Double Shakespeares by Mazer Cary M.;

Author:Mazer, Cary M.; [Mazer, Cary M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Double Memoirs

1. Memoirs

Antony Sher, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1995 to rehearse the title role in Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre under the direction of his partner Gregory Doran, is taking a side trip to his home town of Cape Town, accompanied by one of the South African actors in the production, who is visiting his girlfriend, and is on an airplane for only the third time in his life. In his co-authored rehearsal journal, Woza Shakespeare!, Sher describes watching his fellow-actor’s delight as the plane makes its descent:

It isn’t only Oscar’s joy that touches me. As the character Titus slowly grows, there’s more and more of Dad in him—I’m moving like Dad, sounding like him, being him—and there’s a profound connection between Dad and the airport, D.F. Malan, which we’re about to reach . . . (130; emphasis and ellipses in the original)

Sher then begins a long digression about his father’s death two years before: his parents, who had been visiting him in England, flew on short notice to Israel to attend a nephew’s funeral. While there, Sher’s father died in a hotel room. Doran and Sher flew to Israel, and then accompanied Sher’s mother and his father’s coffin to Cape Town, where they landed here, at D.F. Malan Airport. Arriving at this airport now reminds Sher of arriving, year before, with the coffin of his father—the father who is increasingly, to Sher’s surprise, serving as the model for the character he is building in rehearsal.

The airport in Cape Town serves as a sense memory both for Sher’s emotional experience of his father’s death, and for playing his role in the Shakespeare play. The airplane, the descent, the airport, Cape Town itself, are charged for him, both in terms of the more general memory of growing up, the more specific memories of his father, and the precise memory of his father’s death: the coffin, the funeral, the process of mourning. As Sher’s memoir makes clear, all of these memories—death, mourning, homecoming, fatherhood, the specifics of his father (who becomes Sher’s unintended model for the role)—become important building blocks in his construction of the character of Titus over the course of the rehearsals.

Did it really happen that way? Quite possibly. Sher keeps journals and notebooks, particularly while rehearsing roles, and he quite possibly drew upon these journals when he constructed his sections of Woza Shakespeare! (Sher’s sections alternate with sections written by Doran.) But Sher is also a novelist and prose-stylist (as well as an accomplished painter), capable of introducing thematic elements and shaping a narrative arc; and so the story of his father’s death, which had arisen in his mind as the plane descended into Cape Town, may have been a much later addition, designed to fill the reader in on an important component in the unfolding story . . . or, rather, the two unfolding stories: of Sher’s return to South Africa, and of playing Titus. Either way, it is certainly, in the resulting

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