 |
| Max Stafford-Clark, working with the Out of Joint threatre company. Photograph: John Haynes |
My hero
Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
I
We did two more plays together, and since 2004 we have laboured to put together a fourth. In 2006 we were to have a rehearsed reading of this play, but overwhelming news interrupted the plan. Max had endured three strokes, front, middle and back of the brain, all at the one time. It would have definitively felled Achilles. And certainly it was a long Herculean year before he worked again.
In rehearsal these last weeks, I realised very quickly that something indeed had happened to Max. Something unexpected, yes, but also miraculous. He had somehow augmented his nature, and had become an even greater man. He had met his difficulty with a sort of deep-bedded dancingness. For instance, he had sat with the play so intently, played his mind over it so completely, that it was like watching some heroic painter at work as he rehearsed it, willing to squeeze himself into a tight space to give life to a democratic vision. His actors came up to the gate of his inspiration like horses for apples. He was always, it seemed, well ahead of us, but didn't mind waiting till we caught up.
If I were a Queen's adviser, and not a renegade and disreputable Irishman, I would suggest him for a knighthood, an Order of Merit, a Companion of Honour. For in being his companion these last weeks we have all been greatly honoured
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
006 My hero / Ted Hughes by Michael Morpurgo
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm
2010
013 My hero / Bob Moog by Don Paterson
014 My Hero / Sebastian Walker by Julie Myerson
015 My Hero / My Father John Gross by Philip Gross
016 My heroes in Postman's Park by Christopher Reid
017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey
022 My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore
023 My hero / Edith Wharton by Lionel Shriver
024 My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browing by Sara Paretsky
025 My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown
026 My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls
027 My hero / Samuel Beckett by Nick Clegg
035 My hero / Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor
041 My hero / David Linch by Paul Murray
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
134 My hero / Homer by Madeline Miller
146 My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen
156 My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore
2013
167 My hero / Oliver Sacks by Hilary Mantel
169 My hero / Jean Rhys by Linda Grant
174 My hero / Alice Munro by Nell Freudenberger
176 My hero / Mae West by Kathy Lette
181 My hero / Lydia Davis by Ali Smith
184 My hero / Louise Bourgeois by Tracey Emin
185 My hero / Albert Camus by David Constantine
190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer
No comments:
Post a Comment