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Saturday 17 May 2008

‘It’s the most English thing you could imagine!’

Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon may be a small-town affair, but it is one of the very few non-London dates that involves the diplomatic corps.

On Saturday 26 April no fewer than 18 ambassadors will attend the occasion, the world’s nations joining sundry Warwickshire dignitaries, Stratford’s mayoral chain gang, various Shakespearean bodies, the band of the Corps of Royal Engineers, the Coventry Corps of Drums, sweet little local schoolchildren in boaters, Morris men and some 20,000 delighted onlookers.

You never hear much about this terribly English event because it’s been going on for so long (since 1824) it is taken for granted. This year the president of the celebrations will be Sir Donald Sinden (84 and still puffing 20 a day) who with his colleagues process through the town, around the birthplace and along the Avon to Holy Trinity Church to lay posies and wreaths on the tomb. It is followed by a slap-up lunch (at which Sinden is Master of Ceremonies) in a marquee for 650 people, with speeches and toasts, including one to the Immortal Memory of Shakespeare.

This year at the lunch the annual Pragnell Award will be presented to Michael Boyd, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Two years ago Sinden himself won it. I admitted to him that despite reviewing umpteen productions in Stratford I had never attended its Shakespeare birthday celebrations. ‘Oh my dear, you must go! It’s the most English thing you could imagine, really very, very splendid — and the flowers in the chancel are just ablaze,’ he says in his kippered plum-pudding voice.

It’ll be a day of flags, banners and pomp. ‘It’s my job to unfurl the Union flag,’ he says proudly. ‘I’ll be in my morning suit and top hat and I have asked others beside me to do the same. It had got to the point years ago when some fellows were wearing open-necked shirts. Quite disgraceful! It’s a great occasion — as good as Ascot and really very moving — and it needs finery.’ The ambassadors absolutely love it, by all accounts. They get to meet some real people and by the end of the day are happily swapping phone numbers with the locals.

Sinden has attended 11 such celebrations and has adored Stratford ever since he started working there as a young actor just after the war. ‘I’ve always loved it. I met my wife Diana [Mahoney] there in 1947. I spotted her and said to myself, “Hello hello hello”, and thought she’d do nicely. I proposed to her later that season — after a performance of  Twelfth Night — when we went for a very romantic moonlit walk over Clopton bridge. She fell about laughing. I tried again later and she accepted.

‘Very happy days they were in digs. The Scofields [Paul and Joy] were there — we all went up to Stratford together. Paul’s father knew mine very well as we lived nearby in Sussex. Paul’s death last month was indeed a blow. When Diana died four years ago, Paul read at the service from The Tempest and my old Stratford friend John Harrison read “Fear no more the heat o’the sun” from Cymbeline, which we’d done together.’ The Sinden family have had their share of sorrows. The family was shattered when 12 years ago their eldest son, the actor Jeremy Sinden (he played Boy Mulcaster in Brideshead Revisited), died of lung cancer, aged 45.

The two Sinden boys were marinaded in Shakespeare as they grew up. Donald once took his seven-year-old to Stratford to see Gielgud play Prospero. They went backstage afterwards. ‘If you’re so clever, why didn’t you magic yourself back to Italy?’ the little lad said, rather too perceptively. Gielgud thought about it and said, ‘Have a chocolate.’

Sinden’s classical career was interrupted in 1952 when he began eight years under contract to Rank Films, making his screen debut with Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea. But Stratford has been a constant factor and an old friend throughout his life. He’s full of stories about it. When he gave his Henry the Eighth there (‘bloody awful part’), the director suggested that he be a tad more regal. So one morning, finding no cream to put on his cereal, he barked, ‘See to it, wife, that I am not without cream tomorrow.’ He knew he’d cracked the part when she complained to the milkman, saying, ‘It’s all very well for you but I’m living with Henry the Eighth.’

More articles from: Robert Gore-Langton | this section

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