Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  A little group of actors have gathered round the crutch.

  Alex Hassell asks, ‘What year was that?’

  ‘1984,’ I reply.

  ‘Wow,’ he says; ‘I was only born in 1980.’

  He gives a big, wonderstruck grin, while I think of one of Shallow’s lines: ‘Jesu, the days that we have seen!’

  Friday 31 January

  Coming from a dark, wet afternoon into our big, warm rehearsal room, with its firelit aura, and finding a fight call on the go – Hal and Hotspur bashing away at one another, the silhouette of Terry King circling and coaching – I felt I was walking into a jousting school from long ago.

  For various reasons, like people’s availability and costume fittings, we’ve moved on to Part II. Falstaff’s first scene with the Lord Chief Justice. It’s one of those scenes – and Falstaff has several – which can seem inconsequential on the page: just banter, not much story. But today we reminded ourselves that Falstaff is a criminal, a thief, and the Lord Chief Justice has the power not just to imprison him but hang him. As LCJ, Simon Thorp was icy and dangerous, and our exchange became full of tension, a dance on a tightrope. And probably funnier for it.

  When rehearsals finished at six, Greg had no further appointments – which was unusual – so he was able to come home with me. We hurried through the rain and wind, having to wrap our umbrellas round our heads, and then, just a few minutes later, we were in our bright, heated house, and pouring glasses of our namesake drink.

  Another week has ended, but now I have a much stronger sense of the plays working, and the performances working, my own included. The potential is really quite exciting…

  Saturday 1 February

  I’ve had lots of actors’ nightmares during rehearsals – the usual thing, not knowing lines or being unprepared for a role – but last night I had a new one.

  I walked into a theatre auditorium. A line of naked chorus boys were in front of me, horsing around roughly. I skirted past them. The director, a woman, hurried over to me. She said she was glad I was short and stocky: I’d invigorate the role, create it anew. ‘Falstaff?’ I said. She looked confused. ‘No – Tarzan.’

  Monday 3 February

  Week six.

  As I came into the bathroom this morning, the main section of the Guardian lay in front of the loo. Even from across the room, I could see the familiar layout they use when someone significant has died. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Born 1967, died yesterday of a drug overdose. God, he was only forty-seven. A seriously gifted man. His performance in Capote was as fine a piece of character acting as I’ve seen.

  Each morning, after Emma’s voice call, there’s a singing call, for the company to learn the big Latin motet which begins Part I, ‘Urbs beata Jerusalem’, and the round in the tavern, ‘Fill the Cup’. Everyone’s joining in. Except me. I imagine Greg must have taken the Musical Director aside, and said, ‘Tony has a little problem you should know about. In childhood he had the bar mitzvah teacher from hell, and it’s left him with chronic tone-deafness.’

  The scene we’ve called ‘Fang and Snare’ (Part II, Act Two, Scene One), where Mistress Quickly has hired two officers to arrest Falstaff for debt. Like in the scene with the Lord Chief Justice – who comes into this one too – we had to work hard to get some tension, some realism into it. I have a sense of Shakespeare dragging out comic situations and treading water in Part II, which is never the case in Part I.

  Tuesday 4 February

  …On the other hand, we did the Gloucestershire scene this afternoon (Part II, Act Three, Scene Two), where Falstaff visits Justices Shallow and Silence to recruit soldiers, and it’s one of the most brilliant scenes in both plays, full of genuine comedy and strange melancholy (‘We have heard the chimes at midnight’). It was good to have Oliver Ford Davies back in rehearsals – he’s been absent for a week – and to watch him work. Such detail, precision, and invention. He has a gift for making Shakespeare sound spontaneous – searching for a word, a name, while keeping the rhythm of the text going. And of course a gift for comedy: he’s developing a cackling laugh for Shallow – a sycophantic response to anything Falstaff says – and a shudder in one leg when he recalls the lust of his youth.

  Thursday 6 February

  On the eve of the Sochi Winter Olympics, prominent authors from round the world have denounced Russia’s anti-gay and other repressive laws. People like Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Carol Ann Duffy, Wole Soyinka, Orhan Pamuk, Edward Albee, and many others. As appalled as I am by the homophobia in places like Russia and Uganda, I am equally heartened by the civilised world saying no to it.

  Good work on Falstaff’s hymn to alcohol, to sherry sack, in Part II (Act Four, Scene One). Took inspiration from Professor Robert Winston demonstrating the effects of alcohol in his 1998 TV series, The Human Body: using himself as the guinea pig, he drank through a bottle of red wine on camera, telling us what was happening inside. Falstaff does exactly the same. He gives us, the audience, a blow-by-blow account of how the sack is working on him; his brain, his voice, and – with the writing now becoming gloriously surreal – his bloodstream:

  …The sherry warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes: it illuminateth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm. And then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with his retinue, doth any deed of courage, and this valour comes of sherry!

  The phrase, ‘this little kingdom, man’ is a perfect summation of Falstaff: he is a realm, a world unto himself.

  And then the speech ends with Falstaff stating that if he had a thousand sons he’d get them all addicted to booze. My God, Shakespeare…! I can’t wait to say that line in front of an audience.

  Friday 7 February

  With my lower back stiff and locked again, I visited Dr Rogers, the orthopaedic specialist whom I saw last year. He gave me biopuncture again – a series of injections in the affected area – which released the muscle spasm. I asked him about the Falstaff body suit. It weighs about six kilos. He thought it probably would affect my back.

  I’m going to have to do something about it. Put health first, and sacrifice the fact that the suit gives me a feeling of Falstaff’s weight without me having to act it.

  Back at the rehearsal room, I reported to Greg and Suzi Blakey (our stage manager). We decided to try halving the weight of the suit. It was sent back to Bob Saunders for adjustment. And next week I’ll try wearing it in rehearsals. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it. The accoutrements of the part are starting to worry me:

  I’ve been using a walking stick in the Part II scenes, after Falstaff complains of gout, and it’s felt like an immediate cliché. Why? Don’t know. In theatre, certain things just are. Not sure whether to persist with it.

  And although the Falstaff voice sounded good at the read-throughs, now in the stop-start nature of rehearsals, it’s starting to feel false.

  I have to reassure myself that these things are in the nature of character acting.

  This evening’s TV news showed the opening ceremony of the Russian Winter Olympics. There were five giant snowflakes which unfolded into the five Olympic rings – except one malfunctioned and stayed closed. An American journalist said it was reluctant to come out.

  Saturday 8 February

  Greg has instituted Saturday rehearsals, mornings only. Mainly to give Mike Ashcroft (Movement Director) time to choreograph the action sequences: the Gad’s Hill robbery, the attempted arrest of Falstaff by Fang and Snare, and, most challengingly, Pistol’s arrival in the (Part II) tavern scene, when the character’s manic energy unleashes chaos in the confined space of our one-room set. Snarling and slavering, producing dagger after dagger from his clothes, dropping his trousers, and swinging from a chandelier, Tony Byrne is creating a tour de force performance. Hair-raising stuff, which requires meticulous timing from us all. It’s like
learning a dance routine or a fight, you just have to do it again and again.

  Monday 10 February

  Week seven.

  Back in Part I. The tavern scene. We began to run it, and to my surprise Greg let it keep going – to get us past the hurdle, I suppose, of saying all the lines while doing all the action. But it was awful. I kept drying, could only half-remember the moves, and every detail vanished from what is a long, long scene. I was just adrift on a sea of Shakespeare with no land in sight. One of those times as an actor when you feel totally exposed and slowly crucified.

  Anyway, we then worked through it, and some good things emerged.

  Alex and I really began to click as actors. I went with his method – doing it differently every time – and it was absolutely right for the scene, which is like a prolonged improvisation. The best discovery was that Hal and Falstaff enjoy insulting one another:

  HAL: This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh –

  FALSTAFF: Away, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, bull’s pizzle, you stock fish…

  It’s one of their games, and they relish the worst that the other has to offer.

  (Note to myself: Falstaff needs to be thick-skinned. Stephen BL has observed that no other character in Shakespeare is described, physically, as much as Falstaff. But it’s always abusive. At various times, he’s called: ‘fat guts’, ‘fat fool’, ‘fat-kidneyed rascal’, ‘swollen parcel of dropsies’, ‘stuffed cloak-bag of guts’, ‘whoreson candle-mine’, ‘whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch’, ‘gross as a mountain’, ‘globe of sinful continents’. It’s best for him to laugh along with these. Otherwise he could get seriously depressed.)

  Afternoon. Wore the Falstaff body suit for the first time – a rehearsal version. They were supposed to have halved its weight, but it felt like there was none left at all. I put on an XXX-large T-shirt and sweat pants over it. There was a mirror on one wall, and the impression wasn’t great. Without the big wig that’ll I have, my head looked ridiculously small, and, as we’d already noted at the fitting, clothes make the shape seem generalised: any old padding. The other actors tried to make encouraging noises, but I wished they weren’t seeing it like this. Normally in rehearsals, we all accept that any items of costume or props are only an approximation of the real thing. But it’s somehow different with the body suit. I still feel the burden of proving I can play Falstaff. And that involves transforming myself physically. And the bloody body suit let me down today!

  I must keep calm about it. The process is going to be like the Richard III crutches. We couldn’t make them work at first – but we did in the end.

  Thursday 13 February

  Very enjoyable day. Greg had to assemble the Battle of Shrewsbury (the whole of Act Five), which became a technical exercise, with not much acting required. Which I like. Together with Terry King, Greg created a series of ‘wipes’, where a row of archers or a charge of scarecrow soldiers blur the action momentarily, allowing us to move to the next place of combat. Terry also fitted in the individual fights, which he’s been rehearsing separately.

  So the company got to see the Hal/Hotspur fight for the first time. Alex and Trevor have spent many hours practising, and it has paid off. They’re both very fit and agile, the fight is long, fast and dangerous. What we saw today was halfway between dance and martial arts. Absolutely thrilling. I said to Terry King, ‘You’ve created the best stage fight in the history of stage fights.’ Which is what the story needs. When those two characters finally confront one another, you really want the sparks to fly.

  As for Falstaff, I’ve completely abandoned the notion of him as a Vietnam vet, and rejected Harold Bloom’s emphasis on him being a soldier. There’s far more mileage in playing a fat old man who shouldn’t be anywhere near a battlefield. While people are fighting and dying all around him, he complains of the discomfort (‘I am as hot as molten lead’), disparages the value of honour (‘I’ll none of it’), and saves his skin by playing dead (‘Time to counterfeit’).

  Have to confess that our image of him at Shrewsbury is half borrowed from Welles’s Chimes at Midnight film, where the Fat Knight is seen puffing round the edges of the battle, like Pooh Bear in armour, looking for somewhere to hide.

  Friday 14 February

  Less enjoyable day. Much more nerve-wracking. We worked through the whole of Part I, not running it continuously, but scene by scene. Greg asked us to wait in another room when we weren’t in the scenes, to take away the pressure of performing in front of one another. This helped a little, but on the other hand some of the creative team were present – Stephen Brimson Lewis, Tim Mitchell, Paul Englishby – so there was an audience of sorts. There was also the production photographer taking rehearsal shots. I didn’t put on the body suit – it would not photograph well – and just wore my big winter coat to give myself some bulk.

  Anyway… some of the work was generalised, but a lot of it felt good. I was okay: drying more than I would’ve liked, but Falstaff himself became clearer. Despite everything I’ve said about it not being a Comic Role, the character I’m creating – posh and pompous, yet vulnerable – is making people laugh, and the situations themselves are undeniably funny. As is Falstaff’s outrageousness: his version of what happened at Gad’s Hill, his claim to having killed Hotspur. So if he’s to be a real, three-dimensional man, I’m going to have to focus more on his darker, more melancholy side. His fear of damnation is surprising – for such a pagan creature – but it’s certainly there, a deep-seated thing, probably rooted in childhood. And his fear of ageing and mortality – that surfaces more in Part II, but I must thread some of it through Part I as well.

  But all in all, it was another of those growth-surge moments, when you feel a performance taking shape, feel it starting to work.

  At the end, we all sat in a circle, in the fireside glow of that room, with blue evening light in the windows, and discussed the day. Greg said, ‘It’s an extraordinary play. It’s like a classy variety show, with all these different acts, so different – Falstaff’s world, Hotspur’s world, the King’s world – and we relish them all, and they keep coming back. Extraordinary!’

  As we broke for the weekend, I noticed that several members of the cast had popped out to buy flowers and were taking them home. It’s Valentine’s Day. Greg and I had left cards on one another’s desks this morning, both signed ‘Anonymous’.

  Monday 17 February

  Week eight.

  Worked on Part II (aiming for a stagger-through next week). It was strangely unfamiliar. That keeps happening, with both plays. You go back to one or the other, and it’s like you’re just starting again. Which is unnerving at this stage of rehearsals, when, in normal circumstances, everything would be feeling more and more secure, comfortable, second nature. Oh, I wish we had more time…!

  Evening. To Buckingham Palace. For a celebration of RADA. Founded by Sir Herbert Beerbom Tree in 1904. With the Queen as Patron since 1952.

  We went by taxi, with an official sticker in the window, which allowed us to join the queue of cars outside the gates. The security checks took for ever, and then we were finally driven into the courtyard and the front entrance.

  This was a peculiar occasion for me. When I arrived in London in 1968, I auditioned for the top drama schools, and was turned down, first by Central – with that little run up their steps, and the run back down, empty-handed – and then, more harshly, by RADA. Their letter said: Not only have you failed this audition, and not only are we unable to contemplate auditioning you again, but we strongly urge you to seek a different career.

  I told this to everybody I met this evening – ‘I was a RADA reject’ – until one of them, Mike Leigh, said to me cheerfully, ‘Tony, will you shut up about that. Nobody gives a shit.’

  (He was quite right. The only person who did give a shit – the shocked nineteen-year-old from South Africa – no longer existed, and nor did his saviour, his mother,
who said they were wrong.)

  So then I gave myself over to the evening, which boasted an impressive array of British theatre talent: playwrights like Stoppard, Hare, Hampton, and my cousin Ronnie H, directors like Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands, actors like Alan Rickman, Richard Wilson, Peter Bowles, Tom Courtenay, and some that were surprising RADA graduates – Roger Moore, Joan Collins, and Angela Lansbury.

  Before the event itself, we were invited to greet the Queen. I was pleased to discover that her special handshake was undiminished since the time of my knighthood in 2000. On that occasion, when we were being briefed beforehand by the Master of the Household, one of us asked how we’d know when our time with Her Majesty was over, and he answered enigmatically, ‘Oh, you’ll know.’ It turned out that after the sword-dubbing and a little chat, she extended her hand, you took it, and she gave you a polite but firm shove to the side. As tonight.

  We gathered in the Throne Room, on the rows of seats set out there. Then she entered. It was extraordinary how one little old lady could silence several hundred noisy theatricals.