Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  Thursday 19 September

  After feeling rather grumpy yesterday – it was a matinee day, so no time for line-learning – my spirits were flying again this morning. Worked on the famous tavern scene (Act Two, Scene Four). Just the big speeches in the ‘play within the play’, when Falstaff and Hal take turns to be the king, interrogating his wayward son. Spent three hours on one and a half pages. As well as the joy of savouring the language, there’s the joy of understanding it, ‘translating’ it into ordinary English. Greg has always said there’s a closet clerk in me, and it’s this fussy little chap who loves cross-checking the notes in the RSC and Arden editions, and then writing out the meaning of a word or phrase in pencil on the page opposite the text. There is the most delicious sensation – a taste in the mouth again – when you make sense of a difficult Shakespeare line, when you can speak it with the gist held inside it, but speak it effortlessly, not spelling it out but making it sound second nature. Then, even if the audience don’t fully grasp it, they get some impression of it, a feeling of clarity, from your interpretation.

  At other times, the language is as simple as can be, and then it’s Shakespeare’s melodic sense again that lifts your heart. Here’s Falstaff’s riff on himself: ‘Sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff…’ It’s like African praise-singing.

  I can’t remember enjoying the exploration of a text as much as this before.

  Falstaff is a gift.

  I must thank Greg for it. I can forget to do things like that.

  Monday 23 September

  One of the pluses of working at Hampstead is that I can drive there, park in the car park across the road, and then after the performance I can be home in twenty minutes.

  This afternoon, the traffic was so light I arrived early, and strolled round the big lawn behind the theatre. It brought to mind an image of Greg and me doing the same thing, but in a very different, very tense situation.

  It was in November, 2007, during the previews of my play The Giant, which Greg directed. The storyline followed the carving of Michelangelo’s David, with the artist using a young quarry-man, Vito, as his model. The set was dominated by the colossal block of marble. This began in a horizontal position, was hoisted upright, and then gradually transformed into the famous statue.

  It was the hoisting upright that was the problem.

  Although not real stone, the block was heavy and cumbersome, and lifting it was difficult for Hampstead’s limited stage machinery. Greg had turned this part of the action into a civic ceremony, and our composer, Paul Englishby, had written a tremendous Latin hymn which the whole cast belted out with full-throated power. But again and again – in the tech, in the dress rehearsal, in the previews – they would come to the end of the music, and the block still wasn’t in place. For one member of the audience, the (relatively inexperienced) playwright, this was agony beyond belief.

  So in the interval of the third preview, I grabbed Greg’s arm, and said, ‘Can we talk?’ We walked round the big lawn. I said, ‘Listen, we’re going to have to cut the lifting of the block.’

  ‘Everyone’s doing their best,’ he said quietly, trying to calm me.

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And it’ll get faster.’

  ‘Well, maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I don’t think we can risk it. The whole play stops dead. The block’s just going to have to be vertical from the start. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, and I’m sure now. We’re cutting the lift. Please.’

  He thought deeply, then said, ‘Well, I don’t agree. But it’s your play. I’ll tell everyone at tech notes, and we’ll work out how to restage it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I was so fraught I decided to miss the second half and go home. But first I had to have a quick drink with our guest for the evening, Richard Wilson (actor, director, and close friend). I found him in the pub opposite. He was enjoying the show immensely, he said, and then added, ‘The best bit was the lifting of the block.’

  ‘What?! But it takes for ever.’

  ‘That’s what I liked. It was so heavy – it made it so important, so real.’

  ‘But… we’ve just been talking about cutting it.’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ he said in that certain way of his – no one can be more certain than Richard – ‘No, you can’t cut it. I won’t allow you to. I promise you it holds, I promise you it works!’

  I stared at him, gave a strange laugh, a kind of yelp, then charged back across the road, and found Greg as he was heading back into the auditorium: ‘We’re not cutting the lift!’

  ‘What? Good. But why?’

  ‘I’ll explain later.’

  ‘Fine. It’s your play. We’re not cutting the lift. But we will get it faster.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, smiling gently, as to one who was losing their marbles, then went into the theatre.

  Thursday 26 September

  The weeks are flying by: learning Falstaff in the mornings, playing Freud in the evenings. The entire run of Hysteria has been sold out. There’s a queue for returns at every performance. Very gratifying.

  Wednesday 2 October

  Message from Nick Forgacs at my agents. Peter Jackson wants to talk to me on the phone. This can only be bad news. Why else would he need to do it personally? I suppose Thrain has had to be reduced in the final cut of the movie. I don’t care. There was never any glory to be got from it.

  The photographer Stewart Hemley came to the theatre for a couple of hours before the matinee. I’ve commissioned him to create a record of the Freud make-up being applied, and then some portraits of the finished job. I’ll use these as references for a triptych I’m planning to paint. Called Three Jews, it’ll be self-portraits in the roles of Gellburg (Broken Glass), Jacob (Travelling Light), and Freud. I want to show the same face, an actor’s face, being altered by make-up. I’ll do this in my new studio in our new Stratford house. Becoming the Artistic Director of the RSC is like becoming Prime Minister or a vicar: you get a house with the job. But the building has bad subsidence, and is being extensively renovated at the moment; we probably won’t be able to move in till next spring, after the Henries have opened.

  Thursday 3 October

  As things worked out, Peter Jackson didn’t phone, but emailed. Thrain hasn’t just been reduced, but cut altogether. Purely to do with the length of the film, and not my ‘wonderful performance’. As I said, I don’t care in any important way, but if I think of the waste of time – those days of flying, those hours of prosthetics – it’s mind-boggling. Anyway, I can cry all the way to the bank; I still get paid in full. And so endeth my experience of blockbusters – on the cutting-room floor.

  Saturday 12 October

  The last two Hysterias. They went by quickly. At the end, Terry Johnson popped in to my dressing room to say goodbye. He seemed emotional; hard to tell – he keeps things under tight wraps. Anyway, I’ve grown very fond of him, and his play is one of the best modern plays I’ve ever done, and I’m so pleased that it ended like this, with a short, sold-out run, rather than struggling to survive in the West End (or whatever might have happened on Broadway). I find eight performances a week hard to do – of anything – so these few weeks were quite enough for me, perfect in fact.

  A car was waiting to drive me to Stratford. On the way, I had a Marks and Spencer’s picnic of sandwiches and two miniature bottles of wine. And then I was there, at Avonside, in the arms of my loved one, and he joined me in my traditional chant at the end of a run: ‘Freedom, free-dom!’

  Monday 14 October

  Preview of Richard II. I’m prejudiced I know, but it was pretty damn good. Designer Stephen Brimson Lewis and Lighting Designer Tim Mitchell have created epic images on a deceptively simple set: a reflective floor, a huge, high curtain of delicate chain, a bridge which descends from the flies with the King, godlike, on the thro
ne. Paul Englishby’s music is beautiful. But it’s the cast that are the real knockout. Greg has vowed to get leading actors back to the RSC, and in tonight’s show, there were leading actors even in the supporting roles. Jane Lapotaire kicked off the evening with a blazing portrayal of grief as the Duchess of Gloucester, Michael Pennington did John of Gaunt’s ‘This England’ speech better than I’ve ever heard it, and Oliver Ford Davies was so good as York that you wondered why the part wasn’t more famous, more prized. Nigel Lindsay was terrific as Bolingbroke, a real bloke, and the perfect foil for David Tennant’s Richard, who looked quite feminine, with long red hair and slinky gowns. It’s a startling, striking interpretation. He is utterly vain, utterly narcissistic – almost alienating us – until things start to fall apart, and then he’s like a man discovering himself, and the world, for the first time. Very vulnerable, very moving – in the ‘hollow crown’ speech, and in prison: ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me.’ At the end, there was a standing ovation.

  Wednesday 16 October

  I’m sitting in the office of the Artistic Director of the RSC, and it’s Greg’s office. I still can’t get over this fact. On one wall, he’s put up my big picture (done with coloured pencil on canvas) from the 2007 Tempest that I was in: a co-production between Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre and the RSC. Called Prospero and the Spirits it shows me in the role, but sitting backstage in front of a costume rail, from which hang the fantastical African puppets that were used to create the spirit world. It’s all quite shadowy, except for a bottle of mineral water at my feet – this glows brightly. It’s the real source of magic for an actor playing one of Shakespeare’s biggies.

  We’re here for the first Henry IV design chat-through with Stephen Brimson Lewis. He and Greg want the production to look very different from Richard – that’s glittering and metallic, this needs to be more earthy, maybe a peat floor, maybe wooden walls.

  In terms of Falstaff’s look, I said, ‘It just needs to be the best fat suit in the world.’ Stephen knew exactly which people to go to. He explained that they make the suit in separate sections, each weighted, so that they move like flesh and not padding, which tends to bulk together when you sit, and you end up looking like there’s a pillow stuck up your front. I mentioned the importance of matching the head to the body. I said, ‘Probably a big beard, big hair, like that –’ pointing to the Prospero picture. Stephen looked at it: ‘Yes, your whole head is bigger.’ I said, ‘The neck is often a giveaway when actors wear fat suits, the join point, we’ll have to wear something round my neck. And what about my hands…?’ I told them about the prosthetic hands I wore in The Hobbit: they went on like long gloves, and although unpleasant to wear – hot and clammy – they looked effective. Stephen didn’t think it was necessary: ‘Fat people often have delicate hands. And their legs can be surprisingly thin.’ I like Stephen’s eye for detail. [Photo insert, page 4, ‘Prospero and the Spirits’ 4]

  At one point, he talked about balancing up the demands of comedy and realism. I said there needn’t be any conflict. Explained that I’m not going to approach it as a comic role, but as a character role. ‘So the fat suit simply needs to make me look as fat as I could feasibly be.’

  After the meeting, walking back to Avonside, I thought again about these categories, Comedy, Drama, Tragedy. Why do they persist in our heads? Hasn’t modern playwriting swept away the divides? (I expect to laugh and cry when I see Beckett, Miller, Stoppard.) In fact, Shakespeare himself swept them away. I got some great laughs as Macbeth, Leontes, Titus, even Prospero, and as for Richard III, he brought the house down when, at the end of the Lady Anne scene, he turned to the audience, and asked, ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’

  Thursday 17 October

  Press night of Richard II. The cast rose to concert pitch – which is very difficult to achieve on demand – and the show was quite simply superb.

  At the party afterwards, I bumped into Des Barrit. He wished me well with Falstaff. I reminded him that when he did it, in Mike Attenborough’s 2000 production, I’d never seen the plays in performance before, and so I had a sense of discovering Falstaff for the first time, and it was like finding a new statue by Michelangelo or concerto by Mozart. Here was a great, great creation by Shakespeare, unknown to me. It made me weep – in wonder at the writer’s genius, and in joy at Des’s playing. I’ve always relished his comic style – that big, comfortable, almost lazy presence – I’d seen him use it to tremendous effect as Bottom and Malvolio, and now as Falstaff.

  However much I’m currently trying to deny the funny side of Falstaff, it’s irresistible when an actor like Des makes it work.

  Friday 18 October

  Well, the Richard II reviews are terrific – five and four stars everywhere – and Greg could not have begun his leadership in any better way.

  Before last night’s show, we had dinner in the theatre’s Rooftop Restaurant, and one of our guests was Thelma (Holt; producer and friend). I half-heard her and Greg discussing Death of Salesman. The RSC has been trying to get the rights for a couple of years now – for me to play Willy Loman – and Thelma has been acting as broker between us and the Miller Estate. So far no luck. Greg wants to schedule it for 2015, the centenary of Miller’s birth, but others must have noticed this anniversary too, and our fear is that some big star has snatched it up. Anyway, Thelma was part of a conference call with the Estate today.

  This afternoon she rang us in great excitement. We’ve got it! I’m doing it!

  Good God. Falstaff and then Willy Loman.

  Monday 21 October

  Greg’s down in London, and it’s a filthy day here – dark and wet – but no Monday-morning low. Propped my script in its new position – on the table with the river view – and spent three hours revising Part I, most of which I know (big speeches only). In just six weeks, that’s not bad going.

  Managed to get hold of Stephen Fry’s email address, and sent him our thanks and praise for his TV documentary Out There. This looked at gay life in homophobic countries, like Uganda and Russia. The really extreme places, like Iran, wouldn’t allow him to film, so you just glimpsed footage of gay young men being hanged. Sequences like this, and the interviews that Stephen did with several rabid homophobes, upset me deeply. In the relatively short period of my own life, gay rights has made extraordinary progress: when I arrived in England in 1968 it was only one year after the Wolfenden Report and the legalisation of homosexuality, and yet fast-forward just thirty-seven years to 2005, and I was able to have a civil partnership with Greg. I could be forgiven for believing that the world had become a decent and fair place. Not so. Only part of the world. Stephen’s programme showed the rest of it.

  Tuesday 22 October

  Another three-hour session this morning. I’ve moved into Part II. So all the pleasure of deciphering the lines again, all that delightful, clerical cross-checking to be done. When the notes in the RSC and Arden editions don’t provide what I need, I have another source, a special helpline:

  On the phone to Greg at lunchtime, I said, ‘In Falstaff’s first scene, he talks of “that foolish compounded clay, man”. Explain please.’

  ‘Think of “Man” with a capital “M”, Mankind, and Adam was formed of earth, or clay, so it’s just “foolish Mankind”.’

  By chance, Greg was being interviewed today about the new film of Romeo and Juliet. The screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, has simplified the text, saying that you need a university degree to understand Shakespeare. Bollocks. I’m a dumb South African outjie, who was taught Shakespeare very poorly at school, and never went to university. Yet by the time I put Falstaff in front of an audience, I will convey a sense of the meaning of every single line. The trouble with filming Shakespeare, is that they don’t rehearse enough, if at all. The Romeo and Juliet cast would never have done the work I’m doing at the moment.

  It’s not a university degree you need for Shakespeare, but the craft and graft of classical acting.

  Sunday 27 O
ctober

  There’s news of a Great Storm headed towards the UK, a hurricane on a scale we haven’t known before. It’s being nicknamed St Jude.

  We’ve made some preparations. Did a big shop at Waitrose, filled the fridge, moved the furniture on our little patio against the wall, upturning the table.

  In the past, when the Avon has flooded, it has never spilled onto this (the higher) bank, but what if St Jude breaks the rules? I find myself glancing round our small, overfilled flat: the floors are piled with Greg’s papers and files, my sketchbooks and scripts, our photo albums. What would we save in an emergency?

  As there are more and more warnings about travel disruptions, Greg cancels his trip to London tomorrow for auditions.

  This is a strange feeling. A strange kind of apprehension. People must know it in other parts of the world, but not here.

  Throughout the evening, we find ourselves listening. For the wind to grow. For Nature to do something.

  But nothing.

  As we go to bed, I write on my notepad: Am I hearing, actually hearing, the calm before the storm?

  Monday 28 October

  Well, it seems to have passed us by completely. We turned on BBC Breakfast News, and indeed there were catastrophic scenes along the south coast, and even parts of London, but it moved across the country without coming our way, and is now headed across the North Sea.

  The morning here was beautiful, full of sunshine: the sky very blue, the grass very green, and the Avon that muddy brown, the colour of oxtail soup, which always reminds me of rivers in country towns in South Africa.

  Greg suddenly had the day off, so we cleared a couple of tables, and spread out some special manuscripts.