Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition Read online

  YEAR OF THE KING

  For my parents and Jim

  Antony Sher

  YEAR OF THE KING

  An Actor's Diary

  and Sketchbook

  Contents

  Introduction April 2004 page 7

  i Barbican August-December 198; page 13

  2 South Africa December 1983 page 53

  3 Acton Hilton, Canary Wharf and Gravshott Hall January-April 1984 page 81

  4 Stratford-upon-Avon .April--August 1984 page 155

  Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.

  Richard III, v. iii

  Introduction

  Friday 9.9pril2004

  Last Saturday night saw the final performance of Othello at the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford, prior to its Japanese tour and London run. To mark the occasion, my dresser Keith Lovell gave me a farewell gift: a small framed photograph. I stared at it in astonishment. It showed me twenty years earlier, backstage at the main house, in the middle of a performance of Richard III. It must've been taken just before or after the Coronation sequence which we invented for our production, since I am wearing the vast red silk robe with the special clasp that allowed us to reveal Richard's naked deformed back during the annointing ritual. Mal Storry, who played Buckingham, is posing for the camera behind me, and to one side is my then dresser, the foul-mouthed, good-hearted Black Mac. Both Mal and Mac look rather deadpan, while I have a strange sideways smile on my face.

  What strikes me first is not how young I look - though this is fairly alarming - but how relaxed. For the journey towards Richard III, told in the pages of this book, was a difficult one, full of anxiety, self-doubt and struggle. Back in 1984 it felt like my whole life depended on the attempt to conquer this one great role. Yet the photo shows someone just larking about in the wings. It looks like just another show, just another part.

  And here I am now, in 2004, still working for the RSC - my love for the company undimmed - and indeed playing another of Shakespeare's villains, lago, a man so thoroughly disturbed and disturbing that he makes Richard III look like the good guy. So what's changed? Everything. Twenty years might seem like a long time, but it doesn't feel long enough for some of the differences between the world I was describing in Year of ' the King and the world now.

  Most extraordinary is what's happened to my birthplace, South Africa. At the time of writing the book, the system of apartheid seemed immovable, and its brutalities knew no bounds. And yet now, in this very month of this very year, South Africa is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its first democratic elections. Democratic elections? In South Africa? Ask the thirty-five-year-old in the photograph and he'd have told you it was impossible, at least not without the streets running with blood. Yet that didn't happen either. Instead a miracle did. A miracle that began with one remarkable man walking out of prison to freedom.

  On a personal front, much has happened too: as a gay man I've come out publicly (in this book I'm afraid I'm still very coy about my relationship with my then partner, Jim Hooper), and my father has died, my funny, difficult Dad, and I've been knighted, and I was in a clinic for cocaine dependency, and ... well, if the reader is interested, they could look at Beside Myself, my autobiography. Year of the King was my first book, but I've since published seven more, as well as a stage play, I.D. Writing is now a serious rival to acting in my professional affections, and I'd be hard pressed to say which occupies the place of first love.

  Re-reading Year of the King I was surprised by my obsession with Olivier's Richard III. At the time I genuinely thought there was such a thing as a definitive performance of a Shakespeare role or play. Yet since playing the role myself, I've seen two other Richard Ills that are certainly as good as anyone might hope for: Ian McKellen's chillingly sour Blackshirt at the National, and Simon Russell Beale's glorious poisoned toad at the RSC. I now believe that a significant part of Shakespeare's genius, and one of the reasons why his work has lasted four hundred years, is that he constantly yields himself to re-interpretation. God knows what he himself would make of our endless and busy explorations of how to stage his plays. An all-female Shrew or an all-Yorkshire Antony and Cleopatra, a circus Dream, the roles of Henry V and Henry VI played by black actors, a Hamlet who vomits up his father's Ghost, or indeed a Richard III on crutches ... would he be dismayed by these portrayals? I hope not.

  For me another big difference between 1984 and 2004, and one which is vital to record here, lies in my approach to speaking Shakespeare's language. There's a very significant diary entry on page 228 of Year of the King, dated Sunday 10 June, the weekend before we opened the show: `Time to stop and think, which I don't really want to do. Refuge in the Gielgud hook, The .-lges of Gu'Igud, only to come across John Mortimer's lament on modern verse-speaking. I snap it shut as if killing a bug.' The truth of the matter is that I was terrified of the verse, ashamed of my inexperience with it, and nursing a secret fear that I was trespassing anyway. Wasn't classical theatre the territory of handsome, rich-voiced British giants like Gielgud and Olivier, and out of bounds for little Cape Town nebbishes like me'

  I now feel bold enough to answer that question with a resounding no. Shakespeare belongs to us all.

  Richard III was my first attempt at one of the great roles, and lago is my latest. In between there's been Macbeth, I,eontes, Titus and Shylock, as well as several other classical parts, like the eponymous heroes of Tamburlaine the Great and The Ilalcontent, Caesar in The Roman Actor, Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy. In fact, I believe it's the experience of playing Shakespeare's contemporaries that has made the speaking of Shakespeare himself easier for me. The other writers don't have Shakespeare's gift with the verse - despite all their strengths they don't have, let's face it, his genius - and so they are much harder to speak. After you've battled with, say, the monotonous thump of Marlowe's mighty lines or Tourneur's awkward, twisting mouthfuls of words, you come back to Shakespeare with such relief, such joy. Ile's done all the work for you. All you have to do is breathe it in and speak it out; just let it live in the air. This is, of course, easier said than done. But only by doing it, by practising the skills, will you eventually learn to master them. In the meantime the problem remains, and you can read about it in this book. I think it's only right for me to confess here that the search for a spectacular physical shape for Richard was partly to compensate for my feeling of inadequacy with his language. You could say there was something symbolic about the eventual use of crutches.

  These days I believe that performing Shakespeare begins and ends with the speaking of the verse, and no amount of physical bravura can make up for it. The brains of his great characters are more interesting than their bodies, and their brains are revealed in their manner of talking. Sometimes I sense there's a public conception that all of his creations talk the same way, and that the Collected itiorks simply represent a great generalised wash of Shakespeare-speak. Far from it. I.contes's neurotic, fractured utterances, Macbeth's dangerously measured tone, lago's sick sex-fuelled images, and the sheer energy and wit of Richard's speeches: these are all very different from one another. And it's only by observing the individual ways these men express their thoughts that you can really get to their hearts.

  My conversion to this new approach has been hugely helped by the most important change in my life between 1984 and 2004, and that is the relationship - seventeen-years-old next month - with my partner, the director Greg Doran. Just recently, Greg has been enjoying a terrific run of success with the RSC, conceiving and producing
the Jacobethan Season (for which he won the 2003 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement), the double of The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed, All's Well with Judi Dench, and now Othello - and the press has repeatedly hailed him as one of the best Shakespeare directors in the country. Quite apart from all the other riches of our partnership, I feel I've been remarkably lucky to share my life with someone who knows and loves Shakespeare quite like he does, and who can communicate this passion with such vitality.

  The Swan Theatre didn't even exist in 1984 - it was still our rehearsal room then, the Conference Hall often mentioned in this book - but it is now the best auditorium I know, both as performer and audience member. It creates the illusion, essential for a good classical space, of functioning like a camera: switching from close-up to wide shot, from intimate to epic. It's where I've done all my recent work with the RSC, and I always feel intense excitement when I arrive there to open a new show, and then intense sadness when it closes. So at last Saturday night's performance of Othello I was already rather emotional when Keith suddenly presented me with the photograph of backstage life during Richard III.

  Looking at it, I remembered that for all the struggle and doubt of the journey, and for all my inadequacy at verse-speaking, the role of the `bottled spider' turned out so well for me that it's been quite a hard act to follow. (Who was it that said, Be careful of getting what you want'?) I also remembered that one of the other men with me in the photo, Black Mac, is no longer with us - he died in 2001 - and I miss him. As I hope this hook reveals, he was a tremendous, larger-than-life character: originally from the North-East, working both as an army sergeant and a theatre dresser, rude, funny, kind, aggressive, full of contradictions, the sort of character Shakespeare would've loved. I like it when, in the diary entry dated 18 June, the day before our opening, Mac overhears me practising my speeches and says: `Clever, henny, clever, must be clever to remember that fokkin bollocks.' But then later he confides in me: `The shows I've seen here, mate, the memories I've got, and I've viewed them from angles no other bugger has ever seen, no fokkin critic, not even the directors have seen them like I have, from my special places in the wings.'

  So it is with Black Mac in mind - and other departed figures who haunt the pages of this book, like Dad, and indeed Olivier - that I now invite the reader to go on a twenty-year-old journey with me, in search of one of Shakespeare's most dynamic and original creations, King Richard III.

  Antony Sher, London

  i. Barbican 1983

  August 1983

  Summer.

  To be more precise, my thirty-fourth summer in all, my fifteenth in England away from my native South Africa, my eleventh as a professional actor, and my second as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  These last two years have been eventful, a time of change. Last year, a successful season in Stratford playing the Fool in King Lear and the title role in the Bulgakov play Moliere. Then, in November, an accident. In the middle of a performance as the Fool one of my Achilles tendons snapped and I suddenly found myself off work for a period that was to last six months.

  Unexpectedly, this proved to be a happy time. Apart from anything else, the enforced rest was a chance at last to do all those paintings and sketches I'd long been planning. With my leg encased in plaster I'd sit for hours at my easel, just managing now and then to hobble a few steps back to get a better view. If anything, time passed too quickly. After years in a profession where you're on public display, it was a relief to be a recluse for a change. My temporary disability made any journey from my home in Islington difficult and vaguely humiliating, so few were worth it. There was one exception.

  The Remedial Dance Clinic in Harley Street is so-called because it serves as repair shop to most of the dance companies. Each day I would have to make my way there for long sessions of physiotherapy. This was a new experience for me. Strange, invisible currents of electricity, ultra-sound and deep-heat were passed into my leg and somehow started it working again. The process was slow. When the plaster first came off, the white shrunken leg revealed underneath was virtually useless. But gradually, stage by stage, my crutches could be exchanged for a walking stick, then that was abandoned for boots with stacked heels, and eventually I was walking again in ordinary shoes. Now the process accelerated in the other direction. Running, then jumping, even trying a cautious cartwheel ... preparing to go back into King Lear for the London run at the Barbican Theatre.

  Another treatment of a very different sort, which I decided to try while I had the free time, was psychotherapy. Here the currents are stranger, but just as impressive. A man called Monty Berman has been listening patiently to the story of my life, yawning only occasionally. He makes comments like `Let's validate that', when I relate certain chapters, and `Bullshit!' to others. I sit there, peering at him through my large, tinted specs, nodding in agreement, and then hurry away afterwards to check words like `validate' in the dictionary.

  So the Achilles incident has been a kind of turning point. Invisible mending from head to heel. Now I also pay regular visits to the City Gym, the Body Control Studio, and various swimming pools. I have developed, along with new muscles and energy, that brand of smug boastfulness on the subject of physical fitness: the kind that makes other people - and I remember this well from being on the other side - want to slap you around the mouth.

  Going back into King Lear after six months away was like climbing on to the horse after it has thrown you. But its short London run is already over and I escaped uninjured. I have since opened in a new production of Tartuffe, playing the title role. This has been directed by Bill Alexander (as a companion piece to his production about its author, Moliere) and has been a great hit with audiences, although less so, I believe, with the critics. My uncertainty stems from the fact that, along with a whole string of unwanted habits ditched since going to Monty, I have stopped reading reviews. I never thought I could do it, never thought I could live without them. But now, apart from the occasional twinge, I hardly miss them at all. Rather like giving up cigarettes, I suppose. Unfortunately, I still smoke quite heavily. Which is just as well, as I'm required to do so in the new David Edgar play, Maydays, which is about to go into rehearsal ...

  In the meantime, at the Barbican, Tartuffe and Moliere continue in the repertoire.

  JOE ALLEN'S Dining with a friend one evening, I notice Trevor Nunn [R S C Joint Artistic Director] at another table. He's been on sabbatical ever since I joined the R S C last year, so I haven't met him properly. Yet he is the R S C, so a social gesture might be required. Is it just a little nod? Or a little wave? Or a little of each with a mouthed, `Hi, Trev'? Or as much as popping over to his table and using the more formal, `Trevor, hello'? Luckily, his back is to me at the moment, so none of these decisions will have to be taken till my exit. For the moment I can concentrate on my Caesar Salad.

  Hours later, my companion goes to the loo and almost instantly, as if by magic, Trevor Nunn is leaning forward on to my table.

  `Tony.'

  `Trevor!'

  `I did enjoy Tartuffe the other evening.'

  `Ah. Good. Thank you.'

  `I thought Bill Alexander got a perfect balance in the production between the domestic naturalism and the black farce.'

  `Yes, hasn't he? It's a -'

  `You really ought to play Richard the Third soon.'

  `Oh. Well. That would be nice.'

  I look up at him hopefully. He smiles politely, a touch of enigma, and retreats, disappearing into the smoky, gossipy crowd ...

  Back at home, Jim [Jim Hooper, R S C actor] says, `Beware. It's only Joe Allen's chat.' He's quite right, of course, so I try not to think any further about it. Which is like trying not to breathe.

  There was something unfinished in what he said. `You really ought to play Richard the Third soon -'what might he have said next? `And I shall direct it'? Or, `but not for us'? In the next few days these nine words, this innocent piece of Joe Allen's chat is subjected to the clos
est possible scrutiny. It is viewed from every possible angle, upside down and inside out, thoroughly dissected, at last laid to rest, exhumed, another autopsy, finally mummified.

  I try not to tell people about it, but it does have a peculiar life of its own, this ghost, and will keep slipping out.

  I make the fatal mistake of mentioning it to Mum on one of my Sunday calls to South Africa. She instantly starts packing.

  Another mistake is to mention it to Nigel Hawthorne (playing Orgon) at the next performance of Tartuffe. He twinkles. From then on the shows are accompanied by comments like, `Thought I noticed Tartuffe developing a slight limp this evening', or, overhearing me complaining about putting on weight, he says, `Can't you just edge it up for the hump?'

  This successfully helps to shut me up, so apart from Mum's weekly question, `And Richard the Third?', as if we were about to open, there is no further mention made of it.

  Time passes. Now it is winter.

  Thursday 3 November

  BARBICAN Paranoia is rampant these days, down in our warm and busy warren, miles below a chilly City of London. The end of the season, and for many their two-year cycle, is in sight. Rumours are rife about world tours of Cyrano and Much Ado, videos ofMoliere and Peer Gynt. Many are keen to return to Stratford where, rumour boasts, Adrian Noble will direct Ian McKellen as Coriolanus and either David Suchet or Alan Howard will be giving an Othello. But will people be asked back and, if they are, will good enough parts be on offer? It is widely believed that planning meetings are already in session in those distant offices above street level. As the directors pass among us for their lunches, suppers and teas, actors perform daredevil feats of balance in order to eavesdrop on conversations half a room away.

  I am not above these feelings of unease myself. These years with the company have been the happiest of my career and I too don't want them to end.