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Review Round-up: Callow’s Being Shakespeare AgainDate: 24 June 2011
Simon Callow’s latest one-man show Being Shakespeare opened this week (22 July, previews from 15 June) at Trafalgar Studios 1, where it will play a limited season to 23 July 2011. The show was previously titled Shakespeare – The Man from Stratford and earned Callow a nomination for Best Solo Performance in last year’s Whatsonstage.com Awards.
With this new production Callow seeks to uncover what inspired the great playwright and how the challenges he faced led to an understanding of humanity, bringing to life both the man and his unforgettable characters in the process.
Being Shakespeare is directed by Tom Cairns (Donmar’s Phaedra, Old Vic’s All About My Mother, National’s The Odyssey and Aristocrats) from a script by Jonathan Bate.
Many critics disliked Callow’s Man from Stratford; did they warm to his second stab at the Bard?
Michael Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★
“
Simon Callow sidles into the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ rather like a penitent don, which is a very different approach to the one he adopted in Edinburgh last summer, and light years away from
John Gielgud’s tremulous one-man Shakespeare show. In Edinburgh, Callow came on all rather Bardic and bumptious, with a beard and a flowing white blouson, and a stage full of properties never fully explained … now Callow is taking a more modest mediating role, elucidating
Jonathan Bate’s careful and uncontroversial text with sudden infusions of poetry. There are revelatory, grief-stricken speeches from
King John and
Venus and Adonis, the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet, an extract of Falstaff (the ‘honour’ speech), a taster of a more overall splendour in the role, and even Sir Thomas More’s speech in defence of immigrants from a disputed play in the canon. Best of all, Bate and Callow between them submit a portrait of Shakespeare that is sensible … But the man still remains elusive, enigmatic, unknowable, except as someone familiar with grief … Having embraced the format, Callow can only hint at a more melodramatic outcome in the ‘lost years’, preferring to emphasise such personal details as marriage to a much older woman (Anne Hathaway, the farmer’s daughter in Shottery, not the Hollywood actress), the twins he sired, the son he lost, the fields he rented. He refuses to be drawn on wild speculation about authorship or spying activities. He remains admirably controlled throughout, calling the shots but never quite pulling the trigger … he very nearly makes you want to see him play it again.”
Dominic Maxwell
The Times
★★★
“
Simon Callow had a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe last year with this life story of Shakespeare, then titled
The Man from Stratford. Now he is holding the stage in the West End with this one-man show … Callow has presence, relish, vocal command. But, for all his efforts to pipe some emotional resonance into the life and the extracts alike, for all the stagecraft in
Tom Cairns’ production... it’s admirable and informative rather than affecting. The script, by the Shakespearean scholar
Jonathan Bate, frames our hero’s life in the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech from
As You Like It. As Callow blends quotations with an account of Shakespeare’s early years in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glove maker, the conceit takes a bit of tuning into … Callow injects humanity and drama into his role as narrator. Sometimes forcibly. This keeps things lively but at the cost of some mannered moments with spurious emphases … Callow gives us his Macbeth, his Polonius, his Lear, his Romeo and his Juliet, his rude mechanicals from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his Rosalind and his Orlando... you get the idea … Callow earns a hell of an ovation. But it’s not just difficult to step in and out of great extracts from Shakespeare and do justice to them, it’s impossible.”
Quentin Letts
Daily Mail
★★★
“Being Shakespeare is a good vehicle for this thespy polymath … Mr Callow orates his way through some of the great speeches, luxuriating moistly in every syll-a-bull and vow-elle … Jonathan Bate's clever script takes us through Shakespeare's life on the basis of the 'seven ages' speech in As You Like It, starting with the 'mewling and puking' infant in Stratford-on-Avon. Yes, says Mr Callow, 'puking' really was a Shakespearean word. It was not an activity invented by modern football fans. He gives us quite a few tugs back to the 21st century. Slowly we work through the playwright's eventful life, from marriage to older woman Anne Hathaway to the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. Via plague and wars and a splendid description of Elizabethan London, we follow his professional success to his eventual adoption by the royal court. As Mr Callow speechifies and dabs his damp forehead and steps creakily round the stage (nearly coming a cropper on a step at one point), modest props are employed, and minor lighting and sound cues are observed. There is enough to keep the eye entertained. The mind, too, has plenty to chew. It all ends with the old Shakespeare who, though not exactly 'sans eyes' or 'sans teeth' at the end, must have been physically exhausted. Mr Callow, rapt, wrings every droplet of drama from it all. My dears, a hit, a palpable hit.”
Charles Spencer
Telegraph
★★★
“Callow seems to have quieted down a little. He’s still a touch too histrionic for my taste, and the emotion seems to be laid on with a trowel rather than emerging from somewhere deep within. But his love of Shakespeare is palpable, his enthusiasm infectious, and Bate’s script offers real illumination into both the life and the work. The play is particularly good at showing how The Man from Stratford (the show’s original title) could indeed have become the world’s greatest writer, despite the attempts of various conspiracy theorists over the years to suggest that the son of a glove-maker in a rural town could never have been the author of such magnificent plays – and that someone else must therefore have been responsible … The play is excellent and moving, too, on the way the death of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet may have fed into his work, and how the renewed hope of the late romances after a particularly dark sequence of dramas might have been inspired by the birth of his first grandchild … The piece repeatedly suggests that the reign of Elizabeth, with its wars, terrible plagues and cruel punishments, was far from the golden age some fondly imagine. As an introduction to both the writer and his work, this show has much to recommend it, and though I still find Callow too bombastic a presence, his passion for Shakespeare shines through.”
Paul Callan
Express
“This is no pedantic analysis of (Shakespeare’s) verse structure or discussion of who may or may not have written the plays (a subject much beloved of American academics). For 90 entertaining minutes the actor is a fruity-voiced guide through the highs and lows of this Stratford-born glovemaker’s son whose plays still shine, like some blazing literary sun, from thousands of stages. The writer
Jonathan Bate (a noted Shakespeare scholar) cleverly uses Jacques’s perceptive ‘seven ages of man’ speech from
As You Like It as the basis for a tour of the Bard’s life.
Simon Callow takes full dramatic, even comic advantage of this structure, from the ‘mewling and puking’ baby Will right through to the oblivion of his old age. Ranging in style from the relaxed and conversational to full-throated passions Callow seasons his voyage with major landmarks. These are highly enjoyable – in particular his pathetic Falstaff and Henry V’s roaring inspiration to his soldiers at Harfleur. It is a tribute to his versatility as an actor, not to mention the flexibility of his voice, that Callow can include Romeo and Juliet, Lear, the crazy Margaret of Anjou, Hamlet and Macbeth in his performance. The excerpts from the plays and the verse (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is beautifully spoken) are a moving reminder of how exquisite is Shakespeare’s use of imagery and indeed of English itself … So little is really known about Shakespeare’s life and this highly enjoyable show brings what is available to thoughtful life.”
- Matt Hannigan
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