I think even Anthony Minghella himself would have been embarrassed by the amount of coverage his death has attracted compared to that accorded Paul Scofield, who died last Wednesday aged 86.

This happened because Minghella was in the middle of his career and was a public figure, whereas Scofield last appeared on a stage over ten years ago and was a deeply private man. Minghella was a fine artist and an important and much-loved enabler.

But, excuse me, Scofield was a truly great artist, a Stradivarius among violins, a titan of the twentieth century stage and a man of mystery, hidden depths, undefinable glamour. Only Olivier and Gielgud were greater than him.

Yet The Observer today devotes endless columns of tear-stained love-in to Minghella and rustles up just two short, stale memorials to Scofield — admittedly from Peter Brook and Kenneth Tynan — as if the actor was “so yesterday” we are all now over him.

To some extent this is true, alas. But anyone who saw Scofield’s Lear, his Captain of Kopenick, his Khlestakhov in The Government Inspector or indeed his John Gabriel Borkman ten years ago will never be over him.

He was in the first straight play I ever saw on the London stage, A Man for All Seasons, in 1960 at the Globe (now Gielgud) and I’ll never forget the thrill of that throbbing, honking voice that could wail and plead like a banshee or open, full-throttle, to a rousing trumpet voluntary.

Peter Hall said his voice was an oboe. Richard Eyre said that listening to him was like walking through a wood. But only Alan Strachan’s comprehensive obituary in the Independent has done the actor full and glorious justice.

Benedict Nightingale said he never met him. Admittedly Ben doesn’t get out all that much, but none of us did meet him, really, apart from when he turned up to accept a critics’ award at a lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club. His modesty and charm were almost too much to endure. I simply couldn’t cope with meeting someone who was, to me, simply a god. Gielgud was much easier.

As a man, Scofield seemed constantly to be in watchful attendance on his own unruly talent. Better for him to potter about in his garden than shuffle around in public so beleaguered. He seemed, anyway, to come from somewhere else.

The King Lear, Beckettian and bleak, struck with terror and authority, gave rise to one of the greatest critical essays of our time, that of Jan Kott in his classic book Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Brook’s production was arguably the first ever modern Shakespeare production, and it is certainly the most influential in memory. It changed the lives of everyone who saw it.

I loved Scofield, too, when he was camp and funny. His epicene hairdresser in Charles Dyer’s Staircase was a comic masterpiece and his slightly over-age Khlestakhov in Peter Hall’s 1966 Aldwych production — the great RSC cast also included Paul Rogers, Patience Collier, Eric Porter and David Warner — was a knickerbocker glory of pouting, preening self-delusion.

Strachan hit brilliantly on a theory that Scofield excelled at playing riven, divided characters — the twins in Ring Round the Moon, Khlestakhov, Hamlet, the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory — as if the soul in tumult was in itself a metaphor of his self-revelation through the deceptive art of acting.

No-one, certainly, in my experience, drew buckets from a deeper well on the stage. And I think that, like Maggie Smith, he didn’t fully understand this about himself, or wish to know too much about how and why he did what he did. Hence the privacy clause in his career. Like Alan Bates, and unlike Richard Burton, he never capitulated to Hollywood.

But the greatest Lear was also a disappointing Macbeth (at the RSC opposite Vivien Merchant) and — I can hardly bear to think of it — a deadly dull Othello at the National with Felicity Kendal as Desdemona and Michael Bryant as Iago.
 
And then there was his dire Prospero, first seen at the Leeds Playhouse directed by his old friend John Harrison and later creeping lamely into the West End. And what about Exclusive, a truly terrible play by Jeffrey Archer in which Scofield inexplicably starred opposite Eileen Atkins?

His Salieri was fine but not so fine if you found Amadeus less than brilliant as a play. Yes, Scofield had a immeasurable talent as an actor, but very poor taste, and little sense of being part of any larger enterprise in his career.

He visited plays and theatres like some grandiloquent and rarefied exotic bird, led from captivity and carefully unleashed to transfix sell-out audiences with his soulful music as Uncle Vanya, or his plaintive, eloquent arias as an imprisoned diplomat in Christopher Hampton’s Savages, both at the Royal Court. Acting simply isn’t that “big” or bestial any more, and we are much the worse off without it.  

The best Scofield testimonial last week was the annual “Our Theatre” project at the Globe, where Dominic Dromgoole rightly said that the schoolchildren of Southwark, sharing Hamlet among themselves in a series of quick, bright, energetic snippets from the play, brought the spirit of Shakespeare alive in a way that only a truly great actor could complement and improve upon.

Scofield in his pomp was the actor Shakespeare deserved and we need in order to savour the full tang and flavour of his genius.

The wonderful innocence and joy of children acting on a stage is the base metal of the living theatre that a Scofield, or a Gielgud, or an Olivier, or a McKellen, or a Russell Beale, transforms into gold in the alchemy of his artistry. But without children in the first place, theatre has no future. And without Scofield, it has no past.  

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.