‘Good, on we go…’

Brian Pettifer, actor

I was lucky enough to work with Lindsay Anderson on four occasions. In the films If…., O Lucky Man! Britannia Hospital and the documentary Lindsay made for the BBC in 1992, Is that all there is? I first met Lindsay at the casting director Miriam Brickman’s office in Half Moon Street in London in 1968, when she was helping to cast If…. It would be a friendship that would last until his death in 1994. I don’t wish to try and explain how Lindsay directed actors, I wouldn’t know how, and being on a set with a director of any sort is something that needs to be experienced not written about. The only thing I would say is that the better directors, who cast with great care and precision, don’t need to say much to the actors, encouragement being the directors greatest tool. Not saying Brilliant! Well done! Bravo! Nothing like that, just the occasional ‘Good, on we go, next set up,’ and perhaps a look that lets you know that the scene is working. The films and the plays that made up Lindsay’s working life are perhaps an indication of his sensibility, his humour, his concerns. When I think of Lindsay I don’t think of the films, the work we did together, the fact that you worked with Lindsay not for him. I think of the man, the kindness, the generosity, the advice always freely given, the occasionally fraught visits to his flat, the gossip, the laughs! I will end with a brief quote from a Tennyson poem I recited to him in his flat which he seemed to like a great deal. 

A shadow flits before me, 

Not thou, but like to thee: 

Ah Christ, that it were possible 

For one short hour to see 

The souls we loved, that they might tell us  

What and where they be.

Tennyson

(Images: Photographs of scenes from If…., ref. LA 1/6/3/4; photograph of scene from Britannia Hospital, ref. LA 1/6/9/4.)