Feature: HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE FESTIVAL - Simon Callow is Sergey Diaghilev in Russian Voices: The Lightning Conductor, Embassy Theatre, Sun' Sept' 26th

Published: 23 September 2010
by RUTH GORB

SIMON Callow was at home in Camden Town, very briefly. Having galloped all over the country with his superb one-man show Shakespeare (last stop Edinburgh), he touched down in London for performances at Hammersmith before shooting off to Cardiff, Glasgow, Bromley and (rather oddly), Trieste – “we thought it was time the Italians had a bit of Shakespeare”.

Lucky Italians, or anyone who can see this tour de force, a unique theatrical experience   that brings William Shakespeare miraculously to life. 

The passion behind Simon Callow’s perfor­mance is the expression of a lifetime’s passion for the Bard. It began when he was six years old. “Cry God for Harry, England and St George,” he shrieked round the family home after seeing Olivier’s Henry V. He remembers the incident in his new book, adding that it was a wonder he didn’t get nodules.

The book is collection of pieces he has written over the years. Famous as he is as an actor, director and biographer (his Orson Welles received huge praise),  his output of articles, criticism, interviews, reviews, even obituaries, is enormous. 

In beautiful, witty words, as mellifluous as his own voice, he writes about the theatre – he is the archetypal man of the theatre – but above all about actors. He is, by his own admission, a hero-worshipper. Actors, yes, but also people who have meant a lot to him. The theatre critic Ken Tynan, for instance, who had an extraordinary ability to celebrate the particular quality of a performance, to see what was exceptional.

As for his actor/ heroes, two tower above the rest.  “Paul Scofield – if you compared him with a painting he would be side by side with Rubens. And Olivier, of course. An animal, an athlete, a phen­omenon. He was the most electric, sexy, elegant thing ever seen on any stage – a panther in a cage.”

We come down to reality with a bump as we look back at the start of his career. Passionate about acting, he joined his university dramatic society, and discovered that he was terrible .“I realised I had to learn how to do it. I was also uptight as a person, and I knew I had to do something severe to release the acting. I chose the toughest school, The Drama Centre in Chalk Farm. RADA would have been like a holiday camp. The Drama Centre sounded more like a concentration camp.”

His working life began in the box office of the Old Vic, which may have sounded menial but which opened the doors to the world that was to be his life. He was now able to see “the nightly miracles on stage… as often as I liked.”

Reading his book is like being allowed into those miracles. We meet all the greats, including one who was to change his life – the great Irish actor and exponent of the one-man show, Micheál Mac Liammóir. 

“I was enthralled at   his relationship with the audience, an audience of Anglo-Irish farmers, ex­traordinarily conserva­tive, and there was Micheál, exotic, with make-up and a toupee – and they fell in love with him, they were sparked into life by him, he cast a spell on them. And I thought, ‘What a wonderful thing to be able to do’.”

Some 30 years after the young Simon Callow interviewed Mac Liam­móir at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, he embarked on his own memorable one-man shows. Charles Dickens, he says, took him over – “he fitted me like a glove”.  

His family back­ground had something Dickensian about it. His grandmother was a fine singer and chorus girl who had a mystical belief in Personality, and his great-grandfather was a clown, ringmaster and theatrical agent whose star clients were a 14-strong troupe of midgets. 

“I love clowns,” says Callow. “And I love the clown tradition. It gets to something deep, deep, deep in our nature. It’s about an afflicted person we’re allowed to laugh at. Not now, of course; not politically correct. And beauty is all, now. You can’t have a beautiful clown. Think of Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson – they were clowns.” He looks wistfully at the past.

His present is fixed firmly in Camden, where he has lived for years – “Belsize Park, Haverstock Hill, Eton Avenue, St Pancras Way round the corner from here…I love my house here, I love being near the Heath so I can walk the dogs, or just walk… I do a lot of my prepara­tion while I’m walking; people think I’m mad.” Walking everywhere keeps him fit  plus a work-out in the gym every day that he has a show. “You have to; if you don’t it’s like driving a car on an empty tank.”

On the one hand he loves Camden, on the other it drives him mad. “The impossibility of having a good meal. No proper shops. The atrocity of the Tube closing at weekends, just when people want to  come here.

Writing, he says, is not unlike acting. You have to master a brief, and deliver to a deadline. And as most of his writing has been about acting and the theatre, and as theatre has been the centre of his life for 40 years, this latest  book, he says, is the story of his life.

•  Simon Callow is Sergey Diaghilev in Russian Voices: The Lightning Conductor, at the Embassy Theatre, 64 Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, NW3, on Sunday September 26 as part of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival, 7.30pm, £19/£15, 020 7722 9301. Followed by Q & A. Presented and produced by broadcaster Piers Plowright. Ends approx 8.45pm

• My Life in Pieces by Simon Callow published by Nick Hern Books £20