Oliver Ford Davies on Shakespeare
Oliver Ford Davies has played numerous Shakespearean roles including Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Polonius in Hamlet and the title role in King Lear. He has also written about the practicalities in acting Shakespeare. Here he talks about the problem plays, working his way through the old men and the enigma of the Bard.
When did you first encounter Shakespeare's work?
My father taught English at the Latimer school in Hammersmith for forty years so he really introduced me to Shakespeare and I saw quite a lot from about the age of eight. Then I started doing it at school and when I was fifteen I played Mercutio in a school production of Romeo and Juliet. Clifford Williams was running the local rep and he saw the production and told one of the teachers "that boy's an actor" so that sowed the terrible seed that one day I might become an actor.
Did you find Shakespeare difficult when you were younger?
My memory is that it came quite easily. Some of it is still difficult. Some of the verse in All's Well is very tortured. Words have changed their meaning. Sometimes quite slightly, in a subtle way which makes a considerable difference. There's no good pretending a four hundred year-old text is easy. Iambic pentameter has a rhythm to it so that often the verse is actually easier to learn than the prose. Shakespeare challenges both your imagination in the stories that he tells and your craft. You have to think very quickly. You have to use this language.
A favourite Shakespeare?
Like a lot of actors it tends to be the one I'm working on. I've done a number of the plays three times: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Twelfth Night. I'm fond of all those. I'm very fond of Measure for Measure also.
Measure for Measure is regarded as one of the problem plays much like All's Well isn't it?
We think Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure much at the same time as All's Well. In fact, knowing Measure pretty well, I can hear it in All's Well at times. The King has a scene with the young Helena where she arrives to him and he rebuffs her. She's about to leave, then reconsiders and has another go. I can always hear the first Isabella/Angelo scene from Measure in that, where Isabella is about to back off and Lucio says "try him again" and she comes back. I can sort of hear Shakespeare thinking, I enjoy writing these scenes with young women and older authority figures.
Do you consider All's Well to be a comedy or tragedy?
It's not as clear cut as that. Twelfth Night was the last pure comedy but even that has very dark things in it. After that the so-called comedies (we call them comedies because that's how they were grouped in the Folio) become much more ambivalent and much darker. Measure for Measure seems to be absolutely heading for tragedy and he makes this enormous job of yanking it round into being a comedy. All's Well is much more of a folk tale really, so you know it will have a good resolution. For example in Boccacio's Decameron (the tales written in 1353 on which the play is based), Bertram and Helena live happily ever after and have lots of children. You feel that Shakespeare couldn't quite write that, so he leaves the ending a little bit up in the air and the King finally says "All yet seems well". The Duke twice proposes to Isabella [in Measure for Measure] and Shakespeare couldn't actually give her any lines to indicate whether she accepts him or not, so I think by this time in his life he's become pretty cynical about marriage. I think you have to make up your own mind whether it will last or not.
There is no written record of it being played until the restoration is there?
Perhaps it wasn't performed very much. In the late 18th and 19th century it was considered that the idea of the young woman chasing the young man was totally immodest and out of bounds, so it was done very little in that period. Of course Bernard Shaw, as usual, leapt to its rescue and said Helena is the most interesting heroine in Shakespeare. More difficult to interpret is Bertram. Shakespeare had written lots of upstanding young men and he'd got to the stage when he said now I'm going to show you what young men are really like. Bertram's considered too young to go to war, which suggests he's maybe sixteen. He wants to go war, to gain fame, to lay the local women. He doesn't want to get married.
What drew you to the role of the King in All's Well?
Partly because I'd never done the play before. I'd seen it several times. I'd worked with Marianne Elliot before on Saint Joan and I enjoyed working with her very much. I seem to have been working my way through the old men recently. I did Leonato in Much Ado here at the National a couple of years ago and I've just played Polonius [in Hamlet] with the RSC. The King of France is another of these old men. Unlike the other two he doesn't have a daughter but his relationship with Helena becomes quite a fatherly one. Shakespeare was fascinated by fathers and daughters. They run right through the cannon. Right through to Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest. I've become very interested in that relationship. They're all different. He had love/hate relationships with these old men but he's actually rather fond of them and maybe it's to do with his father, who knows?
Is there a Shakespeare character you'd still like to play?
I'd like to have a go at Prospero. When I was at university I played Falstaff and I'd still like to play him properly. He is a wonderful creation.
What do you think of the books written about Shakespeare?
There have been a number of good books written recently about Shakespeare. There's 1599 by James Shapiro. A very good read and very interesting about a crucial year in Shakespeare's development. Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is also very good. In Soul of the Age, Jonathan Bate divides his life and work into the seven ages of man. Absolutely fascinating. He's good on why for instance Shakespeare didn't end up in the tower for Richard II being performed just before the Essex rebellion (the weak Richard II was analogous to the aging Queen Elizabeth I who had no heir). Let's face it, Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's Men came precious close to the Tower. I very much enjoyed Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, which is really interesting. It's almost entirely speculation, other than we know he lodged with this guy Mountjoy, for a couple of years at least, and that he was involved in a court case. Nicholl goes off and creates a very good picture of the world. I've read an awful lot of lives of Shakespeare and I think Park Honan is probably the most reliable.
I'm reading Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare. He's very naughty really. It's a very good read, he's a very good writer, but he does say things like: ‘it seems likely that Shakespeare played Malvolio' when we've absolutely no idea if he did. We've unearthed an enormous number of likelihoods and indeed probabilities about Shakespeare and his life, but we know very little fact. We don't have a line about what Shakespeare thought. It's just the plays. We have a lot of informed speculation. I wonder if Shakespeare destroyed a lot because he didn't want people to know. In a way it's much better to stay in the shadows, and I think he's great at that.
Oliver Ford Davies was talking to Ben Clare.
All's Well That Ends Well is playing in the Olivier as part of the Travelex £10 Season until 1 October 2009.
Oliver Ford Davies's books Playing Lear and Performing Shakespeare, alongside other books talked about in this interview, are available to buy from the NT Bookshop.
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