Partnership gave us gilded era of Shakespearean theatre
The news that Sir Antony Sher is terminally ill, and that his husband, Gregory Doran, is stepping aside from his duties at the Royal Shakespeare Company to care for him, is a double blow for theatre lovers. The RSC was just starting to get itself back up and running after the pandemic, and the much admired Doran, always a safe pair of hands, has had his work cut out. Moreover, we face the prospect of losing one of our greatest classical actors, and it’s clear that their creative partnership, a striking feature of Doran’s regime, has come to an end.
That partnership has served as a guarantor of quality for the past decade, upholding the RSC’S sense of mission in its mixture of long-honed expertise, star quality and curiosity. For commentators like me, and I suspect many audience members, the Doran-sher “project” represents a gilded era of Shakespearean production, when a deep-rooted understanding of the text, immaculate handling of the language and an aversion to facile modishness held sway. It wasn’t avant-garde but nor was it fusty – very often it dazzled.
Examples of Sher’s own insight into Shakespeare of course go back beyond his work with Doran. His seminal Richard III, first seen in Stratford in 1984, had one critic describe his performance as “scorching its mark in the annals of Stratford like a thunderbolt”. Sher’s sustained forte lies in performances of exhilarating, over-reaching masculinity – his glinting-eyed warrior Tamburlaine (1992) being another talking-point career success.
What’s striking has been his modern combination of corporal command and manifest interiority – every darting eye movement fully registers, affording a rare sense of danger, mystery and shielded vulnerability. As he aged, the gain was his capacity to express a ruminative sadness. His medieval-like Lear (2016) had a stiff portly quality of regal entitlement yet seeped with melancholy.
A memory that comes most to my mind is a real-life encounter, in 2009, in Sher’s native South Africa (which he left in the late 1960s to make his name in England). He was playing Prospero in The Tempest, and talked about his homecoming in a play so full of leave-taking. In contrast to the affable Doran, Sher is much shyer, and I remember him shifting in his seat, full of bespectacled intensity, seemingly wanting to be outside in the sun, but then supplying his own.
There’s always been a touch of the outsider to Sher. I suspect it’s part of what has made him so great as an actor.
In the security of his relationship with Doran, Sher has brought a slew of towering performances to the stage. Theirs has been one of the great partnerships of British theatre.