Talking Shakespeare Kaksi (Two)

Like a potter’s wheel (Coasters, Stockings and Nativities)

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel:

I know not where I am, nor what I do.

The valiant Talbot’s words in Henry VI Part One are a potent reflection of what my mind has felt like during 2020. At times, the effects of the pandemic (on me) have produced clarity, joy and hope but more often confusion, frustration and despair (the negative emotions mostly caused by the UK government, I have to say.) Time has seemed elastic so pre-Covid times feels like two months ago and also two years ago. 

• Local walks continue on most days,
• jigsaws keep the left brain/right brain synapses twanging,
• freshly-baked mulled wine and mince pies have now been sampled and
• posh takeaways from La Rue restaurant provide a once-a-week luxury oasis, providing a time to scrub down, dress up and light candles.

Whatever it takes to cope in this strangest of times…. In the collage below there is evidence that our Advent Stockings (from Sue) have continued to yield treasures at morning coffee time. You can also see the creative endeavours of our Badby friend, Alex Thompson, honorary daughter and sister to the Allard-Johnsons, who has used some of her time at least to design beautiful coasters. These are all evidence of “clarity, joy and hope” – as is the glimpse of an ambitious Nativity scene (see collage above) constructed in a neighbour’s garden, along with child-friendly story sheets telling of those days in May or September (likely) between 4 and 6 BC (probably) when a stable in Bethlehem became the centre of the universe. The centre of my imaginative universe at the moment is re-reading, re-listening to and re-watching Shakespeare plays – it stops my thoughts whirling and helps me avoid becoming frustrated by the news bulletins. I introduced the RSC Talking Shakespeare series in an earlier post (here). PS Kaksi is Finnish for Two so the information below is my record of the second “batch” I enjoyed.

Paterson Joseph and Sir Simon Russell Beale

• Paterson Joseph almost became a chef before turning to acting. All of the interviewees were asked about their earliest introductions to the national poet and Paterson Joseph delivered a classic line that chimed with my own experience: “I didn’t come to Shakespeare – Shakespeare came to me.” I first “noticed” Joseph in 1990 as Oswald in King Lear, and suddenly realised – because of his performance – what a brilliant and significant role Oswald is. I was also lucky to see his shattering Othello (with the evillest Iago I’ve seen in Andy Serkis) at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I loved Joseph’s Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida and, most jaw-droppingly, his tormented Brutus (pitted against Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony) in Julius Caesar. He didn’t talk about his many non-Shakespearean roles (including the recent Kamal Hadley in the BBC’s Noughts and Crosses and one of my favourites, his role in Survivors; plus on stage his compelling Atahualpa in Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre) but then the point of the series is to talk about Shakespeare and I’ll never forget the Channel 4 documentary in which he directed a group of disaffected teenagers in London in a moving production of Romeo and Juliet.
• Simon Russell Beale first exploded into my theatrical knowledge in a series of Restoration plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company playing gut-wrenching comic grotesques with painful vulnerabilities. He has spoken to the RSC Summer School a couple of times and it became obvious that comedy was not his only skill. Seeing him in Ghosts and The Seagull made it clear that he was “one of the greats.” He extracted every moment of impact from his appearances as Edgar in King Lear and his Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was truly disgusting. Then as a toad-like Richard III, an extremely strange Ariel in The Tempest and (at the Donmar) a heart-breakingly buttoned-up, pinched and pained Malvolio from Twelfth Night it became clear he could tackle anything Shakespeare wrote with clarity, intelligence and heart. He triumphed at the National with Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet and surprised (inevitably) with his Cassius in Julius Caesar and Macbeth at the Almeida. I thought he was tremendous as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic but it was his Timon in Timon of Athens at the National (and broadcast to cinemas) that blew me away, reinventing the play anew as a Play for Today in these no-such-thing-as-society Thatcherite times. Of course he’s done Falstaff on TV (a more vicious one than usual) and (brilliantly) King Lear himself at the National. But his Prospero, on his return to the RSC, in a multimedia Tempest was a revelation – here was a guilty Prospero, as tormented as Ariel and Caliban, struggling to forgive himself never mind anyone else and finally breaking the audience’s hearts as he parted from the island.

Paterson Joseph in Julius Caesar, Othello, Noughts and Crosses, Royal Hunt of the Sun, Simon Russell Beale in The Tempest (as both Ariel and Prospero), The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida (with Paterson Joseph), Juliet Stevenson in Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Truly Madly Deeply, Troilus and Cressida, Antony Sher in King Lear (as both The Fool and King Lear), Falstaff and Richard III

Juliet Stevenson and Sir Antony Sher

• Juliet Stevenson confided that she peed on stage during a spear-carrier scene (alongside Ruby Wax) in her first appearance at the RSC in a production of The Tempest. She paid tribute to early mentors in her acting career (well known like Peter Brook and less well known like David Perry) – sometimes by saying or doing things that she reacted against. Her insights into language and space were marvellous to hear as she discussed in detail her approach to Isabella in Measure for Measure, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Rosalind in As You Like It. The season in which she played the latter two roles was a significant one for me as I was living in Stratford-upon-Avon during that year teaching English as a Foreign Language to groups of adults who I would accompany to the theatre so I saw those two productions a great number of times, each time spotting more and more depth and detail, especially in Stevenson’s performances. Of course in later years I got to know her screen work such as Truly, Madly, Deeply and Life Story in which she played Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
• (Sir) Antony Sher, one of the most powerful presences I’ve seen on stage in plays like Tartuffe and Tamburlaine the Great, had a plethora of breakthrough roles to discuss, not to mention aspects of his own biography (growing up a Lithuanian-Jew in South Africa, being gay and working at the Liverpool Playhouse.) His famous Richard III (on crutches with a prosthetic back), Shylock (in Merchant of Venice), Titus Andronicus (in a production which started in South Africa where audiences were unsurprised by the anarchic violence in the play which was given a contemporary political context), Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (where he researched and brilliantly portrayed the psychological condition of morbid jealousy), and the warrior-like Macbeth, in a Swan production that he and Harriet Walter infused with a palpable and terrifying sense of panic - all these performances were memorable and mesmerising. In recent years he famously portrayed Falstaff with equal doses of bonhomie and arrogant cruelty in the History sequence of Henry IV and a monumental King Lear arriving on an elevated wheely-throne.

Greg Doran Talking Shakespeare with Paterson Joseph, Simon Russell Beale, Antony Sher and Juliet Stevenson