Hawaii's Adopted World Class Actor

About the Book

Terence Knapp, an English actor and Inaugural Player of the National Theatre of Great Britain under the direction of Sir Laurence Olivier, appeared frequently in television, films and repertory in England.  These are his recollections of working in Great Britain, touring in Africa and Southeast Asia, studying Japanese theatre arts and directing Japanese actors in Shakespeare and Western Theatre in Japan.  He has lived in Honolulu, Hawaii since 1970 where he teaches at the University of Hawaii and acts and directs in Hawaii, Japan and England.

When he was 11 years old, Terry won a scholarship to Parmiters, an Anglican Grammar School chartered in 1584, at Bethnal Green in London. He was educated in the Classics and exposed to the great tradition of English Literature and, particularly, to Shakespeare.  When Parmiters renewed the tradition of an annual Shakespeare production, Terry was cast as Lady Macbeth.  His performance led to the offer of a scholarship by the London County Council to the Preparatory Academy and, a year later, when he was 17, a scholarship to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Terrys studies at RADA were interrupted by mandatory service in the Royal Air Force.  He was trained as a paramedic and posted to a Mobil Operating Theatre unit based near Oldenburg, in Northern Germany. There he was befriended by a family of Quakers and by the family of the British Resident.  Their encouragement and interest in Terry resulted in his being seconded for a time to Nord West Deutsches Rundfunk where he worked on a great variety of broadcasts as a radio actor.  He played HAMLET at the age of 19 as well as a number of other great Shakespearean roles.  His apprenticeship in radio has served him well.  Years later he worked in radio in Moscow, Tokyo and South East Asia.

In 1953, Terry returned to his scholarship at RADA to resume his studies.  In 1954, at the Public Show presented by RADA at the Savoy Theatre, he was awarded the Academys Medal for his performance as the Doctor in the play A Month In The Country by Turgenev.  He was also given a years contract as the Liverpool Playhouse Scholar.  Moving to Merseyside, where he remained for the next four years, Terry became a member of the Liverpool Playhouse, at that time the doyenne of repertory theatres in England.  The three weekly productions gave him the opportunity to play an enormous spectrum of parts from every genre of drama.  Around the corner from the Playhouse, a quartet of young men were preparing to burst upon an unsuspecting world as the Beatles.

Terry received glowing notices for his performance in a play by Gerald Savory, Hand In Glove. After his success in the play, on the urging and advice of his agent, he left the Liverpool Playhouse to return to London. Terry soon became a successful young character actor on both the BBC and ITA, performing a wide range of roles on live television.  Gerald Savory, the playwright of Hand In Glove would only consent to having his play performed on television or made into a film if Terry repeated his role.  The television production made Terrys name nationwide.

In 1962, Sir Laurence Olivier invited Terry to become a member of the Company of the newly formed Chichester Festival Theatre.  During that summer, he performed with many illustrious actors of the British theatre---Michael Redgrave, Sybil Thorndike, Joan Greenwood, Joan Plowright, John Neville and, of course, Laurence Olivier.

Early in 1963 while performing in London, Terry accepted John Nevilles invitation to join him, Judi Dench and other actors in a British Council Tour of West Africa for three months.  They performed Shakespeares Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Arms and the Man in many remote areas of Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Returning to London by way of French West Africa, Portugal, Spain and Rome, Terry was invited to attend the Palm Sunday Liturgy celebrated by Pope John XXIII.

Receiving a letter from Olivier welcoming him to return to the Chichester Festival Theatre for the second season that summer, Terry joined with several new members recruited from the Royal Court Theatre, some of the members from the previous summer and several new actors, among them Derek Jacobi. Olivier had brought them all together for the second season in preparation for the announced founding of the National Theatre of Great Britain under his direction.  During that summer, Olivier invited Terry to become an Inaugural Player in the newly formed National Theatre.  Terry played Osric in Hamlet in the National Theatres first production, which was directed by Olivier and starred Peter OToole.

Terry remained with the National Theatre for its first four formative years, playing the character roles, which were his forte and which he relished. In 1965, When Olivier became ill during rehearsals of Love for Love, Terry was asked to step in for Olivier in the role of Tattle at the personal request of Olivier, who said nobody else would be able to play the part as well as Terry. The role of Tattle was a tour de force for Terry. He was acclaimed for his brilliance in the comedy role by all who saw the production. The play opened in London at the Scala Theatre after which Terry left with other members of the National Theatre Company for Moscow and Berlin to perform in Love for Love, Othello and Hobsons Choice.  

During the few years since it had been established, the National Theatre followed many new and different directions from its original premise.  Returning to London after the Moscow/Berlin tour, Terry, dissatisfied with the directorship which had changed and looking for more opportunities, asked to be released from his contract with the National Theatre.  He accepted an invitation from John Neville, now the Artistic Director of the Nottingham Playhouse, to return to Africa on another tour.  The tour was cancelled abruptly at the last moment due to an outbreak of civil war in Nigeria, and the Company was instead sent to South East Asia. Touring with other actors in A Man For All Seasons and As You Like It, Terry had his first taste of the East in Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Sarawak, Singapore and the Philippines.

Instead of returning to London when the tour was over, Terry made his way from Manila via Hong Kong to Japan.  A telephone call to a friend of a friend in Tokyo, made at the last minute, resulted in his remaining in Japan for over four months.  Becoming acquainted with a group of young actors affiliated with a Shinkgeki (New Theatre) company, known as Gekidan Kumo, Terry became immersed in the life of the actors of this Company.  At their request he taught some of them voice technique. When they went on tour with their current production, the director of the Kumo offered Terry the opportunity to accompany them in return for teaching voice production to their apprentices.

John Neville enticed him back to England with an offer to join the Nottingham Playhouse where, Terry worked in repertory again for the next two years.  Performing in diverse plays and playing such important splendid lead roles such as Oberon in A Midsummer Nights Dream and Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, he was felt himself fortunate to be working with some of the most interesting talents of the era.  Famous actors vied for the privilege and opportunity of being a guest artist and appearing in a production at the Nottingham Playhouse.  

Prior to his last appearance at the Nottingham Playhouse in a musical starring Dame Cleo Laine and directed by the legendary Wendy Toye, Terry had applied for and had been given the first ever Churchill Fellowship awarded to an actor. The funding allowed him to return to Japan to study their traditional classical performance arts.  Before he left for Tokyo, he ac

About the Author

Terence Knapp was born in the East End of London in 1932.  He is the only son and the eldest of seven children born to Alice Catherine, a Dublin lass and Richard Knapp.  Terrys father served in the Royal Army Medical Corps for twenty years and saw action in almost every major campaign of World War II, rising from Warrant Officer to commissioned rank of Major as Quartermaster.

As a young adolescent in Dublin, Terrys mother worked for her uncle in a shop that made wigs for actors.  In return for bringing the wigs backstage, she was often given free ticket to a performance.  After she came to live in London, she never forgot a young Irish actor with whom she fell in love from afar and she named Terry after him.  Despite the hardship and poverty of life in the Hackney slums during the depression of the thirties, Cathie endowed her children with a love of language, especially of Irish traditional songs, which triggered in young Terry a vivid response to his imaginative realm.

Cathie Knapp was a devout Catholic.  Her strength and courage helped her bring her family through the horrors of war, the blitz, the flying bombs, death and destruction. As the oldest child, Terry suffered through the frequent upheavals of evacuation that kept the family separated from each other in coal mining mountain villages of Wales, a year in Dublin and the harsh ambiance of County Durham.  Despite the numerous temporary quarters in London and, in 1944, a long summer in remote rural Norfolk, Cathy had the fervent belief that all would eventually be well under the protections of the Holy Mother of God to whom the family prayed the Rosary together every night.

Poverty in early childhood leaves a mark which may never be visible but which remains for the rest of ones life as a reminder of deprivation suffered.  Terence Knapp was born into a slum environment of dreadful diseases, overcrowded housing, malnutrition and the apathy of the depression government of Great Britain.  There were times in the Knapp home where money was short and luxury consisted of an enamel bowl of hot meat faggots and pease pudding from the butchers shop.  As the oldest child in the family, Terry took his bath first on Saturday night and would then be dispatched with a six pence to collect the brimming basin of nourishment, bringing it carefully and safely home without spilling or dipping his fingers into it too noticeably.

In a sense, acting began for Terry when he would sing in the dark during the London wartime blackouts to allay his insecurities and fears.  Conjuring up all kind of fantasies to overcome the terror of walking down a completely blacked out street, he would steel himself against the possibility of Nazi paratroopers unexpectedly dropping from the skies, putting him against the nearest brick wall and, in his fertile imagination, slowly torturing him to death because he, gallantly, would not reveal the whereabouts of No. 10 Downing Street.

The Knapp family was poor but it wasnt until they were evacuated from London during World War II, first to an abandoned coal mine village in the Welsh mountains and then to live with a large family of relations in Crumlin, a distressed suburb of Dublin, that Terry found himself looking squalor in the face for the first conscious time.  Everyone seemed to have a cough and a gray face.  The fear of poverty has never left him, accounting, in part, for his strong needs for financial safety and security.

Terrys psychological security had been badly shaken when, as a child of 16 months, he was sent to stay with his great-aunt Emmy at the time his mother gave birth to his sister, Sheila.  When he returned to his mother, he did not know her, would not speak and remained mute for days. A doctor told his mother that Terry had probably suffered a nervous breakdown.  Like poverty, this experience traumatized his early years and has remained part of his psychic baggage.

As a child, Terry was shy and self-conscious.  He sought and found escape by indulging in fantasy and make-believe and was more at home in the world of his imagination than in the real world. Terrys early childhood was colored by an England in which the poor still indulged in street celebrations. When he was three years old, the Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary was celebrated on his street in the standard London East End manner with a bonfire and a street party. Bunting, loyal symbols and flags hung from lamppost to lamppost, criss-crossing the road.  Trestle tables borrowed from the Town Hall were set up in the middle of the street and covered with colorful and emblematic paper decorations, thick sandwiches, cupcakes, trifle, orange squash and vast enamel pots of tea. Each child found on his plate a mug with portraits of the Sovereigns entwined with shamrock and thistle, roses of York and Lancaster and the Lion and Unicorn. The children were also given a freshly minted coin, a many-sided, brass three-penny piece and a bag with an orange, some nuts and raisins.

In the evening, adults came out to drink their loyal toasts of brown ale and gin and orange and to dance the two-step to an upright piano played at the corner of the street.  Terry opted out of these royal festivities, staying home most of the day, hiding behind the open front door.  He enjoyed dramatizing his loneliness, sitting on the floor under the smelly mackintoshes and overcoats hanging on their pegs.

During most of Terrys childhood and until the outbreak of World War II, his father, Richard Knapp, was posted to Palestine.  As a young man, Dickie Knapp was a boxer and football player.  He took the Kings Shilling and entered the military service as a private soldier, rising eventually within the ranks to a Regimental Sergeant Major. With his father absent on military duty, in the distaff-oriented Knapp household, as the first born and only boy, with, then, four younger sisters, Terry became the responsible man of the house at a very early age.

Although Terry never knew a grandfather and saw little of his Uncle Paddy, a colorful personality, he did not lack for paternal modeling. Father Lievertz, a Catholic Priest, became a source of guidance for the young boy. He was the Knapp familys parish priest and was based in a little Victorian wooden chapel attached to an almshouse.

Father Lievertz was originally from Austria.  His father was a Jew but Father Lievertz was able to bring both his parents out of Austria at the time of the Putsch. When Father Lievertzs father, then in his late 80s, was no longer able to serve at his sons masses, Terry was recruited.  Although Father Lievertz was a little cranky and very particular about the right and proper way of doing things, Terry reveled in what the priest taught him. He found a great fascination in the liturgy and ceremonials. Terry would spend most all of Sunday with the Father Lievertz, helping with christenings in the afternoon and the Benedictions in the evening. Whiling away the time between services, Terry read all the booklets in the back of the church.  In this way he learned for the first time about Father Damien, the Leper Priest of Molokai and of the martyrdom of Catholic missionaries and converts in 17th Century Japan, both of which were to have a great significant in his career.

What was exciting was the TV, a huge thing with a very small black and white screen where they watched productions of Shakespeare together.  Father Lievertz also introduced Terry to Wagner with those heavy old records, which played for 3 minutes.  Terry still has the leather bound missal given him by the priest in which was written in Latin a quote from the Gospel Well done thou good and faithful servant.  When Terry went into the Royal Air Force, it was Father Lievertz who took him to the rai