Three shipwreck plays soon on the Stratford stage (From The Oxford Times)

Three shipwreck plays soon on the Stratford stage

3:23pm Wednesday 1st February 2012 in Gray Matter By Christopher Gray

Many actors airily claim never to read reviews, while most critics mischievously choose not to believe them. But Charlie Keegan does read reviews. He read one of mine about him and wasn’t happy with what I said. Unusually, he wrote to tell me so — a first for me, and for him, he said.

The notice related to his performance in the Baxter Theatre Centre’s production of The Tempest, which the South African company brought to Stratford three years ago in association with the RSC, with Sir Antony Sher in the key role of Prospero. Referring to Charlie as an “model-turned-actor”, I commented on a scene when, stripped to the waist, “he becomes alluring eye-candy for Miranda, who comically finds she cannot resist fingering the goods”.

He emailed me to say: “Your assumption that I’m a ‘model-turned-actor’ is profoundly annoying. I happen to have four years of theatre training and a degree in Theatre and Performance from the University of Cape Town. While a student, I happened to do modeling to meet financial obligations. I am an actor, who happens to model.”

I replied, expressing my regret over the mistake and adding: “This was a wrong inference (as I now know it to be) arising from your biography in the programme which gives the impression, as I am sure you must agree, that, studies apart, modelling has been your chief occupation in the past. [The résumé stated: “He has modelled for numerous brands and featured in the Cosmopolitan 100 Hottest Men segment for 2008.”] The reply mollified Charlie, who came back to say: “Thank you for such an admirable response to my email. I appreciate your sentiment and please do not think I hold you in any negative light. Quite the opposite.”

This was pretty generous of him, since I had been obliged to issue a mea culpa in respect of another part of the review where I said that the character he was playing was called Sebastian. He was, in fact, Ferdinand.

Though there is a Sebastian in The Tempest (he’s Ferdinand’s uncle) my confusion was not with him but with a character from an entirely different play, Twelfth Night. As I told Charlie: “I am sorry for my idiotic mistake over your character’s name, a momentary aberration arising from confusion with another victim of a Shakespearian shipwreck.”

All this came back to me a week or so ago when I received details from the RSC’s press office of a trilogy of plays coming up at Stratford next month as the company’s first contribution to the World Shakespeare Festival.

What Country Friends Is This? — the title taken, of course, from a question posed by Viola in Twelfth Night — features both this play and The Tempest as well as a third in which a shipwreck plays a significant part in the story, The Comedy of Errors. They will be performed by a single acting group, led by associate director David Farr.

He said: “In this shipwreck trilogy we are exploring the recurrent obsessions of Shakespeare with migration, exile and the discovery of yourself through others. Amir Nizar Zuabi (directing The Comedy of Errors) and I are both keen to interrogate these in a modern context.

“In these plays again and again Shakespeare returns to the image of man or woman as a drop in the ocean seeking another drop. He describes love and passion as being like the sea, and he sees in shipwreck the destruction and the revival of the self. For a man who appears never to have left his country he travelled far in his imagination.”

For many, the big draw is likely to be the involvement in all three plays of Jonathan Slinger, a brilliant actor whose previous Stratford successes have included the title roles in Richard II and Richard III (night and night about) and Macbeth. He will not be reviving his memorable performance as Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors but taking on the smaller role of Dr Pinch. This frees him slightly for what must seem another massive challenge, alternating Prospero with Twelfth Night’s Malvolio.