‘Patrick Stewart brought virile star power to the stage, from clowns to kings to wounded lions’
Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86, was a classic example of the company actor who becomes a star: a natural Enobarbus who winds up playing Mark Antony. It would be easy to say that he had fame thrust upon him through his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, but I would argue that it was a two-way process. As Peter Bradshaw points out, Stewart brought his RSC-trained gravitas to the screen, but his roles in popular franchises gave him an extra layer of confidence and authority on stage. He became, in short, an even more powerful actor.
I felt a particular fascination with Stewart’s career, since he was in the first play I ever reviewed for a national paper. He was Warwick in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the Bristol Old Vic in May 1965 and I was instantly struck by his rich, resonant voice. Once he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, I followed his progress eagerly. He seemed the perfect team player, capable of anything: Shakespearean clowns such as Touchstone in As You Like It and Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or more muscular figures such as Cornwall in King Lear and Hector in Troilus and Cressida.
But it was one particular season in 1971-72 that convinced me he had star power. He began by playing a ruthless Bulgarian communist in Trevor Griffiths’s terrific political drama, Occupations (a work overdue for revival). Then he played pivotal roles in Trevor Nunn’s four-play Stratford season, The Romans. He was a virile, grim-visaged Aufidius in Coriolanus. He followed that as a volatile, unstable Cassius in Julius Caesar, seething at the arrogant idealism of John Wood’s Brutus. In Antony and Cleopatra, his Enobarbus was a grizzled old sweat, and he took over as the murderous Aaron in Titus Andronicus when the whole cycle moved to London.
Stewart’s career at the RSC went from strength to strength – he was Astrov in Uncle Vanya and Ejlert Løvborg in Hedda Gabler – but there was always another side to his life. Having profited from the tuition of the RSC’s great verse-speaking guru, John Barton, he became passionate about passing on what he had learned. It started with his talking to US students in London each year, a study group led by a Shakespearean devotee called Homer “Murph” Swander to whom, as I saw when I once joined them, he was visibly devoted.
This developed into Stewart becoming a key figure in Actors in Residence, which toured American colleges performing Shakespeare. Eventually, this missionary work changed his life. One day in 1986, Stewart was lecturing and acting in LA, and in the audience was a producer, Robert H Justman, who was involved in a revival of Star Trek. Listening to Stewart, he turned to his wife and said: “We’ve found our captain.”
Stewart first signed up for six years on Star Trek and there were English colleagues who thought he was crazy to abandon theatre. But I would argue that Stewart’s time in Hollywood, which included his role as Professor X in X-Men, enriched him personally and professionally. You could see the benefits when he returned to the British stage. In 2006, he was back with the RSC in Gregory Doran’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, playing opposite Harriet Walter; the following year, I wrote that he was the best Mark Antony since Michael Redgrave. He gave us a magnificently wounded lion haunted by the memory that he had once been king of the jungle.
That capacity to remind us of a Shakespearean character’s self-awareness was also apparent in a stunning performance of Macbeth in a Rupert Goold production first at Chichester in 2007 and then in the West End. Stewart’s Macbeth had all the paranoia that accompanies power but, very much like Olivier before him, he allowed his voice to soar in agony when describing the “troops of friends” that he would never live to enjoy. A year later, Stewart was back with the RSC playing Claudius to David Tennant’s Hamlet in another Gregory Doran production. Instead of the usual stage villain, Stewart’s Claudius was a composed, calculating killer. The great moment came at the end of the play scene when, instead of rising in panic, Stewart strode over to Hamlet and pityingly shook his head as if to say: “You’ve really blown it now.”
After X-Men, Stewart formed a close bond with his co-star, Ian McKellen: both northerners with a Shakespearean hinterland. I wasn’t as wild as everyone else about their performances in Waiting for Godot, partly because I disliked their performing an old Flanagan and Allen number at curtain-call. But they were both superb in a West End revival of Pinter’s No Man’s Land. While McKellen caught perfectly the chattering anxiety and desperate desire to please of Spooner, the pub-poet, Stewart – as the famous writer, Hirst – exuded an infinite weariness and desperate isolation as he drank himself into oblivion. Coming from opposite sides of the Pennines, the two actors even allowed their voices to blend in a musical harmony that is essential to Pinter. Having followed Stewart’s career from its beginnings, I was delighted to see him relishing the star status he had so justly earned.