Lear is played by one of the great classical actors of the age. And his Fool
is played by that odd-job entertainer par excellence, a former Doctor Who
and a man once renowned for stuffing ferrets down his [[ a smile, “and so
have I.” But there’s no denying it — this is an incongruous double-act. The
production is Trevor Nunn’s King Lear, the culmination of the
RSC’s much-trumpeted Complete Works festival.
Sylvester McCoy is playing down the differences between Ian McKellen and
himself. After all, “he’s been in Coronation Street and
panto,” says McCoy, with barely a flicker of trousers. “Everyone seems
delighted by the fact that I’m doing it,” says McCoy.
So they should be. We’ve all seen Shakespeare plays in which the Festes,
Touchstones and Fools are played by RADA-trained stiffs with cloth ears for
comedy. But McCoy’s gadfly credentials are impeccable. An accidental actor
who tumbled into the profession (“literally”, he says), he has a CV of which
the Shakespearean jester Will Kempe would be proud.
Like a fellow Doctor Who, Tom Baker, he trained to be a priest. Later, at
London’s Roundhouse in the Sixties, he worked a shift as a bouncer for the
Rolling Stones. Then along came Ken Campbell, who recruited McCoy (real name
James Kent-Smith) to his legendarily anarchic Roadshow. Soon,
Sylveste (as he was temporarily known) was setting fire to his own head and
secreting ferrets in his pants. “They bite like grim death,” he recalls with
a wince. “The only way to get them off is to blow smoke in their faces.”
One day, he found himself busking outside Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in
Stratford. Littlewood sheltered him from the rain and offered him a job. He
graduated from Stratford to Richard Eyre’s Nottingham Playhouse, and later
played the Pied Piper at the National.
In person, McCoy is unpretentious and, for an actor, unusually frank about his
near-misses and strokes of good fortune. He admits he wishes Ian Holm had
been otherwise engaged instead of pipping McCoy to a lead role in Peter
Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings – and he claims Holm copied his
coiffeur for the part (“Bilbo Baggins has my hair!”). And he doesn’t
disguise his excitement at the Lear job. After bumping into Trevor
Nunn at a West End opening night, he went for coffee with him. “And he said,
‘I believe in synchronicity. I met you and I think you should play the
Fool.’ So I said, ‘I believe in synchronicity too. Whatever that is, I
believe in it. I’m taking up that religion!’ ” But the humility stops at the
point when anyone questions McCoy’s right to such an illustrious role. OK,
he was “too terrified” to go to drama school. “Coming from the Highlands,”
he says, “I knew very little about theatre.” And OK, he has a scattershot
approach to the profession, which he calls “the philosophy of yes”: “When
anyone ever offered me a job I said ‘yes’ and took it.”
But the crazy-paved career is not without lofty accomplishment. He has played
Puck “many a time” and Moliãre in his native Scotland, where he also starred
in Sir David Lindsay’s 16th-century masterpiece Ane Satyre of the
Thrie Estaitesat the Edinburgh Festival. And yet, “even the other day a
friend of mine, a director, said, ‘It’s great that you’ve broken into
classical theatre.’ Does she not know that I’ve done Shakespeare before?”
This, says McCoy, is snobbery. To McCoy, performing King Lear is no
nobler an activity than entertaining the people of Kirby, as he used to, by
hammering nails up his nose. “A lot of the old variety artists,” he says,
“when they were allowed to do straight stuff, they got great responses.”
What entertainers understand and actors sometimes overlook is that (in
McCoy’s words) “an audience is the most important thing in the evening,
whether that’s in a working men’s club in Hull or the National Theatre.
“It wasn’t easy to get over that snobbery when I started,” he says. “But it’s
easier now.” Hence Lee Evans’s impressive dramatic career. Pinter (in whose Dumb
Waiter Evans currently stars), Beckett and Shakespeare understood that
the profoundest laughs come from deep in the abyss. Eliciting laughs against
the bleak landscape of King Lear “is the challenge, but also the
joy,” says McCoy. “Because you know the audience will really appreciate it.”
So will McCoy be bringing his vaudeville skills to the play? “I’ve managed to
get a few things in that I’d love to tell you about. But I shan’t because
it’d spoil it.” Oh, go on. “There’s a thing to do with an egg.” Anything
else? Well, McCoy is a great silent movie buff (he has played both Stan
Laurel and Buster Keaton onstage), and he reminds me that W. C. Fields used
to insist on juggling in every film he made – even Great
Expectations. “And with me,” says McCoy, “it’s the spoons. I play the
spoons in everything I can. And I’ve got them into King Lear!
It’s in my contract, à la W. C. Fields.” He mimics a scene from 1920s
Hollywood. “ ‘But W. C., Shakespeare didn’t write spoons.’ ‘Well,’ ” drawls
McCoy, chewing an imaginary cigar, “ ‘he has now . . .’ ” McCoy’s Doctor Who
played the spoons, too – all the way to the knacker’s yard. McCoy was in
situ in 1989, when the BBC cancelled the Time Lord, and throughout his
three-year tenure, he says, “we always felt we were battling the BBC
establishment, who were fed up with it”. McCoy is characteristically
self-deprecating about his time on the show: “When I watched myself
onscreen,” he says, “I used to hide behind the couch.”
But we Doctor Who fans remember his era with affection. So I’m glad to
hear that the revived series are casting a little sunshine McCoy’s way.
“Lots of children come up to me these days and say, ‘You’re my favourite
Doctor’.”
That the words “former Doctor Who” now have an audience-friendly ring may have
been a factor in McCoy’s RSC casting. At any rate, he hopes that, at the end
of its world tour, the production may find its way back to the revamped
Roundhouse, where his career began 40 years ago. Perhaps, to complete the
circle, he could smuggle the ferrets-down-trousers trick into Shakespeare?
“It might be a good idea,” he says, with a mischievous glint in the eye.
“You never know — they might yet appear.”
King Lear, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (www.rsc.org.uk 08448
001110), from today
