Antony Sher - Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries

Antony Sher

YEAR OF
THE MAD KING

The Lear Diaries

with illustrations by the author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

For Randall

Year of the Mad King

1. The American Lear

Wednesday 27 May 2015

Hes known as the American Lear.

Willy Loman.

But are they really alike?

Im about to find out

These thoughts occur as I stand in the kitchen of our London home, wearing my dressing gown, my eyes still sleepy, my hair a tangle of thin strands its from all the Brylcreem I put into it for last nights show. Im currently in Death of a Salesman at the Nol Coward Theatre, playing Willy Loman, and he has a shiny-neat, sharply parted 1940s haircut.

Meanwhile, my hand is resting on a script from the Royal Shakespeare Companys Literary Department: King Lear.

Ive been pestering Greg (Doran; RSC Artistic Director, and my partner) to arrange for the text to be typed up into this A4 format, so that we can both mark up some suggested cuts for the production scheduled for the second half of next year. It may be a long way ahead, but Ill need to start learning the lines quite soon.

Greg was asleep when I got home from the theatre last night, and he had to drive up to Stratford early this morning, so hes left the script on the kitchen table, with a note: This is yours.

He just means, This is your copy, but it could read as, This is a part you should play, and were doing it now.

In fact, weve been talking about the play for years, as one of our Shakespeare collaborations: Titus Andronicus, The Winters Tale,Macbeth and Othello, with the surprise addition in 2014 of Henry IV Parts I and II. But its one thing to talk about doing King Lear, and another to actually touch the script on your kitchen table on a bright May morning.

I feel lucky.

Older actors queue up to play Lear like younger ones do for Hamlet, and if they want to perform these roles at the RSC or the National, its not easy to get into the queue at all.

So despite all the years no, decades that Ive spent working for the RSC, I still feel lucky that Im going to be playing Lear there. And Id never have imagined, when Greg and I first discussed the idea, that hed be running the company when we finally came to do it.

Ahead is a hectic schedule. Salesman runs till July, then Greg directs Henry V, then the company revives the Henry IVs and Richard II (starring David Tennant), and plays the whole tetralogy at the Barbican, and then we take it on tour, to China and New York.

And then we do King Lear.

If Im still standing.

Saturday 30 May

In between the matinee and evening shows of Salesman today, I went for a little stroll. Found myself heading towards the Pastoria Hotel in tiny St Martins Street, just off Leicester Square. This is where, having just arrived from my native South Africa, I spent my first ever night in the UK. It was Wednesday 17 July 1968, and my parents and I were to stay there while I auditioned for drama school.

Performing Willy Loman eight times a week is proving to be exhausting, and I was hoping that seeing the Pastoria again would wake me up to the big journey Ive made from being a teenage guest in that hotel to a leading actor in a neighbouring West End theatre. But I found the building covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. The renovation was unsightly, and didnt give me the boost I needed. And Leicester Square itself was rather intimidating, with huge crowds, a gang of chanting football fans, and bouncers outside every bar and restaurant. This was the real West End, very different to the sedate and cultured atmosphere of the Nol Coward Theatre. I scurried back to its safety.

Preparing for the evening show, sitting in front of my dressing-room mirror, I was putting fresh Brylcreem into my hair when I started thinking about Willy Loman and Lear again.

Im not sure the term the American Lear means there are profound links between the two characters it was probably just coined by actors to express the fact that the roles are, arguably, the most challenging that exist in British and American drama. Yet, now that Ive got both in my sights, I can detect some traits which they do actually share.

A surprising consonance is that although one is a nobody, a failed salesman, and the other a powerful king, they both have a similar way of imposing their will on others, especially their families. They both have something monstrous in them.

Discovering Willys monstrous side was a major breakthrough for me during rehearsals. He is so iconically a victim figure the little guy weighed down by two suitcases of merchandise he can no longer sell that my performance was becoming hushed, self-pitying and passive, which simply didnt drive the play the way it needs. I kept talking this through with Greg, who was directing, but no solution was immediately apparent.

Then I read a passage in Arthur Millers autobiography, Timebends, and Willy Loman was never to be the same again. Miller is describing one of his uncles, Manny Newman, who was a possible model for Willy. Uncle Manny was also a salesman, also had two sons (one of whom, like Biff in the play, excelled at sport, but not school studies), and also ended up committing suicide. Miller writes of Uncle Manny:

He was so absurd, so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions that he possessed my imagination. Everyone knew his solution for any hard problem was always the same change the facts.

And of Uncle Mannys home:

In that house something good was always coming up, and not just good but fantastic, transforming, triumphant. It was a house without irony, trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place, but surely would tomorrow.

This is the Loman household, and Willy is Uncle Manny: absurd, defying the laws of gravity, changing the facts, shouting with victory.

Suddenly Willy stopped being a victim. Hes a fantasist, a bully. Except that Millers masterstroke is to offset these flaws by showing us Willys place in society. Hes lost in the modern world, hes being destroyed by it. We watch this happening, step by step. As Willy goes under, and as he continues to boast and bullshit, the more it breaks our heart.

This has never happened to me before a playwright guiding me towards a character not just through the play, but a completely separate piece of writing: his autobiography.

Shakespeare does not offer the same help. Autobiography, auto-shmiography. If we know hardly anything about the Bards life, we know even less about the other people in it, people who might have inspired his characters. Imagine if there was an Uncle Jack who was the model for Falstaff, and an Uncle Lee the model for Lear

Monday 1 June

Its June but could be November. Cold, wet, windy. Ive lived in England for forty-seven years now, so why does the weather still continue to surprise and appal me?

Never mind Im holed up in my warm study, with a little stack of Lear scripts on my desk.

I want to try reading it afresh, despite the fact that I know it well. It has cropped up rather frequently during my life in this country

1968. On the first weekend after we checked into the Pastoria Hotel, my mother joined me on a special pilgrimage to a place which held mythic status for me. Stratford-upon-Avon. I was finally going to see the Royal Shakespeare Company in the flesh, and in action. We would have happily watched anything that was in their current repertoire, but the play at that Saturday matinee performance happened to be