely, lordly, amused, well-spoken manner that, in character as Philip Smith, a student of Town and Country Planning and the supposed son of an African Chief, so used to wind up Leonard Rossiter’s Rupert Risgby, as the ever-angst, sardonic landlord flailed around in a miasma of suspicion, jealousy and toe-curling bigotry.
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Warrington, shortly to turn 61, first tried his hand at directing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2010. His interest in this project is a pragmatic one. “I took the view: if it’s a bus I’ll get on it – and see where it goes. I enjoy directing – this was an opportunity and I’ve given it no more significance than that,” he drawls. “The show was a long time ago and it doesn’t exist in the same way for me as it does for other people. It’s ever-present on TV . It’s not ever-present in my life.”
Even though he’s bringing no possessive claim to the piece – which hasn’t only been authorised but authored too by Rising Damp’s surviving creator Eric Chappell – using elements of the originating stage-play, The Banana Box, with gratings from the TV series – he’s not so offhand as to be outright dismissive. If you ask him to name his favourite episode or scene, he can’t oblige. He remembers certain lines – but that’s because he thinks they’re broadly memorable. He has no trace of interest in interposing the way he or the original cast approached things for this reheated version – the actors, including Cornelius Macarthy as Philip and Stephen Chapman as Rigsby, are being given carte blanche to make the roles work afresh on their own terms.
And yet he has robust opinions about the cultural context, and significance, of the show itself – and holds strong memories of the TV recordings. Rising Damp (1974-1978) was ground-breaking in using comedy to explore the dynamic between a white man and black man and exposing attitudes to race and prejudice. That was implicit in the title of Chappell’s breakthrough play The Banana Box, which derived from a comment made in a debate about the entitlement of non-British-born residents to call themselves British: “If a cat has kittens in a banana box, what do you get – kittens or bananas?”
Born in Trinidad but brought to England by his mother in early childhood – his father, the politician Basil Kydd, remained behind and died in 1958 – he grew up in Newcastle. He remembers the attitudes of the time.
“I knew the world the show describes. I grew up being one black person among lots of white people. I was used to prejudice. It happened. I quickly learnt how to become part of where I was. I think you have to confront the fact that Rigsby’s views were the views that were commonly held and they may still be for all I know by a lot of people,” he continues. “People not much older than me have told me when they came to this country that they were seriously asked questions like, 'Do you still have a tail?’
“In a way, it was done with a kind of naivety – it was just stunning ignorance – and if you had said, 'This is an outrageous thing to ask me', they would have been very upset.” Rigsby’s comments do, he avers, stray into pure racism: “He’s a racist, there’s no question about it – but that’s not the real issue.”
It’s the character interplay that counts and why this period-specific sitcom has stood the test of time: “What helped was the dispelling of a myth, and the myth was about black people. If you present something which is the opposite of that myth you begin to undermine it. I think that’s where Rising Damp helped. The difficulty for Rigsby lies in observing somebody who is exactly who he would like to be – apart from the fact that he is black – and that’s very confusing for him.”
Warrington was first cast as Philip when the play was revived on tour in 1973, having had an earlier tryout in Leicester, in which Wilfrid Brambell starred as Rigsby (then called “Rooksby”); it went to the West End for a short spell but it was because the production had been caught earlier on tour in Newcastle by the then Head of Light Entertainment at Yorkshire Television, John Duncan, that it made the leap to the small-screen. When that happened, the primary emotion Warrington recalls is one of high anxiety, not unbounded enjoyment.
“It was my first job on television. What I remember is not the execution but the state I was in, the terror of doing it – of recording on a Friday night in front of a live studio audience, and the sense of responsibility to the other actors.” He still sees Frances de la Tour, who played the immortal Miss Jones, and unhesitatingly praises her as “a great actress”. He holds Rossiter in similarly high esteem, recalling his fastidious attention to detail rather than any of his oft-reputed tetchiness. (“He would be rigorous but he was very generous to me.”) And he believes Richard Beckinsale (medical student Alan) was on his way to greatness too, before he died of a heart attack in 1979, aged just 31: “It was an incredible shock – at that age you don’t think about death.”
Warrington has clearly negotiated difficult patches of career unemployment since Rising Damp – his CV is an interesting jumble of minor and major stage credits, sudden reappearances on TV (he has recently featured on ads for Kenco, and has a supporting role in the exotic BBC crime series Death in Paradise). The success of the show didn’t open many of the right kind of doors – and he admits he failed to recognise some that were.
“I wasn’t terribly interested in fame. There was stuff that came that meant I could have built on that sort of success, but I didn’t do it because stupidly I thought, 'There’s another world out there’.
"I was looking for legitimacy – but I’ve found that legitimacy doesn’t come that way.” Still, having married, had two sons, both of whom are following in his footsteps into acting, he’s doing pretty OK, as it is. Later this year he will star in a “black” version of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons for Talawa Theatre at the Manchester Royal Exchange. And before that he’ll be heading off to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to film a new series of Death in Paradise.
“I’d feel ridiculous saying that I have it tough. I’ll be on the beach out there, in the sun. That’s really not a grind, is it?”
Rising Damp is on at the Blackpool Grand until May 18. Tickets: 01253 290111; blackpoolgrand.co.uk. Full tour details: risingdampontour.com