Year of the Fat Knight

by Antony Sher

Part II goes well. Though the house isn’t quite full. (Couldn’t the RSC have made sure it was?) Do I make any mistakes with the lines? Minor maybe. Can’t really remember. Didn’t cough. Sure of that. Then finally it’s over.

  They say Lear is the Everest of acting. Well, the two halves of Falstaff make for quite a mountain range too.

  I need a party like a hole in the head, but have to attend. There’s food – thank God – I’m starving. Manage to fill a plate, but am then surrounded by people, and can’t get a morsel to my mouth.

  I’m being churlish. The compliments are worth going hungry for.

  David Edgar, twinkling wickedly: ‘The Henries are my two favourite Shakespeares. So I was sure Greg and you would fuck them up. And to my astonishment, you didn’t!’

  Adrian Noble is generous in his praise (very generous given that he did the acclaimed production with Robert Stephens), and goes on one of his wonderful riffs about the difference of tone in the two plays: ‘It’s as if in the middle of a symphony, the conductor suddenly dismisses half the orchestra, and brings in new musicians who’re going to do surprising things – Nigel Kennedy is now on violin and Keith Jarrett is on piano!’

  Mike Poulton says: ‘It’s the best I’ve seen.’

  My agent Paul Lyon-Maris says he was enthralled by the shows, and my work: ‘Who’d’ve ever thought of you playing that part?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say; ‘It was so unlikely, I had to ask if you thought I could do it.’

  Meanwhile, Greg is surrounded by the support team that have seen him through today: best friends Thelma Holt and Richard Sharples, sister Jo, and the family from Wales: Elizabeth, Will and Alice.

  At last we slip away. Emerging from the stage door, we breathe deeply. The smell of Stratford. We say it as one: ‘Good air!’

  Friday 18 April

  It’s 7 p.m. The performance is about to start. From my dressing room, there’s a fine view across the river: a sunny evening, the big green lawns, the long blue shadows of the willows, people strolling along the paths. It’s a bank holiday – Good Friday – and Stratford is packed with visitors. It’s like the whole world is at leisure, except for us in this theatre. Part I tonight, both parts tomorrow. But I feel peaceful, I feel good.

  We’ve had four-star reviews across the board. The show is deemed a success, as is my performance.

  Ahead, there are exciting things: the two Live-from-Stratford broadcasts, the move to our new house, and then in July a fortnight’s holiday. A holiday? Impossible. But it’s when Two Gentlemen of Verona opens and starts to share the repertoire. Until then, we’re holding it on our own, eight times a week; until then, for me it’s just Falstaff, Falstaff, Falstaff…

  Now that I’m playing it, the question is: why is the role not considered one of those which the classical actor measures himself against? Shakespeare has mapped out the career of the (male) classical actor very sumptuously: in his youth, he can play Romeo, Hamlet, Richard II, Hal/Henry V; a few years later there’s Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus, Iago, Benedick, Petruchio, Leontes, Timon; and in his mature age, Lear, Prospero, Titus, Shylock, Antony, Othello. Falstaff isn’t automatically on the list. Why not? We know that Olivier turned it down – yet think of what his powers of transformation and comic inventiveness would have brought to the part. Or Gielgud – think of his wit, his melancholy dignity, the seediness he had in No Man’s Land; he would truly have been the Don Quixote of Falstaffs. Yet of that generation of actors – probably the greatest that has been – only Richardson and Wolfit played it. What a pity. And think of Scofield (I’d have paid in blood to see him do it), think of Donald Sinden, and indeed think of Ian McKellen…! Why have these actors not tackled Falstaff? It’s a mystery to me.

  Over the tannoy: ‘Henry IV company, this is your beginners’ call…’

  I must get ready. Go downstairs to the stage. Crawl into position in the dark. Have the bedding piled on top of me. Feel the truck move down. Then I’ll hear Alex do a big stretching yawn and jump off the bed. It’s my cue. I’ll throw back the quilts, and say:

  ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’

  Epilogue

  Tuesday 23 April

  A day in the life of a show:

  8.30 a.m. My cough is definitely real, and at its worst in the morning – awful, hacking spasms. Greg suggested I try antibiotics. Trouble is, they can cause stomach upsets. If peeing is tricky in a body suit, can you imagine diarrhoea? Anyway, there’s good cause to put my woes aside. This is a great and important day: Shakespeare’s birthday – his 450th! There’s a firework display after tonight’s performance. The organisers could probably wish for better weather. It’s grey, sometimes drizzly.

  10.45 a.m. Good news. Ages ago, the publisher Nick Hern got in touch, and asked if I’d like to write one of my theatre journals about playing Falstaff. I said we’d have to wait and see how the shows were received. This morning, he emailed with an unequivocal yes! I’m delighted. A new focus for my mind during the long run ahead.

  12.15 p.m. Greg pops home, suddenly appearing at the French windows. ‘Come outside,’ he says excitedly. I shake my head, indicating my throat. ‘Oh, just for a moment!’ he insists. I step onto the lawn. The bells of Trinity Church are pealing away. ‘They started at eleven, and will go on till three,’ he says, his face alight; ‘for Shakespeare!’ It’s called a Stedman Peal apparently, and is reserved for only the most special occasions, like royal weddings. We picture those bell-ringers we saw in November – most of them, ladies and gents of a certain age – and smile at the thought of them engaged in this Herculean task. Probably makes our matinee days seem easy.

  4.45 p.m. Arriving at the stage door, I find a card from my grandnephew and theatre-nut Josh. (He’s over from South Africa with his family – Randall’s daughter Heidi and her husband Ed – and saw Part I a couple of days ago.) In neat, carefully schooled handwriting he says: ‘As I arrived at the theatre the adrenalin kicked in as I saw, on this momentous building, a sign that said RSC!’ He calls the show ‘phenomenal’, says to me, ‘I loved the way you played your character’, and thanks us both for letting him see ‘a Shakespeare show at the RSC!’ It’s very touching. If we could have this effect on all twelve-year-olds…

  7.15 p.m. The show. Part I again. There’s an unmistakable feeling of celebration in tonight’s audience. To do with Shakespeare’s birthday primarily, but the warmth extending to us, and our work. (Even my cough was better – no emergency situations at all.)

  10.20 p.m. As the curtain call finishes, Greg bounds onstage, and invites the audience to come outside with us for the fireworks. I race to my dressing room. Rachel takes off the wig as quickly as possible, and my dresser Rafiena helps me out of the costume and body suit, and then, leaving on most of my make-up, I jump into my civvies and go out into the night. I don’t want to miss the next bit. An extraordinary sight greets me: hundreds of people standing behind barriers, gazing up at the theatre expectantly. It’s like the end of Close Encounters. Something miraculous is about to happen. And indeed, as a little divine sign, the drizzle that had fallen all day is no more; the heavens are clear. I find Greg in one of the control tents. There are squads of health and safety people, security people, fire officers. Greg goes onto a podium on the lawn, and, speaking into a mic, asks the crowd to bellow, ‘Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!’ The RSC band strikes up with alarum calls – trumpets and drums – familiar from a thousand productions here, and then someone, somewhere, starts pressing buttons. The first fireworks are disappointing, half out of view, behind the building. I bite my lip: oh no, don’t let this be feeble. But then bigger and better explosions of colour begin to light up the sky above the roof – in high-leaping sprays of gold, silver, blue and red – and in front of the theatre a huge wrought-iron portrait of Shakespeare slowly takes shape in flames, a fire drawing, while behind it an arc of tumbling white sparks gushes down the building like a waterfall. Meanwhile the RSC band has been supplanted by a soundtrack of music: now Prokofiev�
�s Romeo and Juliet, now Cole Porter’s Brush Up Your Shakespeare, now Walton’s score from Olivier’s Henry V film. I turn to Greg. We’re both grinning, both in tears. The feeling is of wonder, total wonder. Fireworks find the child in us all. Music stirs the adult. Together, the mixture is intoxicating. The crowd cheers again and again. Shakespeare’s giant face is fully alight now – how pagan, we’re burning our god! – yet his expression remains as still and unreadable as ever. Though I like to think that in the church down the road, his bones are tapping along to the tunes.

  11 p.m. Walking home to Avonside, I feel dazed. How wonderful to be here, in this town, on this particular night. I have just played one of Drama’s classic roles in a production which Greg directed, in the theatre that he runs, and then we joined all those people to pay homage to the playwright who made it all possible, the local boy made good. It’s one of those moments when I realise I’ve been sleepwalking through my job, and then suddenly wake up, and see it for what it truly is, and it’s completely bloody amazing. Sartre said that there’s a God-shaped hole in all of us. Greg fills his with Shakespeare; the other day he said, laughing, ‘I’m not the director of a company, I’m the priest of a religion!’ And me? I have Falstaff inside me now – I can say it confidently at last – and that great, greedy, glorious bastard leaves no room for anything else at all.

  Praise for Antony Sher’s Falstaff

  ‘A lust for wine, women and mischief are the hallmarks of Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters. All these outsize appetites shine through Antony Sher’s marvellous performance… But more than anything, it is Falstaff’s relish for language – his unstemmed and unstemmable gift for elaborate prevarication, for colourful excoriation, for creative ingratiation – that Mr Sher brings to buoyant life.’ New York Times

  ‘Antony Sher as the roguish fat knight and “corrupter of youth”, Falstaff, is tremendous.’ The Times

  ‘He has played Richard III, Shylock, Leontes, Macbeth and Prospero to huge acclaim. But can Sir Antony Sher, one of our most Shakespeare-steeped theatrical knights, give us a Falstaff to remember? … The answer is yes.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Antony Sher’s magnificent and exquisitely pitched Falstaff is at the heart of this beautifully detailed production.’ Financial Times

  ‘Like Robert Stephens in 1991, Sher reminds us that Falstaff is one of nature’s predators. Sher plays down the fatness to emphasise the knight’s upper-class origins. But, just as you start to warm to this Falstaff, you are reminded of his rapacity… A magnificent, magnetic performance.’ Guardian

  ‘It is Sher’s irrepressible Falstaff that will linger in the memory – a lord of misrule who’s absurd, delightful and in the end deeply sad.’ Evening Standard

  ‘Everything about his performance is superb – the delivery, the warmth, Falstaff’s arrogance and his manipulation of those around him, and that great speech on the eve of war on the perversity of honour is moving and powerful.’ Huffington Post

  Antony Sher

  Born in Cape Town, Antony Sher came to London in 1968, and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy. He is now regarded as one of Britain’s leading actors, as well as a respected author and artist. Much of his career has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he is an Honorary Associate Artist. He has played Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes, Prospero, Shylock, Iago and Falstaff, as well as the leading roles in Cyrano de Bergerac, Tamburlaine the Great, The Roman Actor, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Peter Flannery’s Singer, Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

  At the National Theatre he played the title roles in Primo (his own adaptation of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man) and Pam Gems’s Stanley. In the West End, his roles have included Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, Muhammed in Mike Leigh’s Goose-Pimples, and Gellburg in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass. He played Freud in Terry Johnson’s Hysteria at Bath’s Theatre Royal and Hampstead Theatre.

  Film and television appearances include Mrs Brown, Alive and Kicking, The History Man, Macbeth, Primo and J.G. Ballard’s Home.

  He has written four novels – Middlepost, Indoor Boy, Cheap Lives and The Feast – as well as the theatre journals, Year of the King, Woza Shakespeare! (co-written with his partner, the director Gregory Doran) and Primo Time. His autobiography Beside Myself was published in 2001. His plays include I.D. (Almeida Theatre, 2003) and The Giant (Hampstead Theatre, 2007).

  He has published a book of his paintings and drawings, Characters (1989), and held exhibitions of his work at the National Theatre, the London Jewish Cultural Centre, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and the Herbert Gallery in Coventry.

  Among numerous awards, he has won the Olivier Best Actor Award on two occasions (Richard III/Torch Song Trilogy and Stanley), the Evening Standard Best Actor Award (Richard III), the Evening Standard Peter Sellers Film Award (for Disraeli in Mrs Brown) and the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance (for Falstaff). On Broadway, he won Best Solo Performer in both the Outer Critics’ Circle and Drama Desk Awards for Primo. In 2000 he was knighted for his services to acting and writing.

  A Nick Hern Book

  Year of the Fat Knight first published in Great Britain in 2015 by Nick Hern Books Limited, The Glasshouse, 49a Goldhawk Road, London W12 8QP

  This ebook edition first published in 2015

  Copyright © 2015 Antony Sher

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 Antony Sher

  All illustrations photographed by Stewart Hemley

  Antony Sher has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover photo by Kwame Lestrade

  Designed and typeset by Nick Hern Books, London

  ISBN 978 1 78001 602 3 (ebook edition)

  ISBN 978 1 84842 461 6 (print edition)

  CAUTION This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.