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Saturday 5 July 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.

He never, alas, played Falstaff but he was a famous Prospero, Benedick and Malvolio and a double award-winning Lear — a performance these days that is hard to contemplate, as one thinks of Sinden as a champion farceur with comedy eyebrows. In 1979 he was the last white actor in Stratford to play Othello. Does he regret this part now being off-limits to non-ethnic actors? ‘Yes, I jolly well do’, he harrumphs. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad. Does one have to be Scots to play Macbeth?’ He’s got a point, though from the photos his Othello looked hilarious — like a chocolate cornetto in a sauna.

The booming Sinden voice is the result of advice from an Edwardian stage veteran who told him ‘there’s many an actor sleeping rough on the Embankment for lack of an upward inflection’. His general fruitiness has made him meat for satirists. He was mercilessly pilloried on Spitting Image. When his puppet — a knighthood-obsessed Garrick club buffer — summoned a waiter and asked ‘Do you serve a ham salad?’ the waiter replied, ‘Yes, we serve salad to anyone.’ Although it was true that Sinden could never resist overmilking a laugh, the cruelty of the portrayal left his fond fellow actors baffled.

Scofield turned his knighthood down. But Sinden was thrilled to be offered his. It’s hard to imagine an actor who would enjoy one more. His unabashed view is that knighthoods are good for the theatre, an art form which he believes is fundamentally all about actors. He collects relics of the once famous. In Much Ado About Nothing he wore the same ring that Sir Henry Irving had used. In 1985 he was on flying form as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel, using the spyglass that the Victorian star Fred Terry had sported in the original production.

His collection of memorabilia is astonishing and his heart broke when he lost, in a burglary, prized items including the amulets worn by Edmund Kean as Byron’s Sardanapalus. ‘I would hand the rest of the stuff on to a young actor, but I can’t find any actors interested in theatre history,’ he says mournfully.

We’ve had his memoirs, but still to come is his book on Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend, who I had always assumed was an embittered and vicious old queen. That view is a travesty, says Sinden, who met Douglas in 1943 when he was old and living in reduced circumstances in Hove. They became chums. ‘Bosie took me over to Worthing to show me where Oscar had written The Importance. Oscar would extemporise as Lady Bracknell and he would be John Worthing. It’ll all be in the book.’

The postwar provincial Stratford theatre he knew is these days a multi-million-pound corporate concern with the RSC an ever expanding global brand. The birthday procession will pass the building site and battered remains of the famous pre-war red-brick theatre, whose ongoing and controversial £100 million redevelopment Sinden is angry about. ‘What was wrong with it? It was good enough for Olivier and Richardson. If it ain’t broke... but don’t get me started on that,’ he trails off.

Sinden is today patron of something called World Class Stratford, and his contribution to the town’s future is a proposal for a single-direction ring road to keep the lorries off his beloved Clopton bridge, and to have electric buses for the tourists. For those who want to hear him in person he’s doing his talk about his life and times — Shakespeare and Me — on 27 April in Stratford, a one-man show guaranteed to be 100 per cent audible at the back. ‘Stratford has been a very important part of my life. One wants to acknowledge what Shakespeare has done for us all in the lovely town where he was born, lived and died.’

More articles from: Robert Gore-Langton | this section

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