Scofield remembered at last
Exactly one year to the day after he died, Paul Scofield was remembered in great style yesterday, first in a noon service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, and secondly in more anecdotal vein on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre, where he gave his last great stage performance as John Gabriel Borkman in 1996.
Prince Charles was represented by Sir Tom Stoppard, who joined the congregation in St Margaret’s to hear Eileeen Atkins read from T S Eliot’s Little Gidding, Seamus Heaney from Beowulf and Ian McKellen from the Gospels; Simon Callow gave what was generally agreed to be a superb address.
The Lyttelton celebration was hosted by Alex Jennings and Samantha Bond, starting with Scofield as the Ghost in the Mel Gibson Hamlet and ending with him alone on the seashore in Peter Brook’s film of their legendary King Lear.
Scofield’s Lear is probably the greatest and most influential Shakespeare performance of the last century, as anyone who saw it will testify, and the film does preserve the outline. Jack McGowran replaced Alec McCowen on film as the Fool, and it was a dagger of nostalgic pleasure to see him capering again, with Irene Worth and Susan Engel stiff as Mayan masks as Goneril and Regan.
Diana Rigg, Scofield’s Cordelia on the stage (not the film), said that he used to paint the words “F…” and “Off” on each eyelid, an odd distraction in the tent scene, and that he and McCowen used to challenge each other to list the names of the BBC Radio Repertory company inbetween gulps of high-flown verse (as in “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks…Marjorie Westbury”).
Donald Sinden, noting acidly that Scofield was one of three juveniles at Stratford alongside himself and John Harrison (who spoke touchingly of his oldest and dearest friend) who always got the best parts, demonstrated how he wrung exquisite, dangerous meaning from Macduff’s hopeless response to the news of his wife’s murder: “Oh…by whom?”
And Robert Hardy told a wonderful story of a runaway carriage on a film set that sent actors flying as it hurtled out of control through the Home Counties with Scofield merely sitting tight and eventually muttering, in that elongated, drawling twang….”I don’t believe this.”
John Hurt (Richard Rich in the film of A Man For All Seasons; “I only got the role because David Warner couldn’t get out of Hamlet”), Claire Bloom (his Ophelia at Stratford; she’d never forgotten the self-disgust with which he told her to get to a nunnery) and Anna Calder-Marshall (his Sonya in a truly magnificent Royal Court Uncle Vanya) all stepped up to the plate, and Nicholas Hytner revealed that Scofield turned down the offer of Oedipus at Colonus and immediately regretted it; so do we all!
Although radio producer John Tydeman said that Scofield was all about voice, most of us cannot hear it without also remembering his magnificent beauty as a man, his perfect physique on the stage, his leonine bearing, his magical, god-like presence. He came from another world, and the remarkable thing about him was that he seemed not to be aware of this.
This modesty and self-containment, I suppose what Hytner called his mystery, is why other actors and all theatre folk loved him so much, and they turned out in unprecedented force yesterday afternoon. A roll call of my immediate neighbours in the stalls alone included Edward Petherbridge, Emily Richard, Judy Parfitt, Clive Swift, David Hare, Michael Kustow, Terrence Hardiman, Joss Ackland, Peter Bowles, Oliver Ford Davies, Gillian Diamond, Bill Gaskill, Bill Bryden and Clare Fox.
Peter Brook, smaller with advanced age and increasingly gnome-like, said that he’d suddenly realised that the person with whom Scofield shared his penchant for anonymity was Shakespeare: the characters he played were never pinned down but lived in the moment, utterly real, always changing, flowing through humanity.
And in a gracious, enigmatic reference to Scofield’s widow, Joy Parker, he said that the wholeness of Paul was in the word Joy.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Michael, thank you for writing such a fine piece in recognition of Paul Scofield. Other memorable performances I recall from my early days as a student in London were his Salieri in Amadeus at The National, and he was mesmerising in Dimetos at The Comedy Theatre. He never seemed to receive the wider popular recognition of Gielgud or Richardson in those days, but it was good to read in your blog of the exceptional turn-out of his peers, and you “got him” so well in your description of the experience of seeing him on stage. Best wishes, Kevin Wallace
March 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Hear, hear, Kevin. I have to say I never really liked Amadeus as a play all that much, nor his performance in it. I never saw the Dimetos but Jonathan Pryce has made the part magnificently his own this week. I loved Scofield especially when he was funny. And he was very, very funny as an overage Khlestakhov in The Government Inspector and very, very funny as a camp hairdresser in Charles Dyer’s Staircase. I can still see the quiff, and the shimmy, and the tight trouesers, and hear the plangent twang of his first line: “Funny day, Monday…”