Bedford's Shining Strengths

Riffs on Shakespeare: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

When Brian Bedford was a drama student in London in the 1950s, his classmates included Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney and Alan Bates. They were regarded as a golden generation almost before they were out of school. It says something about the British, and also the Canadian, theatre that of them all Bedford is the only one to have realized his potential as a classical actor, and that he had to come here -- or at any rate chose to come here -- to do it.

He is one of the world's three most accomplished Shakespearean actors, along with William Hutt and Ian McKellen. We really should boast about this more.

Bedford's one-man show, The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet is a distillation, and occasional expansion, of the Shakespearean work he has done since coming to Stratford in 1975.

He gives us extracts from many of the roles he has played there, and a few he hasn't. The scenes and speeches are arranged roughly in their presumed order of composition, and are linked by terse biographical narrative. (Bedford never speaks in the first person, either as Shakespeare or as himself.) The idea is that the writings reflect their author.

Sometimes, the connections seem simplistic, and Bedford probably leans too heavily and literally on the Sonnets as a key not only to the playwright but to the plays. The trajectory -- youthful exuberance, tragic disillusion, mature recuperation -- is one that the Victorians would have recognized, with their maps of the Shakespearean journey from "the Heights" to "the Depths" and back again.

That doesn't make it wrong. The stress on personality is academically unfashionable, and has been for decades, but everyone knows it's the right approach; not even academics actually believe that an author's identity is irrelevant, shameful or (the latest wrinkle) non-existent. And there is a frame here; the evening is never "and then he wrote."

Bedford's Shakespeare is fashioned to his own shining strengths as an actor: intelligence, wit and unsurpassed lucidity. He can get his mind and his tongue around anything. His Shakespeare - in this respect very unVictorian -- is a metaphysical poet, a theatrical John Donne, for whom ideas, compulsively explored and fastidiously juggled, are a conduit for emotion.

He starts, unexpectedly, with the sober Prologue to Henry VIII: unexpectedly, since the play may be Shakespeare's last and is certainly one of his least-known. It's revealing that Bedford should have chosen this, rather than the more flamboyant and open address to the audience that kicks off Henry V.

The Henry VIII speech doesn't appeal to our imaginary forces; it asks us to shut up and listen. It soberly ticks off what we can expect and what we cannot, and tells us to pay attention "for goodness sake." That's the emphasis that Bedford gives it, and the precision is absolutely typical; it banishes the phrase's colloquial familiarity, and restores its moral edge. He gives us the speech as a series of polished rounded sentences. After promising us tragedy (which he later delivers), he concludes "if you can be merry then, I'll say/A man may weep upon his wedding day," a jab that he infuses with a wonderfully mellifluous disdain.

He is at this moment the dapperest of lounge-suited actors, though by half-time the jacket and tie will have come off. He now starts talking about Shakespeare's early years, and makes the reasonable inference that the players who passed through the English Stratford were the inspiration for the barnstorming amateurs of A Midsummer Night's Dream: cue for his generously self-absorbed Nick Bottom, whose Yorkshire accent is a tribute to Bedford's own youth.

He gives us the saintly Henry VI, helplessly envying the life of a shepherd; "how many years a mortal man may live" jumps out at us with a desperate shudder. More provocative is his suggestion that Shakespeare's shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway was the bitter source, years later, of Prospero's obsessive concern for his daughter's pre-nuptial virginity. It makes sense.

There are obvious gaps in the account of Shakespeare's progress: no mention of how political changes and literary fashions may have affected his work, and no Falstaff. There are also gaps in the subliminal account of Bedford's progress. Some of his most notable Stratford roles -- Richard III, Shylock, Benedick, Timon -- are missing, and I wish he had given us his Angelo from Measure for Measure rather than his Duke.

But we do re-encounter his Richard II, more sacramental and less of a tease than I remember, and his Malvolio; and see him sliding into beauty as Oberon, a role he has never played and still could. He also gives us Romeo's "soft what light through yonder window breaks" and reminds us that it is a speech made up of wordplay. The words come out as being about Romeo himself rather than about Juliet, which suggests that Bedford, a self- torturing rather than a natural romantic, would not have been good casting even when the right age. It is nevertheless fascinating to hear him scrupulously hunting down the images and securing every one of them.

His Hamlet, which he played in Liverpool at 21, must have been very exciting; he now has the nerve to offer us the most hackneyed soliloquy of all, "to be or not to be," to think it freshly through and to make us do the same. There is similar chutzpah in his reinvention (a different voice for each of the seven ages) of Jaques' "all the world's a stage."

As our predominant actor of Shakespeare's intellectuals, he must play Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. And of course Lear, in whom the mind turns against itself; he here offers a note-perfect account of the great world- levelling scene at Dover cliff, an inviting sketch that one would love to see fitted into a full portrait. He passes from this directly into Macbeth's ashen "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" which he accurately interprets as the lowest of the depths. That brings us up to Prospero, another role that's waiting for him. "Our revels now are ended," loosed from its apocalyptic moorings in The Tempest, becomes a lyrical set-piece, but the great renunciation makes amends.

Finally, brilliantly balancing his admonitory prologue, he does Prospero's reclusive epilogue. In this he is at once the character acknowledging his dramatic situation, the author acknowledging the limits of his art, and the actor asking for applause. Without either tipping or overplaying his hand, he triumphs as all three.