It was one of the most sensational first nights in the history of the London theatre. No one understood it. Even the so-called experts, the critics. Neither the cast nor the audience had any idea what it meant; and Timothy Bateson had a speech of such utter drivel that self-evidently it was, well, gibberish. The play was called Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett was its author. It became the tragic-comedy of its generation.
Bateson’s was not the leading role. He played Lucky, a furtive, pathetic figure driven round the stage in silence by Pozzo, a bully of lyrical inclination. But the concentration of this small, pitiable figure who apparently never spoke was immense. Then he broke into his now famous but meaningless tirade.
Peter Hall directed the English premiere in 1955 at the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street. He could make nothing of it; the audience was restless; and Bateson, with a rope round his neck, crouched in fear of his bully’s whip, awaiting the next lash.
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Then Hall, on the advice of the play’s agent, Peggy Ramsay, obeyed orders to send to the influential Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson a copy of Beckett’s novel Watt. So the play was held over at the Arts for another week; and when the Sunday papers appeared there was no question that it had a run in front of it. Hobson, a Francophile, knew Beckett’s writing (the author lived in Paris and wrote in French); Kenneth Tynan of The Observer had also been in the house; and together they saved the play, which then moved to the Criterion.
Of Bateson’s performance Tynan wrote: “Anguish made a comic, a remarkable achievement, and perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the play.”
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Bateson won the Clarence Derwent award for the best performance by the most promising actor; and rated Lucky his luckiest role to the end of his days, whether on stage, screen or television, though he conceded it had been psychologically exhausting.
Bateson was born in London in 1926 and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland and the University of Oxford. As an undergraduate he acted in amateur productions, including a part in Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1947 film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
After other minor film roles and professional stage training he joined the Old Vic company in Waterloo Road in 1948, walking on that year as a servant to Faith Brook’s Olivia at Manchester Opera House in Alec Guinness’s production of Twelfth Night, which moved to the New Theatre (then Albery, now No?l Coward). Other Old Vic parts included Ralph to Cedric Hardwicke’s Dr Faustus, a messenger in Congreve’s The Way of the World and a peasant in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
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In Laurence Olivier’s St James’s Theatre company in 1951 Bateson played the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra, and when Olivier and Vivien Leigh toured the play and Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra to New York Bateson also played Thodotus in the Shaw. Back at the Old Vic in 1953 Bateson played Osric to Richard Burton’s Hamlet in an epic production at the Edinburgh Fesitival, Elsinore in Denmark and in London, and Trinculo to Michael Hordern’s Prospero in The Tempest in 1954.
After six years of Shakespeare came a season of modern drama at Leatherhead Rep, and after Waiting for Godot Bateson played in Ira Levin’s American comedy about National Service, No Time for Sergeants (Her Majesty’s). In Paul Tabori’s Brou-Haha (Aldwych, 1958) he played Ubaita; and Bellamy in the musical The Fantasticks.
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Bateson was glad to return to the classics with Olivier at Chichester (a trial run for the proposed new National Theatre company) as Technicus in John Ford’s The Broken Heart.
After a stint in Peter Ustinov’s The Empty Chair at Nottingham Playhouse Bateson found another 17th-century piece of which Ford was part-author, The Witch of Edmonton at Bernard Miles’s Mermaid Theatre, where he stayed (save for a spell in the West End in George Ross and Campbell Singer’s Difference of Opinion) until 1963. Other plays at the Mermaid in which he acted included John Arden’s Left-Handed Liberty and such classics as Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play, Pirandello’s Right You Are! If You Think So and the Shepherd in Oedipus the King.
In 1970 Bateson joined the new Leeds Playhouse for its opening productions, returning to London in 1975 for Garrick and Coleman’s The Clandestine Marriage (Savoy).
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Film credits included Olivier’s Richard III, Our Man in Havana and The Anniversary with Bette Davis. Among Bateson’s television credits were parts in plays, series and serials.
He was married to the actress Sheila Shand Gibbs. She survives him together with their two daughters and a son.
Timothy Bateson, actor, was born on April 3, 1926. He died on September 16, 2009, aged 83