Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

  On a more mundane level, I wore the body suit throughout, and it was bearable – as long as I sat down in-between scenes, and drank lots of water. As for the lines, I never had to ask for a prompt, and, even if I spoke garbage at times, I kept going.

  John Gielgud once said, in typically indiscreet fashion, that the good thing about playing Shakespeare is that if you forget your lines you can just make them up, since no one understands what you’re saying anyway.

  (I don’t think Greg would approve…!)

  Today was the last day in the Union Chapel rehearsal room. At the end, we all gathered on the upper level, poured some Prosecco into plastic cups and Greg proposed a toast to our stage managers. Suzi Blakey leads a crack team: Klare Roger, Daisy Gladstone and Charley Sargant. They now began a Herculean task, packing all the furniture, props and costumes into huge boxes. I thought of the hours they’ve spent in this room, arriving long before us each day and leaving long after we’ve gone. And the hours we’ve all spent together on the work, sometimes exciting and joyful, sometimes tense and frustrating. Because you put everything you’ve got into a show, at this stage you will always feel it’s going to be a hit. You will feel this even with shows that turn out to be flops. For now you are blind with good intentions, positive thinking, and hope. So it’s impossible to predict the outcome reliably. And so creativity remains a game of chance.

  Saturday 8 March

  Packing for Stratford was difficult. I’m going to be away for a long time, about seven months. Along with the task of remembering everything that I might need, there was that sadness which afflicts me whenever I make a big move, and which I try to joke about: ‘He’s here,’ I said to Greg; ‘The Wandering Jew is here again.’

  It was a beautiful day to make an important journey: soft sunshine and spring blossom coming out.

  When we reached Avonside and climbed out of the car, we both took a deep breath. The smell of woodsmoke, the river, and countryside. Greg remarked that one of his favourite lines in the plays is when Justice Shallow says of his Gloucestershire home, ‘Good air!’

  Sunday 9 March

  How splendid to be able to begin the day with a river walk again. The weather was spring-like, the Avon sparkling under a perfectly blue sky. Near the weir at Lucy’s Mill, we saw the big male swan which we call ‘the mad one’. He has a strange attraction to kayaks, mimicking their motions, turning when they do, and sometimes getting randy with them, which must be quite alarming for their occupants.

  Down the other end, we crossed at Clopton Bridge, then, instead of looping back towards home, we detoured to the famous Gower Memorial: the statues of Shakespeare and four of his characters. Greg pointed out that two of these were from the Henries: Falstaff and the one which everyone thinks is Henry V, but is in fact Hal trying on the crown. The sculptor, Lord Ronald Gower, was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s (who attended the unveiling in 1888), and also gay – he got into trouble for trying to pick up a guardsman at Buckingham Palace. Though I don’t think you’ll find that in the guidebooks to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Monday 10 March

  Week eleven. And Rehearsal Room Three.

  The Michel Saint-Denis Studio at the Courtyard Theatre. (Named after one of the most innovative directors of the last century, whom Peter Hall recruited as an artistic adviser in the early years of the RSC.) A big, square, airy space, it holds a lot of good memories for me; I rehearsed Tamburlaine, Roman Actor and Malcontent in here.

  Quite a light day. A long note session on Part II, and rehearsals of a few scenes. We’ll carry on working Part II tomorrow, and then our focus switches onto Part I full time, because we actually start teching it on Friday.

  Greg and I popped into the theatre at lunchtime, and saw the set going up. We were in the Upper Circle, and down below was an army of stage crew with hard hats and radio controls. It looked very serious. A far cry somehow from learning lines in my little rooms, or even what’s been going on in rehearsals. This was an epic image of people preparing for a world-class theatre event. It’s easy to forget the scale of it. And you have to forget it, in a way.

  Tuesday 11 March

  Rehearsal of the second tavern scene, during which the drunkenly crazed Pistol stands on the table, holding the ends of the long tablecloth, which is wrapped round Falstaff, Doll, Bardolph and the Page. Their lunging movements suggest galloping horses. Pistol misquotes a line from Tamburlaine: ‘And hollow pampered jades of Asia.’ In Marlowe’s actual play, Tamburlaine is in a chariot drawn by the kings he’s conquered, and cries, ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!’ This morning I realised that by pure chance I was in exactly the same spot in the same rehearsal room as when I did the chariot scene as Tamburlaine in 1992. Who would’ve ever thought that I would be back here twenty-two years later, now in a Shakespeare play, with one of the other characters satirising Marlowe?

  Ah, the whirligig of theatre…

  I must say that the piece of action we’ve created to end the scene feels absolutely right. Falstaff and Doll can’t bear to part, yet their words of farewell are clumsy and inadequate. As written, Falstaff and Bardolph then exit, and a moment later Bardolph calls Doll from offstage: ‘Come to my master.’ Mistress Quickly urges her, ‘O, run, Doll, run,’ and Doll exits. What’s happened? It can’t be that Falstaff has just slipped and fallen over. It has to be more significant. So we’re showing Falstaff and Bardolph outside the tavern. Suddenly Falstaff breaks down. Bardolph hurries back in to summon Doll. She runs into Falstaff’s arms and they embrace deeply. Theirs has been a love scene (albeit one of the most curious love scenes ever written), and this is a fitting end to it.

  We ran Part II. It was seven minutes shorter than last Friday’s run, and generally much better.

  I must just report – for the record – that when we got to the Shallow/Silence scene in today’s run, everyone in the room stopped whatever they were doing to watch Oliver Ford Davies give a Masterclass in Comedy Acting. I don’t know which was more joyful – Oliver’s performance or the company’s delight in it. And Jim is proving the perfect foil as Silence: a character lost in some deep, inner place. Imbued with this spirit, he joins Shallow in a section which makes you question whether the author is William Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett:

  SHALLOW: …O the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of mine old acquaintances are dead.

  SILENCE: We shall all follow, cousin.

  SHALLOW: Certain, ’tis certain, very sure, very sure: death is certain to us all, all shall die. How much a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?

  SILENCE: Truly cousin, I was not there.

  SHALLOW: Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

  SILENCE: Dead, sir.

  SHALLOW: Dead? See, see, he drew a good bow, and dead?

  And then Silence blossoms bizarrely in Act Five, Scene Three when he’s drunk and can’t stop singing. Shakespeare is renowned for his colossal portraits of mankind, like Lear, Hamlet, Falstaff, and so on – drama’s equivalent of Michelangelo’s marble giants – but with someone like Silence you also see what a superb miniaturist he is.

  Today was the last we’ll see of Part II for a fortnight (while we open Part I). It’s a mind-boggling thought.

  Thursday 12 March

  There’s fog on the river, which is beautiful, and tension in my belly, which is not. It’s the final day of rehearsals. A run of Part I this afternoon…

  The morning was taken up by technical work – not much acting required. Paul Englishby had brought the band in, and we tried some of his music cues. Including the tune which the tavern musicians, Sneak’s Noise, play during Falstaff and Doll’s scene. It had just the right bittersweet air to it. Then Paul tried a slow, strange, drumming accompaniment to the march of Falstaff’s ragged soldiers in the scarecrow-army scene, and now Nia had to stop playing Doll and become one of them. This procession has never ceased to upstage me, and this morning was no exception. Greg stopped the rehearsal:

  ‘Nia, can I
just ask – what gender are you playing?’

  ‘I’m a man, I’m a man,’ she cried desperately.

  ‘Then why are you wearing heels?’

  ‘It’s a long story – it’s my quick change – it won’t be like this on the night.’

  ‘And what’s that weapon you’re carrying?’

  ‘A butter churn.’

  ‘A butter churn?’

  ‘Yes – I’m going to churn the enemy to death. It’s the only thing that she – he – my soldier – could find on the farm to bring along.’

  ‘Right,’ said Greg with a sigh; ‘Carry on.’

  Afternoon. As we were preparing for the run, I saw a small, white-haired figure enter the room.

  ‘Oh no,’ I muttered; ‘God is watching the run.’

  Misunderstanding, Jonny Glynn said, ‘Only if you’re a believer.’

  ‘Unfortunately, in this case I am,’ I replied, watching Ciss Berry take a seat next to Greg. She has represented the spirit of the RSC ever since I joined the company thirty-two years ago. I wondered why Greg hadn’t warned me she was coming. Probably just as well. It would’ve added to my anxiety.

  In the event, the run went splendidly. Part I is a magnificent piece of machinery, with every part of it perfectly constructed and working together like a dream; it’s a Rolls-Royce of a play. All you have to do is go on the journey.

  I felt sufficiently relaxed to watch the other half of the play – the rebels’ story – and was struck by Trevor White’s Hotspur. It’s a very original reading of the role: a boy-man with a wild, gleeful appetite for danger. I’m full of admiration when I see one of Shakespeare’s great roles fresh-minted: admiration for the actor in imagining it anew, and admiration for Shakespeare in allowing such endless reinterpretation.

  Seeing Trevor’s performance helped me understand something about the different nature of the two plays. Hotspur is one of the most charismatic figures in all of Shakespeare. But he’s dead by the time of Part II, and now the rebels are led by the Archbishop of York. Keith Osborn is playing him with great fervour, turning ‘insurrection to religion’, but the character is simply no match for Hotspur. So the rebel scenes are less exciting. Which isn’t great for a sequel. And hence our struggle with it.

  Although I felt good after this afternoon’s run, I tried to avoid speaking to Ciss directly – better to get her opinion filtered through Greg. But then I saw her heading towards me on her walking stick, and bolted over to save her the effort.

  ‘That was great, darling,’ she said quietly. Ciss is the least theatrical of people, yet she does call you ‘darling’ (it just means ‘my dear’) and often describes things as ‘great’ (it just means ‘okay’).

  Unsure whether she was referring to the whole show or my performance, I floundered: ‘Good… yes… and isn’t it the most outrageous thing Shakespeare ever wrote?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Falstaff.’

  ‘Mm. But dark too.’

  ‘Yes, yes’ – hadn’t I played the dark side? – ‘That’s what I mean by outrageous.’

  She thought for a moment, then said, ‘None of you were really finding the language today – you had other things on your minds. But when you do, and when he, Falstaff, when his thoughts are moving faster, it’ll be lovely.’

  This is Ciss’s first principle: the speed and lightness of the text. I’ve always suspected that she feels acting gets in the way. Particularly character acting, where the mannerisms of a different voice might lead to a different rhythm of speech. Falstaff’s posh drawl does slow down some of his lines. It’s right for him, but maybe isn’t the ideal way of speaking Shakespeare.

  So – I don’t think I really got God’s approval today.

  But I will take her note: think faster.

  It corresponds to something I feel about my performance. It needs to be more effortless.

  Evening. Dinner in The Dirty Duck – to mark our last night of freedom. Father Alex Austin was there and came to say hello. He’s the priest at Stratford’s Catholic Church, St Gregory’s, and has a long history with the Doran family. He was a novice monk at Douai Abbey in Berkshire when Greg’s uncle, another Greg, was the Abbot, and many years later, in 2010, he conducted the funeral service for Greg’s dad. Although Greg is a lapsed Catholic (‘I never lapsed, I jumped!’ he likes to say), Father Alex has shrewdly perceived a strong strain of Catholicism in his work. And indeed Henry IV Part I begins with that Latin motet, to bolster the King’s dream of going on crusade to Jerusalem. (By chance, Paul Englishby went to the same Catholic College in Preston as Greg did.) Tonight, we told Father Alex about the new house we’ll soon be getting – it’s not far from his church. He said mischievously, ‘I’ll pop over and give it a blessing on the quiet.’

  Greg laughed. ‘Do – at this point in time all blessings are welcome!’

  5. Fat Knight – First Night

  Friday 14 March

  There’s a new countdown: thirty-three days to the opening on the 16th April, when we’ll perform both plays to the press.

  Today’s Times has a joint interview with Greg and me, alongside a piece about power couples in the arts. We’re listed as number one.

  ‘No pressure then,’ says Greg, as he shows me the article on his iPad. But I’m too preoccupied to take proper notice. I’m leaning over the bathroom sink, peering into the mirror, armed with a beard-trimmer and razor. This is an experiment which I’ve been planning for weeks, and saved for this morning. My beard, which has grown very full indeed, naturally creeps up towards my cheekbones, and this creates a kind of shadow, a flattering illusion, which makes my face look slimmer than it is. To achieve the opposite effect, I remove this hair, and take my beard-line further over towards my ears and lower down towards my chin, showing as much flesh as possible. The result is everything I hoped for. I have a much broader, bigger face – a fat face.

  I hurry to the theatre, to my dressing room, eager to continue this magic trick, this special disguise, this Jekyll-and-Hyde game. It’s the moment when the character actor’s fantasy turns into reality. There’s a new make-up product on the market called Skin Illustrator, created during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean, when they needed something that wouldn’t come off with water; they had the sea to contend with, I have sweat. The beard-whitener has a slight stiffening agent, so as I apply it, I also use it to widen my beard. The false eyebrows further widen my face. The wig widens my whole head. And with reddish colours for booze-bruising and age-puffiness, I widen my nose and my lips. It’s all about horizontal lines, everything going to either side.

  Now into the body suit, and the costume over it. The shirt has been artfully dyed by the wardrobe department, with perspiration patches outlining the moobs, and food stains on the belly. A shabby waistcoat, enormous trousers, and gouty old boots. A worn baldrick and belt helps to show off the swell of the torso and waist. And finally, the pièce de résistance: that great, long, leather, cowboy-ish coat.

  There’s a full-length mirror on the back of my dressing-room door. Falstaff stands before me. I catch my breath. I’ve never been completely sure, till now, that I could achieve this image.

  I try saying a few lines, watching myself. And now it strikes me that two different instincts have mixed together fruitfully. In rehearsals, Falstaff has been emerging as more and more posh, while in costume fittings I’ve wanted him to look as dilapidated as possible. The result: a grand tramp. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this, as an interpretation of the role, but my subconscious has, and I like the conflict that I’m now seeing in the mirror: Falstaff’s elevated sense of himself and the circumstances of his actual life. As a man, he is both a real force and a complete dreamer.

  Over the last couple of hours, there’s been a serious growth surge – the role coming together before my very eyes.

  It’s always a critical moment when you appear in your costume and make-up at the tech and everyone sees you for the first time. I know I’m on to a good thing
when Simon Ash, the Production Manager, who would never normally comment on the artistic side of things, passes me backstage and says, ‘You look great!’

  I’m happy to report that the whole cast are looking great. Stephen BL has a clever way of keeping the design Elizabethan while using other periods to illuminate some characters: the shape of Rakehell’s hat and fur-collared coat suggest a Dickensian ne’er-do-well, Bardolph’s Shrewsbury helmet reminds you of a WWI Tommy. And Mistress Quickly’s costume has a threadbare gentility which is just slightly clownish – it perfectly complements Paola’s Felliniesque performance; she’s Italian, of course, and like the characters in the Maestro’s films, her Quickly belongs both to the real world and the world of fairgrounds and sideshows. [Photo insert, page 5, Paola Dionisotti as Mistress Quickly 5]

  Wanting to see the rest of Stephen’s work, I go out front. The stalls are like Mission Control, Houston, with work consoles and screens everywhere, for the different departments: lighting, sound, music, stage management, and one for Greg. Stephen’s vast wooden set is even more ingenious than it looked on the model, and more atmospheric, with hazy shafts of light filtering through the wattle slats (Tim Mitchell and Stephen have worked together so much, they have a total symbiosis), and it blends into the auditorium itself, so that the whole theatre has become the world of the play.

  The look of it all sends a charge of excitement through the whole company. Sean Chapman says, ‘It makes you just want to give this to an audience. It makes you put all your own fear aside, and just say, “Here, have this!”’

  The long stop-start nature of a tech is hard-going for a man weighed down with a body suit. I keep needing to sit. But discover an odd problem. I can’t easily aim myself into a chair. It’s as if the human bum has its own sensory device, and mine has been foiled by all the padding.