My Life in Pieces: Simon Callow’s Alternative Autobiography

Callow’s other books include Being an Actor, Love Is Where It Falls and biographies of Charles Laughton and Orson Welles. Of course, he’s best known to theatregoers for his myriad stage credits; most recently in the West End, Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. His many other credits include Amadeus, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Holy Terror, Through the Leaves and The Woman in White on stage, and the films Shakespeare in Love, A Room with a View, Howard’s End and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

He’s back on stage this summer playing William Shakespeare in the new one-man play Shakespeare – The Man from Stratford, written by Bard scholar Jonathan Bate. The production, directed by Tom Cairns, is currently touring and culminates with a run from 5 to 30 August 2010 at Assembly Hall as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

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Foreword

A word about the title. It may seem to suggest a certain degree of disintegration. The opposite is intended, though the possibility, of course, is always there.

I’ve been writing for newspapers pretty well continuously for 30 years (unless you count – which I don’t think you should – a piece knocked off 40 years ago for the student newspaper of my university). I have written features, weekly columns (for the Independent, for the Sunday Express and, under the nom de plume Autolycus, for Country Life), a monthly column for Gramophone magazine, travel pieces, book reviews, restaurant reviews. As well as newspapers, national and local, I’ve written features for magazines, theatre programmes, in-house journals; and I have written introductions and forewords and articles for books. I have written about many, many things, but most of my writing by far has been about acting and the theatre.

Looking at them again, these literally hundreds of thousands of words, I seem to have been in the grip of a virulent form of logorrhœa. The fact is, my overriding ambition, through all the years of my childhood, and long before I had any notion of being an actor, was to be a writer. I have always had a compulsion (noted on many school reports) to communicate in words – audibly, normally, and in class, to the intense irritation of my teachers. But even then, in those garrulous days of childhood, I was writing: mostly what in America is called journaling, which even I could see was a hiding to nowhere. I had no subject other than myself. So at a certain point, bored and disgusted with that self, I put my writing on hold.

When I found the theatre, I knew I had my subject, and I started writing again. I felt like an anthropologist who has had the good fortune to discover a lost tribe. Being an Actor, my first book, published in 1984, was the culmination of nearly 15 years of writing about this new world I had discovered and which had proved so hospitable to me. No one, of course, had read what I wrote, though occasionally it would spill over into letters. Then, in 1981, the London Evening Standard asked me – to be precise was cajoled by desperate publicists into asking me – to write about the play I was in, and from then on I have been asked on a pretty regular basis to commit my deathless thoughts on the subject to print. I’ve been at my happiest celebrating actors and acting, directors and writers. Sometimes this has taken the form of interviews, sometimes profiles, increasingly often obituaries.

It will be evident to anyone who so much as dips into the book that, like my hero, Kenneth Tynan, I am a bit of a hero-worshipper. My luck is that I have encountered so many people whom I could admire. Taken together, the celebration of performers, directors and writers amounts to a view of acting and the theatre; in some pieces, I have spelled this view out. I have sought to fascinate the reader with those aspects of the life of the theatre (and of film) that have fascinated me. Like another hero of mine, Laurence Olivier, who said he wanted to interest the public in the art of acting, I have tried to spark a debate about it, to alert people to the fact that there is no single truth in this art, and to the possibility of gloriously different modes of expression within it. I am also writing for those who, like my 15-year-old self, are doing their theatregoing in their rooms at home. I am aware that to a large extent, I am writing about a theatre which no longer exists or will soon cease to. The theatre constantly remakes itself. Perhaps this book might sow a seed, encourage a few people, not to turn the clock back, but to take note of what heights the theatre and acting has from time to time attained, and strive to match it.

Put together, the pieces form an account of my relationship, over more than 50 years, to the theatre and, to a somewhat lesser degree, because I have been rather less involved in it (and over a much shorter period), to film. I’ve arranged them, not in chronological order of composition, but as their subjects came up in my life, so I suppose they amount to a sort of alternative autobiography, or at the very least, a growing narrative of my theatrical preoccupations. I have written about my career as such in Being an Actor and Shooting the Actor. Here I write about my passions, my concerns and my dreams.

Theatre has been at the centre of my life for four decades, so to that extent, this book is the story of my life.

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Quotable quotes

“Was Shakespeare gay? This simple – if, until very recently, unthinkable – proposition begs two large questions: what do we mean by ‘gay’, and what do we mean by ‘Shakespeare’? … Nothing human was alien to him, and thus throughout the plays we find passages where the love of a man for another man is given noble and powerful expression.”

“Criticism has become the performing flea of journalism, an outlet for the prejudices of the critic, expressed in verbal cadenzas designed only to parade his or her coruscating brilliance; the work under review is the merest occasion for this exercise… Hyperbolic reviewing, in which everything is either heaven or hell, has helped to create a great confusion both within the profession and in the public: things that are quite ordinary are acclaimed as great; things that are flawed but fascinating are denounced as heinously bad. The theatre will in the end only ever be as good as its audience, and the critical discourse is central to what the audience brings with it to the performance. The art of theatregoing needs to be rediscovered, and a new criticism must be an essential element of that rediscovery.”

“It may not strike you that love scenes have figured heavily in my curriculum vitae, but you would be wrong. I have tumbled with the best of them, and it has not always been easy. Partly, I suppose, in my case the problem has been to imitate heterosexuality convincingly. Is one getting it quite right? Just what do heterosexuals get up to in bed? But in truth, it’s always been tricky, whatever the orientation. With neither drink nor drug nor meal nor relaxing social ambience to blur things, there you are, face to face, in all your unadorned physicality.”

“There is a curious paradox best expressed, in one of her finest apercus, by the late Bette Davis: ‘You don’t have to be neurotic to be an actor,’ she said, ‘but nobody who liked themselves ever became one.’ She’s right, and it’s a safe rule that the lovelier or more handsome the actor, the less likely they are to like themselves. And yet here we all are, hauling ourselves – our tired old bodies, our hated faces – in front of the cameras and the footlights for close inspection at every available opportunity. This inevitably gives rise to a certain gloomy narcissism in the profession; when your face is your fortune, or at the very least, your living, you are compelled to take note of its evolution, the process of decay, the evidence of excess… Occasional resort is taken to the knife, but – quite apart from the ultimate unreliability of almost all facial surgery – the results are doubly unhappy, firstly because even the smallest tuck or nip limits flexibility of expression of the single most communicative part of the body, and secondly because it’s not you any more.”

“Waiting for Godot has lost none of its power to astonish and to move, but no longer seems self-consciously experimental or obscure. With unerring economy and surgical precision, the play puts the human animal on stage in all his naked loneliness. Like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.”

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My Life in Pieces: An Alternative Autobiography by Simon Callow is published by Nick Hern Books (hardback, £20). To purchase your copy now, click here.

To coincide with the book’s publication this week, Simon Callow is in conversation with Emma Freud at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre at 6pm on 5 July 2010. Call the NT box office on 020 7452 3000.

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