Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition

by Antony Sher

  Henry V. Adrian has done a melancholy, anti-war production of the play. I find myself thinking heretical thoughts - longing for the heroic thrills of the Olivier film. No doubt I will pay for such hypocrisy. The production's concept works splendidly in McDiarmid's sinister Chorus. Branagh is remarkably calm, strolling around that famous stage as if born on it. As for Burgundy's sticks, I don't think they're going to pre-empt the crutches.

  Much later, leaving The Duck, I happen to pass the table where a pride of critics sit at their supper.

  Billington says, `Oh dear, you chaps always have to run the gauntlet through us chaps writing about you.'

  I say, `Yes, Pam was wondering earlier whether she should put all of you in the back tonight.'

  Coveney: `But then we'd have to run the gauntlet through you lot.'

  Tinker: `No we wouldn't. We'd leave last.'

  Thursday 29 March

  Wake hardly able to move my back at all because of yesterday's gym injury. Phone Charlotte and make an appointment. Cancel tickets for Midsummer Night's Dream tonight and leave Stratford hurriedly. I don't want the R S C to know that I've injured myself again - I was off for six months after the accident and cost them an awful lot of money.

  Charlotte diagnoses a torn ligament in my lower back.

  `You have been working very hard,' she says as I prepare to winge.

  A corset and home to rest.

  Friday 30 March

  Wearing this absurd corset, I make my way to Marylebone Medical Library to research. As I get out of the car I hear something give in my neck. This is getting silly now.

  With stomach strapped in so tight that I have to breathe in short gasps, and neck at a strange angle (as if trying to look under tables), I introduce myself to the librarian.

  `Hello. Charlotte Arnold phoned you from the Remedial Dance Clinic.'

  `Ah yes.' She looks faintly surprised. She was expecting a researcher not a patient.

  `I'm an actor about to play Richard the Third -'she needs no convincing - `do you have any books on deformities and so on?'

  She smiles politely, reaches under the table and straightens her skirt, which I appear to be trying to look up while panting, and says, `Please follow me.'

  I'm immobilised further with a ton of books and settle at a table. The library is a small basement room; outside the window you can see just a square of sunny pavement. Perfect for long hours of research, reading and sketching. My own pains are quickly forgotten as I encounter every variation of human malformation, many beyond belief. Often the photos are of babies, who look at you with wide serious eyes; the older children look rather dazed, propped up naked in front of the camera, like Auschwitz experiments.

  Many useful photos of kyphotic spines.

  It might be possible to create the optical illusion of muscle wastage by enlarging the bone joints. This is distinctive in many cases.

  The librarian brings me some medical essays on what might have been wrong with Richard, as he appears in Shakespeare's play. How extraordinary that her filing system should extend to this.

  Working from clues in the Richard and Henry VI texts, the theories are varied and some rather fanciful. One suggests his kyphosis was caused by the breech delivery ('I came into the world with my legs forward'), another that breech deliveries can cause cerebral palsy. The oddest suggests he was suffering from a rather unpleasant bowel problem called coeliac disease, which explains why he's so often referred to as `foul' and `indigested'.

  Play him smelly?

  Sunday i April

  The weather plays April Fool all day - bright sunshine, then snow, hail, sun again.

  Dinner with Dickie. The Play For Today he directed, UndertheHammer, has been on this week and has been a big success. I think it's his best work yet.

  Still battling out Richard ideas with him. He questions me carefully. `If he has crutches, why does no one mention them in the text?'

  `They do. They keep referring to him as various four-legged creatures.'

  `Hmmm.' He talks again about how my work is straying away from the kind of acting that he respects (stillness, truth, openness) towards tricksy swagger. He urges me to see Richard as crippled inside, to minimalise the deformity. `You don't have to think of yourself as just a physical actor, you know. You do have other qualities.'

  `But in the text, in Richard's first speech, he says that he is "Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up." He's not talking about flat feet, he's talking about something massive. Why should it be such a hang-up otherwise?'

  `Because our faults always seem exaggerated to ourselves.'

  `Then why do others see it? Why does Lady Anne call him a "lump of foul deformity"?'

  `Because she's not that keen on him.'

  `So everyone just invents these descriptions, but actually he looks like Robert Redford?'

  `Look, all I'm trying to say is don't let it take over. If you're going to use those bloody crutches they must become part of Richard's body in a way, so that the audience can just forget about them after the first five minutes.'

  This raises a new problem. How am I going to rehearse? How am I going to hold the script and practise on the crutches at the same time? The only solution would seem to be learning the lines before rehearsals start. This goes against everything Dickie believes in as a director: `That's terribly unfair to your fellow actors. Come sailing in with your lines learned. The cast are already going to be in awe of you as the leading actor. That way you're really going to distance yourself from them and give them no chance of catching up. Anyway, how can you possibly learn the lines before you know the first thing about your character, his relationship to the other characters, the situations of each scene? It's unthinkable!'

  Good to be put through this, although somewhat alarming.

  Monday 2 April

  MANOR HOUSE HOSPITAL, HAMPSTEAD In pursuit of her polio theory, Charlotte has arranged for me to meet Tom Wadsworth, an orthopaedic surgeon. I am met by a bustling, cheerful nurse with a thick German accent. She seems very excited by my visit. `So you are an actor. Which king is it you are to play?'

  `Richard the Third.'

  `Ach no! You are too young and healthy. Go away, you must not do it!'

  Luckily Wadsworth comes in before I can be thrown out. He is a short, round, middle aged Yorkshireman with small eyes hidden behind half glasses. At first his manner seems wearily professional but it soon becomes apparent that the man is a raging and delightful eccentric. When he talks you miss every other phrase, the Northern sounds buzzing quickly and elusively round the sunny room.

  `So you're to play a scoliotic ... this book ... illustrated by ... best medical illustrator in ... borrow it if ... back to me sometime.'

  This throws me somewhat, since I have definitely decided against the S-shaped scoliotic back with side hump. I say, `Actually, I'm thinking more along the lines of kyphosis.' I'm hoping he'll be impressed by my knowledge of the jargon, but he doesn't seem to have heard at all.

  `Scoliosis ... now what happens is, y'see ... twists round ... respiratory difficulties, of course ... this comes up ... this over here ... there you have it.' He sits back, puffing from his impersonation of a scoliotic.

  I am phased, but determined. `I see. What would happen if it were kyphosis?'

  At this point the door opens and the German nurse bustles in with his morning mail. She says something about a complaint which jolts him into life.

  He says, `Can you fetch Mister uhh ... some tea?'

  `Perhaps he would prefer coffee.'

  `I would, yes please.'

  `It's only Manor House coffee, I'm afraid,' she chuckles, `not Maxwell House.'

  `Poison,' mutters Wadsworth tearing at his letters, `Complaints! ... What's she talking about? ... strange sense of humour, stranger than mine ... mustn't be churlish ... Out-patients! Disgraceful! Naked people lying in corridors ... right, that's that.' He tosses the papers aside. `Where were we? Respirat
ory problems ... scoliosis.'

  Clearly I'm not going to get him on to the subject of kyphosis, so I try a different tack. `Actually, it's terribly useful what you told me, but I was hoping to ask you about polio.'

  `Poliomyelitis?' he asks, and continues to correct me each time I use the abbreviation, to check we're talking about the same thing. I have difficulty pronouncing new words and eventually make a brave stab at it, but it comes out as `poliomuhhhs'. But this won't wash with him. `Poliomyelitis?' he asks. Firmly, as if to break down a stubborn intern.

  What he tells me about poliomyelitis is both encouraging and unhelpful. It is a virus leading to muscular paralysis which can affect any of the limbs to various degrees. It is therefore difficult for him to generalise about the symptoms and most of my questions are met with the answer, `Depends on the extent of the paralysis.' But he does confirm the floppy, outwardturning feet that Charlotte demonstrated, and talks about a shapelessness of the limbs, a lack of curvature in the muscles.

  The inconsistency of the disease allows me a wide range of possibilities.

  Wadsworth says, `Yes, give him a scoliotic back ... some poliomyelitis in a leg ... bit in the arm ... should do the trick.'

  'Uhm, probably be kyphosis, but anyway, good, yes, thank you. Are there any other side-effects to the disease?'

  `Respiratory difficulties,' he replies briskly.

  'No, I mean to polio.'

  `Poliomyelitis?'

  `Yes.'

  `Can't think of any.'

  `Eating problems?'

  'Nope.'

  `Sleeping?'

  `Nope.'

  `Sexually?'

  `Nope. Doesn't affect the groin area or the libido. Though ... depending on the extent of the paralysis ... your chap might have difficulty with positions.'

  'Positions?'

  `Positions.'

  And on this thought-provoking note he wraps up the interview.

  The cheerful German nurse ushers me out. `And where is it you are to play this terrible king?'

  'Stratford-on-Avon.'

  Her eyes go misty. `Ahh. One of the first places I visited when I came to this country long time ago. And a more beautiful place on God's earth you could not ask for.' Then, looking at me, she shakes her head and says, `Too young, too healthy, don't do it.'

  Tuesday 3 April

  sTRATFoRD Hump-fitting with the Bills A. and D.

  The Technical of Merchant is in progress on stage. We stand watching the television monitor in the Green Room. I still find it annoying that the Gobbos are hunchbacks.

  `We can hardly be accused of plagiarism,' says Bill A., `giving Richard the Third a hump!'

  We go over the road to the wardrobe building and find that Frances Roe, head of wardrobe, has laid out a grisly exhibition in the fitting-room. `This is Ian Holm's foot, this Ian Richardson's and here's Alan Howard's.' They are boots built up to look like club feet. Howard's is the most spectacular with studs and the chain used to drag the foot along. `Now over here,' she says, leading us across the room as if in a department store, `I dug out some of the humps we've used. Just to give you an idea of what you might want. This is Alan Howard's again, and here is Anton Lesser's.' These are vests with the humps built into them. `They're both side humps but we've also done two lovely big central humps for the Gobbos this season.'

  Frances hands me one of the hump-vests to try. I shrink away. The idea of building my deformity on top of another actor's seems wrong. Worse than that, it seems somehow unclean. Not the garment itself which is spotless (scene in Stratford's Sketchleys: `Just two jerkins, one doublet and the hump then?'), but the notion.

  `Isn't there some other way of doing this?' I ask.

  Bill D. to the rescue. He finds a body stocking and says, `Climb into that and we'll shove in bits of padding.'

  It's a form of body sculpture. For a couple of hours I stand there while they force armfuls of padding into the stocking. An enormous wide back, huge shoulders bulging up into the hump which rises to join almost at the top of the head. Bill D. says he's been looking at a book on the making of the film Alien and has been inspired by the shape of the creature. `Like there's no neck, just this massive energy coming up the back and going straight into the cranium.'

  By padding the hips, knees and ankle joints we twist the body. This is a crucial experiment. My theory is that it must be possible to build the deformity and not have to hold it. It's clearly going to work. The optical illusion is that both legs are permanently twisted in one direction.

  The image is complete and we look at it on the crutches. The massive top-heavy bulk and especially the thickened arms make the legs look very thin. And the enlarged joints make the muscles look wasted. The whole thing makes perfect sense - a man who has had to work hard at building up the strength in his upper body because of a weakness in the legs. Like those disabled athletes in wheelchairs. The bulk looks so heavy it seems to throw the body forward, and appears unsupportable without the crutches.

  `Now, what colour is he in?' Bill D. asks. `It's gotta be black, hasn't it? Gotta be black. Dusty black to start with, inky black later on.'

  `Is this a good moment to discuss the head?' asks Bill A. slightly cautiously. This is already a bone of contention. I offer a deal: I'll drop all ideas of facial prosthesis except for a broken nose and cauliflower ears, in exchange for not having to wear a wig. They seem pleasantly surprised. Bill D. counter-offers: no wig, but a hair-piece at the back to fill in the gap where the hump meets my head. `That way we see your own forehead going into your own hairline going into the hump. The join is thus totally invisible.'

  Now he takes polaroids to work from, pretending to be David Bailey at Richard III's wedding: `Look this way Your Highness, smile if you can; Lady Anne in a bit, down a bit, that's it luv, try and stoop down to your husband's level ...'

  We yell with laughter, a lot of it relief. Bill D.'s invention is endless: `The Mighty Hunchback. Sounds like a new hamburger chain. Or the new VW.'

  I drive back to London feeling very high. But later I have another look at the polaroid I bought back. The misshapen white body stocking and NHS crutches make me look like I've just returned from a disastrous ski-ing holiday. It's difficult to tell whether this is a good idea, or one as daft as this photograph looks.

  Thursday S April

  Bullied by Charlotte back to classes at the Body Control Studio - so much part of my recuperation after the accident. Alan Herdman's Pilates Exercises are based on the principle of all support coming from the stomach. You stretch and strain on various racks while Alan stands above you and prods steely fingers into your middle, saying `Stom-ache!' - instantly giving you just that. My favourite bit is at the end, when you put on moonboots and hang upside down for ten minutes. The spine relaxes, all the organs re-arrange themselves and you come away feeling beautifully stretched.

  Video of last night's QED programme on a travelling medical team in India's remote northern villages. A lot of footage of polio victims. Some cases are so extreme that they're reduced to moving around in various squatting positions, little wooden platforms in each hand. Would it be possible to play Richard scrunched up like this, as an alternative to the crutches? I try it. It's agony.

  Maybe Bill A. is right about extreme agility. Maybe it would be possible to develop such speed and flexibility with the crutches that they become a positive asset. It's a red herring to think of disability in terms of speed. It's more to do with a different rhythm. That's what you see when you look at someone who is disabled: they have a different rhythm.

  Saturday 7 April

  My last cigarette. Ever. I hope.

  Sunday 8 - Saturday 14 April

  GRAYSHOTT HALL HEALTH FARM, HINDHEAD, SURREY Charlotte said it sounded like something out of a James Bond movie. Not at all. A large, sedate Victorian house in vast grounds. Quiet pink corridors. People drifting along them in dressing-gowns, smiling at you in a euphoria of well-being or in the last stages of acute starvation.

&nbs
p; On arrival you have a consultation with one of the medical staff. My man utters `My, my's and `Dear oh dear's as he scans the list of injuries Charlotte has drawn up. `Well Mister Sher, you are clearly reaching an age when you're going to have to start taking things a bit easier.'

  Next, there is an introductory talk by the resident director. All the newcomers gather nervously in the drawing room. The director is a very short, very old and, no doubt, very healthy little man. His manner is that of a bank manager. Toothbrush moustache, and spectacles which magnify his eyes alarmingly.

  The men among us, we are told, are here because of the stress of business - `either earning too little or too much' - the women because `running the home isn't as enjoyable as it was before the war'.

  He now launches into his main lecture on the Body and Health. His metaphor is the automobile: we wouldn't dream of abusing our motor cars in the way that we abuse our bodies. He expands this argument under the headings of Overloading, Servicing and so on.

  A group of Israelis in front of me, who speak very little English but have managed to catch these constant references to motor cars, begin to exchange worried glances.

  Our little director concludes by listing the various medical services available and mentions that there is an army psychiatrist who swims in the pool every morning. How we are to avail ourselves of his services is left unsaid. Presumably just by plunging in and swimming alongside: `Ah, morning Captain, I have this problem with foreplay ...'

  THE JACKET POTATO The medical consultant and I had agreed that I should `eat normally' while I'm here as I haven't come to lose weight. I'm ravenous by dinner time, after fifty lengths in the pool (no paddling psychiatrists in evidence), and greedily order roast turkey while all around me pale lips pick at lettuce leaves and sip at lemon juice. My smugness turns to horror when the meal arrives. At first the plate appears to be empty and I assume the meat will arrive on a separate dish. But the next that arrives contains only a minute portion of carrots and sprouts. Puzzled, I re-examine the first dish and discover that the soft pastel design on the bottom is in fact a wafer-thin slice of turkey. This would appear to be their idea of `eating normally'.