Walking Shadow, page 1
To Richard, the best of best friends, with thanks and love
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
Macbeth (Act 5 scene 5)
Contents
Introduction
THE DYING DIARIES
THE FOLIO ROADSHOW
Part One Chapter One: Stratford-upon-Avon
Chapter Two: The UK Folios
Part Two Chapter Three: Westward Ho!
Chapter Four: North of the Border
Part Three Chapter Five: Germany
Chapter Six: The Great Libraries of Dublin, Cambridge and Oxford
Part Four Chapter Seven: California
Chapter Eight: ‘The Great Literary Slug’
Chapter Nine: January 2023
Chapter Ten: Stratford, Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle
Chapter Eleven: ‘Slippery Times’
Part Five Chapter Twelve: Japan and ‘The Unknown World’
Chapter Thirteen: Australia
Chapter Fourteen: New Zealand and a Māori Love Story
Chapter Fifteen: Cape Town
Part Six Chapter Sixteen: North American Folio Roadshow I: Chicago to Boston
Chapter Seventeen: The Book World’s Jekyll and Hyde
Chapter Eighteen: North American Folio Roadshow II: Connecticut to Texas
Part Seven Chapter Nineteen: Vancouver
Chapter Twenty: Foliomania
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
A Note on the Author
Plates
Index
Introduction
On a December night in 2021, I lost half my life: Antony Sher, actor, writer, artist, husband and my life partner of thirty-five years.
He was diagnosed with cancer that June. The original prognosis was five years. That soon whittled down to just six shocking months, and on 2 December 2021 I lost him. 2.12.21 – the date engraved forever on my heart.
Tony started to write a journal about what was happening to him. He called it The Dying Diaries. As with all the books Tony wrote, The Dying Diaries are brutally honest and raw. I wrote a diary too in those last months, rather more mechanically, in order to keep on top of everything, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to control the uncontrollable.
I took compassionate leave from my role as Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company to care for him. After he died I stepped back from the job. Losing Tony, leaving the RSC and moving from Stratford, and the house we had made our home for so long, was challenging. Shakespeare helped.
I set out on a quest. 2023 was the quatercentenary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. If his friends John Hemmings and Henry Condell had not pulled that miraculous volume together we would have lost half of those astonishing works. No Macbeth, or The Tempest, no Julius Caesar, or Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale.
We have our own First Folio at the RSC in Stratford. I would show it to the acting companies each time I did one of the plays within it. I decided to celebrate the 400th anniversary by trying to see as many of the other copies in Britain as I could. Then it snowballed. The second part of this book recounts that journey.
When I got back home I finally felt able to read Tony’s Dying Diaries. That allowed me to begin properly to face what I had been running away from. I decided to edit our two diaries together, to trace our shared experience of an event which we all encounter: our shared experience of dying − not of death – which I discovered, however much we are loved, we ultimately and inevitably face alone.
Greg Doran
John Kani and Antony Sher in Kunene and the King A month after Tony’s funeral, I began sorting his desk and found one of the A4 spiral-bound exercise books he always used to write in. On its cover was a yellow Post-it listing the short stories he had written during lockdown: The Wonder, The Sea Point House, The Man Who Woke Up Happy. Six of them in all. I opened the cover expecting to see one of his early drafts. Instead I found the following:
YEAR OF THE SATSUMA
The dying diaries
A diary of dying
by
Antony Sher
(24.8.21–)
It wasn’t the alternative subtitles that got me, it was the date, and the fact that I could now fill in the missing part, 2.12.21. The day, fourteen weeks later, that he died.
He began with a prologue. Here it is:
PROLOGUE
A year ago, in the theatre, I was playing an old South African Shakespearean actor dying of liver cancer.
Now, in real life, I am an old South African Shakespearean actor dying of liver cancer.
Who says that actors don’t take their roles home with them?
The play was Kunene and the King by John Kani.
When John and I were together in The Tempest in 2009 – him playing Caliban, me Prospero in an RSC/Baxter Theatre co-production – he asked me to have coffee with him one morning and told me that he was thinking of writing a play for the two of us. His plans for it were still very unformed at that point, but he thought it might be about a white actor and his black dresser. This sounded a bit like a South African version of my cousin Ronald Harwood’s famous play The Dresser, but I encouraged John to proceed. I was just immensely flattered by the idea of being in a two-hander with John, like those great pieces he performed with Winston Ntshona in the 1970s – Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, which they conceived and created along with Athol Fugard.
I heard nothing more about the project for the next decade.
Then in 2018 I suddenly received an email from John, saying, ‘Remember that play I wanted to write for us? Well, I’ve done it and here it is, and please let me know what you think. Give my regards to Greg.’
I read the play immediately. My role was still that of an actor, a Shakespearean actor, but his role was now of a professional medical carer, who is assigned to the actor because he has terminal liver cancer. I emailed back: ‘I think it’s basically terrific – so I’ve given Greg more than your regards, I’ve given him your play to read. This could be one for the RSC.’
Greg agreed with me. The play was basically terrific – funny, moving, full of raw living politics, and, perhaps best of all, offering an extraordinary picture of how Shakespeare is viewed by different cultures (in the play, the actor is an expert practitioner of the Bard and the carer is a devoted fan). Greg felt it needed some work. But the RSC might fund workshops and then produce it in collaboration with a South African partner, which turned out to be Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre.
John couldn’t believe his good fortune. I believe he has my first email – saying I was showing the play to Greg – framed on his wall.
With Janice Honeyman as our director – she’d worked with both of us many times, including The Tempest and this would be her fifth RSC production – we held two invigorating workshops, the first where John and Janice joined me in Stratford, the second when I joined them in Johannesburg. Both with RSC assistant director, Nel Crouch serving as an invaluable script editor and researcher.
As we worked through the text testing the scenes by reading them aloud, then doing alterations or sometimes even re-ordering certain sequences, I was deeply impressed by John’s openness in allowing his script to be changed. Research-wise we could supply some of it ourselves. The play is set in 2019, twenty-five years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, and John knew all about the history of his country during and after apartheid. And the Shakespeare play which my character was hoping to do before he dies is King Lear, which I had just played in Stratford, London and New York, so I had a good knowledge of which quotes to choose and why.
But our main topic of research was cancer. I remember us saying to one another that there wouldn’t be a single person in our audiences who didn’t have some personal experience of the disease, either directly or second-hand, and that we had a duty to honour them and to get our facts right.
Together we interviewed medical experts, visited hospices, watched documentaries, read articles, then struck gold when we made contact with Kathryn Mannix, the author of With the End in Mind, a remarkable book about dying which relates her encounters with various patients when she was an oncologist. One of her chapters called ‘Little Dancer’ led to a complete rethink of our third and final act. In the chapter Kathryn Mannix describes the effects of a particular drug on a dying patient who is suffering extreme nausea: it causes her to be very hyper, mentally and physically, ‘dancing’ through her last hours of life. What a brilliant solution for us – to create a strange upbeat tone for the concluding phase of a story, which otherwise would inevitably have a gloomy, dying fall.
Kathryn Mannix agreed to come on board as the production’s technical adviser.
We rehearsed at the Fugard, then opened in Stratford – to tremendous reviews, including a five-star rating from Billington in the Guardian, then played the Fugard, and then finally reassembled for a West End run at the Ambassadors, starting in January 2020. And that’s where my story really begins.
I turned the page to the first chapter.
Saturday 14 March 2020
A matinee day. Throughout my fifty-odd years as an actor, I’ve never got used to doing a show twice a day and frankly never ceased to hate it. You feel like videotape, which someone runs through, then rewinds, then runs again. But my matinee-day blues are tempered on this occasion because we have only two weeks left to run.
It’s crazy, I know. I’m tremendously proud of being in this show and of its success, yet I can’t wait for it to be over – as with any show I’ve ever done. When it comes to creativity, I’m impatient and easily bored, so I’m not really a theatre actor by nature. The endless repetition defeats me.
Finally, the long day comes to an end. I find Tim West and Pru Scales at the stage door. They’ve waited to say hello and well done. Tim played the Fugard a couple of years ago, with his son, Sam, in Caryl Churchill’s A Number and had a good time there. I chat with them, then climb into the pre-ordered taxi which is waiting for me next to the stage door and head for home, relishing the thought of a peaceful Sunday ahead.
Little do I know that I will never return to the stage door, or this theatre, or any theatre, and I will never work as an actor again.
Tony had written one more entry describing the erratic way in which lockdown had finally been imposed and how we promptly made our way home to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the house we rented from the RSC on the edge of the Welcombe Hills. The rest of the pages were blank. Lying beneath it were two of the black sketchbooks in which he used to write his diaries, assiduously labelled in the top right corner with the dates. The first diary began in April of that year and ended in the week he began drafting ‘Year of the Satsuma’. The second diary took him until five days before his death.
Tony had always written a diary. In the last few weeks of his life we had gathered them all together, hundreds of them going back to his teenage years. He would read them through in a rather listless way. At one point when he seemed very far away, I asked him if he was all right. ‘I’m reading my life,’ he explained. ‘It’s not an easy read.’ Occasionally he would choose an extract to read to me. There was a wonderful description of his beloved Table Mountain, and another recalling how we had once watched from the cliff top as a group of seals chased a shoal of sardines into Bantry Bay, while noisy gulls and mute cormorants took advantage of the feast, diving into the kelp-filled ocean. Layer upon layer of life.
He told me to do what I liked with his diaries, probably burn them, but that I should at least read these last two. I couldn’t. And didn’t. For over two years. But then I did. So what follows is an account of dying, from the person facing death and the one left behind.
THE DYING DIARIES
Year of the Satsuma:
A Fable of Living and Dying
Tony Sher and Greg Doran’s parallel diaries from June–December 2021 subsequently woven together by Greg
(Tony’s entries are in roman; Greg’s entries are in italics)
JUNE
‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ Wednesday 9 June 2021: Diagnosis
4.15 God. Just received a phone call from Dr Shearman. He’d seen my ultrasound scan from this morning. Reports that there are two dark patches on my liver. Will have to do more scans.
I asked, ‘How sinister can this be?’
He said, ‘I can’t say. Not till we’ve done the further scans.’
It must be cancer.
He said they could be birthmarks.
Then why haven’t they shown up before?
No – it’s cancer.
Probably explains why recently I have felt iller than before.
Cancer.
Don’t know what to think.
Other than I’m not ‘getting away with it’ any more.
Sat in shock outside, waiting for G to come home.
I went through every detail: having to tell family and friends, having to choose chemo or not, the final few days, etc.
And will it be one of those slow, lingering cancers, or one of the fast ones?
Looked around the garden – particularly beautiful, everything blooming – and wondered whether I’d see it next year. Poured a glass of champagne. Amazing how fast the anaesthetic of alcohol works. The word ‘cancer’ was still stuck in my head but there was now a nice numbing distance between it and me.
G took the news with a kind of blank shock. Said ‘whatever happens, we’ll go through it together’.
Tony is waiting for me at the front door. His gastroenterologist, Dr Shearman, has rung to say two ‘patches’ have appeared on his liver. We go into the garden to discuss.
Later that evening, I have an hour-long international call with our RSC America Board, about possible future plans. Hard to concentrate.
Saturday 12 June
After siesta, went for a pee. Felt a bit faint halfway through, finished peeing (thank God) but then a dizziness overwhelmed me and I fell backwards, between toilet and bath, hitting both and all stuff in between: toilet roll holder, toilet brush holder, etc. G dashed to my help. He couldn’t get me up at first. Then did, and onto bed. Bad bruising and scratches on right arm, but it could’ve been worse. Very, very shaken though.
A little later, lying back on the bed, he shudders with the weird sensation of falling backwards through the mattress. I know this is hypertension, but don’t know what to do about it.
Sunday 13 June
Have to use stick indoors now, but determined to have the pre-birthday treats we’ve lined up for today. Breakfast and lunch on our splendid new patio at the fence in the garden. Best restaurant view in Stratford.
Monday 14 June: Tony’s seventy-second birthday
I refuse to write up my birthday in black,1 but it was a very strange and quite worrying day.
On waking, dizziness very bad. G went off for an early walk on the Welcombe Hills with Catherine Mallyon,2 a two-and-a-half-hour catch-up. He was just popping home afterwards to collect his stuff and go to work, but found me on the bed, looking very white. He cancelled going to work today.
We rang Dr Alia, and (bless this new Medical Concierge service) she came round an hour later. Checked blood pressure, pulse and urine (all normal). She confirmed that the ‘falling through the bed’ feel is hypertension. That the dizziness could be from anxiety (which is immense) about next week’s CT scan. Anyway, it was a godsend having G home for the day. And we did manage to create the semblance of a happy birthday.
Message on my phone tells me that I have tested positive for the coronavirus and must immediately self-isolate for ten days. In my hurry to complete my lateral flow test (which the whole company working in the building have to do every seventy-two hours) and, in my resolute determination to keep optimistic, I have ticked positive instead of negative.
Wednesday 16 June
11.40 a.m. Appointment with Dr Shearman, Stratford Hospital.
As always with doctors these days, I went in having rehearsed a fight. Thought he’d say he couldn’t comment on results of the ultrasound scan till after the CT scan next Tuesday.
I was wrong. He was fully willing – and had indeed pre-decided – to talk about the results.
The fact is they seem very conclusive.
I have primary liver cell cancer.
Two spots, one quite big, 65 mm (size of a satsuma, he said) and one smaller, 25 mm (size of a walnut).
A liver transplant is out.
The first treatment they’ll try is zapping the two spots with chemo.
If this fails, they’ll open me up and burn off the spots physically.
Wouldn’t give any prognosis at this stage.
He asked if, in the light of this news, I’d still be staying up here or returning to London for treatment. I replied: ‘Greg is my strength, and he’s here, so I’ll be here.’
So treatment will be in Coventry.
Generally I felt relief more than anything.
So it is cancer. Good to have the word said out loud and calmly by a medical person (rather than my uninformed nightmare images of it).
It doesn’t sound ultra urgent, or ultra critical yet.
Came home in a strange mood, oddly lighthearted.
Tony opens the front door. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he says. Dr Shearman has confirmed that the dark patches are indeed cancer. I find myself reeling. I had not expected any diagnosis until the CT scan next week. I am not ready to hear this.
