What’s on Jim’s Mind (Issue #89)
I read yesterday that the wonderful actor, Sir Antony Sher, had died.
He passed in December but since I hadn’t heard the news he was still alive to me. Funny how that works… it goes the other way as well. Sometimes I’ll open the Times and come across the obituary of someone and think, “He was still alive? I thought he’d gone to join the majority years ago.” In my mind these poor souls have the misfortune to leave us twice. Oh well, such is life…and death.
Sir Antony was a shining example of that vanishing breed: the classical stage actor. Someone who spent the vast majority of his career in front of a live audience, often with the RSC or the National, instead a camera on location. Barbara and I first saw him in the Winter’s Tale back in the days when the Royal Shakespeare Company maintained a permanent London home at the Barbican. Sher called his performance a breakthrough experience for himself, the moment when he discovered it was possible to sound like a person on stage and to stop trying to be a certain type of English actor — honey voiced, tall, and noble– none of which he was.
He said it allowed him to understand that when he was addressing the audience with:
And man a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, hold his wife by th’arm
That little things she has been lucid inst absence…
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He was actually saying to the people in the seats in front of him: “Stop thinking of this as a play. I’m talking to you — sitting right there, right now. Have a think about who your wife might be screwing!”
He did show up on film on the rarest of occasions, most notably (for me) as Shakespeare’s psychiatrist, but all in all, he was a man of the stage. Performing as Macbeth, Falstaff, Richard III (on crutches) and as the best Willy Loman you can ever imagine.
I find I’ve been meditating about death a fair amount lately, not morbidly so, it seems to be there lurking in the shadows. Some of it, I’m certain, is a product of going back to work on Mother Courage and Her Children, which might more accurately be subtitled “and The Life and Death of Her Children”.
My brother called me yesterday and we talked for almost an hour about memories of my youngest brother who passed in the fall. Even more recently, Barbara has been grappling with the death of her older sister, whom she talked with on the phone almost everyday. Harriet, or as she renamed herself in midlife, “Coco” was a real corker. We often described her as Auntie Mama running a home for retired horses, an assortment of cows, pigs, goats, and dogs on Cold Comfort Farm, which she had remade into a paradise.
I guess they’re all in heaven now… or maybe not. As Mark Twain once remarked in a political speech of 1901, there is a choice involved. “Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to — both have their advantages, “heaven for climate, hell for company!”
And who might that company be? I don’t know, maybe Napoleon, Goethe, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, P. T. Barnum, Robert Burns, Benjamin Franklin, Brigham Young, Tom Paine, Voltaire, George Sand, Kurt Vonnegut… John Lennon, definitely. Perhaps even Sir Antony Sher.
— Jim Niesen
