Celebrated stage actor Simon Callow tells Laura Davis about Shakespeare, his mother and coming out
IT WAS a “rather hairy Cockney lady” who introduced Simon Callow to Shakespeare. The five-year-old, who would go on to play some of the greatest roles in theatre, listened enraptured to the battles and bloody deaths as Macbeth played on her radio.
She was the headmaster’s mother at the school where Callow’s own mother worked as a secretary – his education thrown in as part of her salary.
“It seems stupid to say it changed my life but it did because it aroused my imagination in the most extraordinary way,” recalls the 60-year-old actor, whose many film and TV roles include Hugh Grant’s exuberant friend Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
“Of course I didn’t understand what was going on but all these images formed in my mind of battlements and men fighting hand to hand and of witches and blasted heaths and the walking dead. It was absolutely astonishing to me.”
As soon as he could, he would read aloud from his grandmother’s collected works, enjoying the music of the words and the stories they painted.
Since then, he says, he has been a “Shakespeare addict”, so it was inevitable that, after his one-man show about the life of Charles Dickens won critical acclaim, that he would turn his attention to the Bard.
The Man from Stratford, which tours to the Liverpool Playhouse next month, was written by biographer Jonathan Bate – “who knows more about Shakespeare than any one living human being”, says Callow.
Combining his scholarly research with the actor’s experience of the stage, the piece considers the world the Elizabethan playwright was living in – “and thus”, adds Callow, “his mind”.
The one-man show looks at his education, what it would have been like to grow up in 16th century Stratford-upon-Avon, why he married so young, what took him to London, what was it like to walk from Stratford to London and, as Callow puts it, “what happens when a boy from Warwickshire who has only met half a dozen sheep and the local police constable goes to a huge, noisy, polyglot city”.
