My Life in Pieces (70 page)

At the unusually early age of thirty-nine, with Peter Brook as his director, he played
King Lear
, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest role for a man, and his hardest. Rejecting any attempt to reproduce the external details of old age, he transformed himself into the ancient king by sheer power of imagination, a terrifying and pitiable bull of a man. His voice seemed to
be made of granite, granite which cracked and splintered under the pressure of his inner dissolution. This performance, in Brook’s shockingly radical production, toured the world; it was one of the early productions of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company which established it as among the greatest theatre companies of the world, and it set the seal on Scofield’s own greatness. In rapid sequence, from the early 1960s he took on the widest variety of roles, tragic, comic, classical, modern, each transformed by his profound and fantastical imagination: embittered Athenian plutocrats, drunken Russian nobodies, gay barbers in Brixton, German petty criminals revenging themselves on authority, kidnapped diplomats, heartbroken provincials, foxy Venetian con men, mediocre and ultimately homicidal composers, pesky old New Yorkers, deranged ancient mariners, each with their characteristic and extraordinary voices.

All these, of course, for live audiences. He had his successes on film – for his Thomas More he won an Oscar – but his satisfaction was above all to be found working with an audience. The extraordinary surges of power he created in the theatre electrified not only his public but his fellow players too, particularly so because his force was so tightly harnessed. He banked down his flames, for the most part, allowing them to smoulder. But if he unleashed a thunderbolt at you, you knew all about it. He might easily have dominated his audience, but that was not what he wanted. He sought to draw them into the human life he was incarnating, to bring the character’s entire inner world on stage with him, and allow the audience to experience the man for themselves. Wherever you looked in his performances, you found layer upon layer of complexity and depth, amounting to a complete transformation. Laurence Olivier once declared that his life’s work had been to interest the public in the art of acting. Scofield’s might be said to have been the exact opposite: to make the audience forget the art of acting. Above all, he wanted them to forget about him. He said that he was very secretive about his personality: it was not for public consumption. In giving thanks for his life and work, we should be grateful that he flourished in a time when it was still possible for excellence to be admired without its sources being dismantled, dissected, raked over, torn apart.

He guarded his God-given talent like a tiger; his loyalty to it was fierce and without concession, and he was willing to give up a great deal for it. His talent was, indeed, a secret, in all senses of that word: it was the source of his success, it was private, and it was a great and abiding mystery. He
takes it with him to his grave, but he has left behind an enduringly inspiring example of what an actor who is also an artist might achieve: a body of work of such depth, breadth, imaginative and indeed visionary power that it rivals that of any great artist in any sphere. At the age of seventy-five, he took his leave of the stage he had commanded so incomparably for so many years with one of his very greatest incarnations, John Gabriel Borkman, ‘a man,’ as Scofield said, ‘frozen and trapped by the past, embracing his own obsessive drive towards an anarchical climax, proclaiming his mad preoccupation with the forces and spirits of the earth, until his brain and body simply crack under the force of his avid desire to dominate his own small kingdom.’ That was the scale on which Paul Scofield worked, that was the breadth of his canvas, addressing nothing less than the human condition, head-on.

That is what the theatre, what acting, can and should be.

My greatest debt, of course, is to the editors who commissioned most of the pieces collected here. For the last eight years, I have been under exclusive contract as a book reviewer to the
Guardian
newspaper, and my editor there, Claire Armitstead, has been a model of patience and tact. I’d also like to thank Claire Tomalin who, as Books Editor of the
Sunday Times
, gave me my first book to review, and spare a grateful thought for the late Charles Wintour, father of Anna, who, as editor of the
London Evening Standard
, commissioned my first printed pieces. Matt Applewhite and Jodi Gray of Nick Hern Books have put a sprawling and much-modified manuscript into wonderfully elegant form; my secretary Fiona Wilkins has devoted many hours to deciphering ancient and yellowing cuttings and typing them up. That fine actress Gwendoline Christie gave up a good deal of her spare time to do the initial research, which greatly helped to shape the book. Finally, I must thank Nick Hern – AGAIN. This book was his idea, as was my very first book; Simon Callow, author, was, in fact, more or less his invention. His forbearance over what has been, even by my standards, an uncommonly protracted gestation period, has been admirable, as he read and reread literally hundreds of pieces of sharply varying merit. His advice and encouragement have been indispensible, to say nothing of his unerring identification of error or clumsiness. Nearly thirty years of warm friendship and close professional collaboration lie behind this book, which is, among other things, a monument to our unfailingly happy working partnership.