“She just does. We’re ready to go.”
As the camera slowly pushes in on her, you can see in Miss Shepherd’s rheumy eyes her entire vanished youth, a future thrown down the drain. But Maggie never believes you when you tell her she’s good.
We were in Camden Town, so life imitated art. I arrived early one Monday morning to find the Art Department evacuating the van of its contents. It had been left in the drive over the weekend, and a couple of drunks had set up temporary home in it. Miss Shepherd’s apparently filthy furnishings were now genuinely filthy. “Don’t tell Maggie! Don’t tell Maggie!” they cried as they took the dirty mattresses away to be deep-cleaned, then made fake-filthy all over again. But they were never filthy enough for her: between takes she looked for food to smear on them. She was delighted when I eventually told her.
The week before we started she went to Oxford, to look through the archive that Alan gifted to the Bodleian Library. It includes the collected writings of Miss Shepherd. Her religious pamphlets, scrawled notes and shopping lists were carefully preserved by her landlord and now share the shelves with the First Folio, the Gutenberg Bible and the original conducting score of Handel’s Messiah. Through Maggie she achieved a whole new level of posthumous fame.
PART THREE
Old Things
7
A Reason to Do It
SHAKESPEARE
“It was obvious why you did Henry V, just after the Iraq War,” said a member of the audience at a Q&A before a performance of Henry IV Part 1 in 2005. “What about Henry IV? Was there a reason to do it? Or was it just that Michael Gambon was available to play Falstaff ?”
“There is no wrong time to do these plays,” I replied sententiously. “They will always speak to us.” I might just as well have quoted Ben Jonson: “He was not of an age, but for all time.”
Shakespeare was of an age, of course: he wrote for a specific audience at a specific time. And as his plays have hardly ever been off the stage since he wrote them, they are also (so far) for all time. But so much has been said about him that it’s easy to find yourself saying it again. King Lear is an Everest of a part. Twelfth Night is suffused with autumnal melancholy. The Henry IV plays are an incomparable panorama of England. There’s a whole parade of clichés about Shakespeare’s plays that imply there’s nothing new to say about them. But the reason to do them is always to discover them as if for the first time, and to confront the competing claims of then and now.
Awed by Henry IV, I never got much further than the incomparable panorama of England. Only in the last few decades have professional historians caught up with the way Shakespeare interweaves high politics with the concerns of ordinary people. In a Rochester inn yard, a carrier blames the death of his friend on inflation: “Poor fellow never joy’d since the price of oats rose, it was the death of him.” In Gloucestershire, two neighbours talk about student tuition fees: “I dare say my cousin William is become a good scholar. He is at Oxford still, is he not?” says the first. “Indeed, sir, to my cost,” moans the second.
The two plays are as interested in the tavern as the court, and they layer the medieval past with the Elizabethan present. The Boar’s Head and its patrons are lifted from the London pubs that their first audience drank in, two hundred years after the reign of Henry IV. The monarchs and politicians that they gossip about come from the pages of the historian Holinshed, but the Prince of Wales has his eyes firmly fixed on the future. “Past and to come seems best; things present worst,” says the Archbishop of York: a familiar enough sentiment. There is nothing specifically medieval about a frustrated prince struggling to escape the burden of his birth by knocking around the streets of London with a bunch of troublemakers. The tensions between Prince Hal and Henry IV, the mother of all father–son relationships, are universal. A father treats his son with contempt; the son has to deal with it. What’s new—or rather, what’s old—about that?
But loving the Henry IV plays too much, I felt more constrained by them than I did by Henry V. I was wary of bringing too much of the present to them. I wasn’t convinced that a narrative about civil war in England, the consequences of regicide, and the stricken conscience of the usurper would make much sense if the plays were presented, as they were in the 1590s, in a modern context. I thought in 2005 that they were driven by a specifically Tudor terror of a return to the bloody chaos of the Wars of the Roses. Writing now, in 2016, that terror feels much closer. Town and country are divided, and so are North and South, Scotland and England. There is nothing remote about Hotspur’s rage, on behalf of the neglected North, at “the jeering and disdained contempt” of the proud king. Falstaff, milking Gloucestershire for money and “continual laughter,” is the incarnation of London’s contempt for Middle England. I overestimated the stability of our body politic and I wish I could have another go at tapping into folk memories of civil strife.
And I underestimated the tremendous freewheeling energy of the plays. They move from the king to Francis the pot boy; from the cynical Falstaff to Owen Glendower who claims, with the utmost seriousness, that he can raise spirits from the vasty deep. There are wild juxtapositions not just of location and class, ancient and modern, but of ways of looking at the world, ways of making theatre. The plays have more faith in the expressive possibilities of the stage than I did. I smoothed too many of their jagged edges. I could have sharpened the contrast between the vaudevillian tavern scenes, the sobriety of the English court, the bucolic detail of the Gloucestershire orchard, the cinematic bravura of the battles.
About Michael Gambon, my questioner in the Olivier Theatre was right. I directed seven of Shakespeare’s plays at the National between 2003 and 2015: Henry V, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and Othello. All of them started to make sense to me because I could imagine particular actors bringing them alive.
Michael is so irresistible to his audience that he wasted no time on Falstaff’s geniality. He softened nothing that makes “that old white-bearded Satan” satanic. Simply by being Gambon, he reconciled two schools of literary criticism: the academic idolaters of Falstaff, for whom he represents in his wit and appetite a justification for any amount of extracurricular drunkenness and lechery, and those who recoil at his serial immorality.
When Gambon spoke to the audience, he worked on the assumption that they were all wannabe Falstaffs. Soliloquies and asides need a clearly defined relationship between character and audience, and more often than not rely on the assumption that the audience is filled with apprentices. The maid in a Restoration comedy, when she turns front and comments on the action, speaks to a host of maids less expert than she is. Richard III speaks to student tyrants, with whom he shares the insights of the master. Hamlet assumes in his audience a philosophical thirst that requires them to make the same journey as his own. In each case, the actor must be clear whom he’s speaking to, and what he wants of them. Gambon did not doubt that his seedy old drinking buddies out front would have as few qualms as he did about recruiting the worst dross he could find and sending them into the cannon’s mouth.
I have led my ragamuffins where they are pepper’d; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end to beg during life.
A hundred and forty-seven dead, three left to beg for the rest of their lives, and the wages of the dead to be collected by Falstaff in perpetuity if he can get away with it. Job done. And still on the lookout for any opportunity, however grubby: Henry IV Part 1 ended with Gambon looting the corpses that still littered the battlefield. Michael’s innate carelessness about his own amour propre dissolved the line between Gambon and Falstaff. At an early preview, they dug each other out of trouble without a whiff of shame.
The better part of discretion is valour, in the which better part I have sav’d my life. (Pause.) No, that’s not right. The better part of valour is discretion. That’ll do.
Matthew Macfadyen was no more judgemental of Prince Hal tha
n Michael was of Falstaff. The prince declares his hand within minutes of his first entrance, promising to throw off his loose behaviour at his own convenience, looking forward to his glittering reformation and the applause which he knows will greet it. Matthew solicited no sympathy, nor expected censure. In their superb disregard for their audiences’ opinions, he and Gambon were in total harmony. Their objectivity was a reflection of the way the plays are written: it’s never easy to know what Shakespeare himself thinks, but in these plays the authorial point of view is as good as absent and he seems to work almost as a documentarian.
Hal, Falstaff, the king: the plays, like most of Shakespeare’s history plays, have little time for women. Despite being written when the most successful and powerful of all English women was on the throne, they marginalise women more even than they have been marginalised by history. There is no mention of Hal’s mother; he refers to his stepmother once, without respect; Hotspur, Northumberland and Mortimer have wives who together take up only a few minutes’ stage time; there’s a hostess and a whore, and that’s about it. What kind of incomparable panorama of England leaves out half of its population? And what kind of production makes no amends for what may be an acknowledgement of historical reality, but feels hard to defend in the context of the age-old insistence that Shakespeare is for all time?
I no longer think it’s good enough to insist only that Shakespeare held the mirror up to his own world. To perform his plays is to invite universal participation in them. He demanded of his own audience a suspension of disbelief: piece out our imperfections with your thoughts, and before we get to all our other imperfections, those boys wearing dresses? They’re women.
I think we can make the same demands on ourselves. If we claim him as our national playwright, we could start by allowing in the entire nation. Nobody now seriously thinks that skin colour should preclude actors from taking part in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, any more than I should be precluded from directing them because I am a third-generation Jewish immigrant. They belong to all of us: to Adrian Lester as Henry V and David Harewood as Hotspur as much as to (Irish) Michael Gambon as Falstaff. Audiences had no problem with any of them, and will soon have no problem with equal representation of women in the companies who perform his plays. Over the last few years, experiments with gender-blind casting have shown great confidence in the audience’s acceptance of the invitation to join an imaginative conspiracy, which is one way of describing an evening in the theatre. Had I included more women in the Henry IV company, I would have forced myself to be less anodyne. I would have had to create a stage world where women were part of the political power structure, or a world less confined by the literal representation of power.
Still, the production had its strengths, particularly in its articulation of the great dying fall of Part 2. “A pox of this gout! Or a gout of this pox! For one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe,” says Falstaff to his cronies in the audience, and the girl he puts on his knee tells him it’s time “to patch up thine old body for heaven.” They’re all obsessed with decay and mortality. “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” asks Poins as he watches gouty, poxy Falstaff trying to get it on.
“Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent!” boasts ancient Justice Shallow to his fellow Justice, Silence. “And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!”
“We shall all follow, cousin,” says Silence.
Shallow was John Wood, with whom I had once done King Lear at the RSC. He was revered and even feared by his fellow actors for his fierce intelligence. Fifteen years after Lear, and struggling with ill health, he applied his forensic wit to another old man, but this one, instead of raging against an unjust cosmos, seemed to tiptoe to the edge of the grave, dare himself to look in, and creep away in disbelief. As John and Michael Gambon recalled their misspent youth, Michael’s eyes turned watery with regret. John asked after Jane Nightwork, a prostitute they both knew. “Doth she hold her own well?”
“Old, old, Master Shallow,” said Michael, seeing himself in her wrinkled face.
“Nay, she must be old, she cannot choose but be old, certain she’s old,” said John, and although he didn’t actually say “but I’m not old, I can choose not to be old, I will never be old,” that’s what you saw: an old man in denial of the relentless passage of time, and in denial too of the fact that he didn’t make enough of it while he had it. “Jesus, the days that we have seen!” he said, trying to persuade Michael that they were cut from the same cloth.
“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” said Michael, though you knew as he said it that whether Shallow was there or not when the chimes struck was a matter of indifference to him.
“That we have, that we have, that we have, in faith, Sir John, we have,” said John. He hadn’t, which was why he had to say he had so often.
John was sometimes so wracked with coughing in the wings that we worried he wouldn’t make it onto the stage. With iron will, he suppressed the illness that killed him six years later, and was always there for his entrance. Deluded, shallow Shallow—a man with less iron in his soul than anyone else in England—was the last part he played in the theatre.
I first met John when I had lunch with him at an indifferent restaurant on 58th Street in New York in 1987 to persuade him to play Prospero in The Tempest at the RSC, where I worked briefly before Richard Eyre brought me to the National. I was overawed: John had been part of my Shakespearean education. His Brutus in the RSC’s 1972 Julius Caesar was the most exciting performance I’d ever seen, a man whose integrity was undercut by his own delight in it, his intellect the source of his self-destructive pride. John’s intellect and imagination were supported by a voice of extraordinary expressive range that enabled him to communicate whatever he was thinking to the back of even the largest house.
Imagination and intellect in an actor are nothing without the technique to allow an audience, or a camera, access to them. John had spent a decade in America trying to persuade himself that he was as technically equipped in front of a camera as he was in front of an audience. Maybe the energy that fuelled his stage performances were a handicap in the movies. The camera likes to discover what an actor thinks or feels. Actors more accustomed to reaching out to an audience in a theatre sometimes mistake the need not to demonstrate to the camera for a need to do less, or even do nothing. In fact, the camera ruthlessly exposes nothing for what it is: nothing. Film acting requires every bit as much imagination and variety as stage acting. John’s film performances are much better than he thought they were, and he never did too little to be compelling, but it was on stage that he was at his most fascinating. He was happy to return to Shakespeare.
As Prospero, his long, thin frame quivered with a furious hunger for control. His voice wasn’t serene or beautiful, and beauty is in any event beside the point. A stage voice is not an end in itself, but I have watched actors construct in rehearsal subtle performances that are ultimately stymied by voices too weak or flat to convey what stays hidden beneath the surface. John’s voice was a direct emanation of Prospero’s rough magic. His memorial service in 2011 ended with it, recorded live at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1988.
Graves at my command
Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art.
Graves opened and the dead rose in the yawning chasm of the vowels: graves, wak’d, op’d, forth, art. These days, nobody has as many stops on the baroque organ as John had, or even wants them. One of the many admiring actors who had come to remember him said with regret that it would be impossible to imagine doing it like that now. With the company of actors who came regularly to the National to perform Shakespeare, I evolved a way of dealing with the text that valued supple naturalism above all. But I miss John’s wild music.
I miss too his lack of sentimentality and his volatility, which went some way towards justifying the abstraction of the two prod
uctions we did together in Stratford. As King Lear, his wrath when his eldest daughter Goneril demanded a reduction in the number of his followers was terrifying: “Detested kite, thou liest.” The rage of all the Lears I had ever seen swelled from this accusation to a crescendo of raw hatred. But John, sweeping his men out of Goneril’s house, suddenly turned back to her, possessed by love for her, unable as a father to leave his eldest daughter without embracing her passionately. And in the heat of his embrace, on the verge of asking her to forgive him, love and hate became indivisible, and he found himself cursing her.
Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her!
He hated her because he loved her; he cursed her with sterility because he couldn’t bear to leave her. Like so many of the insights I have witnessed in rehearsal, this seemed to come unbidden: I have no idea whether John had planned it. But it was rooted in our bleak shared vision of the play: in the moral universe of King Lear, every impulse towards good is mocked by its opposite.
There is no right answer to the question Lear asks his three daughters: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” The truth, which is what Cordelia tells him, is probably the worst answer of all:
I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.
Ethical absolutes collapse under the weight of lived experience. Gloucester blames the gods:
Balancing Acts Page 17