I arrived at the Richmond Theatre on Tuesday amidst the well-coiffed and well-handbagged crowd that gathered on the steps bordering The Green after emerging from their vintage Mercedes, or from the heavy, black front doors of the venerable flats and houses nearby. The occasion? The opening night of Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford written by the Shakespeare biographer and critic Jonathan Bate and performed by one of those abstract and brief chroniclers of our age: Simon Callow, who took on every guise of Shakespeare in his seven ages – from puking infant to the last scene of all. He was our North and South and East and West, a veritable shape-changer who one minute would make us laugh with Falstaff and the next minute make us cry for Lear.
      From a multi-media Brechtian set back-dropped by a small projection screen and decorated with a plain plywood platform and chair, plus a few other basic props for prompting our imagination, Callow narrates and animates the story of Shakespeare’s life – boy done good in any other terms and, as things always come round, a reflection of our own time. Because he was the son of a local councillor, Shakespeare was able to be sent, for free, to one of the newly established grammar schools, the academies of the Elizabethan age. Here he studied – what else? – grammar, and yet more grammar; however, this grammar was in Latin, less Greek, learned by rote and turned inside out until the student, if able, became an acrobatic linguist. ‘What is a lapis? A stone. And what is a stone? A lapis.’ Shakespeare, as we know, proved able.
      Bate and Callow humanise Shakespeare, and we begin to see him no longer as merely a static legend, a name without association apart from the writer whose plays and poems so many whining young schoolboys, and girls, must carry in their satchels as they creep like snails ‘unwillingly to school’. As a result, even those amongst the audience who weren’t necessarily fans of The Bard but who went simply as a matter of course (‘See you next time!’ said one man to the usherette), even they would not fail to appreciate the man’s rise to fame, which Bates contextualises against our modern-day emotions and ambitions. As a glover’s son, Callow tells us, Shakespeare would have learned another kind of craft but one that also used the skill of working with his hands – a respectable, middle-class yet hard-graft life of curing, dying, cutting, selling – working the trade. Useful perhaps in later life when he moved to London and eventually became a stagehand, then actor, then editor, then writer and entrepreneur. No doubt he would have picked up the lingo of both the backroom and the front, and was astute enough learn from his father’s rise and fall from grace. And yet still proud of where he came from and possibly driven to prove himself and redeem the family name – so much so that as he became successful he built for himself a Stratford property empire, to become a mogul who owned half the village, including one of the biggest houses to live in with his family, just doors down from where the glover’s shop would have been. Bates’s play is an insight into how, as with any writer – the observant voyeurs – Shakespeare weaved his own experiences through the plots and characters of his own plays: how Hamlet evoked the memory of his only son, Hamnet, who died at the age of ten; how Lear may have been a friendly lesson to his later patron, the newly crowned King James I, to warn him of the dangers of cunning courtiers and the blinding quest for power; how The Tempest celebrated the joy of his first-born grandchild.
      I am a great fan of Shakespeare. Indeed, I love Shakespeare; however, I often worry plays such as this will be too didactic. Too, dare I say it, thespian. I fear we as the audience will sit squirming until the lecture or the spectacle is over, especially those of us who’ve been asked to go as guests, or those of us who’ve taken someone along and then worry they’re too tired or too bored or simply uninterested. Happily, my worries were banished in an instant with Simon Callow’s energetic, affectionate performance in this fast-moving, entertaining yet by-the-by-informative vignette of the life of a man who became famous and who simply started out as a middle-class kid from Stratford. He was an Elizabethan and Jacobean celebrity who eventually died quietly and without fanfare back in his home town; he would be a twenty-first century celebrity now, as well as celebrated. It is interesting that, when Bate directs our gaze to Shakespeare’s life, we realise that he was as much an everyman as the characters he created – a man of his time and, wouldn’t you know it, of ours, too.
Kelly Falconer