Review Round-up: Callow’s Being Shakespeare Again

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::L0427551707} 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