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| Actor Robert Shaw |
“He must have been lonely, and
that that was his life — teaching boys and helping them. He used to take three
or four of us to see plays in London. The first real play I ever saw, in the
autumn of 1944, was Hamlet, with John
Gielgud, in a repertory production put on at the Haymarket. Mr. Wilkes took
some of us to London during a school holiday. We saw Gielgud’s Hamlet at a matinee. That evening, we
saw Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson in Peer Gynt, and the next day we saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III at a matinee, and Alastair
Sim in the James Birdie play It Depends
What You Mean that evening. The third day, we saw Laurence Olivier in the
film Henry V in the morning, and in
the evening we saw John Gielgud again, in Love
for Love.
“I was quite dazzled. Gielgud made
an extraordinary impression on me. I can see him now as he looked in Hamlet — that long, angular body in the
black costume. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, picked up Hamlet, and read it from beginning to
end.
“Me. Wilkes taught French and
directed all the school plays. He always had time to talk to the boys. We used
to sit in his room until two or three in the morning talking about books and
politics. Mr. Wilkes was one of those English liberal of the thirties — a
member of the Left Book Club, who probably thought about going to fight fascism
in Spain but then hadn’t done it. He was that kind of teacher.
“He directed me in the school
plays, but told me not to try to become a professional actor. He said that I
had the wrong temperament for it — that I was too rebellious and wanted my own
way too much. Later on, I found out that it was his policy to say that to
everybody, on the theory that if you’re set on doing a thing, you’ll go ahead
and do it anyway.” — Robert
Shaw, The Player: Profile of An Art
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