Year of the King E-Book

Antony Sher

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A classic of theatre writing, a unique insight into the creation of a landmark Shakespearian performance.Antony Sher's stunning performance for the RSC as Richard III on crutches won him both the Laurence Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor. This book records - in the actor's own words and drawings - the making of this historic theatrical event.'one of the finest books I have ever read on the process of acting' - Time Out'a most wonderfully authentic account of the experience of creating a performance' - The Sunday Times'a brilliant, compulsive account' - Guardian

Leseprobe

Antony Sher

YEAR OF THE KING

An Actor’s Diaryand Sketchbook

with an Introduction by the author

NICK HERN BOOKSLondon

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

For my parents and Jim

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

April 2004

1 Barbican

August–December 1983

2 South Africa

December 1983

3 Acton Hilton, Canary Wharf and Grayshott Hall

January–April 1984

4 Stratford-upon-Avon

April–August 1984

About the Author

Copyright

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

Richard III, v. iii

Introduction

Friday 9 April 2004

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, Iago, 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 IIIs 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, 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 book, The Ages of Gielgud, 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 Iago is my latest. In between there’s been Macbeth, Leontes, Titus and Shylock, as well as several other classical parts, like the eponymous heroes of Tamburlaine the Great and The Malcontent, 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. He’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 Works simply represent a great generalised wash of Shakespeare-speak. Far from it. Leontes’ neurotic, fractured utterances, Macbeth’s dangerously measured tone, Iago’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 book 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

1. 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 Molière. 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.