My Life in Pieces (60 page)

To try to create such a Falstaff was perhaps a little beyond my capacities
at the time. Certainly it was not the way the critics wished to think of him,
and they unanimously rejected my performance. They did so all over again
when I tried to develop it a bit further in
Merry Wives: the Musical
at
Stratford-upon-Avon a few years later. They had all collectively fallen in
love with Robert Stephens’s famous performance from the late 1990s:
expansive but frail, touching and affectionate, but lacking in grossness
and the earth. All subsequent performances will be judged by this until
someone comes along and breaks the mould, something I proved unable
to do (though I’m damned if I’m not going to have another crack at it, in
Shakespeare’s plays, unadulterated). Critics are a fact of life that, like the
existence of VAT inspectors, one can embrace intellectually, but the expe
rience of being criticised – in my case, at any rate – remains acutely
painful. I wrote this piece for the
Independent
, whose critics, as it hap
pens, have rarely been able to find a good word to say about any of my
work.

Critics. Even as I write the word, a sort of hopelessness spreads over me, an inner voice whispers: ‘
You can’t win this one
.’ At the beginning of one’s career (and in some cases, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end), one is so shocked to the core by the whole phenomenon of criticism as it is practised – the cavalier judgements, the slipshod reporting, the personal animus, the power of life and death over a show or an exhibition or a career – that one’s instinct is to fight back, to have a showdown, to scotch the lie. Letters to the editor follow, and are sometimes published; interviews are given in which the artist’s pain is expressed; in some cases, retaliatory action is attempted.

In every case, the effect is wholly counterproductive. When the critic of a Sunday paper devoted a whole paragraph of his vitriolic review of my production of
My Fair Lady
to denouncing my ‘arrogance’ and ‘lack of psychological insight’ for rearranging the order of the numbers in the score, I wrote a mild letter pointing out that the sequence was the standard sequence, exactly as written by Lerner and Loewe. The critic in question wrote one sentence by way of reply: ‘I could have cried all night.’ So I was now doubly in the wrong: making a fuss about nothing, and unable to take a joke. The critics’ response to criticism is always measured: the critic was simply expressing his opinion. To the challenge
that some degree of expertise, some understanding of the matter in hand, might be appropriate, there is always the answer that the critic is the representative of the man or woman in the street, on whose behalf he or she is sending a report. This is particularly true of drama critics, for whom there appears to be no qualification whatever. It is generally assumed that music critics have some training in music, some capacity to perform it or analyse it technically, but this is not the case with drama critics, most of whom have neither acted, nor directed nor even so much as attended a rehearsal. Happy
métier
! – in which you may say anything you like with absolute impunity. Pontius Pilate is their patron saint;
quod scripsi scripsi
their motto: what I have written, I have written.

Does it matter? Is it not all part of the rough and tumble of what will always – we hope – be a controversial business? And was it not ever thus? Well, no, actually, it was once different, and the difference is the key to the changes that have overcome all the performing arts in this century. In a world in which audiences have lost all contact with the performance or creation of art themselves, they depend greatly on expert opinion – but the more this has become the case, the less expert the reviews and the more purely opinionated. Criticism has become the performing flea of journalism, an outlet for the prejudices of the critic, expressed in verbal cadenzas designed only to parade his or her coruscating brilliance; the work under review is the merest occasion for this exercise. This is not to say that the judgement is necessarily wrong: for the most part critics are intelligent, often highly committed people. But the substance of their reviews is rarely concerned with the specifics of the performance or production, and largely filled with general adjectival elaborations – superb, exquisite, heavy-handed, dull – of the simple proposition ‘I liked it’ or ‘I loathed it.’

The result is that there is no longer any record of performance. Just as the art of theatrical portraiture – with the charming and very useful exception of William Hewison’s cartoons in
The Times
– has died, the art of verbal reporting has disappeared. Theatre and dance remain ephemeral arts; the tradition can only be passed on by direct accounts, written or oral. I don’t simply want to know whether Ian McKellen was good or bad as Dr Stockmann; I want to know what he did, how he attacked the part, what physical life he gave to it, how he stretched his own resources, what new dimension he brought to our understanding of the role. It is here, too, that the other crucial contribution of criticism is
failing: the maintenance of standards. Hyperbolic reviewing, in which everything is either heaven or hell, has helped to create a great confusion both within the profession and in the public: things that are quite ordinary are acclaimed as great; things that are flawed but fascinating are denounced as heinously bad. The theatre will in the end only ever be as good as its audience, and the critical discourse is central to what the audience brings with it to the performance. The art of theatre-going needs to be rediscovered, and a new criticism must be an essential element of that rediscovery.

Bill Hewison is of course now long gone. The only person who still prac
tises the art of theatrical portraiture, superbly, is Antony Sher. If anyone
wants to know what Ian McKellen’s Iago or Edgar or my Pozzo was really
like, then they would learn as much from one of his paintings as from all
the critics put together. I reviewed Tony’s first book,
Year of the King
, in
the
Sunday Times
in 1985.

Again and again in recent years Tony Sher has created astonishing and unforgettable images on stage and screen. Last year at Stratford, he created the most astonishing and the most unforgettable image of all: the paraplegic Plantagenet: Crookback on crutches. In so doing, he at last revoked the
droit du seigneur
over the role established forty years ago by the greatest actor–image-maker of the century, Laurence Olivier.
Year of
the King
tells how he did it, providing at the same time a rich account of the temperament of the bravura actor – of which species he is the supreme example in his generation.

What is it, bravura acting? The unkind definition is: acting which looks like acting. A more generous, and more accurate, definition is: acting in which every aspect of the role is made physical, is externalised and crystallised and indicated by means of sensuous impact. The excitement of the performance – excitement is above all the aim of a bravura performer – is experienced through the audience’s nervous system. Thus to speak of ‘unforgettable images’ is to touch on the essence of bravura. Anyone who thinks this is easily achieved, is a form of showing-off, or egomania, has only to read Tony Sher’s book to be disabused. It is hard, hard labour, brain-, body-, and soul-busting work, requiring the mental application of
a policeman tracking a criminal, the physical fitness of an athlete competing in the decathlon and the competitive instincts of a presidential candidate. It is an inherently ambitious undertaking – but ambition at its best, for the art, for the performance. Sher reveals himself to be both competitive and ambitious, haunted by other people’s achievements and the prospect of failure; but he is ambitious and competitive for his
per
formance
, in the way a mother might be (his mother was!) for her child.

This book, his journal, takes us from the moment when his Richard was a mere misty glimmer in Trevor Nunn’s eye to its triumphant birth and acclaim by world. He details his growing obsession – how the thought of playing the part invades his dreams and his waking moments alike; how valiantly he tries not to contemplate it, not to discuss it, not to read it even until it’s absolutely certain – but his lust for the part overmasters him. His mind, and even more remarkably, his sketch pad, swarm with monstrous shapes, he can’t keep his hands off anything in print which might relate to the object of his desire. It’s hopeless; he’s a goner; and before long he’s committed to the part on terms that he’s sworn he’ll never accept. Wise friends advise him: wouldn’t some nice quiet role, full of inner confusion and unfathomable text be better for him? Or a film? All meaningless to him: he must have that part. Not because he has some special affinity with psychopathic regicides, but because of what he could do with the role. He goes back to his family in South Africa, a joyful and sometimes baffling journey into his past and himself. He finds that in his house ‘I’m on display everywhere. Every inch of wall is covered in photos of me or my paintings or posters of plays. It makes me rather uncomfortable; as if I’ve died and this is the shrine.’ Later, his therapist tells him, ‘You still want to come home from school with prizes saying “Look, Mommy, I’m best”… Bury all that.’

But there’s one prize he must have. Even among his folk, on the other side of the world, Richard is eating his mind out: he sees him everywhere: in the landscape, even: in a mountain shaped like a hump. Back in England, the serious work begins: research, investigation. He visits homes for the disabled, he reads medical volumes, he sees documentaries. He becomes obsessed by Dennis Nilsen and Peter Sutcliffe; he ponders the physical lives of bulls, he examines the activities of insects. Anything to achieve the shape of this man he’s going to play. All the time he’s haunted by Laurence Olivier. Well might he be, not only because of the dread memory of the lank wig, the vulpine face, the steel whip of his voice: it’s because
they’re at the same game. Bravura calls to bravura across the decades. Tony is approaching the part just as Olivier might have done. Indeed, Olivier has often remarked that the motive for his 1944 performance was Wolfit’s brilliantly silky success of the previous season. He was determined to be as different as possible; just as Tony rears away from Larry. But like Larry, he must ground his work in reality: he must find his frames of reference in the real world. No abstract nouns for him; no academic conceits.

And he must be fit. Despite a snapped Achilles tendon only a year before, he throws himself into bodybuilding; he gives up smoking; he submits himself to a hilarious health farm with a resident army psychiatrist who can be found in its swimming pool (‘How are we to avail ourselves of his service…? Presumably plunging in and swimming alongside: “Ah, morning, Captain, I have this problem with foreplay.”’). When rehearsals start he experiments with different kinds of crutches; he submits to having his spine cast in wax; he toys with different costumes. Finally the image has shape and reality and the production takes shape around it. Because, in a sense, the image has preceded the text, there is something of a struggle; but in the end there is integration, and integrity, and triumph.

This is a most wonderfully authentic account of the experience of creating a performance. It’s full of delicate and sometimes moving observation; full of striking information (you’ll know the difference between scoliosis and kyphosis by the time you’ve read it); full of the frustration and tedium and occasional tears of the unequal struggle of any of us flawed thespians with ourselves and a great role, and full of his own astonishing and unforgettable drawings. Images, images, images! What images!

Tony spectacularly hit the critical jackpot with his Richard. When he told
Michael Caine that he hadn’t read his reviews, Caine said: ‘Read them? I
thought you’d written them.’ Like all of us, he has from time to time expe
rienced the opposite.

A show of mine which provoked one of those feeding-frenzy attacks to
which critics are collectively prone was Simon Gray’s
The Holy Terror.
Simon and I had been waiting to work together in the theatre for nearly
twenty years. The night before the first night we had supper. The show
had gone very well that evening but we both had a foreboding of doom, 
amply justified. Somehow this made the total crash of the play even more
annihilating. The attack on Simon, whose
Smoking Diaries
had just been
universally acclaimed by all the literary critics, was savage; the assault on
me was only slightly less violent. I shall always particularly cherish the
review by the legendarily witty Rhoda Koenig in the
Guardian
: the sight
of me making love to Polly Fox at the end of the first act, she said, would
give her nightmares for months to come. This is a piece I wrote for the
Guardian
about playing love scenes in 2009.

It was reported the other day that an actress somewhere has walked out of a play because of some difficulty with a love scene. One has to sympathise. It’s a tricky business. Despite the massive growth in recent years of touchy-feelyness and kisses on all cheeks upon the slightest acquaintance, and notwithstanding the supposed shamelessness of actors, extreme bodily intimacy remains a delicate issue. It is not a problem addressed by drama schools. As far as I am aware, there are no courses in Advanced Osculation or Girl on Boy Body Surfing, though it’s a while since I was a student. At the Drama Centre in 1970, emotional nakedness was the order of the day, although it is true that in the world outside getting your kit off was more or less
de rigueur
, from
Hair
to
Oh! Cal
cutta!
to the Living Theatre’s
Frankenstein
. But that was Epic Nudity, nudity as the exemplification of Innocence and Vulnerability, the bare forked animal. Love scenes are a different matter.