Covering Shakespeare

An Actor's Saga of Near Misses and Dogged Endurance

David Weston

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783195633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

David Weston has spent a lifetime acting in Shakespeare's plays, and has been directed by the likes of Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn and Michael Croft. Chosen as Ian McKellen's understudy in the RSC's King Lear, David toured the world and recorded his experiences in his diary, which became the award-winning Covering McKellen: An Understudy's Tale, called 'Salty, evocative and informative' by the Daily Mail. It went on to win the prestigious S.T.R. Theatre Book of the Year Prize for 2011. In Covering Shakespeare Weston goes even further, tracing his sixty-two year association with the Bard. He has appeared in twenty-nine of the thirty-seven plays, many several times, and has worked with all the major companies to the outmost limits of the Fringe, from Hollywood to Hong Kong, with the great, the mediocre and the forgotten. He has stories and reminiscences about them all, as well as advice for young actors written in his inimitable style. The book also contains a synopsis of each play and table outlining the total number of lines per character in each of Shakespeare's plays, rediscovered from an 1889 edition of Evenings with Shakespeare: A Handbook to the Study of His Works. Shortlisted for the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography 2015

Henry IV Part One

‘The Falstaffiad’
Professor Harold Bloom (1930 –)

Tattle: Lord Hunsdon, the patron of Shakespeare’s company, and incidentally the father of an illegitimate child with the aforementioned Aemilia Bassano, died in 1596 and was succeeded as Lord Chamberlain by Lord Cobham, a strict Protestant, who strongly disapproved of theatres, actors and playwrights. He was descended from Sir John Oldcastle, a follower of John Wycliffe, who fell out with Henry V and suffered a martyr’s death. Shakespeare originally called his fat disreputable knight Oldcastle – a trace survives in Act One Scene Two when Hal addresses Sir John as ‘my old lad of the castle’. Was Shakespeare deliberately lampooning Cobham by depicting his ancestor as a whore-mongering thief? One thing that no commentator has ever mentioned, as far as I know, is that Shakespeare has Oldcastle/Falstaff commit his robbery, the only real crime we see him do, on Gadshill, a few miles away from Lord Cobham’s ancestral home, Cooling Castle. That was really rubbing salt into the wound. After a few performances Cobham made his displeasure vehemently known and the name was changed to Falstaff, again taken from an historical figure, Sir John Fastolfe, who fought ignominiously in the loss of France. Shakespeare would in all likelihood have spoken the Epilogue at the end of Part Two, and would have thus made his forced apology on stage: ‘Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man.’ But Shakespeare and his fellows did not have to endure Cobham long. He died the following year and the more benign George Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s son, was appointed Lord Chamberlain in his place.

Will Kempe was probably the original Falstaff, although the character is on a different planet from Bottom and Dogberry, roles that Kempe definitely played. Although a miserable few find the fat old knight an unfunny and unpleasant old fart, the renowned American scholar, Harold Bloom, ranks Falstaff alongside Hamlet, Rosalind and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s most profound creations, claiming he speaks the best and most vital prose in the English language. Others see him as the quintessential Englishman, with many of our virtues and our faults. John Fraser, once the handsomest juvenile in Britain, played the old fat man throughout Africa and Asia; time and again he was told by the natives that he was just like some Englishman they knew.

Strangely enough there have been very few memorable Falstaffs. Sir Ralph Richardson is generally accepted as the ‘best Falstaff there ever was,’ but alas there is no record apart from Rembrandt-like photographs. Richardson is said to have ignored the low comedy aspects of the role – the puns, the belches, and galumphing horseplay, beloved of Elizabethan groundlings, but which are often perplexing to refined modern audiences (the present-day frequenters of the Globe excepted). He played him with an absolute presence of mind, triumphing over every challenge until his rejection. Harold Bloom, who does seem to go in for hyperbole, considered Sir Ralph’s bounding up on ‘Embalmed!’ after his supposed death at the Battle of Shrewsbury, was the most joyous representation of secular resurrection ever staged. Richardson himself observed: ‘Not until you play Falstaff do you realize how small the mere actor is… It’s like trying to play a huge organ with too vast a keyboard to reach the steps at the top and down at the bottom at one and the same time.’

Orson Welles saw Falstaff as symbolising ‘Merry England where the hay smelt better and the weather was always spring-like and the daffodils blew in the gentle breezes.’ He somewhat perversely went on to make a dark, melancholy film with an international cast in the middle of a Spanish winter. Welles looks every inch, or ounce, Falstaff; but there is something missing. His mind seems to be wandering elsewhere – perhaps he was preoccupied with his usual financial problems with finishing the picture. On stage I have seen fine actors such as Brewster Mason, Michael Gambon and Robert Stephens sweating and puffing away, but have yet to find the true old rascal. Roger Allam brought out all the low comedy to the delight of the groundlings at the Globe, but missed out on the pathos. Simon Russell Beale gave a perversely unfunny reading recently on television. Queen Elizabeth would never have requested another play about the mawkish character Beale presented.

Combined these two plays have to be my favourites. All England, not only Merry – the stews and the taverns as Shakespeare knew them – are crammed within them. They are bursting with energy, humour, poetry and passion. Kenneth Tynan considered the Shallow scenes to be the most naturalistic in all Shakespeare. It is hard to understand why there have been so few outstanding productions. The best I’ve seen was at the Old Vic in the mid-1950s. The vigour and comic life of the Boar’s Head, the elegiac magic of Justice Shallow’s orchard and the heartbreak of Falstaff’s rejection, are still etched firmly in my mind. And what a cast: Robert Hardy as Hal, Eric Porter as King, Paul Rogers as good a Falstaff as I’ve seen, Paul Daneman giving the performance of his life as Shallow, and John Neville, a rip-roaring cockney Pistol: ‘’ave we not Irene ’ere?’

Memories: Ian Mullins ran the Everyman at Cheltenham, a beautiful theatre designed by the great Frank Matcham, as a very successful fortnightly rep, putting on a mix of plays that would have been a worthy repertoire for the National. In the autumn of 1965 he offered me Prince Hal together with a line of such tempting roles that, even though there were television parts in the offing, I could not refuse. It was to be my only experience of what being a member of a repertory company in a smallish town used to be like. The theatre and the actors were truly part of the community, albeit a middle-class one. It was Cheltenham after all. There was a colonel, ex-Indian Army, a bachelor, who never failed to invite the prettier actresses to a curry supper at his grand house, every second Thursday after he had seen the play. They told me he behaved impeccably throughout the entire evening. There were the well-bred ladies who took coffee in the theatre bar each morning, eager to give comments, usually appreciative, on one’s performance. The girls of the famous Ladies’ College were regular patrons and had wild crushes on the younger male members of the company. Billets-doux and little gifts were always to be found at the stage door. I did particularly well as some had recently seen me as Dick Turpin in my Disney film. The actors and actresses were known and welcomed in nearly every shop or pub in town. And Cheltenham was still a lovely town then, before it was ruined by traffic schemes. The Polygon was filled with elegant shops, Cavendish House was a miniature Harrods, and we downed schooners of sherry whilst we ate our steaks at the new and very trendy Berni Inn. My theatrical lodgings consisted of a large comfortable room in a fine Regency house overlooking an elegant square. The Cotswold Hills lay ten minutes’ drive away, where I walked Kosher, my Dalmatian dog, and learned my lines by declaiming them to the wind. Life was good on £30 a week.

But there were sad things too. One was an old actor, named Frank, who played fathers, vicars and other distinguished types. He was gay but fearful of revealing it in case it prevented him getting heterosexual parts. It was still not fashionable or completely legal to admit to being gay in the swinging sixties. He had spent his entire career in rep, going from one town to another, never having fixed roots or a permanent partner. He was also suffering from the old actor’s nightmare – he was finding it more and more difficult to remember his lines. He was cast as Glendower and his hands were shaking in rehearsals as he struggled to stammer out the Welsh. He never got it right. I was very relieved not to be in that scene. It was pitiful hearing him take prompt after prompt throughout the run; it was doubly sad in that he knew his time was up. He couldn’t cram any more lines into his poor old brain. I was on tour a few years later and came across him in a tatty boarding house in Birmingham, where he had become a permanent resident. His hands were shaking more than ever as he ate his lonely, greasy breakfast. I said hello but he didn’t remember me.

Prince Hal came towards the end of the season sandwiched between Dick Dudgeon in The Devil’s Disciple and Lophakin in The Cherry Orchard. Ian Mullins, a conscientious director, had been an actor in Anthony Quayle’s production at Stratford in 1951. He gave me as much of Richard Burton’s performance and moves as he could remember. (Many of the traditions and much of the business in playing Shakespeare have been passed down from actor to actor through the centuries, all the way back to Burbage.) We had less than ten days to rehearse, whilst I played Dick Dudgeon at night. There was no time for discussion or finesse: all I could do was learn the lines and try to speak them with clarity and pace. Hal is a difficult part; he is outshone by Hotspur’s valour and Falstaff’s wit. The jokes are for the most part obscure and difficult to put across. He is an unpleasant prig, playing cruel practical jokes, watching and waiting for his moment. The role is only fulfilled when both parts are played together with Henry V. Richard Burton made his name when he did the trilogy at Stratford in 1951; Ian Holm followed him in 1964; Robert Hardy was memorable on television. I can’t really think of any other great Prince Hals. It wasn’t really my part, I’d wanted to play Hotspur, but that was taken by a very experienced repertory actor, who considered himself to be the leading man. He modelled his performance on Olivier, who is supposed to have been the first to have played Hotspur with a stutter. Olivier justified this because Lady Percy describes her husband as ‘speaking thick’. She probably meant he spoke with a northern twang, but as the poor chap dies trying to say ‘worms’, Olivier decided that Hotspur had trouble with his double-u’s. This can put ten minutes on the running time and my Hotspur eked out every last second. Each night he got slower and slower, especially in the final scene, when he became extremely loath to die and leave the stage to me. Indeed the night his mother came he inexplicably parried my final thrust at his vitals and we had to go through the complete fight again. He eventually emigrated to South Africa and pursued his art there. The young Antony Sher witnessed one of his performances. He was reputedly still over-acting.

But there were some very good things about that production. The standard of acting and performance in a good three-weekly or even fortnightly rep was not too far behind some of the stuff offered these days at the National or RSC after months of rehearsal. Josephine Tewson, whose perplexed visage is known all over the television universe as Patricia Routledge’s long-suffering neighbour in Keeping Up Appearances, was hilarious as Mistress Quickly, and Daniel Thorndike, a nephew of the incomparable Dame Sybil, had a good shot at Falstaff. Dan, who I worked with on several occasions, was one of the most decent men I have ever met, justifying the old adage about his aunt:

‘Nobody loves anybody

Like Sybil loves everybody.’

1970: I eventually got my chance to play Hotspur in an open-air production at Ludlow Castle as part of the annual Festival. With memories of Cheltenham etched in my mind, I decided not to go for the stutter. The play was directed by an over-opinionated, over-weight chap just out of Cambridge. I was cast at the last moment, I think I was about his tenth choice, and we didn’t get on from the start. The budget was sparse. The Festival was financed by a local committee who appeared to think the actors should be honoured to perform for them at minimum payment. I seem to recall that we didn’t get paid at all during the three weeks of rehearsals in London. I was even more concerned that there was no money for a fight director. A fiery, brutal fight is crucial for the final confrontation between Hal and Hotspur, but our director insisted that he could arrange the fight himself. We soon discovered he couldn’t. Hal was played by Michael Byrne, an acerbic actor, far more suited to Hal than I’d been, and we put together as good a fight as we could manage, practising ferociously in the railway yard beside my abode in Pimlico, to the consternation of the neighbours and passers-by.

Hotspur was not the piece of cake I’d thought, most parts never are, and I got little inspiration from the director. Three weeks passed all too quickly, and one sunny Sunday morning I found myself driving up to Ludlow in my bumpy Citroen Deux Chevaux, its roof rolled back, with my faithful Kosher and two young actors and their kit jammed into the rear. Ludlow is relatively unspoilt now, having avoided the fate of most small towns by preserving its individuality by banning the ubiquitous chain stores; but it was idyllic then, like stepping back into the pre-war England that only exists in black and white movies on afternoon television. Ancient inns served strong beer brewed on the premises, butchers and grocers were crammed with appetising hand-raised pies and sausages and cheeses, the stalls in the market square were overflowing with local produce – it’s no wonder that today Ludlow is considered a gourmet’s paradise with Michelin star restaurants. My delight quickly evaporated as soon as I walked into the castle courtyard and beheld the set. If there was one play at Ludlow that didn’t need a set, it would be Henry IV Part One. Hotspur had lived in this very castle. He’d climbed those towers and watched from those ramparts and walked upon that greensward. They were crying out to be used; but a Cambridge friend of the director had spent almost all the budget designing a monstrous set of three separate metal stages, which obliterated all traces of the castle behind it. The three stages were supposedly areas for the three elements of society represented in the play – royalty, nobility and commons. The common or Falstaff area was in the centre and the other two areas raked down perilously towards it, linked by narrow catwalks. There were twelve edges of stage to fall off.

So began one of the worst weeks of my life. It was World Cup time again. On the Monday, after a frustrating day, slowly staggering through the play trying to put it onto that dreadful set, most of the company were crammed into a smoky room at the back of the pub we’d adopted, drinking the cheap but extremely potent local scrumpy, cheering on England as they swept to a seemingly triumphant two-nil lead against the old enemy, Germany. Life was suddenly great – it made up for me missing the 1966 final – I’d even forgotten about that damned stupid set – when Sir Alf Ramsey decided to take off the incomparable Bobby Charlton to preserve his energy for the next game. That was the turning point – it was unbelievable – before we knew it we’d lost two-three. (I have just read newly released allegations that the German team had taken illegal stimulants.)

The following morning, with sore heads and heavy hearts, we returned to the play. We had no help from the director or his designer friend as we worked out entrances and exits, which sometimes entailed frantic route marches behind the castle walls to get to the other side of the stage on cue. It was late afternoon before we got to the fight scene. The castle had been opened to visitors throughout our rehearsals and there were always a few watching us without any visible sign of comprehension. I think we may have both been trying to ignite their interest as Michael and I began our fight, which we waged with sword and dagger. We started tentatively, aware of the edges that suddenly came up behind us as we swept around the stage, but as the pace quickened, Hotspur took over. I parried with my dagger, snarled and swung around and found myself hurtling off the slippery metal stage on to the ancient stones five feet below. I fell onto a rock still holding the sword tightly in my left hand and broke my wrist.

The director was as useless in a crisis as he was at directing, but the extremely attractive young actress, fresh out of Oxbridge, playing my Lady Percy, took over. She produced a flask of brandy which I gratefully imbibed as she took me to the local cottage hospital in her car. They couldn’t do anything for me and telephoned for an ambulance to take me to A & E in Shrewsbury. My distress was somewhat alleviated when Lady Percy insisted on accompanying me. I lay throughout the journey with my head on her lap, like a stricken warrior, while she stroked my fevered brow, her inviting breasts bobbing a few inches from my chin, pouring yet more brandy down my grateful throat. When we arrived at the hospital the first thing a forbidding matron asked was if I’d had any alcohol. When I replied in the affirmative – my breath would have told her anyway – she ordered me to go away for three hours until the effects had worn off.

My dutiful Lady P was still in attendance and suggested we pass the time in a cinema. We found one nearby where the latest James Bond film was playing. I’ve never been a great fan of Bond, but endured it until the villain twisted Sean Connery’s arm and the throbbing pain in my wrist became unbearable. We hurriedly left the cinema and I staggered into the street to behold a plaque declaring: The body of Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy was hung here in chains after the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1402. Hotspur was suffering again that night on the same bloody spot. Eventually, after sipping bitter lemons in the Falstaff Inn and trying to alleviate the pain by concentrating on the heaving bosom of my fair companion, the three hours were up and she delivered me back to the hospital where I was examined by a very young and very tired doctor from the Subcontinent. He didn’t seem to believe me when I explained I’d got myself injured sword fighting at Ludlow Castle. I was given pain-killers at last, my wrist was reset and put in plaster, my arm put into a sling, and the ambulance transported me back to Ludlow with Lady Percy stroking my brow even more tenderly than before.

We opened the following day and strangely enough the injury helped my performance. I played most of the evening with my arm in the sling, as if it were a wound I’d suffered at the battle of Holmedon, which precedes the action of the play. I flourished it in my first scene when I said: ‘I then all smarting with my wounds being cold,’ and used it as a cause of Hotspur’s impatience and anger, especially in the scene with Lady Percy, which had suddenly come to life. Her line: ‘In faith, I’ll break thy little finger, Harry;’ got an unexpected and welcome laugh. It was even more appropriate at the end. I’d always found it hard to believe that Hal could beat Hotspur in single combat, after Hal had been spending all his time drinking and wenching in the taverns with Falstaff, whilst Hotspur had been in training, waging constant war against the Scots. I made a great show of taking my arm out of the sling before the battle, trying to hold the swor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• School Plays
• King Henry VI
• Titus Andronicus
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Comedy of Errors
• The Taming of the Shrew (Loves Labour’s Won?)
• Richard III
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Romeo & Juliet
• Richard II
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• King John
• Henry IV Part One
• Henry IV Part Two
• Falstaff
• Henry V
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Much Ado About Nothing
• As You Like It
• Twelfth Night; Or, What You Will
• Julius Caesar
• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida
• All’s Well That Ends Well
• Measure for Measure
• Othello
• Macbeth
• King Lear
• Timon of Athens
• Coriolanus
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Pericles
• Cymbeline
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest
• Henry VIII (All is True)
• Afterthoughts
• Synopses
• Evenings with Shakspere [sic]
• Shakespeare’s Life up to 1590
• Index