News and Queues
“Excuse me!” I gasped, “Did I hear on your radio that Robert Kennedy had been .. shot at?” The gravity of the shooting was not clear in that early bulletin.
The radio was a transistor, and it may be necessary nowadays to say that transistors were portable radios, frequently carried about by their owners and played out loud in public places. It was 1968.
The transistor (‘trannie’, people used to call them) belonged to an American party near me in the early morning queue for tickets at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were applying for seats for that day’s performance of “King Lear”, starring that fine Shakespearean Eric Porter. I would not have been particularly surprised to pick up transatlantic news along the way because ‘Bobby’ Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency … five years after his brother President John Kennedy had been assassinated by shooting. I did not expect a ghastly re-run of fairly recent history. Already, two months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr, with whom Robert Kennedy had been connected through his advocacy of the increasingly prominent Civil Rights movement, had himself fallen victim to an assassin. It was a time when American public life seemed to be dominated by the gun.
Considerably shaken by the news, I and the rest of that putative Shakespeare audience bought our tickets and dispersed. Later that day, in Stratford town, a newspaper placard told me that Senator Kennedy had actually died.
In such ways do political life and artistic life get interwoven in one’s experience. They say everybody (who’s old enough) remembers where they were when these things happened, and I could certainly tell you where and how I heard various traumatic items of news — both the Kennedys, Princess Diana … When I heard about John Lennon’s murder, I was about to do “Henry V”.
That day at Stratford came back to me just recently when my Facebook friend, that fine actor Madhav Sharma posted a recollection of queueing at Stratford for “King Lear” with a group of fellow RADA students. This was five years before the occasion I have just described. That time, the King Lear was Paul Scofield. Madhav’s companions included the late Susan Fleetwood, who played Lear’s daughter Regan in the later production which I saw. Apparently Madhav and his friends had queued all night for their tickets.
Well, I haven’t queued all night for anything, but I have had an equally tiring experience of that kind — once again involving the Stratford theatre. In 1973 I was in a theatre season in Wales, and a colleague and I decided to go to see another very celebrated production at Stratford — John Barton’s “Richard II”, in which Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco alternated the roles of King Richard and his cousin and supplanter Bolingbroke (Henry IV). We had a free Saturday when we could get there, so after our Friday show we travelled through the night on trains from South Wales to the Midlands. There was a a gap in the timetables which we filled by trying to sleep in the station waiting room at New Street in Birmingham. But a party of jolly squaddies had other ideas. Anyway, we peeled ourselves out of our final train at Stratford and legged it to the theatre, splitting up to get places on both the queue for the matinee and the one for the evening show. We were determined to see the casting both ways round.
We got our tickets and staggered off into the town. Not a lot of time for anything before we were back for the matinee. The inevitable happened, after our chaotic night of travel. We took turns during the early part of the performance — at waking each other up.
But we saw both shows, and both configurations of actors. And nobody got assassinated that day. Well, King Richard did, actually. Two King Richards, in fact.
