Thoughts on Shakespeare: John Gielgud
Obituary
The National Post

For a time, John Gielgud dominated the system that created the giants of British theatre.

It seems a rough image to use of so fastidious a performer, but if ever an actor died with his boots on it was John Gielgud. He was 96 and he was still taking bookings, on film if not on stage, having made his professional debut a full 79 years earlier. He was a star before the end of the 1920s. No other major actor can have bestridden a century so completely.

So what everybody said a week ago remains true: His death signifies the end of an era. That doesn't mean that a particular type of acting has irrevocably died out; things are never that neat, and Gielgud's style, suitably adapted, lives on in actors of at least three generations whom he directly or indirectly influenced. What's more important is that, in his own generation, he was one of seven actors (and the number is precise) who came to prominence in the '20s and '30s and from that point dominated English classical acting, therefore English acting, and cast a long shadow over North America as well.

The obituaries have all linked Gielgud to Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, but there were also Michael Redgrave, who, as a heroic actor, was at one time rated ahead of Richardson; Donald Wolfit, a barnstormer who stood apart from the others (he and Gielgud detested one another) but was undoubtedly a great actor; and Alec Guinness, still with us but retired. They were all knighted, of course, and most subsequent theatrical knights have seemed like pretenders. There was one woman in the group, Peggy Ashcroft, and she was damed. We are not going to see a bunch like that again, partly because the system that bred them has split apart. It was a system that Gielgud dominated for many years. He made the classical popular, and at mid- century he symbolized the best in British theatre, as a director and producer as well as a performer. Every actor in that group of seven, even Wolfit, worked at some point under his banner, and Ashcroft was practically his permanent leading lady.

How you respond to them all must depend to some extent on where you came in. For me it was the 1950s, and at that point Olivier was the man, largely on account of his audaciously intimate Richard III on film. (Even stagestruck and living in London, I had few chances then to see these actors in the flesh.) Gielgud seemed to me, not old-fashioned exactly, but remote; I couldn't get past the musical voice (I favour the cello metaphor myself) and the very identifiable tunes it kept playing. I heard him play Hamlet on records and I could tell he was being very sensitive and very intelligent, but I couldn't hear the character. He seemed vacuum-sealed (and it probably didn't help that at this point he was older than most of the actors playing his elders). Years later I saw him at a special benefit take a breath and launch into the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy on a great wave of nervous energy -- and that was it; that was history, being remembered and being made.

I saw him play Prospero in 1957 and again in 1975; felt cool the first time and bowled over the second. I think the change was partly in him, more in me and most in the climate. He often said himself that his approach to Shakespeare's verse grew less indulgent as he grew older, and that second Prospero was very rigorous. His last Shakespeare was the radio King Lear with which he celebrated his 90th birthday and which is available on cassette. The familiar rhythms are still there, and the phrasing is wonderful; he isn't too convincing as the former tyrant, but the reconciliation and death are, of course, sublime.

By the 1970s he and his contemporaries weren't playing much Shakespeare; they'd already done it all. They'd switched to the moderns, and here Olivier, with his zest for disguise (he was the only one who could do accents), should have been ahead. It didn't work like that, though.

What happened was that Gielgud took his own patrician qualities and made us respect them, largely through laughter. He held them up to the light and let them shine with an irony that oddly reinforced their dignity. He said himself that Peter Brook's savagely stylized production of Oedipus (in which he functioned, nobly, as a sacrificial victim) freed him to confront the audience head-on, which he did as the headmaster of the satirically named Albion House in Alan Bennett's disrespectful pageant Forty Years On; he was both a stand-up comic and a figurehead of England's past, slightly askew.

Then there was Veterans, a play neglected in the obituaries but absolutely pivotal, because in it he played himself, a classical actor bemused but unfazed by the madness of making an epic movie; Charles Wood, dramatist and screenwriter, wrote it out of his experience of working with Gielgud on The Charge of the Light Brigade. His comic timing was outrageously perfect. (I mourn having missed him in the great classic comedies, even more than in the tragedies.)

Finally, there was Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, the crown of Gielgud's recurring double act with Richardson, another actor whom it took me time to appreciate but whose truth-in-eccentricity I now adored; like many critics I seemed to spend much of the 1970s writing love letters to the two of them. Gielgud and Pinter brought out the best in one another; he made the speeches sound great, but he could only have done that if they were great.

The role, of a parasitic minor poet in a rumpled pinstriped suit, brought him perhaps closer to character acting than ever before.

Still, if a character actor impersonates, then Gielgud wasn't one -- not really. Olivier was, but once I'd grown up, I was hardly ever able to enjoy Olivier. I'm not denigrating him (I didn't like his Othello, but I've never seen one to touch it), but I sensed a paradox: Olivier was always selfishly trying to be someone else, while Gielgud and Richardson were unselfishly themselves, to the benefit of the characters they were playing. (In Canada, William Hutt seems to me to have split the Gielgud-Olivier difference very neatly.)

This worked marvellously in the film and TV work that occupied Gielgud's last years. Take the butler in Arthur: Probably other actors could have timed as exquisitely his immortal response to Dudley Moore's announcement that he was taking a bath ("I'll alert the media"), but nobody else could have got such a laugh, because nobody else was Gielgud. He justified his presence in the Holocaust miniseries War and Remembrance with a moment of pure and truthful comic gold, when it was suggested to him that he pose as a journalist and he recalled, with a mixture of pride and guile, that he had indeed once written an article for Life magazine.

I met him just once, in 1977, when he was rehearsing the title role in what turned out to be an unfortunate production of Julius Caesar. He probably sensed trouble ahead but he still poured out his enthusiasm for the play ("such a noble play," he said). He dropped, alas, none of his legendary bricks in my presence; but in all other respects he was the man I had expected, and I was thrilled. He talked very fast. With the same understated urgency that distinguished his acting, occasionally he hinted he might be becoming old-fashioned, but was obviously not about to lose sleep over it. Nor should he have. He was, and remained, timeless.