Table Of ContentYEAR OF THE KING
For my parents and Jim
Antony Sher
YEAR OF THE KING
An Actor's Diary
and Sketchbook
Contents
Introduction April 2004 page 7
i Barbican August-December 198; page 13
2 South Africa December 1983 page 53
3 Acton Hilton, Canary Wharf and Gravshott Hall January-April 1984 page 81
4 Stratford-upon-Avon .April--August 1984 page 155
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
Richard III, v. iii
Introduction
Friday 9.9pril2004
Last Saturday night saw the final performance of Othello at the RSC's Swan
Theatre in Stratford, prior to its Japanese tour and London run. To mark the
occasion, my dresser Keith Lovell gave me a farewell gift: a small framed
photograph. I stared at it in astonishment. It showed me twenty years earlier,
backstage at the main house, in the middle of a performance of Richard III. It
must've been taken just before or after the Coronation sequence which we
invented for our production, since I am wearing the vast red silk robe with the
special clasp that allowed us to reveal Richard's naked deformed back during
the annointing ritual. Mal Storry, who played Buckingham, is posing for the
camera behind me, and to one side is my then dresser, the foul-mouthed, good-
hearted Black Mac. Both Mal and Mac look rather deadpan, while I have a
strange sideways smile on my face.
What strikes me first is not how young I look - though this is fairly
alarming - but how relaxed. For the journey towards Richard III, told in the
pages of this book, was a difficult one, full of anxiety, self-doubt and
struggle. Back in 1984 it felt like my whole life depended on the attempt to
conquer this one great role. Yet the photo shows someone just larking about
in the wings. It looks like just another show, just another part.
And here I am now, in 2004, still working for the RSC - my love for the
company undimmed - and indeed playing another of Shakespeare's villains,
lago, a man so thoroughly disturbed and disturbing that he makes Richard III
look like the good guy. So what's changed? Everything. Twenty years might
seem like a long time, but it doesn't feel long enough for some of the
differences between the world I was describing in Year of ' the King and the
world now.
Most extraordinary is what's happened to my birthplace, South Africa. At
the time of writing the book, the system of apartheid seemed immovable, and
its brutalities knew no bounds. And yet now, in this very month of this very
year, South Africa is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its first democratic
elections. Democratic elections? In South Africa? Ask the thirty-five-year-old
in the photograph and he'd have told you it was impossible, at least not
without the streets running with blood. Yet that didn't happen either. Instead a
miracle did. A miracle that began with one remarkable man walking out of
prison to freedom.
On a personal front, much has happened too: as a gay man I've come out
publicly (in this book I'm afraid I'm still very coy about my relationship with
my then partner, Jim Hooper), and my father has died, my funny, difficult
Dad, and I've been knighted, and I was in a clinic for cocaine dependency,
and ... well, if the reader is interested, they could look at Beside Myself, my
autobiography. Year of the King was my first book, but I've since published
seven more, as well as a stage play, I.D. Writing is now a serious rival to
acting in my professional affections, and I'd be hard pressed to say which
occupies the place of first love.
Re-reading Year of the King I was surprised by my obsession with Olivier's
Richard III. At the time I genuinely thought there was such a thing as a
definitive performance of a Shakespeare role or play. Yet since playing the
role myself, I've seen two other Richard Ills that are certainly as good as
anyone might hope for: Ian McKellen's chillingly sour Blackshirt at the
National, and Simon Russell Beale's glorious poisoned toad at the RSC. I now
believe that a significant part of Shakespeare's genius, and one of the reasons
why his work has lasted four hundred years, is that he constantly yields
himself to re-interpretation. God knows what he himself would make of our
endless and busy explorations of how to stage his plays. An all-female Shrew
or an all-Yorkshire Antony and Cleopatra, a circus Dream, the roles of Henry
V and Henry VI played by black actors, a Hamlet who vomits up his father's
Ghost, or indeed a Richard III on crutches ... would he be dismayed by these
portrayals? I hope not.
For me another big difference between 1984 and 2004, and one which is
vital to record here, lies in my approach to speaking Shakespeare's language.
There's a very significant diary entry on page 228 of Year of the King, dated
Sunday 10 June, the weekend before we opened the show: `Time to stop and
think, which I don't really want to do. Refuge in the Gielgud hook, The .-lges
of Gu'Igud, only to come across John Mortimer's lament on modern verse-
speaking. I snap it shut as if killing a bug.' The truth of the matter is that I was
terrified of the verse, ashamed of my inexperience with it, and nursing a
secret fear that I was trespassing anyway. Wasn't classical theatre the territory
of handsome, rich-voiced British giants like Gielgud and Olivier, and out of
bounds for little Cape Town nebbishes like me'
I now feel bold enough to answer that question with a resounding no.
Shakespeare belongs to us all.
Richard III was my first attempt at one of the great roles, and lago is my
latest. In between there's been Macbeth, I,eontes, Titus and Shylock, as well
as several other classical parts, like the eponymous heroes of Tamburlaine the
Great and The Ilalcontent, Caesar in The Roman Actor, Vindice in The
Revenger's Tragedy. In fact, I believe it's the experience of playing
Shakespeare's contemporaries that has made the speaking of Shakespeare
himself easier for me. The other writers don't have Shakespeare's gift with the
verse - despite all their strengths they don't have, let's face it, his genius - and
so they are much harder to speak. After you've battled with, say, the
monotonous thump of Marlowe's mighty lines or Tourneur's awkward,
twisting mouthfuls of words, you come back to Shakespeare with such relief,
such joy. Ile's done all the work for you. All you have to do is breathe it in
and speak it out; just let it live in the air. This is, of course, easier said than
done. But only by doing it, by practising the skills, will you eventually learn
to master them. In the meantime the problem remains, and you can read about
it in this book. I think it's only right for me to confess here that the search for
a spectacular physical shape for Richard was partly to compensate for my
feeling of inadequacy with his language. You could say there was something
symbolic about the eventual use of crutches.
These days I believe that performing Shakespeare begins and ends with the
speaking of the verse, and no amount of physical bravura can make up for it.
The brains of his great characters are more interesting than their bodies, and
their brains are revealed in their manner of talking. Sometimes I sense there's
a public conception that all of his creations talk the same way, and that the
Collected itiorks simply represent a great generalised wash of Shakespeare-
speak. Far from it. I.contes's neurotic, fractured utterances, Macbeth's
dangerously measured tone, lago's sick sex-fuelled images, and the sheer
energy and wit of Richard's speeches: these are all very different from one
another. And it's only by observing the individual ways these men express
their thoughts that you can really get to their hearts.
My conversion to this new approach has been hugely helped by the most
important change in my life between 1984 and 2004, and that is the
relationship - seventeen-years-old next month - with my partner, the director
Greg Doran. Just recently, Greg has been enjoying a terrific run of success
with the RSC, conceiving and producing the Jacobethan Season (for which he
won the 2003 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement), the double of
The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed, All's Well with Judi Dench,
and now Othello - and the press has repeatedly hailed him as one of the best
Shakespeare directors in the country. Quite apart from all the other riches of
our partnership, I feel I've been remarkably lucky to share my life with
someone who knows and loves Shakespeare quite like he does, and who can
communicate this passion with such vitality.
The Swan Theatre didn't even exist in 1984 - it was still our rehearsal room
then, the Conference Hall often mentioned in this book - but it is now the best
auditorium I know, both as performer and audience member. It creates the
illusion, essential for a good classical space, of functioning like a camera:
switching from close-up to wide shot, from intimate to epic. It's where I've
done all my recent work with the RSC, and I always feel intense excitement
when I arrive there to open a new show, and then intense sadness when it
closes. So at last Saturday night's performance of Othello I was already rather
emotional when Keith suddenly presented me with the photograph of
backstage life during Richard III.
Looking at it, I remembered that for all the struggle and doubt of the
journey, and for all my inadequacy at verse-speaking, the role of the `bottled
spider' turned out so well for me that it's been quite a hard act to follow. (Who
was it that said, Be careful of getting what you want'?) I also remembered that
one of the other men with me in the photo, Black Mac, is no longer with us -
he died in 2001 - and I miss him. As I hope this hook reveals, he was a
tremendous, larger-than-life character: originally from the North-East,
working both as an army sergeant and a theatre dresser, rude, funny, kind,
aggressive, full of contradictions, the sort of character Shakespeare would've
loved. I like it when, in the diary entry dated 18 June, the day before our
