Thoughts on Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The National Post

I grew up with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was in the English equivalent of Grade 9 when Peter Hall founded it in 1960, and my undergraduate years, 1963-66, coincided with the company's first glory period. So the RSC has been part of my life, and so have the four actors, all among its early pillars, who are now in Toronto performing The Hollow Crown -- a show that is itself an RSC institution, one that dates back to the company's very first year.

It may be eliding the truth to say that Hall founded the RSC. What he did was take over the artistic direction of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, and radically expand it. He opened a London base at the Aldwych Theatre; he admitted non- Shakespearean plays, including new ones, to the repertoire; he tried to create at least an approximation of a permanent company. The "Royal" tag was bestowed in 1961, thus creating a brand name that, in the words of another director, Bill Gaskill, had "everything going for it except God."

One of Hall's appointees was a Cambridge don, John Barton, who had firm and fruitful ideas about the speaking of dramatic verse. Barton was to develop into one of the finest of all Shakespearean directors, but his initial encounters with professional actors were bruising. As a salve, in that first 1960 season, he devised and directed an evening of readings "by and about the Kings and Queens of England": The Hollow Crown. Its first private showing was successful enough for it to be given a Sunday-night showing at the Aldwych the following year.

The critics came, and raved. The show went into the main bill and has remained a standby ever since, suitable equally for school tours and the West End: cheap to mount, requiring no learning of lines and providing a showcase for company stars, actual or potential.

The list includes the four who are doing it here, in what amounts to an RSC franchise rather than an official production; none of them has worked in a full RSC production for at least 20 years. The three men are still listed in programs as RSC Associate Artists, but this seems to be shorthand for "actors who are working somewhere else."

To take them in order of their first RSC appearance: Ian Richardson was in the original 1960 company, arriving in the middle ranks (billing was hierarchical in those days) after playing Hamlet at a major rep. Today this would be unthinkable: A young actor with that kind of credit would insist on playing star parts straight off or would go into TV, which is one reason why standards have declined.

Richardson made an immediate mark playing fops and minor villains. From 1962 he was getting leads on the order of Oberon, Cassius and Coriolanus. One of the keystones of the Hall-Barton approach was an emphasis on the metaphysical wit of the language, and Richardson played this with exemplary relish and lucidity; he could also, when he turned on his high trumpet tones, be terrifying. It was an influential voice; you could hear RSC juniors doing unconscious imitations of it. Length of service had something to do with this; he is the only member of the current quartet who has acted before with all of his colleagues. He stayed, almost nonstop, until 1975, by which time his mastery of his means was exhilarating to watch. Since then, he has done little theatre, though his cold- blooded Prime Minister in House of Cards is about as classic as TV acting gets: a modern Richard III.

Vanessa Redgrave's stature as a film and stage actress hardly needs comment. You might claim, though, that the RSC made her. In 1961 a West End appearance in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea had established her as one of Britain's best young actresses, rather than just the daughter of the great Michael Redgrave. The same year Hall, always a greedy snapper-up of talent, needed a Rosalind (in As You Like It) at short notice. Redgrave -- apart from her unquestionably being, as the text prescribes, "more than common tall" -- delivered a melting, magical performance, in a perfect production by the late and very fine Michael Elliott; for audiences of the right generation she will always be the Rosalind, just as her father will always be the Uncle Vanya. She stayed for another year, to do The Taming of the Shrew and Cymbeline, then left to conquer the world. She's never been back, but the mark she left was indelible.

Donald Sinden arrived in 1963 as an actor dedicated to the theatre (he'd started out at Stratford in 1945 and '46) but best- known as a light comedian in British films. He was eased in with a couple of supporting roles, then took the major one of the Duke of York in the great history cycle The Wars of the Roses, a performance in which you could feel the enthusiasm of an actor claiming his birthright. (The RSC discovered actors; it also rediscovered them.) He left but kept coming back, staking an undisputed claim as a grand master of Restoration comedy in The Relapse, playing a superbly funny -- and disturbing -- Malvolio in a Barton Twelfth Night that remains definitive to everyone who saw it, and finally surprising everyone as one of the most powerful and moving King Lears of our time. Sinden has a sonorous instrument and formidable timing, tunable to both comedy and tragedy. He may also know more about theatrical lore and tradition than any other actor alive.

Alan Howard arrived last of the four in 1966 -- as a young actor known but not well-known -- and lit a fire almost immediately, playing a degenerate Renaissance princeling in The Revenger's Tragedy, for a new director, Trevor Nunn, and opposite Richardson, whose decisive break it also was. He was also the last to leave, staying until the early '80s. He, too, had a trumpet voice (lower register) and a great command of rhetoric; he was the broadsword to Richardson's rapier. He was an unmatched actor of heroes, Henry V and Coriolanus, who explored their insecurities without mocking their strengths. He also showed, in Wild Oats and The Forest, both plays about players, a delightful talent for self-satire.

All four of these actors, in different ways and at different times, helped define the RSC and its style; a style whose influence has now gone round the world. And all, incidentally, say they would like nothing better than to go back. And from what I've seen recently I think it needs them.