A Life of Rhyme; Simon Callow is bringing to Stratford the closest thing Shakespeare had to an autobiography

Riffs on Shakespeare: There Reigns Love
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Shakespeare's sonnets tell the story of "one of the most graphic and self-destructive loves in the language." So says Simon Callow, the English actor -- and many other things -- who is performing a selection of them, under the title There Reigns Love, at this year's Stratford Festival: previewing now, opening Sunday.

Callow has been doing the sonnets, in one form or another, for nearly 30 years now, off and on. He's done them once before in Canada, in 1999 as a one-night benefit for Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto: an occasion on which, he told me on the phone this week, he'd noticed "a chap in the front row, looking very intent" who turned out to be Mike Myers. "Of all people," he didn't quite add, though some of us might.

It may be that Austin's powers of concentration were greater than mine. I remember that recital as an inspiring but somewhat taxing occasion; these are tough, dense poems, and I can't have been the only member of the audience whose concentration sometimes flagged.

This time, though, Callow will only be reciting 80 out of the published 154. I told him I was grateful for this concession, but he cheerfully dashed my confidence by revealing that when I'd seen him at it in Toronto, he'd only done 60.

This, though, he says, will be different; it will be more of a show, perhaps more of a play. It has a new title; one of hundreds of striking phrases that offer themselves up from the text (though, as he says, out of context those ardent quotations tend to sound like the names of Ivor Novello musicals). And he's learnt them.

He won't be standing at a lectern, which is what he did at the National Theatre in London, back in 1979, when he read the entire 154 in a three-hour stretch, this time with John Gielgud sitting a little more expectedly than Mike Myers but perhaps more dauntingly, in the fifth row.

Callow was on the crest of a wave, having recently opened on the same stage as Mozart in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, which may to this day may be his celebrated stage role. (He's in the movie, too, but as another character.) The performance was spurred by the theories of a scholar, John Padel, who had taken what Callow rightly describes as "the approach of almost anyone who reads the sonnets -- they start speculating about them as autobiography."

Padel was convinced that the original publishers of the poems had scrambled their order in order to obscure what might have been some embarrassingly famous identities, including those of the "dark lady" and "noble youth" with whom the poet seems linked in an obsessive triangle of love and jealousy.

Callow himself isn't so sure that the sonnets are literally autobiographical; he does think they provide a window onto intense and tortured feelings that Shakespeare himself must have experienced: a rare opportunity to hear the most reclusive of authors speaking in the first person.

There Reigns Love is not, Callow insists, "a scholar's night out -- it's entirely speculative. It has the trajectory and the journey of a play." It also, for the first time, has a director: the veteran Michael Langham, Stratford's artistic director through most of the '60s, who knows the Festival's various stages like nobody else and has, Callow says, "an incredible freshness --he makes no concessions at all to age."

Most of the actual rehearsing has been done, fast, in Stratford. The two men had met and discussed the work in London, where they both live, but Callow's schedule at the time was typically full.

He was engaged in two projects, both of which might be considered late outcroppings of Amadeus: playing the psychiatrist in a touring production of Shaffer's Equus and directing a Mozart opera, The Magic Flute.

This has been the pattern of his life for the last 20-odd years. In 1984, he published a book called Being an Actor, a combination of memoir and credo, and it started him on a second career. Or perhaps re-started him on a first; though acting had "consumed" him for years, his original ambition had been to write. That first book, which was both forceful and funny, led to others, including a superb biography of Charles Laughton and another, a three-parter still in progress, of Orson Welles.

His byline can also be found regularly on the arts pages of The Guardian. Along with writing has come directing films, plays, operas and musicals. He has also acted in plenty of movies, while his most noted stage-work has been less in plays alongside other actors than in one-man shows about writers: not just Shakespeare but Wilde and, most prolifically, Dickens.

He has become not so much an actor as "a person about the theatre" -- my description, not his, and one, I think, that he temporarily accepts with some misgivings -- and a uniquely valuable one: I would rather read him on the theatre than almost any critic; he not only has more practical knowledge and sympathy than most of us, he also writes better. But he does want, he says, to get back to stage acting.

Pushing 60, Callow reckons he has 10 more years to play the great classical roles that, so far, have surprisingly failed to come his way. His Shakespearean resume, for example, consisted for years of just the grizzled warrior Titus Andronicus and the young lover Orlando in As You Like It. (He may be the only actor to have played them in that order.) He's since played both Falstaffs, but in peculiar circumstances: in a stage version of Chimes at Midnight, Welles' film adaptation of Henry IV and in a musical of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

He insists that he won't play soldiers, which rules out Macbeth and Othello, but he does want to have another crack at Falstaff; who, one might quibble, was a soldier if a reluctant one. He certainly should play more Shakespearean leads. Meanwhile, he gets to come closer than most actors to playing the man himself.