Ian McKellen recalls the renowned director John Barton
John Barton, Stratford 2007
Tomorrow 8th February 2018 is John Barton's funeral in
London. John Barton's obituaries have rightly hailed his half-century
working for the Royal Shakespeare Company as director, playwright,
play-doctor and teacher.
In 1960 when he was 32, John abandoned academia
in Cambridge, where he was researching the original staging of Elizabethan
theatre, at the behest of his chum Peter Hall, both of them having acted and
directed for the Amateur Dramatic Club. When the caretaker of the ADC's
theatre heard that John, then Lay Dean of King's College, was off to
Stratford-upon-Avon he said: "Oh yes, Mr Barton was always the one who Peter
got in, to sort out the problems." Barton was the Fixer: Barton the Expert:
Barton who studied, practiced and lived for the Theatre.
At once he was
given The Taming of the Shrew to direct, starring Peggy Ashcroft and the
younger Peter O'Toole, neither of whom got on with the ex-academic and
insisted he be replaced. Peter Hall told his mate the game was up and that
he should return to Cambridge. John refused and locked himself in his
office, day-and-night, fed from a tray delivered by his secretary, until he
was allowed to re-start his career in the professional theatre. A year
before he died, I asked John about all this. He seemed to have forgotten or
at least forgiven. Dame Peggy had later become one of his stalwart
colleagues, starring in his anthology entertainment The Hollow Crown.
O'Toole meanwhile had his large nose put out of joint, literally and went
into films.
In truth, John's disparaging reputation as a mere academic
missed the mark. His studies at King's College served him well as a
director.
In a tradition of dramatic verse-speaking established by George
Rylands, another don at King's, for John too, it all began and ended with
the words. Everything was at the service of clarity, even if it meant
cutting, as he did for me, Leontes' knotted, jazzy verse in The Winter's
Tale, because the actor wasn't making it comprehendible. Other times, if
he felt a speech, soliloquy or rhetoric, weren't quite working, he'd cover
their defects with some background music, whose melody would do the repairs.
Sometimes he jollied things up in an overtly theatrical (some thought in
a vulgar) way. He set Much Ado About Nothing in colonial India; he
surrounded Dr Faustus with puppetry; he re-wrote early Shakespeare for his
masterpiece The War of the Roses and later for King John. He was also a
master swordsman and choreographed RSC fights and battles, as he had earlier
done for the Marlowe Society's undergraduate productions at Cambridge.
The television series (and book) Playing Shakespeare set out his method: a
humane appreciation of the thoughts in a speech, plus a scholar's alertness
to the language and how it might instruct the actor on how to speak a line.
The rhythm and stress in the verse do that, he rightly thought.
He was on
hand at the centre of a mighty experiment — the formation of a theatre company
expert in Shakespeare and other classics, as well as in new plays by Pinter
— and Barton. He thrived in a closed environment — Eton, King's College,
RSC. At Cambridge and Stratford, he was the wise adviser. His wayward hair
untamed atop a noble twinkly visage, he was always listening to you, in
conversation or in the theatre.
My first contact with him was
life-affirming and life-changing. He was on the panel from the ADC
Committee, who judged the auditions of first-term undergraduates, like me
and Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn, who also ended up in the professional
theatre. We were bidden to do to speeches — one Shakespeare, one modern,
from the list of suggestions they provided. Having been impressed by Anthony
Quayle's blacked-up Aaron in Titus Andronicus a couple of years
previously at Stratford, I chose Aaron's speech on the list.
I'm told the
panel was umimpressed, so my second, modern speech would be vital. My chance
to participate in undergraduate theatre was fading. I chose a speech not on
the list. Billy Rice is a retired music-hall performer in John Osborne's
The Entertainer. In his speech of reminiscence for days-gone-by, I could
at least aspire to some versatility. I expect my Billy was good, at least on
sentimentality and I enjoyed distorting my 18 year-old body to suggest
Billy's age.
Still the panel remained unimpressed but John insisted I be
allowed into the ADC. So I was. He must have detected enough of the
character man in me, that he might use and develop. For his production of
Henry 4th part 2, he'd found a possible Justice Shallow. This was for the
Marlowe Society. I have already recorded memories of that production and of
Chekov's Three Sisters, his farewell to amateur theatre.
I last saw him
just before he moved from his West End apartment behind the BBC's
Broadcasting House. As I chatted, he nibbled at processed cheese and
biscuits and fruit: not at all communicative. Then I told him I was about to
play King Lear at Chichester. He stopped chewing, turned his lovely aged
face to mine and smiled broadly. I took his delighted grin as a sign that
my old mentor approved. I thanked him with a hug.