An actor’s notebook

It is delightful to be writing for a magazine I’ve read, man and boy, since I was 15. Such is my affection for The Spectator that I felt a particular puff of pride when my name appeared on the cover a few weeks ago. The fact that the words in question were ‘Simon Callow’s Wagnerian disaster’ barely dented my pleasure. It advertised a quite collectibly horrible review of a short biography of Wagner I had written. The reviewer was Michael Tanner, a great explicator of philosophers, and indeed of Wagner himself. The review, dripping with scorn, had a certain personal edge to it. After having for my work as either actor, writer or director held up for scrutiny for over 40 years now, I became aware at a certain point that, as Orson Welles ruefully observed of himself, they don’t review my work any more; they review me.

My most indelible review was from James Fenton, then theatre critic of the Sunday Times: ‘Mr Callow’s stomach is a dreadful warning to us all,’ he said. The play was Christopher Hampton’s youthful masterpiece, Total Eclipse, in which, stomach and all, I played the poet Verlaine. I saw all of Christopher’s early work as it came out; he was my writer, the playwright of my own times who spoke most directly to me. His first two plays dealt with sexual complexity, and he did it with a kind of restrained elegance and eloquence that his more ferocious confrères weren’t attempting. He wrote, and writes, with a suppleness and a subtlety which is unique to him: the word lambent comes to mind. ‘Playing lightly and brilliantly over its subjects; gracefully sportive,’ says the OED. Just so. Mozartian is another word that comes to mind. At the moment, I’m directing The Philanthropist, which Hampton wrote for the Royal Court when he was 23.