The New York Times-20080127-To Boldly Go Where Shakespeare Calls
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To Boldly Go Where Shakespeare Calls
Full Text (2273 words)THE first reinvention of the British actor Patrick Stewart was so counterintuitive as to seem perverse. For nearly 20 years he had been a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company; suddenly, in 1987, he was the captain of a spaceship on an American television series, acting alongside a gold-tinted android and a large hairy Klingon.
For some reason it worked. With his aura of stern yet fair authority and seriousness of purpose, Mr. Stewart made Capt. Jean-Luc Picard the moral center of Star Trek: The Next Generation across seven seasons, helping to keep it from sliding into camp or self-parody. Hollywood took to him, and he took to Hollywood, also appearing in various Star Trek films and, in a variation on a theme, as Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies.
Now, at the age of 67, Mr. Stewart is in the midst of a third act in his unlikely career that brings him full circle: back to England and back to the Shakespeare of his youth. And while his earlier professional life here was, by his own estimation, very sound but never spectacular, his new incarnation, in roles like Prospero in The Tempest and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, has been a revelation. Critics who sniffed that he had sold out to zoom about television screens in a preposterous spacesuit, as Nicholas de Jongh put it in The Evening Standard of London, have showered him with perhaps the highest compliment they can conjure. He has, they say, overcome the technique-destroying indignity of being a major American television star.
(That works both ways. There's always this sense in Los Angeles that if you're doing theater, it's because you can't get film or even television work, Mr. Stewart said.)
Mr. Stewart's latest performance, in the title role of Rupert Goold's stunningly staged Macbeth, which opened at the Chichester Festival last summer and sold out its subsequent West End run, has been his most celebrated so far. Now scheduled to open next month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, the production inspired several British newspaper critics to pronounce it the Macbeth of a lifetime, the best they have ever seen. (And they see a lot of Shakespeare.) Mr. de Jongh called Mr. Stewart one of our finest Shakespearean actors; Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph said he had turned in a truly great performance.
So charismatic is Stewart as an actor that he can make the simple act of preparing a ham sandwich one of the scariest things you've ever seen, Mr. Spencer wrote.
In a recent interview Mr. Stewart spoke happily, even sentimentally, about his Enterprise-commanding days, which left him with a castful of close friends and an unexpected appreciation for the importance of Star Trek in American culture. He found the 1999 film Galaxy Quest, a satire that gently mocks the actors and fans of a Star Trek-like series, hilarious, but also moving, he said, in its recognition that there was something profoundly serious and good about the series.
But he came back to Britain and to full-time (for now) Shakespeare, he said, because he was homesick and fretting about lost time and missed opportunities. Roles were passing me by, and I wanted to do more, he said.
So to find a role like this, he said, his voice trailing off over lunch at a Soho hotel. That voice is so familiar -- a rich, resonant baritone with a hint of his Yorkshire roots -- that you half expect him boldly to summon his starship crew for a conference on how to handle the latest Romulan outrage.
It is his first Macbeth, but Mr. Stewart has been preparing for it all his life, since he was a youth in the northern mill town of Mirfield, near Leeds, and spent his spare time acting in the dozen or so local amateur dramatic societies that flourished there. I used to recite Shakespeare from memory, he said. I just learned all these big speeches. That's what's so interesting about playing Macbeth this year, because I've known these speeches all my life.
Mr. Stewart is a natural storyteller, and this long conversation touched on, among other topics, the enduring appeal of Shakespeare, the new album being released by his Next Generation castmate Brent Spiner, the embarrassing con perpetrated on him recently by a gas-station trickster with a plausible sob story, and the miracle of tape recorders. (Mr. Stewart once worked briefly as a reporter, relying on faulty shorthand.)
Musing on the two halves of his Shakespearean career, Mr. Stewart said that acting feels different to him now. He kept himself in check in the early years, he explained, acting with deliberation rather than passion, faking rather than feeling.
I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time, he said. A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is 'telling beautiful lies,' and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way.
Depicting the out-of-control fury so essential for the meatiest Shakespearean parts was particularly difficult, Mr. Stewart said, because his father was a military man with a prodigious, terrifying temper. I was absolutely determined that it would never play any part in my life at all, he said.
But Mr. Stewart had two pre-Star Trek experiences that helped him move past that determination. One came when he appeared as the unpleasant Leontes in The Winter's Tale in 1981. He recalled the director, Ronald Eyre, saying to him: If you can find this man inside yourself and really let him out, I think it might work. And furthermore, if you really do that, I'll be there all the time, and I'll catch you when you fall.
The second instance came as Mr. Stewart was rehearsing as George in a 1986 production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Young Vic.
What are you doing? the director, David Thacker, asked him, Mr. Stewart recalled. That may be good enough for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but it's not good enough for the Young Vic.
Not since I was at school had I been spoken to that way, Mr. Stewart said, referring to his days at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in the late 1950s. He and I then talked privately about risk, about daring, about the danger of being overprepared, about improvisation, leaving yourself open to the unexpected. As a result, he said, he realized that you can have those feelings and still be safe, and everybody else will be safe too.
Since the quality he most exudes is a Captain Picard-esque goodness, Mr. Stewart needs all the inner rage he can get to play Macbeth, a particularly bloodthirsty man in a particularly blood-spattered production, set in a Stalinist Russia permeated by treachery, atrocity and claustrophobic paranoia. Mr. Goold's interpretation is strikingly original. When Lady Macbeth obsessively scrubs her hands, the water that spews from the faucet is blood red; the three weird sisters are nurses who perform their famous Double, double, toil and trouble scene as a seriously creepy rap number; the banquet has spectacular staging that should be seen rather than described. Mr. Goold uses the age difference between his leading man and the actress playing Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood, 35) as a way to explain how the originally heroic Macbeth so readily succumbs to his wife's monstrous political ambitions for him.
We wanted a big age gap, Mr. Goold said. We wanted to look at what happens where ambition comes late in someone's life, rather than in the prime of life, where you've kind of settled for where you are, and someone comes in and says that you should go for the main prize.
Mr. Goold, who also directed Mr. Stewart in The Tempest, went on: I've tried to get to the depth of what his assets are as an actor. In 'Macbeth' he plays someone who becomes a completely psychotic, deranged butcher, but he has a humanity, a basic soulful decency, an everyman quality to him. It's the same in Star Trek, he added: The world around him is incredibly, vividly surreal, with cyborgs and strange creatures, and he's the human heart of it.
When Mr. Stewart signed up for The Next Generation, he had just finished Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and found himself walking into as exotic a situation as he had ever encountered. Discovered by a Star Trek producer who saw him speaking at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Stewart balked at the standard contract committing him for six years. But he calmed down when everybody told me it would be a flop, he related. A friend of mine said, 'Get a suntan, make some money, go home.'
All he knew about Star Trek had been gleaned from registering that his two children occasionally watched a show on television featuring guys in yellow and blue T-shirts, he said. Things like 'Beam me up, Scotty' never meant anything to me. I didn't know what sitting in that chair meant, how that role resonated for a large number of Americans.
To his bemusement he was described in The Los Angeles Times, he said, as unknown British Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart. On set he had difficulty fitting in and took offense at the way he felt his castmates tended to horse around. So he called a meeting and lectured them about having to be more serious, he said.
That did not go over very well. It was really awful, being dressed down by the captain, said Mr. Spiner, who played Data, the android, and is still close to Mr. Stewart. We really thought, 'Well, please, get over it.'
He added: In the beginning he approached it as you would a serious Shakespeare role. It was serious work, but when you're working 16 to 20 hours a day on a soundstage with no windows, you better be having a good time with the people you're working with, or else you'll go berserk.
In any case Mr. Stewart eventually came around to lead the cast on a new mission: Each actor had to generate a laugh a day.By the end of the first year we'd broken him down, and he became perhaps the silliest of us all, Mr. Spiner said.
But Captain Picard never gave up the stage completely. For several years in the 1990s Mr. Stewart performed a one-man version of A Christmas Carol on Broadway, reprising it in the Christmas season of 2001. He played Prospero in a memorable performance of The Tempest in Central Park in 1995, and two years later he played Othello in an unusual production in Washington in which the races were reversed -- his Othello was a white mercenary in a black African nation.
But this latest turn of his career is giving him the chance to make up for whatever time he had lost back home.
I'm going to Stratford next year to play Claudius in 'Hamlet,' knowing that I shall never be asked to give my Hamlet, Mr. Stewart said. I've done bits of it in recital, but I never played Hamlet, I never played Romeo, I never played Orlando, I never played Benedick. He offered an actor's version of the adage about youth being wasted on the young: The sad thing is that when you're really ready to play these roles -- when you really know how to play them -- nobody's going to cast you.
He said he was looking forward to the exuberance of New York. It would irritate my father so much -- because he was a military man, and both my brothers did military service, and I didn't -- that I walk around New York and I hear, 'Hey, Captain, how are you?' he said.
More than anything, he has Shakespeare on the brain. I have this theory that these roles, the really great roles -- there are elements of them in all of us. And that is part of the greatness of this dramatist, that he taps into something which is entirely human. You feel him reaching out his hand and saying to you as an actor, 'Come on, it's easier than you think.'
Mr. Stewart described an experience he had recently, as he walked alone before dusk near his rural village in Oxfordshire. Suddenly I had this urge to speak the role, and there's nobody about, he said. So I started at the top of the play, with 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen,' and I said the whole role through aloud, just to refresh my memory. It was a long walk.
But it hit me before I said the lines 'Light thickens, and the crow/Makes wing to the rooky wood' -- That's exactly how it was, he continued. And I thought: This is wonderful. Every night in New York when I come to that part, I'll remember where I was, on this lonely road with bare fields on either side, and there's a mist hanging over the field, and indeed there are crows.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Patrick Stewart, at top with Kate Fleetwood in Macbeth; above, as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in the film Star Trek: Insurrection; and below, with Glenn Close in the Showtime film The Lion in Winter. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY KRISTY WIGGLESWORTH/ASSOCIATED PRESS; ELLIOTT MARKS/PARAMOUNT PICTURES; KEN WORONER/SHOWTIME) (pg. AR6); Patrick Stewart at the Gielgud Theater in London, where he starred in a Macbeth that opens next month in Brooklyn. (PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE FORREST/INSIGHT-VISUAL, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. AR1)