Free Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Antony Sher

all what he does in this household. It
disturbs me.' But at the first preview, at the first whiff of the audience's
delight in this bloodsport, I was off; inventing snorts, hops, dancing
eyebrows before their very eyes. The irresistible drug of laughter. It will be
so predictable playing Richard like that. Must root his wit in self-defence.
Everything comes from his deformity, his pain.
    Interesting that the first two encounters happen to him. He's just sitting
there when Clarence and Hastings pass. Almost as if he's in a wheelchair
- he's been pushed out into the sun and left there.
    Play him in a wheelchair?

Wednesday 14 December
    Coming out of the gym I stop to memorise the surroundings for future
visits. I realise with a shock that I'm a block away from Sea Point Boys'
High School. All the shops have changed over the years and nothing is
familiar. Then I round the corner and there's the parade ground and the
school, exactly the same. Lean on the fence and stare hard. A flash of me
and Tony Fagin walking during Break, talking, talking, dreaming of going
overseas and becoming famous.
    The gates are open. I wonder whether to go in but the signs `Trespassers
will be Prosecuted' intimidate, particularly in Afrikaans.
    Walking along the fence staring up at the windows. Those classrooms.
In one I glimpse a world globe, almost black with dust. That must be the
Library. A book of photos - Alec Guinness in all his roles and disguises
- pored over endlessly.
    I have to pass through a group of Coloured women. They are very
drunk, their eyes and mouths ugly; they sway viciously. Maids off duty
still dressed absurdly in those pink uniforms. One looks at me horribly
through bloodshot eyes. She is rake thin, her bony arms flailing around
in the air; toothless, her thick lips flapping like her jaw has no hinges, shouting a stew of Afrikaans and English, swearing and spitting as she
staggers down the street. These are the people who will murder us in our
beds, we thought as children. They still frighten terribly.

    Reading Richard III. For a play so famous for its mass-murders, there's
surprisingly little violence on stage, but a constant sense of danger which
I like. When the violence does erupt (the stabbing of Clarence, Hastings'
head being brought on) I think it should be done very realistically and
shock immensely.
    Leafing through piles of old Time magazines that Dad has collected
over the years, on cue I come across a fascinating article on murderers
and capital punishment.
    A mass-murderer called Henry Brisbon Jnr, twenty-eight, Negro, from
a family of thirteen children, his father a strict Muslim, says: `I'm no bad
dude, just an anti-social individual. I was taught to be a racist and not like
whites. As I grew up I decided I didn't like nobody.'
    Different methods of capital punishment through the centuries. One
of the oddest is from nineteenth-century India, where the culprit was tied
to the hind leg of an elephant which was then forced into a fast trot,
bouncing the man along behind. He was untied, given a glass of water
and then had to put his head on a stone. The elephant was made to step
up and crush it.
    Not that modern electrocution is any less bizarre; the way the jury have
to take their seats as at the theatre, the executioner invisible behind a
two-way mirror. (Lermontov's line from Maydays: `I have always thought
the condemned are blindfolded not for themselves, but for the executioner.
So he can't see their faces.') When the electricity is pumped through, the
victim's eyeballs bulge from their sockets and burst. Then his brain boils
alive. The state boiling brains, Nilsen boiling heads ...
    And my current fear is making Richard too funny.
Thursday 15 December
    As I'm going out to sketch, Katie makes a big fuss about locking the door
behind me. She says she's scared to be in the house alone.
    `It wasn't like that when I lived here.'
    `Oo Master Antony, it's terrible what goes