Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  Antony Sher

  YEAR OF

  THE FAT KNIGHT

  The Falstaff Diaries

  with illustrations by the author

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  For Verne

  Contents

  Dedication

  1 A Fat Knight?

  February–March 2013

  2 Character Acting

  April–September 2013

  3 All Those Lines

  September–December 2013

  4 Three Rehearsal Rooms

  December 2013–March 2014

  5 Fat Knight – First Night

  March–April 2014

  Epilogue

  April 2014

  Praise for Antony Sher’s Falstaff

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  1. A Fat Knight?

  Monday 11 February 2013

  It’s all Ian McKellen’s fault.

  A month or so ago, Greg (Doran; Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director, and my partner) was talking to Ian about whether he’d like to come back to the company, and what parts he might play. Greg mentioned that he was directing Henry IV Parts I and II next year, and what about Falstaff? Ian said it wasn’t of interest to him, and then added, ‘But why are you looking for Falstaff when you’re living with him?’ Ian was making reference to a performance of mine that he’d seen at the National Theatre: Jacob in Travelling Light. Nicky Wright’s play is about the early days of film-making, set in an East European shtetl, circa 1900, and Jacob is the local timber merchant (and embryonic movie mogul), described in the stage directions as ‘a big and ebullient man, a Tolstoyan peasant’. As a character, he is what is called larger-than-life. And yes, looking back now, I suppose Jacob could have been Falstaff’s Jewish cousin.

  Anyway, Greg told me what Ian had said, and we smiled at it, and didn’t take it seriously at all. Falstaff has never been a part I’ve remotely thought of as being mine.

  Casting it has preoccupied Greg for a couple of years now, and I’ve been his sounding board from time to time. All sorts of names have been mooted – including Patrick Stewart, Jim Broadbent, Brian Cox – but Greg eventually decided his first choice was Derek Jacobi. The offer is presently with him.

  Today we drove from our home in Islington up to Oxford University, where Greg will be this year’s Humanitas Visiting Professor of Drama. The first event takes place this evening, an In Conversation with him and me, chaired by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate.

  In the car, Greg mentioned that he suspected Derek was going to say no to Falstaff, because of other commitments. Greg said he’d found himself really taking stock. I thought he’d changed the subject when now he suddenly started talking about my two performances at the NT – Jacob in Travelling Light and Voigt in The Captain of Köpenick (which opened last week):

  ‘Both times you’ve surprised me, and it’s nice that can still happen – I would have thought I knew your full range. But there was something about the size and earthiness of Jacob, the mischief of Voigt… well, they were things I hadn’t really seen before. I think Ian might be right. I think you could play Falstaff. Why don’t you read it?’

  I stared out of the car window at the countryside around the M40, familiar from a thousand drives to and from Stratford – there had been snow during the night and it was still falling lightly. I didn’t know how to react to Greg. I had no problem about not being the first choice for the part – if you live with a director, you understand the nature of these things – but the idea was still baffling. Me as Falstaff? Short, Jewish, gay, South African me as Shakespeare’s gigantically big, rudely hetero, quintessentially English, Fat Knight? It made no sense.

  But this is an ongoing problem for the character actor. He never feels ideally right for any part.

  I said, ‘Well… let’s talk about it again… if Derek says no.’ And we moved on to other things.

  In Oxford, we were given an attic room overlooking the quad in one of the colleges, Brasenose. At 5 p.m. we did our event, which was really quite easy: talking about three of our Shakespeare collaborations – Titus Andronicus, Winter’s Tale and Macbeth – illustrated with clips from the filmed versions. Then drinks in the college with the principal, and dinner at High Table. It’s another world…

  Tuesday 12 February

  Greg stayed in Oxford (he’s doing a series of talks and masterclasses over the next few days) while I returned to London.

  Köpenick has been out of the NT repertoire for a few days, so we had a line-run this afternoon. Must say I went into the room with a heavy heart. We had some mixed reviews last week, and a real stinker on Sunday. (I don’t read reviews, but I get told the score – the star ratings – and the Sunday Times gave us only two.) I felt vaguely embarrassed in front of the company; as the leading actor, I was involved in the whole gestation of the show. But I needn’t have worried. Actors are a buoyant breed. I don’t know if any individuals were disappointed by the reviews, but as a group they were full of energy and laughter today, and full-throated in the big sing-songs, and passionate about keeping the fights and dances in tip-top shape. The session really lifted my spirits.

  And the show itself was good this evening, with a big, warm audience.

  So far, touch wood, no real damage from any of the negative reviews.

  But the experience has unsettled me. I saw the 1972 NT production of Köpenick, with Paul Scofield as Voigt, and Frank Dunlop directing John Mortimer’s very witty adaptation of Zuckmayer’s original. It was a fine piece of theatre, and much acclaimed. Currently we’ve got a spectacular production by Adrian Noble, and a gritty new version by Ron Hutchinson, but the critics just haven’t come to the party. It has shaken my faith in my own judgement.

  So the Falstaff idea isn’t coming at a great time…

  Wednesday 13 February

  Greg rang from Oxford. He’s just spoken to Derek Jacobi, who has said no. Not because of other commitments, but because he’s reread it and can’t see himself in the role.

  ‘So,’ said Greg; ‘I am now officially proposing that you do it.’

  After a pause, I said, ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’ Then put the phone down, feeling I’d just had bad news.

  Friday 15 February

  Greg was appointed to the post of Artistic Director – we call it The Job – in April 2012, but he’s only been fully in charge since September. As he finds his legs, he’s being helped by a formidably good PA, Jane Tassell. She sees it as one of her many duties to ensure that he has proper holidays, and since holidays have always been an important part of our relationship, Jane constantly checks Greg’s work schedule against mine, and marks out possible breaks. She then fiercely monitors Greg’s diary, keeping these periods clear. He’s been very busy recently, and I’ve been opening Köpenick. So, with another substantial gap in my NT performances coming up, we’re grabbing a holiday in Kenya. It’s next week, so there’s not much time to properly consider Falstaff. Despite a career of doing classical theatre, I still find Shakespeare difficult to read. Over the last two days, I’ve been inching through Falstaff’s scenes – just them, not the whole plays – with the aid of the RSC’s excellent new edition (co-edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen), using both the notes at the bottom of each page and the synopsis of scenes at the end.

  Some first impressions that surprised me:

  • On three occasions in Part I, Falstaff resolves to clean up his act (‘I must give over this life’, ‘I’ll repent suddenly’, ‘I’ll leave sack’), and yet in Part II his biggest, most celebratory speech is a hymn to alcohol (‘If I had a thousand sons, the first principle I would teach them should be to ad
dict themselves to sack!’). I sense the circular rhythms of serious dependency here. Rather than just a jolly old bloke who likes his drink. Could one play him with serious dependency?

  • His imagination. Whether talking about Bardolph’s nose or Shallow’s nakedness there’s a hugely inventive, colourful mind at work.

  • His heartlessness. Not just the famous speech about soldiers being ‘food for powder’ (cannon fodder), but he’s a dangerous friend – he’ll rubbish you behind your back without a thought. He does this to Shallow, to Hal, to Poins, and others.

  • His charm. People like Mistress Quickly know he’s a shit, yet love him.

  As well as reading the text, I have a recent performance in mind. Normally, I’d avoid seeing another actor play a part I was considering, but it’s too late this time. I watched the BBC TV series The Hollow Crown last year, with Simon Russell Beale playing Falstaff in the Henries. But I don’t feel intimidated – it was too individualistic an interpretation. Not so much a life force as a death’s head, intensely haunted by his own mortality. Really came into his own in Part II, as did Richard Eyre’s film – a great melancholic picture of England as a sick land. This was so good, that for the first time I wondered if Part II wasn’t the better play.

  Reporting back to Greg, I say, ‘Falstaff is not a great part.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘It’s two great parts.’

  ‘Ah. Right. Is that a yes then?’

  ‘No. I can’t easily see myself as him. I keep thinking – why me? Just because I’ve put on a bit of weight and I’ve got the title, why should I be the Fat Knight?’

  We laugh, but my doubts are serious, and real.

  Sunday 17 February

  It’s crazy. Today’s Observer published a list of top power couples. Which included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chairman and Madame Mao, Beyoncé and Jay Z, and us.

  ‘How on earth did we get on that?’ I asked.

  ‘They must’ve wanted to tick the gay box,’ Greg replied.

  Over lunch at the Almeida Restaurant, we discussed the Falstaff situation. Greg asked me to explain my reservations.

  ‘Well, there’s “the look”, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Every Falstaff has to wear a fat suit.’

  ‘Yes, yes, and anyway it’s my thing. Richard III didn’t just have a prosthetic hump, but big muscular arms and twisted knees too, the young Tamburlaine had to be athletic, the old one was obese, there was Cyrano and his nose, there was…’

  ‘You can change yourself… you’re a “shape-shifter”.’

  ‘But it’s not just Falstaff’s shape. There’s something about his spirit. That’s the truly big bit of him.’

  ‘You could do it.’

  ‘Then why haven’t I been thought of before? You’ve talked about all sorts of actors. We’ve talked about them together. I’ve never been in the frame. Never – in either of our heads.’

  ‘And that’s fine,’ said Greg confidently. ‘Happens all the time in casting. The best idea, the person you end up with, wasn’t even on your original list.’

  ‘Well… there’s something else. And it’s not easy to talk about.’

  Greg frowned. This wasn’t like us.

  I proceeded slowly: ‘We’re in a funny position. That crazy Observer thing about power couples. I mean, when we met, I was already established, you were starting out… and yet now, in terms of power, you’re much more powerful than me. You know I have no problem with that. You know I rejoice in you having The Job. But with something like this, where I’m a completely left-field idea for the part, and maybe completely wrong… we could be accused of nepotism.’

  ‘Oh that’s nonsense – you’re a leading classical actor!’

  ‘You’re not thinking about this properly. Nepotism. I mean it seriously. I’d hate that charge to be made. I’d hate it for you especially. And actually it could be bad for you – this early on in The Job – if you get this wrong.’

  ‘I’m not getting this wrong.’

  Greg was calm. I was not.

  He said, ‘And if it’s of any comfort to you, the Board would have to ratify your casting. It comes under a clause called Conflict of Interests. At the next Board meeting, I’d have to step out of the room while they discussed exactly what you’re scared of – the question of nepotism.’ He paused. ‘So how do we proceed?’

  ‘I need advice from someone who’s outside us… but someone who knows the business. Paul is coming to see Köpenick when we get back from Kenya…’ (Paul Lyon-Maris, my agent) ‘…We’re having dinner. He’ll be good to talk to. He’ll tell me straight.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And now I think we need to change the subject. Don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’ Leaning forward, his face alight, he gave a whispered shout: ‘We’re going on holiday!’

  Wednesday 20 February

  Africa.

  There’s nothing like it to clear the mind and refresh the soul. We regularly visit South Africa, my homeland, to see my family, but occasionally we go to East Africa for the real thing. Wild Africa.

  We’re in the Maasai Mara on the Serengeti, staying in a tent camp called Cottar’s, which is designed in a colonial 1920s style, the period of big-game hunting – then done with rifles, now with cameras.

  Our jeep is open (canvas roof but no sides), thank goodness – you don’t always get these in East Africa – and our guide/ranger is a warm, wise man who asks us to call him G-G. He has a young Maasai tracker with him.

  Over the years, we’ve done so many game drives in so many different reserves, that it’s easy to become complacent. But this morning, we had a truly exciting time, with viewings of three of the big five: we rode alongside a pride of lions on the move, complete with big males and cubs of different ages, some very small and cute; a family of elephants, with young too; and a massive herd of buffalo. Also saw giraffe, a huge eland bull, and a cheetah atop a termite hill.

  But it isn’t only the animals. More often it’s the place itself. On the dusk drive yesterday, one half of the landscape lay under a biblical spectacle of sun shafts and cloud shadows, while the other had a tranquil, delicate, almost underwater light. It was the most magical vision. I held my breath. Which happened again this afternoon, when we went to the open savannahs, the oceans of yellow-green grass. We stopped for sundowners (the jeeps carry iceboxes with drinks of your choice) on a little rocky island with one tree, an umbrella thorn acacia, and from that standpoint, you could turn three hundred and sixty degrees and see nothing but the rolling plains and the huge, climbing sky. This was the Africa of fantasy, of dreams, of legend. It was like civilisation had never happened.

  Laurens van der Post describes it beautifully in this piece, which Greg found in a book of essays: ‘What wilderness does is present us with a blueprint, as it were, of what creation was about in the beginning, when all the plants and trees and animals were magnetic, fresh from the hands of whatever created them. This blueprint is still there, and those of us who see it find an incredible nostalgia rising in us, an impulse to return and discover it again.’

  Tuesday 26 February

  We’re spending the second half of our trip on the coast just below Mombasa, in a hotel called the Alfajiri Villas.

  This is the part where we holiday properly, doing nothing at all. Other than swim, sunbathe, read, eat and drink. We have a pool on the patio of our villa, but we prefer the sea. The best local beach is Congo (where the Congo River flows in), about 3km north, a forty-five-minute walk along the sands. We have to be accompanied by a member of the hotel staff. This is not to protect us from Somali pirates (though we’ve heard some grisly stories), but from what are called the beach boys. These are hawkers who pester tourists with their goods. And will snatch cameras and bags too. They’re pretty relentless. You feel like a wildebeest trying to take a stroll through a pack of hyenas. So we’re grateful for our bodyguard. The other, unaccompanied white visitors on the shoreline, who all seem to be elderly German
s, their skin sunburned to a wrinkled, leathery finish, look rather vulnerable. Anyway, it’s worth it when we get to the other end. The beach is on a slope below some magnificently gross baobabs – the Falstaff of trees! – and the water of the Indian Ocean, on the Equator, is blissful.

  Talking of Falstaff, we’re having pre-dinner drinks on our patio this evening, when Greg suddenly says, lightly, tentatively, ‘We haven’t really mentioned the Henries.’

  ‘No. But I’ve been thinking about it.’

  ‘And – ?’

  ‘I just have this image… an awful image… of people laughing at me. For thinking I could play him. For having the chutzpah.’

  Greg smiles. ‘You’ve never been short of chutzpah.’

  ‘It’s the Shakespeare biggies, isn’t it? They’re in a different league, on a different scale. You can’t get it wrong. Well, I mean you can get the playing of them wrong – there are a hundred wrong things you can do in rehearsals, or in the design, or whatever – but what you can’t get wrong is the starting point. Your own certainty that you’re right for the part.’

  ‘Were you absolutely certain you were right for Macbeth… Leontes… Prospero…?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t, you know I wasn’t, yet they still felt within reach. But there’s something about Falstaff. He’s just so… iconic.’

  Greg sighs. Tries to talk about the other casting. The title role, King Henry IV, is one of the hardest parts to cast in Shakespeare. It needs a leading actor, but leading actors don’t want to play it. Henry is written as a very angry man, and there’s a deadly temptation to just shout your way through every scene.

  Greg and I agree that the best Henry we’ve seen was Jeremy Irons in the Hollow Crown series. He was a brooding, haunted man, endlessly fascinating. The part suddenly seemed like a great part. We bumped into Jeremy at a Christmas party a couple of months ago, and complimented him on his performance. He said he could never have done it in the theatre. The camera allowed options – degrees of introspection – that just wouldn’t be available on stage.