by Simon Callow
The result is that there is no longer any record of performance. Just as the art of theatrical portraiture – with the charming and very useful exception of William Hewison’s cartoons in The Times – has died, the art of verbal reporting has disappeared. Theatre and dance remain ephemeral arts; the tradition can only be passed on by direct accounts, written or oral. I don’t simply want to know whether Ian McKellen was good or bad as Dr Stockmann; I want to know what he did, how he attacked the part, what physical life he gave to it, how he stretched his own resources, what new dimension he brought to our understanding of the role. It is here, too, that the other crucial contribution of criticism is failing: the maintenance of standards. Hyperbolic reviewing, in which everything is either heaven or hell, has helped to create a great confusion both within the profession and in the public: things that are quite ordinary are acclaimed as great; things that are flawed but fascinating are denounced as heinously bad. The theatre will in the end only ever be as good as its audience, and the critical discourse is central to what the audience brings with it to the performance. The art of theatre-going needs to be rediscovered, and a new criticism must be an essential element of that rediscovery.
Bill Hewison is of course now long gone. The only person who still practises the art of theatrical portraiture, superbly, is Antony Sher. If anyone wants to know what Ian McKellen’s Iago or Edgar or my Pozzo was really like, then they would learn as much from one of his paintings as from all the critics put together. I reviewed Tony’s first book, Year of the King, in the Sunday Times in 1985.
Again and again in recent years Tony Sher has created astonishing and unforgettable images on stage and screen. Last year at Stratford, he created the most astonishing and the most unforgettable image of all: the paraplegic Plantagenet: Crookback on crutches. In so doing, he at last revoked the droit du seigneur over the role established forty years ago by the greatest actor–image-maker of the century, Laurence Olivier. Year of the King tells how he did it, providing at the same time a rich account of the temperament of the bravura actor – of which species he is the supreme example in his generation.
What is it, bravura acting? The unkind definition is: acting which looks like acting. A more generous, and more accurate, definition is: acting in which every aspect of the role is made physical, is externalised and crystallised and indicated by means of sensuous impact. The excitement of the performance – excitement is above all the aim of a bravura performer – is experienced through the audience’s nervous system. Thus to speak of ‘unforgettable images’ is to touch on the essence of bravura. Anyone who thinks this is easily achieved, is a form of showing-off, or egomania, has only to read Tony Sher’s book to be disabused. It is hard, hard labour, brain-, body-, and soul-busting work, requiring the mental application of a policeman tracking a criminal, the physical fitness of an athlete competing in the decathlon and the competitive instincts of a presidential candidate. It is an inherently ambitious undertaking – but ambition at its best, for the art, for the performance. Sher reveals himself to be both competitive and ambitious, haunted by other people’s achievements and the prospect of failure; but he is ambitious and competitive for his performance, in the way a mother might be (his mother was!) for her child.
This book, his journal, takes us from the moment when his Richard was a mere misty glimmer in Trevor Nunn’s eye to its triumphant birth and acclaim by world. He details his growing obsession – how the thought of playing the part invades his dreams and his waking moments alike; how valiantly he tries not to contemplate it, not to discuss it, not to read it even until it’s absolutely certain – but his lust for the part overmasters him. His mind, and even more remarkably, his sketch pad, swarm with monstrous shapes, he can’t keep his hands off anything in print which might relate to the object of his desire. It’s hopeless; he’s a goner; and before long he’s committed to the part on terms that he’s sworn he’ll never accept. Wise friends advise him: wouldn’t some nice quiet role, full of inner confusion and unfathomable text be better for him? Or a film? All meaningless to him: he must have that part. Not because he has some special affinity with psychopathic regicides, but because of what he could do with the role. He goes back to his family in South Africa, a joyful and sometimes baffling journey into his past and himself. He finds that in his house ‘I’m on display everywhere. Every inch of wall is covered in photos of me or my paintings or posters of plays. It makes me rather uncomfortable; as if I’ve died and this is the shrine.’ Later, his therapist tells him, ‘You still want to come home from school with prizes saying “Look, Mommy, I’m best”… Bury all that.’
But there’s one prize he must have. Even among his folk, on the other side of the world, Richard is eating his mind out: he sees him everywhere: in the landscape, even: in a mountain shaped like a hump. Back in England, the serious work begins: research, investigation. He visits homes for the disabled, he reads medical volumes, he sees documentaries. He becomes obsessed by Dennis Nilsen and Peter Sutcliffe; he ponders the physical lives of bulls, he examines the activities of insects. Anything to achieve the shape of this man he’s going to play. All the time he’s haunted by Laurence Olivier. Well might he be, not only because of the dread memory of the lank wig, the vulpine face, the steel whip of his voice: it’s because they’re at the same game. Bravura calls to bravura across the decades. Tony is approaching the part just as Olivier might have done. Indeed, Olivier has often remarked that the motive for his 1944 performance was Wolfit’s brilliantly silky success of the previous season. He was determined to be as different as possible; just as Tony rears away from Larry. But like Larry, he must ground his work in reality: he must find his frames of reference in the real world. No abstract nouns for him; no academic conceits.
And he must be fit. Despite a snapped Achilles tendon only a year before, he throws himself into bodybuilding; he gives up smoking; he submits himself to a hilarious health farm with a resident army psychiatrist who can be found in its swimming pool (‘How are we to avail ourselves of his service…? Presumably plunging in and swimming alongside: “Ah, morning, Captain, I have this problem with foreplay.”’). When rehearsals start he experiments with different kinds of crutches; he submits to having his spine cast in wax; he toys with different costumes. Finally the image has shape and reality and the production takes shape around it. Because, in a sense, the image has preceded the text, there is something of a struggle; but in the end there is integration, and integrity, and triumph.
This is a most wonderfully authentic account of the experience of creating a performance. It’s full of delicate and sometimes moving observation; full of striking information (you’ll know the difference between scoliosis and kyphosis by the time you’ve read it); full of the frustration and tedium and occasional tears of the unequal struggle of any of us flawed thespians with ourselves and a great role, and full of his own astonishing and unforgettable drawings. Images, images, images! What images!
Tony spectacularly hit the critical jackpot with his Richard. When he told Michael Caine that he hadn’t read his reviews, Caine said: ‘Read them? I thought you’d written them.’ Like all of us, he has from time to time experienced the opposite.
A show of mine which provoked one of those feeding-frenzy attacks to which critics are collectively prone was Simon Gray’s The Holy Terror. Simon and I had been waiting to work together in the theatre for nearly twenty years. The night before the first night we had supper. The show had gone very well that evening but we both had a foreboding of doom, amply justified. Somehow this made the total crash of the play even more annihilating. The attack on Simon, whose Smoking Diaries had just been universally acclaimed by all the literary critics, was savage; the assault on me was only slightly less violent. I shall always particularly cherish the review by the legendarily witty Rhoda Koenig in the Guardian: the sight of me making love to Polly Fox at the end of the first act, she said, would give her nightmares for months to come. This is a piece I wrote for the Guardian about p
laying love scenes in 2009.
It was reported the other day that an actress somewhere has walked out of a play because of some difficulty with a love scene. One has to sympathise. It’s a tricky business. Despite the massive growth in recent years of touchy-feelyness and kisses on all cheeks upon the slightest acquaintance, and notwithstanding the supposed shamelessness of actors, extreme bodily intimacy remains a delicate issue. It is not a problem addressed by drama schools. As far as I am aware, there are no courses in Advanced Osculation or Girl on Boy Body Surfing, though it’s a while since I was a student. At the Drama Centre in 1970, emotional nakedness was the order of the day, although it is true that in the world outside getting your kit off was more or less de rigueur, from Hair to Oh! Calcutta! to the Living Theatre’s Frankenstein. But that was Epic Nudity, nudity as the exemplification of Innocence and Vulnerability, the bare forked animal. Love scenes are a different matter.
It may not strike you that love scenes have figured heavily in my curriculum vitae, but you would be wrong. I have tumbled with the best of them, and it has not always been easy. Partly, I suppose, in my case, the problem has been to imitate heterosexuality convincingly. Is one getting it quite right? Just what do heterosexuals get up to in bed? But in truth, it’s always tricky, whatever the orientation.
With neither drink nor drug nor meal nor relaxing social ambience to blur things, there you are, face to face, in all your unadorned physicality. The feeling is more morning-after than night-before. There was a scene in Shakespeare in Love which was particularly unlovely in that way. The character I played, Sir Edmund Tilney, is having a quick poke when he is interrupted. It’s a brief scene, but it needed to be urgent, animal, groiny. The schedule was behind, it kept getting pushed further and further back, it looked as if we wouldn’t get to it, then suddenly it had to happen and it had to happen NOW. The actress and I were hurtled through make-up. The shot list was very simple, the action obvious – so much so that they were already discussing the next shot while we rehearsed. I was introduced to the actress, there was a brief, practical discussion about how much would be exposed (my bum, her tits) and how long it should last (thirty seconds), the furniture was quickly adjusted, the director called ‘Action!’, whereupon, like a couple of mating dogs, we leaped on each other, our climax topped by the director’s ‘Cut!’ Great satisfaction all round, lens checked, hands shaken, and off we went, as the crew raced to the next set-up. I never saw the actress again, and indeed, to my embarrassment, I can’t quite remember her face, let alone any other part of her anatomy. A typical one-night stand, in fact. At least it all happened so quickly that there was no self-consciousness.
Passionate scenes at least have their own momentum. Romantic encounters are a different matter. It needs a special kind of trust to express physical tenderness with a stranger. Some people, of course, have a gift for instant intimacy, and it’s never quite who you might expect. Thirty years ago, I was in a BBC production of La Ronde, Schnitzler’s famous play in which each character has sex with someone and then moves on to another person who, in turn, moves on to someone else. So all the actors have two sex scenes. Mine were with the very young Amanda Redman and that remarkable and distinguished actress Dorothy Tutin, then nearly sixty. I was naturally very relaxed about Amanda and very anxious about Dottie: the idea of embracing her seemed like lèse-majesté. In the event, it was Dottie who hurled herself at me with thrilling rapacity, while Amanda was rather shy. These differences are clearly visible in the finished product. Not that Amanda looks at all reserved: but with her it was technique, whereas with Dottie it was feeling. As in life, so on screen.
Sex on radio is something else again. In the 1970s, Anna Calder-Marshall and I played lovers in a play by Fay Weldon: as soon as her husband left home, I slipped between his sheets. These were the days of Method Radio, so there was a bed, and blankets, and pillows. Anna and I duly clambered into the bed and set about us with gusto, puffing and grunting and lip-smacking, all the while trying to turn the pages of our scripts noiselessly. The result was a cross between sumo wrestling and origami. The trick was not to catch each other’s eyes, or we would have collapsed. So far so good. Unfortunately, the scene was not just between the two of us: there was a dog in it, trained by the jealous husband to stop us from making love. The production couldn’t run to a real dog, but we had a barking Jack Russell on a separate speaker, held by a rather tubby stage manager, who attempted little jumping-up-and-down movements, scampering around the studio, running at us, speaker in hand, every time we essayed a little passion. Tears of laughter spurted out of our eyes as we squealed our lines, the hysteria quickly reaching orgasmic heights. The director leaped out of his booth to berate us savagely, like schoolchildren. When we finally did the scene, the lovemaking was – how shall I say? – tight-lipped.
And then there was the play I did, very early in my career, for Gay Sweatshop. It was a two-hander, a simple romantic (but for the time radical) tale of two young men who fall in love with each other and then drift apart. Inevitably, perhaps, a rather torrid offstage romance developed between us. In the central scene, we were in bed together, naked. Then we had to get out of bed. The ingenuity expended on concealing the very obvious pleasure we took in each other’s proximity led to rather baffling improvised choreography involving cushions and hats.
Well, we were young. Nowadays, the problem is much more one of engendering arousal than of suppressing it. You’re doing this in front of other people, remember – the director, the camera crew, props, make-up, continuity – for other people, sometimes millions of other people, and it’ll be up there for all time, to be watched dozens, even hundreds of times on DVD. For some, that might, in itself, be a turn-on. But, like everything else in film – and, one is tempted to add, in life – it boils down to technique. And it’s astonishing what can be done with mirrors and smoke and a little smart editing.
During the tour of The Holy Terror, I appeared, as the stage directions required, naked, but I think we all decided that I was getting a little old for it. Y-fronts were firmly in place by the time we hit the West End. But one never learns. I wrote the following for the Sunday Times in 2003.
In Through the Leaves at the Southwark Playhouse I play Otto, an alcoholic steelworker who is engaged in a sometimes clumsy, sometimes brutal attempt to thrash out some sort of relationship with Martha, a woman offal-butcher. Things, for the most part, do not go well, but after the most savage scene of the play, there is a curiously haunting scene in which Otto takes a bath. Martha comes into the bathroom while he is flannelling himself. It is evidently the first time she has seen him fully naked. The following exchange occurs: Otto: ‘What you staring at?’ Martha: ‘Nothing.’ Otto: ‘Like what you see? Shoulda seen me when I was younger. What a physique. I was quite the athlete.’ Martha: ‘Pity you don’t do more outdoor sports instead of you know what.’ Otto: ‘No blubber anywhere you look.’ Martha: ‘What’s that there – on your tummy?’ Otto: ‘Don’t talk crap. That’s sheer muscle.’
The scene proceeds with her gently scrubbing his back. For perhaps the only time in the play their defences are down and a kind of ease prevails between them. So: a delicate, intimate scene, which the designer and director have staged behind a gauze, warmly and rather dimly lit. There was no question in anyone’s mind but that I should have to be naked for the scene: indeed, Otto’s nakedness is the point of the scene. No reviewer so much as bothered to mention it; it is a seamless, integral part of the whole production. The day after the first performance, the Evening Standard Diary carried a piece whose headline blared ‘NAKED CALLOW LEAVES TOO LITTLE TO THE IMAGINATION’. With lewd innuendo the writer claims that theatregoers ‘are getting a tiny bit more of Simon Callow than perhaps they bargained for’, describing a nude scene ‘so protracted it proved too much for at least one member of the audience’ who allegedly left the theatre during the scene. (In fact, the individual in question left during the previous scene to go to the loo, thus missing the offending s
cene, returning in time for the next one.) ‘The expansively built actor suddenly stripped naked under the spotlight, leaped into a bath and enthusiastically kneaded his flesh,’ the piece continues. A seasoned theatregoer was questioned about ‘the ordeal’. ‘It didn’t really add to the drama, it was highly disgusting and at least three minutes long,’ said the unhappy customer.
Now, regular readers of the Standard Diary would not for a minute have supposed that this item bore any resemblance to the truth. We all know that the Diary of any newspaper is its crèche, where infant journalists – not old enough to be exposed to real news yet – totter about with their building bricks, desperately trying to engineer Stories where none exist. The genre has its laws, as inflexible as those of the syllogism or the Zen koan: first invent a scandal, then invent someone outraged by the scandal, then invent their complaint. It is quite whimsical, rather Alice in Wonderland, like life seen upside down. I don’t complain; it’s just a bit of bunting that comes along with being in the public eye in whatever capacity. The follow-up to the story in the Daily Mail was in the same vein, but somewhat more unpleasant, of course. Having rehashed the supposed outrage, the Mail diarist invented a ‘Lady Bracknellish’ companion who remarked: ‘How strange that a man with such a big voice should have such a small endowment.’ The Standard returned to the fray the next day, quoting from a satirical book by Nigel Planer called I, An Actor, whose glossary contains the line ‘Callow, verb, to expose one’s genitals in the name of art.’