Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  Just before I climb out of it, I remember to get my priorities right: ‘How will I pee?’ Bob says he’ll have a think about it.

  After he’s gone, Stephen and I have a chat about the costume. I don’t think there should be any vanity element. I’ve seen some photos of Robert Stephens in the part, and he had a bold, colourful, peacock look. That’s definitely not for me. I want Falstaff to be much more dilapidated. Maybe he’s homeless? Maybe Mistress Quickly lets him keep a trunk of belongings at The Boar’s Head, but he mainly lives in the same clothes, and just sleeps in different taverns and bawdy houses. Stephen says he’ll pick out a selection of old costumes from the RSC stores, and we’ll try them on. We also have to think about his armour for the battle – very rusty, Stephen thinks – and then some change to his appearance in Part II, when he’s playing out his fantasy of being the Hero of Shrewsbury, the Man Who Killed Hotspur.

  In terms of make-up, Stephen reckons a wig might be best, to give my hair the bulk it needs to match the fat suit. And I want to try false eyebrows (like Ralph Richardson’s, but more realistic), to help widen the face.

  All in all, very exciting. I’m increasingly convinced that little Antony Sher can turn into big Jack Falstaff.

  Afternoon. The historian Ian Mortimer came in to talk to us. He’s the author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, and The Fears of Henry IV. This latter book seeks to restore the reputation of Henry IV. Greg was quick to point out that it’s not imbued with the same fervent zeal of the Richard III Society. Nevertheless, the book starts with this sentence: ‘Shakespeare has a lot to answer for.’

  Mortimer – a tall man with beaked nose and number-one crop on his dome – began by telling us that there is extensive information about Henry’s life: ‘His household accounts are so well preserved that we even know how he wiped his bum.’ Then Mortimer delivered a fast, passionate account of his subject, meticulous about dates and details. In his youth, Henry was an exceptionally talented fighter (in jousts), ‘the perfect knight’. As second in line to the throne, he decided to depose the tyrannical Richard II, and had him starved to death, which took two weeks. But once he was King, Henry had a run of bad luck: a series of harvest failures, which led to riots and rebellion. His worst problem was his own son – not the wastrel Hal of the plays, but more the character of Henry V, a born king, who couldn’t wait for the crown.

  I found all this interesting, but was more eager to plunder his knowledge of the times. And we’re talking Elizabethan, not Medieval; Greg and Stephen want to set our production in the period when the plays were written.

  Mortimer’s description of drinking places was a surprise. At the top of the scale there were inns, which were like hotels, and relatively comfortable. Then taverns, which if they served wine, were still quite classy, then alehouses, then bawdy houses where you could still get a drink. He wasn’t completely sure what sack was – my own research is proving difficult – but thought it was probably closer to wine than anything else. Which would make The Boar’s Head posher than we’ve been imagining. Paola Dionisotti (playing Mistress Quickly) quite liked the idea, because her character has great pretensions, but I didn’t. I said, ‘I’d ask for my money back if I went to see the Henries and The Boar’s Head was portrayed as a… a…’

  Greg completed my sentence: ‘… A Premier Inn!’

  ‘Exactly. I want it to be low life.’

  Winding up the session, Greg said to Mortimer, ‘You began by telling us that it’s even known what Henry used to wipe his bum. What was it?’

  Mortimer gave a little smile – I got them with that one – then answered, ‘A kind of cotton wool.’

  Thursday 9 January

  The reviews for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are ecstatic: they make front-page news on several of the broadsheets. ‘I’m sure it’s more Hilary Mantel than anything else,’ Greg said; ‘But it ain’t half bad for the RSC!’

  A bad attack of nerves tonight – about tomorrow’s read-through. With two weeks’ work already done, there’s more need to deliver than normal. Yet why am I frightened – after forty fucking years in the job?! It pisses me off. Well, good, I’ll get through it as I get through all pressurised situations – on anger.

  Friday 10 January

  …But no. I wake with an awful feeling of dread.

  What’s this about?

  I suppose it’s another aspect of being a character actor. A read-through presents us with a different challenge from most of the other actors. They can just read in their own voices. We have to suggest a completely different person – step into the spotlight with him, for all to judge.

  And in this case I still feel a special focus on me – to prove I can play Falstaff.

  Today is the moment that he makes his first appearance.

  On the Tube journey, I find myself taking comfort from the thought of Meryl Streep filming The Iron Lady. There must have been days when, as an American, she had to stand up in front of a dozen distinguished British actors, and be Margaret Thatcher. That will have taken a lot of chutzpah, or balls, or call it what you will.

  There’s an emergency situation when we arrive (which helps distract me from my own anxiety): Jasper Britton can’t make it. He’s got gastro-enteritis. ‘I wonder what he’s wiping his bum with?’ muses Sean Chapman (playing Northumberland and Douglas). Jasper’s understudy, Simon Thorp, will read the part.

  When it comes to Falstaff’s first scene, I launch in with a voice that has gradually developed since that day when I pieced together his past: a bit posh, a bit fruity, a bit fatty.

  People begin to respond well – with laughter – but what about Greg? This must be a big moment for him too. Whatever he might’ve said to the contrary, he went out on a limb when he cast me in this part. He’s put his money down, as it were, and today he finally gets a glimpse of the goods. What if he doesn’t like them?

  At the end, he compliments us all on a splendid reading – which it was; people are doing exciting work – but I don’t see him in private. He’s swept away to lunchtime meetings, and then straight afterwards, we have the design showing: Stephen using a model box and screen images to reveal what the set will look like. It’s a world of wattle-and-daub walls and rough timber floors, very simple and very flexible, effortlessly changing from Eastcheap tavern to Westminster court to Shrewsbury battlefield to Gloucestershire countryside. It’s beautiful and striking. Stephen is very gifted.

  Greg finishes today’s work early, and it isn’t till we’re on the platform at Clapham North that he says to me, ‘I thought your reading today was terrific.’

  My heart lifts.

  ‘And you’ve kept him completely hidden,’ he adds. It’s true. Throughout my line-learning I’ve made sure he never heard me doing any of the part. ‘Where did that voice come from?’ he asks.

  I say I’m not sure – but later, thinking about it, realise it’s an amalgam of the voices of two corpulent film actors from my youth: Robert Morley and James Robertson Justice. Both very self-assured, rather pompous, and with a sense of devilment. How the melting pot works…

  There are moments in the creation of a role which are like growth surges: when you suddenly feel it developing, suddenly sense it could work. Today was one of those moments.

  But it’s still only the beginning.

  Saturday 11 January

  Over lunch at Frederick’s, we were discussing the pleasure of working on Shakespeare’s language, when Greg suddenly said, ‘You know, I have the best job in the world!’

  Monday 13 January

  Week three.

  In normal circumstances, we’d now start conventional, up-on-your-feet rehearsals; we’ve paraphrased the text and done the read-through. But these aren’t normal circumstances. There’s another whole play to go. So we were back round the table today, inching through Part II, doing what Greg calls these ‘head-banging’ sessions, and they were becoming quite, well, head-banging.
But it’s worth it. The clarity in last Friday’s reading – you could hear it. And we’ll break up this work with other activities during the week…

  Tuesday 14 January

  I asked my PA/researcher Sue Powell to help me find out about sack, and we’re getting some conflicting information:

  Onions’s A Shakespeare Glossary: ‘General name for a class of white wine formerly imported from Spain and the Canaries.’

  Helen Hargest of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust suggests it was a dry white wine mixed with sugar: ‘Fynes Morrison in his account of his travels in England commented that he had never experienced seeing the practice of mixing wine with sugar in any other country, because “the taste of the English is thus delighted with sweetness”.’

  Cesar Saldana, Head of the Consejo Regulador (Regulatory Board) in Jerez, says: ‘“Sack” derives from the Spanish word “sacca” which refers to the quantity of wine drawn out from the “solera” (ageing stock) for shipment. The style of wine was probably a sweetened young oloroso. Somewhat similar to today’s cream sherries.’

  Nick King from the UK’s Wine and Spirit Educational Trust says: ‘Lustua (a current sherry producer) did until recently produce a wine called Dry Sack, which was a delightfully, slightly sweetened old oloroso.’

  So – wine or sherry? I favour the theory that it’s a dry white wine sweetened with sugar. (Falstaff refers to ‘sack and sugar’ in the tavern scene.) It’s more feasible to drink that in great quantities than something like cream sherry.

  Greg wants to show the company the battle scenes from Orson Welles’s Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight: they’re violent, messy, ugly. In searching for them tonight, we end up watching the whole film. I’ve seen it before, but it’s different to what I remember. (Maybe because I know the material so much better now.) It’s very handsome, in black and white, with rich use of chiaroscuro and those epic, low-angle shots which became Welles’s signature style from Citizen Kane onwards. But despite its atmospheric darkness, it’s surprisingly light in tone. Mainly due to Welles’s own performance. It’s as if he’s so right for the role he forgets to play it. The result is, as The New York Times said in their review at the time, ‘a street-corner Santa Claus’.

  Wednesday 15 January

  Our field-trip day: a company visit to the Museum of London and Westminster Abbey.

  Can’t say I was looking forward to it. I’m not a good tourist. When we go on holiday, there’s a constant tug-of-war between Greg’s desire to visit galleries, ruins and cathedrals, and mine to laze at the poolside with a good book and glass of chilled wine. There’s something about hordes of bored people dutifully traipsing round a famous site that can kill it stone dead for me.

  But today turned out to be different from that…

  At the Museum of London, they’d prepared two private rooms for us, with artefacts and clothes from Elizabethan times. We were free to handle things, and there was an immediate thrill in being able to touch the past. Such surprising objects. From the large earthenware watering can to the tiny, delicately carved prod-and-spoon for removing ear wax. Many daggers; everybody carried one at the time. ‘What would that do for your peace of mind?’ mused Jim. One was called ‘a bollock dagger’, because of the shape of its handle. ‘I’ve got to have that!’ cried Tony Byrne, who’s playing the violent, sexually crazed Pistol. Lots of drinking vessels – the kind that Falstaff would’ve used – made of pewter, clay and leather.

  Most of the clothes had been recovered from being buried, so were a muddy brown. But the curators showed us a colour chart of the dyes available, and there was a rainbow of choices. A child’s shoe was poignant, a codpiece drew giggles, and it was intriguing to see how things were repaired and adapted; your clothing was not as disposable as it is now.

  They also had some theatrical items, which delighted us: the Hotspur costume worn by Charles Kean, and the bald wig, moustache and beard which George Robey used as Falstaff. They said they were puzzled by a pinkish, plastic-like film on the front of Robey’s wig. ‘It’s his make-up,’ exclaimed Stephen Brimson Lewis (who was soaking up all the details of the exhibits); ‘It’s still caked with his make-up!’

  At Westminster Abbey we were surprised to be met by the Dean himself, the Very Reverend John Hall – bespectacled, straight-backed, with a cultured but twinkling manner. He led us to a place which features in Part II, Act Four, Scene Two, when the dying King asks:

  KING HENRY IV: Doth any name particular belong

  Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?

  WARWICK: ’Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord.

  KING HENRY IV: Laud be to heaven! Even there my life must end.

  It had been prophesied to me many years,

  I should not die but in Jerusalem,

  Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land.

  But bear me to that chamber. There I’ll lie.

  In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

  The Jerusalem Chamber turned out to be a large, airy, panelled room hung with sixteenth-century tapestries. The Dean warned the squeamish among us not to look at the one behind me. I glanced round. It showed the circumcision of Isaac, and indeed I flinched. But most fascinating was the beamed ceiling: it bore Richard II’s insignia. Which would have been the last thing seen by Henry IV (who, as Bolingbroke, deposed Richard), perhaps causing him to wonder if it had all been worth it.

  I was expecting that to be the end of our visit, but now the Dean took us on a tour of the Abbey, with him as private guide. Although I’d been here several times before – and indeed had the honour to unveil the window to Marlowe in Poets’ Corner a few years ago – this was special. The Dean led us up a little staircase behind the high altar, to the Edward the Confessor Chapel and Shrine, and then into a deeper space with Henry V’s tomb. Alex Hassell bounded forward to touch it. The Dean told us that the carved figure originally had a silver head and hands, but these were stolen. The hands were only replaced in the last century, and modelled on Laurence Olivier’s. Now the Dean fetched some keys on a wooden block, opened a door, and took us up another secret staircase – very narrow, with worn marble steps – into the Henry V Chantry Chapel where his wife Catherine was buried. This area had a marvellous, elevated view of the Abbey, and the whole building suddenly struck me in a new way. History was not dry, old and book-bound. History was alive, sensuous, heart-stirring. Seeing this colossal space, crowded with ghosts, seeing its long aisles and towering ceilings, half-dark in winter light, this was like seeing a natural wonder – the Victoria Falls or Grand Canyon – and it took my bloody breath away!

  Thursday 16 January

  When Greg went round the circle this morning, asking each person to comment on yesterday’s field trips, the word most commonly used was ‘moving’.

  In the afternoon, a visit by James Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar from New York (whom I last saw when we were there for the Matilda/Caesar openings). He has a very vivid way of talking about Shakespeare, or, as Greg put it, ‘It’s like they’re episodes of The Sopranos.’ Of Hotspur, James says, ‘It gives me a rush watching him!’ Of Falstaff: ‘He frightens me, but I’m also envious of him. He symbolises an escape from the world of obligations. This man is Excess!’

  He speaks about the Henries as the point in Shakespeare’s writing career when he learns to meld History and Comedy. He describes Eastcheap as a green world – like the forests in Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It – a dreamworld, which doesn’t quite exist. The first Falstaff/Hal scene begins with Falstaff asking what time it is, and Hal replying that it doesn’t matter. And in their last scene – in Part II – when Hal rejects Falstaff, Hal says, ‘I have long dreamed of such a man… but being awake, I do despise my dream.’ But then again, James says, ‘The whole of Part II mourns the loss of time, it is full of melancholy.’

  Someone asks him about the Freudian aspect of Shakespeare. James suggests we might look at it the other way round. Did Shakespeare help to create Freud? The father of psychoanaly
sis read Shakespeare from an early age. Did he learn something about father/son relationships from Henry and Hal? Is there a better example of therapeutic role-playing than the ‘play extempore’ in the tavern scene? ‘Cheaper than a session with your shrink,’ says James.

  Later, thinking about James describing Falstaff as ‘Excess’, I wonder if he’ll be disappointed to see the character played as a real alcoholic, with drink making him suffer as well as rejoice? Some people want Falstaff to be just a pagan force, all-consuming and invincible. I’m saying no, let him have some very human fears about his health and his soul – Shakespeare has written these in, after all – and let him always disregard them.

  But will that be acceptable to his fans?

  Friday 17 January

  Read-through of Part II. Like last week, I was full of nerves beforehand, and full of relief afterwards. Finally got to hear Jasper doing Henry, and he’s going to be good (there you are, you see, I’m making judgements from a read-through): full of pain and fury. And Nia Gwynne (playing Doll Tearsheet) has a very heartfelt quality as an actress. This is valuable because Doll brings out a completely different side of Falstaff. Their relationship is strangely tender, and one of Shakespeare’s masterstrokes in the writing: a fat old man with a pox-ridden whore. As for Oliver Ford Davies as Shallow – he stole the read-through just as he’ll steal the show.

  Saturday 18 January

  Lunch with Ronnie Harwood. Good to see him looking pretty chipper. He’s been through a lot. Two days after Natasha’s funeral, he suffered a heart attack, and was operated on. Greg asked if he thought that the two things were connected. Ronnie replied, ‘Of course. When they opened me up, they were looking for a broken heart.’ He said he wasn’t experiencing grief as he expected it to be, because he had a sense of Natasha being with him all the time. He regularly meets with Antonia Fraser and Victoria Rothschild (who was married to Simon Gray): ‘We call ourselves the Three Merry Widows.’