I’m gonna Wishaw that man…
I don’t think I’ve seen a more electrifying male double act on the stage since Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in the Old Vic Speed-the-Plow than in the contest joined between Andrew Scott and Ben Whishaw in Cock in the Theatre Upstairs.
Their speed and rapport as they deal with Ben’s character’s sudden lurch into heterosexuality is truly breathtaking. And funny and touching at the same time.
Andrew’s neat and precise in speech and mopvement, Ben shaggier, though painfully pencil-thin, with his bushy mop of tangled hair.
That hair’s like a proud busby that’s been left out in the rain, and it’s on temporary loan to anyone called John: John in the Mike Bartlett play at the Court, John Keats in Jane Campion’s studiously beautiful film Bright Star.
Whishaw’s played notably in several films to date, best of all in Perfume, but his John Keats in Bright Star gives the fullest idea of his particular magnetism.
Not only is he perfect as the poet — the right age, the right casual but nerve-jangling intensity, the right Cockney rough edge, the right physical vulnerability — but he has a rare quality of utter mytery about him.
You see eveything that’s going on in Whishaw’s acting while simultaneously wondering what exactly it is. It’s as though the actor himself is afraid of the answer.
He’s completely mesmerising on screen, as indeed he is, close-up and personal, in the cockpit chamber of the reconfigured Upstairs studio.
And his hair has a glorious unruly life of its own, a deep, dark forest of a thatch that stands up like a warning to bad wigs everywhere.
It’s facinating to speculate how it might look in ten years time, or twenty. Will it give up the ghost, like Keats, or will it outlive its youthful sprouting and flop and fade like a retreating landscape of follicle follies.
I can’t see a bald Whishaw, can you? But when you Wishaw upon a star, you can see him playing every great holy fool in literature from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard II, the great David Warner roles.
And surely he must play Hamlet again before it’s too late? I thought he was too young and boyish in Trevor Nunn’s production some years ago. He’s got more pain and poetry about him now, and the hair’s grown to its full fruition.
One of the most interesting things about Whishaw is how prepared he is to make life hard for himself.
He’s given outstanding stage performances in plays by Philip Ridley and controversial productions by Katie Mitchell. And the exposure demanded in the Theatre Upstairs play is intense in the extreme. There’s no hiding place.
And yet still you look at him and you think: what is going on inside that mobile, pleading face and under that extraordinary mop? He’s a conundrum, and it’s the sort of challenge posed to an audience by only the very best, and most special, of actors.