In Antony Sher’s final performance as an actor, he was “an old South African Shakespearean actor dying of liver cancer”. The play was a two-hander by the black South African actor-writer John Kani; Kani played Sher’s at-home nurse, as the two men explored mortality, racial politics and the humiliation of dependence. The London run was shuttered by Covid-19 in March 2020. Sher never worked again.
In June 2021, after a career that established him as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leading actor, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. As he wrote in his diary, “who says actors don’t take their roles home with them?”
This heartbreaking book, published by Sher’s husband, Greg Doran, is a tribute to love, grief and Shakespeare. Sher and Doran met in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1987. Sher, the experienced star, was playing Shylock for the RSC’s The Merchant of Venice; Doran, the minor role of Solanio. (“I’d hit him and spit at him,” Doran later told an interviewer.) Nearly 35 years later, the two men were living together in an RSC cottage in Stratford. Doran had long since made his successful pivot to directing, becoming the artistic director of the RSC in 2012, with Sher his most frequent collaborator. They were at the heart of the company’s family. Shakespeare was at the heart of their life together.
Walking Shadow is a memoir composed in three distinct voices. The first section is a duet. Sher kept diaries all his life; Doran kept diaries of the experience of caring for his husband as Sher’s body broke down in the six short months between diagnosis and death. Doran has published their diaries for each day in parallel. “So what follows is an account of dying, from the person facing death and the one left behind.”
We see both men’s reactions to the same doctors’ prognoses; the mutual, guilty self-knowledge when they snap at each other in pain or exhaustion; even the conversation about Dignitas. Sher is sympathetic to assisted suicide legislation in the UK; Doran is not, worrying thoughtfully about “the mental strain it would put on the sick and the elderly… the terrible extra pressure on the disabled community”. But he promises to “be right there” and book the flights to Zurich if Sher decides this is what he wants. It is the dying man who realises the insurmountable snag. “Once it was over G would have to return alone. I couldn’t bear that thought.”
The second section, which comprises the bulk of the book, is a different type of text altogether. It is a pilgrimage memoir by Doran, chronicling his project to visit as many surviving copies as possible of the 17th-century collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio, of which more than 200 survive in museums and private collections around the globe. But we are hearing now from a different voice, and a different Greg Doran: no longer the raw and howling private man, but the public figure and Shakespeare educator. In Sher’s diaries, he was simply “G”.
When Doran tells his sister Jo about the project, she recognises its “true purpose as a massive piece of displacement activity”. He accepts the truth of this, but on he goes with his displacement; and, as we follow him from Stonyhurst to San Francisco, from Cape Town to Kobe, there are times when the reader too will feel displaced, yearning to be back in Stratford and reading about a time when Sher was still alive and this book was still a love story.
Just like Doran, we miss Sher’s own voice, raucous, sharp and gritty, inveterately quoting the American comedian Jackie Mason and inventing baking rhymes with “G” about life as a “faygeleh bageler” (in other words, a gay Jewish man who bakes bagels). One of the many joys we witness in their marriage is the delight Doran takes in embracing Sher’s Jewish South African culture, particularly its humour. “Getting sillier and sillier, we laugh ourselves to sleep,” Sher writes on the night of the bagels. Across all the pages in which Sher still breathes, laughter dances.
‘Getting sillier and sillier, we laugh ourselves to sleep,’ Sher writes in his diary
Without Sher, Doran can still spin a colourful yarn. There are fabulous tales about these ultra-valuable early editions of Shakespeare and how they have survived. In 1623, when Shakespeare’s colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell collated what they claimed to be his complete works, approximately 750 copies were printed. As numbers dwindled, and Shakespeare’s global fame rose, unscrupulous characters have been willing to fight, forge and kill to claim ownership of a copy. There have also been heroics, including those of a woman named Emma Sutro who rode a horsedrawn buggy across the cratering pavements of San Franscisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, to rescue her family copy from a burning warehouse.
There’s a delicious opening vignette: in 1964, the RSC was invited to perform in front of Pope Paul VI to mark the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. The RSC’s own Folio was brought along to the Vatican, handcuffed to a production manager at the behest of insurers as it traversed Europe by train. It was placed on a lectern during the performance. All went well, until the actress Dorothy Tutin, overwhelmed by the emotions of her curtain call in the Holy City, had the impromptu urge to grab the Folio and hand it to the Pope for blessing. His Holiness, used to being given lavish gifts by visitors, assumed that this was simply the latest offering and had it immediately marched away for storage. It took deft negotiation by the archbishop of Westminster to ensure its retrieval.
This is the type of theatre lore that Doran is uniquely positioned to tell, and he tells us well. (The incident is also revealing about the Vatican’s attitude towards transparency in 1964: it was explicitly denied by Rome when reported in the press, Doran says, despite being witnessed.) He has a natural ability to recreate the atmosphere of famous moments in the theatre known only to us by documentary report.
The stories retold here of terrible attempts to forge and “discover” lost Shakespeare texts are well-established ground: the teenage hoaxer William Henry Ireland; the pseudoscholar John Payne Collier, termed a “great literary slug”, who claimed to have discovered a Folio with contemporary “corrections” to Shakespeare lines he didn’t like.
But unlike scholars who have told these stories, Doran has a director’s inner eye for scenes such as the chaotic evening in 1796, when London audiences gathered at Drury Lane to witness the first staged performance of Ireland’s latest “discovery”, billed as a new Shakespeare play called Vortigern and Rowena. Ireland’s father, much like proud parents and producers in today’s West End, packed the gallery with friends guaranteed to cheer no matter the quality of the product. The drama on stage descended into farce. One actor missed his mark when collapsing “dead” and lay down immediately under the curtain line, head and feet on opposite sides. “So when the curtain descends,” writes Doran, “it not only splits him in half but the weight of the curtain bar makes the dead body emit a terrible groan.”
By the end of that evening, no one credited Vortigern and Rowena as Shakespeare’s language. Leading actor John Philip Kemble, who had become vocally sceptic during the rehearsal process, “with marmoreal grandeur, deals its death blow”. His character had a line of dialogue which read, “and when this solemn mockery is over…”. Kemble delivered it twice, for laughs, direct to a hysterical audience. The closure of the run, expected to last at least 60 performances, is announced at the curtain.
These are theatre stories told by a great theatremaker. But Doran is not a scholar of book history, despite his enthusiasm. The history of the Folio’s creation has been better told recently in Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare’s Book. or Emma Smith’s Shakespeare’s First Folio. (Surprisingly, for a former actor, Doran doesn’t pick up on Laoutaris’s thesis that the commercial impetus for Condell and Heminges was the mass mourning at the death of Richard Burbage, the star actor then better associated with some of these plays than Shakespeare himself.)
Inspecting the inscriptions and alterations of early modern books he’s lucky enough to see up close, Doran records the brainwave explanations that occur to him with an endearing but infuriating amateurism. A 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, held in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, is inscribed by a former owner. Without the slightest training in early-modern handwriting, Doran misreads two initials for a numerical date and reimagines it as Shakespeare’s own dedication to an unknown friend. A copy of the First Folio held in Skipton is unlikely to have been vandalised by Charlotte Brontë, despite Doran’s best hopes.
A copy of the First Folio held in Skipton is unlikely to have been vandalised by Charlotte Brontë
There are prejudices, omissions and self-serving platitudes. Any early-modern religious history is clearly informed by Doran’s Catholic education: the Jesuit Henry Garnet, for example, appears sympathetically as something of a martyr after his execution “solely for having advance knowledge” of the Gunpowder Plot—that is, for withholding information about the planned massacre of innocents.
Back in the present day, Doran thanks the former RSC executive director Catherine Mallyon and its current chair, Shriti Vadera, for their support when he took sudden compassionate leave, but there is no acknowledgement of Erica Whyman, his hardworking deputy who stepped up to lead the company through the end of the Covid crisis. Nor the mountain of Covid-loan debt that engulfed the company after Doran’s departure and has since cost more than 10 per cent of its workforce their jobs in redundancies.
During this period, Doran directed the superb Arthur Hughes in Richard III, and he repeats here the necessary orthodoxies about the need for the role to be reclaimed by disabled actors such as Hughes, who has radial dysplasia. Sher’s own breakthrough at the RSC, however, was a 1984 performance of Richard III that he gave on crutches: “I had set out to look for a physical shape, but maybe what I found is something about being disabled,” he later wrote. Was Sher “cripping up” or building empathy? The debate rages on, but his widower makes no attempt to interrogate these contradictions.
Yet there is a deep beauty to this memoir of pilgrimage, anchored in Doran’s love of Shakespeare and his love of Sher. At its best moments, Doran draws on his memories of Sher the actor to illuminate Burbage, Kemble and all the others who have brought these plays to life. Rummaging in the Burbage archive at Dulwich College, he is reminded of Burbage’s own prowess as a painter. (“Tis a question whether that make him an excellent player, or his playing an excellent painter,” wrote a contemporary.) He thinks of Sher, a devotee of art therapy, painting himself as each of his Shakespeare roles as part of his process to find the character. Sher’s spectral image is everywhere on this journey. His voice is all too absent.
