Sir Tim Rice

How apt that the train from London on the way to visit Sir Tim Rice is a throng of women in floral frocks and men in suits and boaters, dresscode for one of the highlights of the English season, the Henley Regatta.

There is something so terribly English and traditional  (less so in his private life), about the 73-year-old librettist of some of the most successful musicals in the last five decades, three of them with the composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, which is coming soon  to the Sydney Opera House.  

He kindly arranges for his Spanish chauffeur, Louis, who has worked for Rice for 14 years, to pick me up at the station and drive me to his new home, near Henley-on-Thames. We approach the attractive period white house, set in six acres of land, via narrow, ribbon-like country lanes, and get stuck for a good twenty minutes behind a rubbish disposal truck.

The room where the interview takes place is large and  comfortable, with walls covered in art by the pre-Raphaelite John Waterhouse (Lloyd-Webber’s collection of pre-Raphaelites is so exceptional it was shown at the Royal Academy of Art), Augustus John and the Impressionists, Dufy and Pissaro. Rice’s particular taste is for portraits of kings and queens but, one year on after his departure from Barnes in London, his royals are still languishing in boxes.

Rice is tall and rangy, wearing a pair of faded orange espadrilles. Below wayward bushy brows, his pale blue watery eyes don’t always meet your gaze. There is a tendency towards self-deprecation, which stiffens into self-justification if one touches on his less successful projects.

He is very fond of  Australia, he says, having  visited maybe 20 or so times ( the twin draws are cricket and theatre connections) – the last occasion was in November – and he relishes the chance to look up old mates, such as Jim Sharman who directed Superstar. We talk about the death of Harry Miller, whom he knew quite well, and when I mention the MeToo stories about Bob Ellis, he says, mildly: “Well, the politically correct movement in Oz is as strong as anything, really.”

His enthusiasm for cricket started when he was a boy, keen on maths, compiling statistics and geography. The game mirrors life, he says, in that “it has long periods of not much happening then a bit of excitement and you can end up in a draw which is cricket terms means – inconclusive result.

“I believe that most people when they die won’t think, ‘Oh, my life was a triumph!’ and they won’t think, ‘My life was a complete disaster’… most sane people would say ‘Well, I think my life was a draw.’” But I didn’t think that when I was seven!”

The Rices have an unusual marriage – he and his wife, Jane McIntosh, the champion of the disappearing red squirrel,  live largely separate lives, she on their 33,000-acre Scottish estate, Dundonnell; he in Oxfordshire, now, and Cornwall where he writes. They met while working together at a radio station, married in 1974 and have two children: Donald, a film director, 41, and theatre producer, who helps his mother run Dundonnell and Eva (named after Eva Peron), 43, a novelist.

The marriage dissolved in the late Eighties after tabloid revelations that Rice had been conducting a long affair with the singer, Elaine Page, who played Eva Peron on the West End – but Jane has kept her title of Lady Rice as the couple have never gone further than obtaining a decree nisi. She has a partner and Sir Tim  has two daughters by two different girlfriends: a sixteen-year-old by the artist Nell Sully and , more recently, Charlotte, by the writer Laura-Jane Foley, 36, after a three-month relationship which ended when she became pregnant. He is reputed to have said: “I can’t go on having babies – this is going to bankrupt me.” Rice is worth 152 million pounds at the last count in 2017.

Rice has said that he has regrets are about the way that various relationships ended. “Well, one has a lot of regrets,” he says, ruefully. “ As I said in my book, the bloke who wrote Je ne Regrette Rien was barking up the wrong tree. But it’s like – coming back to cricket – you have good moments, you have bad moments.”

And so to Evita. The story was his idea – after hearing a radio programme about Eva Peron, then seeing a tv documentary which piqued  his interest enough to go to Argentina and do research: “ the more I studied it, the more I thought that this was an extraordinary story.

“Not many people in England had heard of her and now everybody has.”

Yes, because of you! “Well, of course – but a fat lot of credit we’ve had for that.” How do you mean? “I’m just saying that people forget that nobody knew who Eva Peron was in Britain in 1976 when the record came out and we were therefore told that it was a bad idea for a show.”

Rice says that when he heard that Madonna was to play his creation in the film of Evita, he was very pro the idea: “And she was the best thing in it. Her image is not dissimilar to Eva Peron and she even looks a bit like her. She’s dynamic, she’s a very tough cookie – all these things matched up.”

Rice and Lloyd-Webber, who hadn’t worked together for 20 years, wrote a new song in 1996 – You Must Love Me – for the film, which comes at the end, as Eva is dying:  “I only wanted to do it, if I felt the song was good and it just worked [it picked up the Oscar, Rice’s third, and is now in the show] ” he says. “Which was unusual because most songs one writes aren’t very good.”

How about the stand-out song, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina? Surely the two men must have instantly realized it was going to be a massive hit? “We didn’t think it was going to work out of context, no,’ he says. “But we were arrogant enough to think that we’d written something pretty good. We didn’t have a title for it and tried one or two silly ones like ‘It’s only your lover returning’ which was awful. “ 

He recalls one critic, at the time, saying: “This song is a string of clichés”…” which it was meant to be,” he says, still slightly stung all these years on. “It was intended to be a speech made by a manipulative woman on a balcony looking fab, speaking to the masses and saying – like most politicians – a lot of things that sound quite nice but if you analyse them mean absolutely nothing.

“You get politicians of all parties saying, ‘We are aiming to make this country… we consider all honest, working people ….’ it’s absolute garbage. It’s what people do and how they improve things that matters. But you need words sometimes, too.”

Before we come to a close and talk about his own politics, I wonder how he feels about the health of the modern musical.  When I last spoke to Lloyd-Webber, some years back- the composer was feeling quite downbeat about the lack of emerging talent on the scene. But that was before the huge success of The Book of Mormon, and the even bigger triumph of Hamilton, the Tony awarded, hip-hop musical – coming to Australia next year – about Alexander Hamilton, America’s first treasury secretary (its London cast recently made world headlines when it was  joined on stage by Prince Harry).   

Rice thinks the former is “great fun… but Hamilton is brilliant.” He has seen it three times, “and it is quite unusual for me to see something even once. It’s certainly shown that you can do musicals with contemporary music – we showed that with Superstar and Evita.”

I ask him if he regretted donating to UKIP – the party’s only well-known leader was Nigel Farage, apparently admired by Trump – whose members were once described by former PM David Cameron as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. He says that, first of all, he didn’t donate to the party directly “I bought a table at a dinner which UKIP sponsored and I don’t regret it at all.”

It must be rather annoying because everyone thinks you are a UKIPer now? “Oh, I don’t think they do and anyway I am a proud Brexiteer.” (UKIP, under Farage’s leadership, played a significant part in the pro-Brexit propaganda.) He proceeds to explain, in his opinion, why the referendum went the way it did, concluding: “They [the Remainers] cocked the whole thing up. They misjudged the mood. They were arrogant. They were elite and now they can’t take it.”

What about the lie that was told about the £350 million a week that would go to the National Health Service if we left Europe? “Well, what’s wrong with that? You can argue that’s a lie but I would say that’s a twisting of the facts. And no more lies than we were given by Project Fear. They were terrible – lie after lie after lie. But even if the twisting of the truth were the same, if we don’t abide by the result, the public who voted – by which I mean ordinary, decent people , “an unconscious echo of the politican’s phrase he despises, “why would you believe any vote ever again.”

As for Trump, although he seems “a pretty unappealing individual”, what irks him far more are the “stupid” anti-Trump protestors who don’t argue logically but hurl abuse. “And every time somebody like Robert de Niro or an actor – I mean my views are no more important than anybody else’s but most actors and showbiz luvvies seem to think that their views matter! Absolute cobblers, they don’t. So every time one of them gets up and says ‘Fuck President Trump’ it gets 100,000 votes for President Trump. They’re morons.”

He is more worried about the left than the rise of the Far Right in Europe: “UKIP’s collapsed, so there you are,” he says. He acknowledges that racism still exists but that it’s nothing like the old days: “You couldn’t have had Obama in the States, then, or Sadiq Khan as mayor of London or so many excellent Black and Asian – BAME or whatever they call it – guys and gals running things. The England football team is 50 percent black and they’re bloody good players!”

As he stands up to walk me to the front  door, where  we are greeted by a refreshing blast of sunshine, he says, in a final flourish: “I mean, white men have had it, really, haven’t they? I’m one of the last ones standing.” I feel a song coming on.

Sydney Morning Herald