Making It So by Patrick Stewart

Author:Patrick Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Still, in my early days at the RSC, the blessing of my wonderful job and my equally wonderful job security took some getting used to. After my first season wrapped, we moved back to London for the break, leasing a flat in Bayswater near Hyde Park. Sheila and I filled it with secondhand furniture, and I rented us a TV set, my first. Given the outsize role that television was to play in my future, it’s funny to think that I never had one until I was twenty-six years old.

As an associate artist under contract to the RSC, I was getting paid even though I wasn’t working—a situation so alien to me that it felt wrong. I was restless. I wanted to be working. As luck would have it, I encountered the director John Barton while attending a play at the Aldwych, and I admitted to him that I was at loose ends. John asked me if I was based in London, and, if so, would I like to do some verse work with him at his flat two or three times a week.

With one of the greatest directors in Britain? I jumped at the chance, and for two months, we worked on sonnets, speeches, verse, and prose. Though John was academic in his approach, he welcomed the injection of emotion and physicality into delivering verse if it suited an actor’s objectives. Whereas Peter Hall took a more traditionalist approach, preferring that you hit your line endings as Shakespeare intended, John regarded line endings more fluidly, as a means of launching you into your next thought. I still keep this in mind whenever I study a script. It was such a privilege to have those one-on-one sessions in John’s tiny Marylebone office, a script in my lap.

When we reconvened for the next RSC season, I learned that I was to play Grumio, the dimwitted comic sidekick to Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Trevor Nunn, and the banished Duke Senior in As You Like It, directed by David Jones. I had not worked with David, but I already had the year before with Trevor. He was the wunderkind of the RSC, an associate director even though he was only six months older than me. We were to become dear friends, but our relationship got off to a rocky start. The previous season, he had recruited me for one of the RSC’s non-Shakespeare plays, The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play ascribed then to Cyril Tourneur and now to Thomas Middleton, both of them the Bard’s contemporaries.

Trevor told me that the play was centered around two brothers, Vendici and Hippolito, who seek revenge against a duke who disgraced their family and shamed their sister. The great Ian Richardson was to play Vindici, and Trevor wanted me for Hippolito. What? When do we begin?

But I didn’t know the play, and when I got the script, I realized that something wasn’t right. The first scene is indeed a dialogue between

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