My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  All our lives in the theatre we have heard this maxim: LESS IS MORE. Most of the recent great explorations of acting – Brecht, Brook, Grotowski – have been directed towards this LESS: stripping back. But very often less is simply less, and more is actually MORE. We must overcome our fear of the theatre theatrical when it comes to acting. A theatre is where we are. The theatre is the place where extraordinary things happen, where you see people behaving, not as they do on the street, but as they might in your dreams – or your nightmares. When the shaman does his dance, nobody says: ‘Could you do a little less, please?’ When the great comedians, the great clowns walk on stage, we know we are in the presence of something else, something well known to us but outside of our experience. At the very least an actor should, as the great Irish actor Micheál mac Liammóir used to say, ‘displace air’. But he should also transform the energy in the auditorium; he should invade the collective unconscious of the audience and bring them up short. He should not merely quite interest them, or quite amuse them. He should brand himself on their souls, breaking down the prison walls of logic. This used to be the job of actors, and of clowns. As Michael Chekhov would say, it requires a certain openness to the great forces of the universe to attempt it.

  Film and television will perfectly satisfy the demand for realism. It is only when the need for something which goes further is felt that people have recourse to the theatre, an inherently poetic medium. Actor-poets are what the theatre as a unique art form needs. Why else bother to go to the theatre? The profound importance of Chekhov’s work – he would have hesitated to call it a system – is that its aim is to breed just such a race of actor-poets. The beauty of his approach is that he offers a direct route to the actor’s creativity by the simplest of means. Stanislavsky’s anxiety about his own lack of creativity, his insistence that what Chekhov called ‘inspired’ acting was only available to the very few preternaturally gifted performers (of whom he did not consider himself one), and that only a cautious, logical method will pay dividends, is replaced by Chekhov’s faith in the naturalness of the acting instinct, his conviction that if left untampered with, it will soar into the zones of human experience to which only the imagination has access. Using his work won’t necessarily make you a great actor, but you will be approaching acting as an artist.

  This exhortation was addressed more to myself than to anyone else. I tried to apply its ideas to the Falstaff I played at the Chichester Festival in Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles’s conflation of the two parts of Henry IV. I saw the Fat Knight as Shakespeare’s masterpiece in character, a figure at once mythic and real, but essentially pagan, a figure from carnival, part of what C. L. Barber calls ‘Shakespeare’s Festive World’. I wrote the following piece for the Independent to coincide with the opening of the production in 1998.

  Sir John Falstaff has been widely described as Shakespeare’s greatest creation and his best-loved character, which in the circumstances is no mean claim. The adjective Falstaffian has long passed into the language. We all know what it means: fat and frolicsome, gloriously drunk, bawdy, boastful, mendacious; disgraceful but irresistible; above all, fun. Not only, as he says in Henry IV, Part Two, witty in himself ‘but the cause that wit is in other men’, Falstaff provokes cascades of comparisons both from critics and from his fellow characters in the play; to see him is to be irresistibly impelled to describe him.

  Because of all this, we feel we are very familiar with the character, comfortable with him; we know who he is. It is easy to overlook quite how spectacularly original and unprecedented a creation Falstaff is. There is no other character in Shakespeare to match him; no other character in the whole of Western literature, as far as I am aware, quite like him. There are, of course, plenty of braggarts, innumerable sots, and reprobates galore. In the theatre alone there is the miles gloriosus, the bragging soldier of the Roman comedy of Terence and Plautus; mischievous rogues are a staple of the city comedies of Jonson and his contemporaries; and comedy through the ages, from Aristophanes to Terry Johnson, could scarcely survive without the figure of the drunkard. There are even somewhat similar characters in Shakespeare: Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, elements of the Thersites of Troilus and Cressida. But even to mention these other characters is to affirm the uniqueness of Falstaff. In his never-failing wit, the abundance of his appetite and the bigness of his spirit, he contains – embodies, indeed – a life force which is so overwhelming as to be beyond type, certainly beyond morality and even beyond psychology.

  Above all, he is extraordinary, in the two parts of Henry IV, because of the relationship he has with the young Prince of Wales, soon to be the great warrior-king, Henry V. Here is the seventeen-year-old heir apparent choosing to spend his days with a debauched, besotted, monstrously fat old reprobate in an East End brothel. It is as if the young Prince Charles had slipped away from Buckingham Palace to hang out with Francis Bacon – with the difference that Falstaff is not only debauched, he is positively criminal: he and his dubious cronies beat people up in dark alleys and take purses from innocent travellers; and the young Prince Henry is no constitutional monarch’s son, he is the heir of the divinely anointed and all-powerful absolute monarch, who in his very person is England. What is going on, then? Is this mere truancy? Is the boy simply getting it out of his system, sowing his wild oats? Or is there something deeper going on? It seems there is.

  It would be one thing if Hal were to have taken up the company of tarts and pimps, or to be slumming around with chums of his own age and class. But it is quite another for the prince to have adopted this old scoundrel not merely as a friend but as a mentor, and to have extended to him every appearance of love and tenderness. What do they want from each other, this odd couple? What Falstaff gets is, in a sense, obvious: the excitement of being so close to the heir to the throne, and the opportunity to practise his habitual lèse-majesté at the very closest quarters; and the delight of being connected to youth, the most gilded youth of all, clearly has a tonic effect on the old rascal. But what does Hal want from him? Alienated from his cold, anxious, controlling and guilt-ridden father, he has clearly chosen Falstaff as a surrogate father, an antidote to the sterilised atmosphere of the court, as commentators have understood from as early as Maurice Morgann, in the eighteenth century. He is liberated, relieved, made to think by this fallible, permissive, funny creature of animal warmth, who inverts all the pieties and the truisms he has had dinned into him. It is with Falstaff that he discovers his humanity, the common touch which enables him to do what his father has never been able to do, to unify the kingdom and to reach out to his subjects in a way which they can understand.

  But clearly Falstaff is just a phase that he’s going through, the supervisor of his rites of passage. To have this absurd, impudent figure at his side after he has ascended his throne would be out of the question, an embarrassment and a dreadful example. He has to go, as Hal understands from the beginning of the play; it is not a question of whether, but of when. The scene at the coronation in which Falstaff is rejected is both devastatingly upsetting and profoundly necessary; Old Hal makes way for New Hal. There is a sense of elation at the establishment of a new order, but also a tremendous sense of the price that has to be paid. ‘Banish plump Jack,’ Falstaff says in Part One, ‘and banish all the world.’ Not all the world, perhaps, but some rich, natural, flawed, human part of it without which we are all poorer. It is this theme that Welles stressed when he made his version of the two plays which, with consciously elegiac intent, he entitled Chimes at Midnight, focusing on the advancement towards kingship of Hal as he outgrows and outstrips both his fathers. For Welles, the rejection of Falstaff was the death of Merrie England, with its natural harmony, and the birth of the modern world, willed and coldly realistic.

  This is a highly convincing and effective account of the plays. But as so often with Shakespeare, there is a sense of something else, deeper, stranger, behind the simple narrative, an impression of bur
ied rituals, ancient lore, vanished conceptions, which account for the profundity of our response. With the Reformation, England had undergone a radical change just before Shakespeare’s lifetime, and it becomes more and more clear that the old faith, and the even older, Pagan faith that it had absorbed, were still present in the dramatist’s consciousness and that of his audience. The glorious, abundant, anarchic life in Falstaff, wholly credible within the world of the play, has an energy which is also somehow primitive, even primal. Shakespeare’s sources for the character are, as always, diverse; first named Sir John Oldcastle, after the real-life rebel of that name, he was rechristened when Oldcastle’s surviving family, the powerful Cobhams, vigorously objected to the scurrilous portrait Shakespeare presented. Sir John Fastolfe, whose name Shakespeare borrowed more or less at random, also really existed, but bore no resemblance, not even a faint one, to the character in the play. But behind these shadowy historical personages lay another figure, one often referred to in the course of the plays: the Vice of the medieval morality plays, with whom Falstaff is specifically identified again and again, corrupting the youthful hero until finally overcome himself. Dover Wilson’s great monograph, The Fortunes of Falstaff, makes a very good and clear case for Shakespeare’s reworking of this relationship.

  Something in this interpretation does not quite ring true, however. It neither explains the loving warmth of Hal’s feelings, nor does justice to the magnificence, the positively regal expansiveness, of Falstaff’s spirit. It was a little-known American anthropologist, the late Roderick Marshall, who pointed to the existence of another tradition which is more likely to be the fundamental underlying matrix of the character and the relationship. He identified Falstaff with a figure common to many cultures, known variously as the Substitute King, or the Interrex. When the Divine King in these cultures becomes ill or incapable, a Substitute King is sought from among the banished descendants of the Divine King of the previously conquered peoples; once captured, ‘this King for a day, a week or an indefinite period of atmospheric danger, has to perform rites of overeating, overdrinking and excessive coupling… to reinvigorate the reproductive powers of nature.’ His job is to initiate the heir of the Divine King into the rituals necessary to make the conquered soil flourish – secrets unknown to the conqueror. The parallels with Falstaff, Hal and the ailing Henry IV are evident. Marshall identifies various figures in different cultures who correspond to the Interrex. Some are familiar and obviously Falstaffian. Silenos, grossly fat, drunken, debauched, followed, like Falstaff, by a dubious rout, was the tutor of Dionysos, and was one of the pre-Athenian gods, the children of Kronos, whose task was to shriek, dance, and copulate as noisily as possible after midnight to waken the sun which might otherwise slumber on indefinitely. Bes, the Egyptian god, tutor to Horus, is the god of life’s pleasures, and presides over parties and children; he is described, in perfectly Falstaffian terms, as ‘the old man who renews his youth, the aged one who maketh himself again a boy’. Janus, the Roman god, lord of the Saturnalia, is identified with the ancient god of sowing and husbandry, and presides over ‘the golden age of eternal summer’ – Merrie England by another name. At the Saturnalia the declining powers of the sun are encouraged by sympathetic magic: roles are reversed, the Mock King is appointed, and perhaps at some point killed. ‘The whole state becomes childlike to encourage the sun to do the same.’ And thus, at the court of King Falstaff, Hal is able to become the child that his father’s chilly court refuses to allow him to be; and having been truly a child, he can then become truly a man.

  These figures (and many more with striking similarities to Falstaff, always including great girth, bibulousness, hairiness, great age and seeming agelessness, profanity, sedition and endless wit) suggest the profundity of the archetype: but how did they filter through to Shakespeare? Marshall suggests a link. Researching the seventeenth-century mummer plays, which almost certainly derive from earlier folk plays which Shakespeare may very well have known, Marshall was struck by the familiar pattern of the characters: the leading character simply called the Presenter but also known as the Recruiting Sergeant, Fool, Clown and Father Christmas; his wife Mother Christmas, also known as Dolly; the subsidiary characters Little Devil Don’t and Old Tossip, the red-nosed drunk, his followers; and Saint George, also known as King George or any other English King, including Henry. Father Christmas is hugely fat, red-faced, wears bullock’s horns and has a bladder. He is ‘in many ways a bearded child who… though just turned into his ninety-nine years of age… can hop skip and jump like a blackbird in a cage’. Father Christmas helps the King to fight two battles, but, like Falstaff, he is dismissed and dies.

  It is neither possible nor particularly valuable to quantify the elements which create a mythic figure like Falstaff, but it is unwise to ignore them in the interests of mere psychological verisimilitude. Falstaff is part of the great culture of fertility which underlies our entire civilisation. We may control fertility, chemically and socially, but the grand patterns of human nature will not be so easily manipulated. Hal’s initiation and growth to responsible manhood can only be achieved as a result of a negotiation with nature, a negotiation which we have largely abandoned. It is salutary to think that as recently as four hundred years ago, the greatest genius of the language placed such a primitive figure right at the centre of his great saga of English life.

  To try to create such a Falstaff was perhaps a little beyond my capacities at the time. Certainly it was not the way the critics wished to think of him, and they unanimously rejected my performance. They did so all over again when I tried to develop it a bit further in Merry Wives: the Musical at Stratford-upon-Avon a few years later. They had all collectively fallen in love with Robert Stephens’s famous performance from the late 1990s: expansive but frail, touching and affectionate, but lacking in grossness and the earth. All subsequent performances will be judged by this until someone comes along and breaks the mould, something I proved unable to do (though I’m damned if I’m not going to have another crack at it, in Shakespeare’s plays, unadulterated). Critics are a fact of life that, like the existence of VAT inspectors, one can embrace intellectually, but the experience of being criticised – in my case, at any rate – remains acutely painful. I wrote this piece for the Independent, whose critics, as it happens, have rarely been able to find a good word to say about any of my work.

  Critics. Even as I write the word, a sort of hopelessness spreads over me, an inner voice whispers: ‘You can’t win this one.’ At the beginning of one’s career (and in some cases, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end), one is so shocked to the core by the whole phenomenon of criticism as it is practised – the cavalier judgements, the slipshod reporting, the personal animus, the power of life and death over a show or an exhibition or a career – that one’s instinct is to fight back, to have a showdown, to scotch the lie. Letters to the editor follow, and are sometimes published; interviews are given in which the artist’s pain is expressed; in some cases, retaliatory action is attempted.

  In every case, the effect is wholly counterproductive. When the critic of a Sunday paper devoted a whole paragraph of his vitriolic review of my production of My Fair Lady to denouncing my ‘arrogance’ and ‘lack of psychological insight’ for rearranging the order of the numbers in the score, I wrote a mild letter pointing out that the sequence was the standard sequence, exactly as written by Lerner and Loewe. The critic in question wrote one sentence by way of reply: ‘I could have cried all night.’ So I was now doubly in the wrong: making a fuss about nothing, and unable to take a joke. The critics’ response to criticism is always measured: the critic was simply expressing his opinion. To the challenge that some degree of expertise, some understanding of the matter in hand, might be appropriate, there is always the answer that the critic is the representative of the man or woman in the street, on whose behalf he or she is sending a report. This is particularly true of drama critics, for whom there appears to be no qualification whatever. It is ge
nerally assumed that music critics have some training in music, some capacity to perform it or analyse it technically, but this is not the case with drama critics, most of whom have neither acted, nor directed nor even so much as attended a rehearsal. Happy métier! – in which you may say anything you like with absolute impunity. Pontius Pilate is their patron saint; quod scripsi scripsi their motto: what I have written, I have written.

  Does it matter? Is it not all part of the rough and tumble of what will always – we hope – be a controversial business? And was it not ever thus? Well, no, actually, it was once different, and the difference is the key to the changes that have overcome all the performing arts in this century. In a world in which audiences have lost all contact with the performance or creation of art themselves, they depend greatly on expert opinion – but the more this has become the case, the less expert the reviews and the more purely opinionated. Criticism has become the performing flea of journalism, an outlet for the prejudices of the critic, expressed in verbal cadenzas designed only to parade his or her coruscating brilliance; the work under review is the merest occasion for this exercise. This is not to say that the judgement is necessarily wrong: for the most part critics are intelligent, often highly committed people. But the substance of their reviews is rarely concerned with the specifics of the performance or production, and largely filled with general adjectival elaborations – superb, exquisite, heavy-handed, dull – of the simple proposition ‘I liked it’ or ‘I loathed it.’