Steve Pratt talks to Edward Petherbridge about turning his darkest hour into a successful play

A STROKE robbed Yorkshire-born actor Edward Petherbridge of the chance to play one of Shakespeare’s greatest parts, King Lear. As he recovered, he found that he’d retained the entire role in his mind. Couldn’t we do a two-man version of Lear, he suggested to fellow performer Paul Hunter while appearing with him in his first stage part after his illness?

Hunter had a better idea – a theatre piece about not playing Lear. The result is My Perfect Mind which mixes the life-changing chapter from Petherbridge’s life with King Lear. Despite what may be seen as the downbeat subject matter, the result is something of a “madcap comedy” according to Petherbridge. He plays himself with Hunter as everyone else, from a hospital consultant to Lear’s Fool. Kathryn Hunter directs the show, which next week comes to the Stephen Joseph Theatre, in Scarborough – a town where Petherbridge ppeared there in weekly rep early in his career.

“Scarborough is something special for me as a town. I started at the Ludlow Festival playing in Edward II, by Marlowe, in the castle grounds and then, after a spell in national service, I went into Scarborough rep. It was rather cushy because one didn’t do a play every week, although you only rehearsed each one for a week,” he recalls.

His 50-plus year career since then has encompassed Olivier’s National Theatre company in the 1960s, where he created the role of Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and work with the Royal Shakespeare Company including Nicholas Nickleby. He won an Olivier for Strange Interlude, part of the McKellen-Petherbridge company at the NT. On TV, he’ll be recalled for his portrayal of Lord Peter Wimsey in the Dorothy L Sayers Mysteries.

Thoughts of retirement didn’t enter his mind following his stroke during rehearsals for a production of King Lear in New Zealand. He knew how debilitating a stroke could be because his mother suffered a stroke two days before his birth and never recovered her speech fluently or the use of her right leg. “My hand was comatose after the stroke,” he says.

“For a while I couldn’t read or write. I thought what am I going to do? My first wife, who was in New Zealand, came to see me and brought a radio. That was a huge lifeline. I began to try to write and when I got home I decided I was going to write with my right hand somehow every day.

“I tried to write a poem most days and then I began to draw a little bit. Probably a month or six weeks in, I attempted a self-portrait in pastel. After a month to eight weeks I found my hand was much, much better.”

His first work after his recovery was a production of the long-running off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks, in London.

“I went with the RSC with repertoire of plays to New York. One Sunday I decided to take a walk to the Lincoln Centre and park. In Manhattan there’s an extraordinary community of hardcore theatregoers and I was stopped as I walked and welcomed back to New York. One of the people I found that I’d met having a coffee on the sidewalk – see I am using the lingo – was the director of The Fantasticks. He had just seen Nicholas Nickleby on Broadway and my little part in it. I didn’t know until he told me ten years later.”

He and Paul Hunter, co-founder and artistic director of Told by an idiot, were cast as “this extraordinary double act of decrepit actor and sidekick” in the production. My Perfect Mind arose from their conversations about Lear.

What’s it like doing a show all about himself? “I think actors are such egomaniacs anyway and if you do Hamlet you can’t help but betray your personality. You betray so much about yourself if you are acting properly,” is how Petherbridge views it.

“One has to realise it’s rather heady doing this because we have had, and continue to have, amazing feedback and things audiences take to their heart,” he says. “You are not playing to millions or tens of thousands like you would if you were on TV or the West End, you are playing in small size theatres. There is the fun and challenge of speaking Shakespeare’s lines as well as veering into these rather surreal scenes from past, present and possible future.”

But is it better than playing King Lear the play? “I can’t say, except I sometimes think to myself that if this is the booby prize then this sort of booby prize gives booby prizes a very good name. It’s not in any way a disappointment.”

Petherbridge was a weekend painter turned down by art school because he didn’t have the qualifications. So he went to his first love which was drama school.

“I faintly kept my drawing up over the years and then an actor I’d been working with asked if I would do his portrait. He commissioned me,” he says. “I had a picture hanging at the Royal Academy summer exhibition this year. Trying to get accepted is just like trying to get a part in a film, only much worse. It was a miracle I got in. My declining years have been quite fruitful.”

My Perfect Mind: Scarborough Stephen Joseph Theatre, Nov 11-15. Box Office: 01723-370541 and sjt.uk.com