by Simon Callow
The latter part of the play is in fact wonderfully easy to act; everything the actor, even the twenty-seven-year-old actor, needs is there. Who could not rise to the extraordinary pathos and indeed realism of Titus’s scenes with Lavinia, tongueless, handless, ravished:
Wound it with sighing, girl, kill it with groans;
Or get some little knife between thy teeth,
And just against thy heart make thou a hole,
That all the tears that thy poor eyes let fall
May run into that sink, and soaking in,
Drown the lamenting fool in sea-salt tears.
Or:
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers:
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet,
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.
And the extraordinary exchanges over the fly that Titus’s brother Marcus kills:
MARCUS. Alas, my lord, I have but kill’d a fly.
TITUS. ‘But’? How if that fly had a father and a mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly,
That with his pretty buzzing melody
Came here to make us merry, and thou hast kill’d him.
The scene in which Titus madly fires off arrows with letters attached to them to the gods has a weird jazzy energy to it that spits off the page. Told by his bewildered nephew that Pluto has urged him to wait, he cries:
He doth me wrong to feed me with delays.
I’ll dive into the burning lake below
And pull her out of Acheron by the heels.
Marcus, we are but shrubs, no cedars we;
No big-bon’d men framed of the Cyclops’ size;
But metal, Marcus, steel to the very back,
Yet wrung with wrongs more than our backs can bear:
And sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell,
We will solicit heaven and move the gods
To send down justice for to wreak our wrongs.
All of this is perfectly recognisable human behaviour (given the extremity of the situations), expressed in a flexible, varied and inventive form. Here Shakespeare seems to have left his Senecan models completely behind; it is entirely individual in music and in thought, and Titus’s character is embodied in his verse.
The beginning of the play – or rather Titus’s beginning in it – is another matter, although it is arguable that here the expression also reflects the man and his circumstances: the war-weary hero, supreme commander, doughty warrior, servant of the state, for whom he has sacrificed many sons on the field of war: his utterance is long-breathed, rhetorical, pompous, though not without deep feeling. It is the speech of someone who is used to being listened to:
Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!
Lo, as the bark that hath discharg’d her fraught
Returns with precious lading to the bay
From whence at first she weigh’d her anchorage,
Cometh Andronicus, bound with laurel boughs,
To re-salute his country with his tears,
Tears of true joy for his return to Rome.
It was a hard note for a young actor to hit, that tone of weary authority, that easy massiveness. It is critical that the character makes his first entrance at the absolute height of his power and dignity if those humiliations which Saturninus heaps on him in quick succession are to register. In fact, his decline is vertiginous, quicker by far than that of Lear; it happens with comic-book speed. Within minutes, he has slain one of his own sons who defies him, is spurned by the Emperor whom he has just endorsed, sees the Queen of the Goths whom he has just beaten in battle become the Emperor’s consort, and endures seeing two of his other sons falsely accused of murder. That is a mere prelude to what then happens: his daughter is raped and mutilated; he hacks off his own hand, in exchange for the return of his sons; and he takes delivery of those sons’ heads severed.
One damn thing after another. And Titus is heroically eloquent in his distress. Tynan’s wonderful phrase, ‘a concerto of grief’ (a concerto for left hand, in this instance), precisely expresses the musical quality of the lamentation, and it needed an actor with far greater range than I then had to find the variations within the grieving. The imagery is all watery, of tears and the sea, and in my mind’s ear I heard The Flying Dutchman and the waters of the Rhine, and I hurled myself at these great arias, forcing the emotional stakes higher and higher, pushing my vocal resources to breaking point. The text is conventional; neither in imagery nor in phrasing does it begin to express the individual who is grieving.
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs do blow;
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth:
Then must my sea be moved with her sighs;
Then must my earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge, overflow’d and drown’d;
For why my bowels cannot hide her woes,
But like a drunkard must I vomit them.
The impersonality, is, of course, part of the point: the actor needs to become a conduit for these torrential, primal emotions. How I longed for lungs of brass, a throat of steel. I wanted a Heldentenor’s ability to ride a hundred-piece orchestra. Knocking myself out with a sort of Method approach to the emotions, and killing myself with absurd vocal challenges, I rendered myself voiceless after three performances. Restored to some sort of audibility with dubious potions brewed by the notorious and sorely missed laryngologist Norman Punt, I had to learn to husband such feeble resources as I now had. By the end of the run, I had learned a number of invaluable lessons about Shakespeare and about myself, and was giving a reasonable lightweight account of the impossible part. I was a shrub, no cedar, I, but it was true and clear enough. I was never happier, though, than when I was mad, a state into which I sank at each performance with deep relief.
After Titus I was obsessed by Shakespeare and his work. In a way, it was and probably always will be an outsider’s obsession because I started acting his plays late and never had the complete immersion in his work that membership of the Royal Shakespeare Company has brought to so many British actors. This has not stopped me from seeing the plays on every possible occasion, and from greedily consuming books about him. But I am aware that actors are still, in 2010, judged by their Shakespearean achievements, and mine – by comparison with my friend Tony Sher, for example – have been occasional and somewhat erratic.
With Titus, I celebrated five years of acting professionally, long enough for some of my pigeons to start coming home to roost. My first two employers reappeared in my life and each offered me something wonderful: Peter Farago, now associate director at Birmingham, asked me to play Eddie, the psychiatrist in David Edgar’s play Mary Barnes, and Robert Walker, now running the Half Moon Theatre in the East End of London, offered me the title role in Brecht’s anti-Nazi, pseudo-Shakespearean comic strip, Arturo Ui. The latter caused a real sensation. Robert’s dangerous, sawn-off production transformed the old synagogue in Alie Street into a metal jungle of the cities, and, as before, he encouraged me to go further than I could possibly have imagined. Brecht offers every opportunity; I created a Frankenstein’s monster, put together from spare parts – my wig discovered in the dustbins of the Royal Opera House, my nose and Hitler moustache from a joke shop, tied on with the thread plainly visible, my body an ape’s. Underlying it all was the soul of a malevolent clown (some genetic influence there, perhaps). It was, I admit, a stab at Great Acting, something which had preoccupied me for a long time, though it was a very unfashionable notion: the very words were poison in, for example, Joint Stock. I determined to do something people would never forget. I’m not sure whether that happened or not, but it certainly attra
cted attention. Mary Barnes was a huge success, too, both in Birmingham and in London at the Royal Court. It certainly had a great performance at its centre, but it wasn’t mine. It was Patti Love’s in the title role, an account of such unsparing emotional truthfulness that it threatened to unhinge the actress; for my part, no acting was required – I simply responded to her. Ironically, however, it was this performance, in Mary Barnes, and not my Arturo Ui, that led to the biggest break I ever had professionally. I wrote the following for the Guardian in conjunction with a revival of the play in question in 2007.
I’m sitting in my tiny bedsit in Hampstead in the sweltering summer of 1978 thinking about Zen Buddhism. The phone rings. ‘Callow?’ a voice growls. ‘Dexter. Listen. Ruby Shaffer’s written a play about Mozart and you’re going to play Mozart so you’d better get your fucking Köchel numbers together, hadn’t you?’ ‘I suppose I had,’ I say. And he rings off. Now, there were a number of remarkable aspects to this conversation, not least the fact that John Dexter, Head of Productions at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, original director of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and the legendary production of Othello in which Laurence Olivier had played the title role, was one of the most powerful directors in the world, I was a relatively unknown, relatively young, relatively new actor (I was twenty-nine and I’d only been acting for five years), and he had never seen me act in any medium. I’d met him once, it’s true, in conjunction with another play – he’d given me kippers at the Savoy and we’d got on splendidly – but the play had never happened, and I had heard no more from him. Now here he was barking down the line at me and telling me that Peter Shaffer had written a play about Mozart. I knew enough about the business to know that this was a piece of theatre history in the making. The team was perfect: a play about Mozart, good. A play by Shaffer, very good. But a play about Mozart by Shaffer (and directed by John Dexter): a dream ticket, as we hadn’t yet learned to say. But how would he write it? What was the story?
The play was on my doormat later that afternoon – the first script I’d ever had biked to me – and I found that I already knew the central situation. By obscure chance, being a bit of a classical music trainspotter, I had heard Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera Mozart and Salieri, a setting of Pushkin’s little drama of the same name inspired by the notion that Joseph II’s Court Composer Salieri had poisoned Mozart; the story had first appeared in the conversation books of Salieri’s former pupil, Beethoven, by then so deaf that he could only hear with his eyes. Pushkin’s play is brief, dark, chilling, a simple and haunting tale of envy and rivalry. Shaffer, I discovered, had taken this grim anecdote as a starting point for a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent, postulating a Salieri who was industrious, skilful and pious, driven to frenzy and ultimately homicide by a Mozart who was foul-mouthed, feckless, infantile and effortlessly inspired. Salieri, in Shaffer’s play, was the one person in eighteenth-century Vienna who fully grasped the extent and implication of Mozart’s genius, and was thus the one most savagely wounded by what he saw as a cruel joke perpetrated by the God he worshipped: the vessel chosen to receive the greatest music ever written was the least worthy of His creatures, all Salieri’s piety, diligence, good taste and talent passed over in favour of a repulsive little nerd. The cosmic insult thus delivered, reasoned Shaffer’s Salieri, was a snub to virtue everywhere. What was the point of living morally and decently if the only thing that really mattered – to Salieri, at any rate – was quite independent of decency and morality? The only way to silence those intolerable questions was to snuff out the source of them: to erase Mozart.
I was not yet thirty and on the brink of a promising career, but I could understand that. Who has not felt dully foolish as they diligently plough their furrow, doing the best they can with what they’ve got, only to see someone else who has some ability, some quality for nothing, for absolutely nothing – a face, a voice, a body, a brain – surge forward effortlessly to claim the golden prizes? It’s not even necessarily a question of the prizes: it’s the ability to do or be in some way extraordinary, beyond the reach of mere work or application or even talent. If one can’t be or do that, what’s the point? As I sat in my bedsit, one of a handful of people in the world ever to have read the play, I knew that before long the typed manuscript in my hand was going to be part of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Shaffer had touched a nerve, had dramatised an idea which would reach out to the collective inner experience of an audience in a way in which few plays – Equus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun among them, as it happens – ever do. ‘Mediocrities!’ Salieri addresses us, claiming to be our patron saint, and scarcely a person in the theatre feels that he might be talking about someone else. (One night at the Olivier Theatre, a year or two later, one individual sat in her seat, bolt upright, keenly focused on the stage. The rest of the auditorium was keenly focused on her. Did Margaret Thatcher, that night, allow her eyebrow to rise ever so slightly at being included in Salieri’s mocking embrace? She hadn’t liked the play, she said afterwards: it was dirty.)
A question formed in my mind: was it true? Not did Salieri kill Mozart, but was Mozart really so immature, so unthinking, so unstable? Could he really have been Pete from Big Brother? Shaffer had mined Mozart’s letters – especially the ones written to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla in Basel – for scatological baby-talk, to rub Salieri’s nose in Mozart’s dirt. He had recycled certain myths (about Mozart never making a correction in his scores, for example). He had simplified his personal relationships. He had omitted Mozart the endlessly adaptable craftsman. He had done, in other words, what a dramatist does: he had left things out if they were not germane to his purpose. He had written a Mozart, Mozart glimpsed by lightning, true, as far as it went, but not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We were in a theatre, not a court of law. As for Salieri: here Shaffer was free to make up a great deal, since so little was known of the private man. Above all, what he had done was to make the story not merely dramatic, but theatrical. The answer to my question – to all my questions – was provided by the dramaturgy, by the framing device: everything that happens in the play is told to us by Salieri. The stage directions were very clear on this point. Not merely are we to understand that Mozart’s character and his actions as we see them are filtered through the memory of a very old and distinctly eccentric man: so is his music. Shaffer’s dazzling idea was for us only to hear what Salieri could remember – fragments, sometimes exactly what Mozart wrote, often a mere approximation, on occasions a distortion.
Whatever I saw or didn’t see on that first reading – those first feverish readings, one after another – I knew that I had just been handed (without audition, without interview, without discussion) the part of a lifetime. Salieri was on stage for much, much longer than Mozart – perhaps twice, maybe three times as long – but every time Mozart appeared it was to dazzling effect, and when he wasn’t there, he was being talked about. He strutted, preened, shrieked, farted; he rutted, he burbled, he dreamed; and finally, after a long and frightening scene with a masked figure whom he took to be the messenger of death and whom he abjectly begged to reprieve him, he died. As imagined by Shaffer, this Mozart contradicted everything that his music seemed to be. The audience would be in a constant state of uproar, but in the end, they would be won over, their every preconception overturned. And this would be done by theatrical means, not literary ones.
I had been an ardent fan of Shaffer’s from my youth: for my A-level English paper I had written about his plays, which in the published editions come complete with descriptions of the first productions, and was thus deeply excited to see on the page, the virgin page, how essentially geared to performance Amadeus was at its core. One scene above all struck me as pure theatre: Salieri welcomes Mozart with a charming little march of his own composition to the Court of Joseph II where he is Kapellmeister. When the Imperial entourage has departed, and the two composers are left alone, Moza
rt thanks Salieri for his march but – wouldn’t it be interesting, he says, running over to the keyboard, if you changed this phrase here? altered the rhythm a little? used this harmony? – and in a minute and a half, he has turned the Italian’s anonymous exercise in note-spinning into what the world will soon know as ‘Non più andrai’ from Le Nozze di Figaro. The whole dynamic of the play was there, in that single scene, mediocrity mocked by genius. For an actor it was, to borrow a phrase, pure theatrical Viagra.
And I was that actor. Who, however, would play the central role, Salieri himself? Dexter invited me to lunch at the Savoy, scene of our one previous meeting, and introduced me to Peter Shaffer, quizzical, feline, funny, above all modest, and anxious about the destiny of his play. Dexter was in rampant form, like a Tartar warlord, dividing up kingdoms, making demands, devising strategy. He might do the play at the National, but only when Jocelyn Herbert, the designer of his choice, was free, which could be three years from now. He would insist on twelve weeks’ rehearsal, which ruled out a commercial production. He would get Michael Tippett to write the incidental music. And who, I asked, who would play Salieri? Dexter hadn’t made his mind up. It should be Larry, but Larry was frail. John was too nice. Ralph too mad. Burton? Drunk. Christopher Plummer? Not Italian enough. Paul Scofield? suggested Peter, timidly. My heart skipped a beat. Scofield, the master of human complexity, his body all circumflex angles, with his witchy ability to sound every subtle resonance in a phrase, finding echoes and reverberations that opened up doors into unknown cavities in the human soul. Yes! ‘So much – gravitas,’ I said, suddenly doubting whether that was a very smart thing to have said. ‘Too much fucking gravitas, dear. We’ll have to knock that out of Mrs Scofield if we cast her.’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘we will.’ He signed for lunch and was gone. Peter sighed deeply. ‘You see?’ he said. I did. It was wildly exciting.