Simon Callow explores the beauty of the Bard (From Streatham Guardian)

Simon Callow explores the beauty of the Bard

1:36pm Friday 23rd July 2010

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The Man from Stratford arrives in Richmond on Tuesday.

I’m always thrilled to come to Richmond because I have never done a play that hasn’t fitted perfectly into that wonderful auditorium or found a keen response from that audience.

But this show is quite unlike any other show I’ve done, and the reason can be simply stated – William Shakespeare. I should explain that it’s a one-man play, written by Jonathan Bate, who knows more about Shakespeare than anyone alive, and that it’s the third in a series of one-man plays about writers that I’ve done over the past 15 years. The first was The Importance of Being Oscar, written by the great Irish actor and story-teller, Micheál mac Liammóir, whose dresser I very briefly was in my youth.

Mac Liammóir invented the form, in which he talked about Wilde and became his characters so suggestively that by the end you were convinced that you’d been in Wilde’s company. It was such a joy to do that I suggested that my friend, the producer Howard Panter, should commission a play in the same style about Charles Dickens, which Peter Ackroyd accordingly wrote with such brilliant panache.

I played it for three years, and formed a passionate connection with Dickens, who, both as man and as writer, touched and thrilled me to the core.

I had always loved Oscar Wilde, from early youth, and had read literally everything by him and almost everything about him, but when I came to do The Mystery of Charles Dickens, I found myself wavering in my admiration.

Dickens was so much bigger, so much more extraordinary, so much deeper and darker. I felt bad about Oscar, but a greater love had claimed me. Each man kills the thing he loves.

And now it’s happened again.

My adoration for Dickens has been eclipsed by the man from Stratford. Nobody would have been less surprised about this than Dickens himself – he worshipped Shakespeare, and he would have greeted the idea that he should be considered his equal with derisive laughter.

Of course, Dickens is great – towering, titanic. But you are always aware of his presence in his writing. With Shakespeare, you are only aware of the characters. Moreover, with Dickens, there are limits to his sympathy and to his experience. With Shakespeare, all of human life is there – he gives the greatest account I know of in the whole of world literature of what it is to be human.

Of course, he is supreme as a wordsmith, and masterly in terms of dramatic construction, but it is his capacity to capture life on the wing, to write the music of our lives, to remind us of the almost infinite richness of human existence, that marks him out as the greatest.

What kind of a man created this astonishing body of work? That is the question that The Man from Stratford raises, and the answer is a surprising one: a man like you and me.

I have found this answer oddly inspiring. He understood us so well because he was one of us.

The play is about how linking a genius for language and stagecraft to profound common humanity makes Shakespeare the supreme writer of our civilisation.

The Man From Stratford, Richmond Theatre, July 27-31, 7.45pm. Call 0844 871 7627 or visit ambassadortickets.com

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