Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  Couldn’t work today, couldn’t do lines. Went into town, to buy some things for Christmas – which we’ll be spending in South Africa.

  Back at home, Rosinda (our cleaning lady) was ironing shirts downstairs. She’s Portuguese, and isn’t always fluent in English, yet said, ‘A great star in the sky has gone out.’

  Phoned home. Spoke to Verne (my sister) first. She said the good thing was that South Africa was united again, in a way it hasn’t been for a long time: ‘Black and white people are singing and dancing in the streets.’

  Then spoke to Randall (my elder brother), who said, ‘It’s a day of great sadness for me. Y’know, if it wasn’t for him, we might not be here any more.’ He meant the whites. Although Mandela hadn’t been in power for years, he was a controlling influence. Randall talked of his fear that South Africa could go the way of Zimbabwe. Mentioned the extremist, Julius Malema: ‘He’s not just the mad clown that people say… he’s a clever politician… he’s formed his own party, and he’s very popular… among all the young people who have nothing, and nothing to lose.’

  Jesus.

  All my life, my family has been talking like this. Even under Apartheid, during the safest, sunniest days on those all-white beaches, when my people lazed in luxury, and my dad was Master Mannie, die ou Baas, even then he was forever trying to think of ways of getting money out of the country, ‘a nest egg’, just in case we ever had to flee, like his parents had from Lithuania. Then, as Apartheid was ending, the Shers were absolutely sure there’d be a catastrophic bloodbath. (To be fair, everyone thought the same, blacks and whites – the Miracle of Madiba had yet to happen.) And now it could all start up again…

  Jesus.

  Tuesday 10 December

  While Greg went to his preview of Richard II – now transferred to the Barbican – I watched Mandela’s Memorial Service on TV. Attended by Presidents, Prime Ministers, and thousands of spectators. Though not as many as expected: the vast stadium was only two-thirds full. Maybe because of the torrential rain. Which is a good sign in African culture; one man said, ‘The gates of heaven have opened for Nelson Mandela.’ The biggest ovation was for Obama, and the worst booing for Zuma – which must have been quite a humiliation on this world stage. But it delighted his opponents. The ANC veteran Ronnie Kasrils was grinning as he said, ‘The populace has spoken – it is truly Shakespearean!’

  Wednesday 11 December

  Blush, the beloved country.

  Three disgraceful things have emerged about yesterday’s Memorial for Mandela:

  The SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) didn’t show the booing of Zuma. The organisation is censoring the news just like they did when they served the Apartheid government.

  The man who was signing for the deaf, standing alongside each speaker, was a fake: he was signing gibberish. He’s been identified as mentally ill, with a tendency to violence. Obama’s team must be flabbergasted that the South Africans saw fit to put this man right next to their President.

  Worst of all, somehow. Knowing that Desmond Tutu was at the service, thieves broke into his Cape Town home, and burgled it. It’s happened several times before, apparently: once they even stole his Nobel Prize.

  Each of these things – the corruption, the incompetence, the crime – are so typically South African. I don’t say that with any ease.

  Thursday 12 December

  Richard II’s London press night. This was a significant moment: the RSC back at the Barbican. I’m delighted about it. There was something terribly self-destructive about our quitting the place in 2002 before we’d found an alternative base. We simply became one of the homeless in London. We drifted around, trying the West End, the Roundhouse, and a couple of other venues, but we were no longer a significant presence in the capital city. So – we must thank the Barbican for welcoming us in again. But it did feel strange arriving there tonight, particularly as the first thing I saw was a giant picture of me – the ad for the Henries, which will play here next autumn. Otherwise, it was all as I remembered: the foyers as hopeless as before, with acres of deserted space, and the auditorium as splendid. The production sat beautifully on the stage, and the cast rose to the occasion. David Tennant was even better than in Stratford. As his world collapsed around him, he tried behaving as he always had – preening, not caring – but you knew what he was feeling. It was very moving. As was the standing ovation at the end.

  My boy did well.

  Friday 13 December

  The Story of Falstaff’s Ring.

  During this morning’s line-learning I got sidetracked and ended up piecing together a picture of Falstaff’s life.

  It began when I became intrigued by a line in Part I, Act Three, Scene Three. Falstaff is complaining to Mistress Quickly about having his pockets picked in the tavern, and says, ‘I have lost a seal ring of my grandfather’s worth forty mark.’ (A mark was two-thirds of a pound at that time, so a considerable amount of money.) Quickly claims she’s heard Hal say it was a cheap copper ring. And indeed when Hal now enters, he calls the ring ‘a trifle, some eight-penny matter.’ So which version is true? Maybe both. Maybe Falstaff did possess a valued family heirloom, but maybe it was used in some shady deal or lost one drunken night, and maybe in recent years he’s been wearing a worthless replacement.

  It set me thinking about Falstaff’s history. He’s so much a creature of the present, he so fully occupies the space before your eyes, the here and now, that you don’t stop to think about him existing in any other time frame. Yet there’s another tantalising line in his last speech in Part I (Act Five, Scene Three): ‘If I do grow great again…’ Again? I suggested cutting this word, but Greg wanted to leave it in, hinting at some former, more elevated way of life. A life where people had seal rings worth forty mark.

  In Part II there is more detail about Falstaff’s family. In Act Two, Scene Two, Poins reads a letter from Falstaff, in which he refers to ‘my brothers and sister’. Dear God, there are more of them. A family of Falstaffs. What does the sister look like?!

  And Justice Shallow is full of information about him in Act Three, Scene Two. Recalling his own young adulthood, Shallow says, ‘Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy, and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk.’ (Pages were often from top families, put into service to learn about life at court.) Shallow also reports that Falstaff beat up the King’s jester Scoggin, fought well with a backsword, and, when he was older, joined Shallow in what sounds like a threesome with the salaciously named Jane Nightwork. But is Shallow’s word reliable? Well, later in the same scene, Falstaff himself remembers being with Shallow at Clement’s Inn (one of the Inns of Chancery) and the lewd goings-on there.

  So – fragments of the Fat Knight’s biography.

  None of which an actor can actually play.

  Other than to give him a certain inbred grandness.

  Not in his look – I feel sure of that; he’s fallen on hard times, he’s become a thief – but maybe in his sound.

  I try a few lines in an old-fashioned, plummy accent; the kind that has a laziness to it, dragging two vowels into one – ‘cowards’ becomes ‘cow’ds’ (almost ‘cards’) – and a satirical tone, which clamps quotation marks around every other word or phrase. So, for example, entering the tavern scene, he says:

  ‘A plague of all cow’ds, I say… is there no “virtue extant”?’

  Yes, sounds good, sounds right.

  And it coincides with something Greg said to me some time ago, ‘His voice is going to be much posher than yours, isn’t it?’

  Sunday 15 December

  In the days when I was seriously doubting whether I could play Falstaff, I’m glad I didn’t see Bernard Shaw’s review of Beerbohm Tree’s performance in 1896:

  ‘Mr Tree only wants one thing to make him an excellent Falstaff, and that is to get born over again, as unlike himself as possible.’

  Tuesday 17 December

  Greg was on the phone to his sister, Jo. I heard him say, �
�We start Monday week.’ (Meaning rehearsals.) I thought he’d made a mistake, then realised he hadn’t. It’s incredible to think we’re going all the way to South Africa and back before Monday week. Even more incredibly, on Monday week, Falstaff will cease to be a mass of lines that I’m learning, and will become my new role, my new job.

  Wednesday 25 December

  Cape Town, South Africa. Christmas Day.

  We’re staying at The Mount Nelson (the grand old hotel from colonial times), in one of the garden cottages at the back, alongside a smaller, quieter swimming pool than the main one. Kids and mobile phones are banned here – oh joy.

  Our cottage has a lovely stoep (porch) and this is where we sit this morning, before going to the big family lunch. Greg has his head buried in his book, The Fears of Henry IV, by Ian Mortimer (who’ll be visiting rehearsals), but I find it difficult to read anything, do anything, other than soak in the sensations of my childhood. The particular blueness of the sky and brightness of the light. The birds: the glorious, noisy ha-di-dahs (ibises), the glossy starlings with that brown flash on their wings, the Cape doves doing their distinctive call. The insects: big, African-sized orange-and-white butterflies fluttering over our garden of roses and busy Lizzies, and brown-and-blue dragonflies darting round the pool. On the far side, two more sights which fill me with nostalgia: a hedge of pink hydrangeas (like the ones Mom used to cultivate at home), and the tawny flanks of Signal Hill, from where, every day at noon, you hear the thud of the cannon which is fired up there.

  At 12.45, Verne and Joan (her partner) collect us at the front of the hotel, and drive us up to the suburb called Highlands Estate, where Heidi and Ed (Randall’s middle daughter and her husband) are renting a house. It’s right next to Table Mountain. When I get out of the car, I sway back on my feet, astonished to find myself so close to this famous rock. All week the South-Easter has been blowing, which creates, along the top, a low, rolling cloud – the so-called tablecloth – but today the weather is still, and the sunlight on the stone has an extraordinary quality. I like to think that it comes from the fact that the mountain stands on the very end of Africa, above the freezing Atlantic, with the next land mass being the Antarctic. So even on a baking hot day like this, there’s an icy clarity to the light, almost like the light on a glacier.

  There are twenty-four of us assembled for lunch. Greg is proud of the fact that a few years ago he introduced Christmas to my Jewish family, who had never celebrated it before, and are now hooked.

  Someone announces: ‘Presents, presents – gather all kids and Christians!’

  Originally, Greg was the only Christian, and the only adult to get presents, but the family has acquired a few more since.

  When it comes to the meal, different households provide the different courses. Our contribution is a huge Christmas pudding from Fortnum and Mason: their King George plum special. Normally I have to watch my weight carefully on holiday, but not this time; I have a special dispensation, called the Falstaff licence, and can pig myself silly. The lunch is taken slowly, with long breaks, when people go outside to sunbathe or swim in the pool. Not very Christmassy, but very South African.

  At the end, champagne is poured and Randall stands to make the toast. Trying to get silence, he quotes Tutu from Mandela’s Memorial the other day: ‘Not until I hear a pin drop!’ Randall is a natural public speaker, and on good form today. He pays credit to those among us who’ve made big changes in their lives during the last year – including Greg running the RSC.

  In reply, Greg tells the assembled that he’s got conclusive proof of why he has a rightful place among the Shers, and holds aloft a book we found at Exclusive Books on the Waterfront. Called The Historical Karoo (the vast area of semi-desert north of Cape Town) by Chris Schoeman.

  ‘…It’s got a chapter on Middlepost!’ Greg says.

  ‘Oich, Middlepost,’ says Yvette (Randall’s wife); ‘The one-horse town where the horse died.’

  Greg explains that the author mentions my novel Middlepost, and how it’s a fictional account of how my grandfather came to own the tiny dorp, building a motel, shop, and petrol station, and running it as a stopping-off place for long-distance commercial travellers (South Africa’s Willy Lomans). The chapter also describes the Battle of Middlepost during the Boer War, when General Jan Smuts led a Boer Commando against the British troops at the settlement. The account of the battle is given by no less a figure than Arthur Conan Doyle, who, having created Sherlock Holmes and killed him off, was serving as a medical orderly during the war. He recounts how, when the Brits were losing, the cavalry rode in to the rescue, led by a young captain by the name of Doran…!

  Everyone is suitably impressed by the coincidence, and cheers. Greg doesn’t go on to say that Captain Doran failed to save the situation, and the Boers won. To this day there’s a gravestone at Middlepost – I remember it from childhood holidays – honouring the soldiers of the Imperial Yeomanry who were killed there.

  When we read this section in the book the other day, Greg said, ‘So in this one little snapshot, you get General Smuts, Sherlock Holmes, Grandfather Sher and Captain Doran!’

  ‘I must tell Terry Johnson,’ I said; ‘There’s a play in it.’

  Friday 27 December

  Managed to squeeze in lunch with our closest friends here: Janice (Honeyman; theatre director – she did the Tempest that I was in) and Liza (Key; documentary film-maker). A visit to Cape Town would be incomplete without seeing them. Janice spoke eloquently about Mandela’s death: ‘You see, the Miracle of Madiba is that over and over again he brings out a togetherness, a unity between people here. And it’s absolutely heartfelt. The ecstasy we felt when he gave us the possibility of salvation in 1994… it was kind of repeated when he died. As we were celebrating his life, there was an amazing closeness between everyone, a euphoria. There are times when this place can seem to be disintegrating, morally, but maybe his death has given us another chance to pull together, to hold together.’

  I sat hushed, wishing I shared her optimism. But they live here – they know better.

  In my preparations for Falstaff, I’ve been too squeamish to watch programmes like Embarrassing Bodies, to study obesity, but this afternoon a man elected to give me a full-frontal, real-life display of the condition.

  We were at the poolside, and I swear we heard him coming before we saw him: a small rumble in the earth like the arrival of Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park. Then he loomed into view, wearing nothing but sunglasses and swimming trunks, all the rest of his mountainous flesh on display. Of course I’ve seen severely overweight people before, but never as naked as this. He carried a walking stick; didn’t use it, but held it like a weapon. This added to the sense of danger that he somehow possessed; if he was prepared to commit this amount of self-harm, what might he do to others?

  ‘But Falstaff can’t be like that,’ Greg whispeared; ‘We can’t fear for his health.’

  ‘No, no,’ I answered; ‘And we’ve agreed – he’s not going to be this size. But all the same…!’

  The best thing was that he stared at us with incredulity: these two mature chaps with no females in sight. Greg and I don’t kiss and cuddle in public, but there’s an intimacy between us – looks and smiles, handing one another towels and sun oil – that belie our being just friends. This man certainly spotted it straight away.

  Good for you, I thought – yes, let human beings gawp at one another in disbelief.

  Back on the stoep of our cottage, I did some discreet drawings of him. I plan to work them up into a picture called Falstaff at the Pool.

  Tonight we go to the part of Cape Town that I know best, the area where I grew up, at the far end of Sea Point, just before it turns into Bantry Bay. This time of year would have been the long summer holidays in my schooldays, so every sensation touches me in a tender way – it’s from my youth, it’s in my blood – and all so different from the life I’ve led ever since in England. On summertime evenings in the Northern Hemi
sphere, it’s the light that lingers. Here the sun sets fast, the night is immediately dark, and it’s the heat of the day that lingers; it’s very sensual – as is the smell and sound of the sea… this is always present, the sea…

  We’re having a braai (barbecue) at Montagu House, which used to be the Sher family home. After Mom’s death in 2006, it was left to us four children. Joel (my younger brother) bought up our shares, and created his own home here, with Eileen (wife) and Beth (daughter). Among the extensive renovations, he built a big brick braai on one of the decks – he’s the best braaier in town – and this is where we gather for our farewell meal.

  Farewell – already?

  I knew it would hurt – the shortness of this holiday – and it does. And although I’m glad Joel has kept the house in the family, being here hurts a bit too. Nothing is recognisable – until I go to the loo, and notice the wrought-iron stair rail leading upstairs. That’s exactly the same as in childhood. Except it seemed fancier then, and bigger…

  As we’re saying our goodbyes, everyone wishes us well for Monday.

  ‘Why, what’s happening then?’ says Greg, making them laugh – while a little flutter goes through my belly. It’s going to be there, I think, for many months to come.

  4. Three Rehearsal Rooms

  Monday 30 December

  London.

  The British winter always comes as a shock after our Christmas holidays in South Africa. Not the cold, the rain, or snow, but the lack of light. These bad-light days: blighty days, as I call them.

  Anyway, no Monday-morning gloom today, for today we start the biggest venture of our working life together. All sorts of feelings are prickling away inside me, excitement and fear, but certainly no gloom.

  Before we leave the house, we do the ritual that launches all our projects. On the mantelpiece of our dining-room fireplace stands a wooden carving which we bought in India some years ago. It’s of Ganesh, the Hindu god of Good Beginnings and Obstacles, which is an appropriate title for any rehearsal period. We take a pinch of red kumkuma powder from a container, and throw it onto the elephant-headed figure, making a wish. Your wish can’t be for yourself, but in this case our wishes are virtually interchangeable: mine is for his production, and I presume his is for my performance.