Top thespian Simon Callow tells Heath Library of his first visit to the theatre, aged five

Thursday April 1, 2010

By JOSIE HINTON

HIS love affair with the theatre began when, as a five-year-old boy in 1954, he was dragged “kicking and screaming” to see Peter Pan at the now demolished Scala Theatre, off Tottenham Court Road.

More than 50 years later, actor and writer Simon Callow still recalls falling “absolutely silent” as he walked through the doors and was hit by a “sense that something extraordinary was about to happen”.

Speaking to the Friends of Heath Library in Keats Road on Wednesday night, as part of a regular series of talks from writers, Mr Callow told an enraptured audience that this was the precise moment his soul was sold to the theatre – beginning a career spanning more than half a century of watching, acting, directing and writing plays.

“It’s extraordinary to think what a piece of theatre can do,” he said. “It explodes your imagination, and the extraordinary thing is that it happens right in front of your eyes. The moment I walked through the doors of the Scala Theatre nothing could disturb my appetite for the play I was about to see.”

He told how he was particularly impressed by the colossal Captain Hook, played by Sir Donald Wolfit, one of a generation of “Titan” stage actors whose loss Mr Callow laments. With the increased importance placed on television and film, he continued, actors have become so fearful of being deemed unsuitable for the screen that they are afraid to really “act” on the stage. 

“Occasionally an actor is so powerfully idiosyncratic in himself that he manages to slip out of this trend, and I’m thinking specifically of Mark Rylance, who does extraordinary things with his voice and his body,” said Mr Callow. “But generally actors are discouraged from attempting anything on that scale.”

The full story of his career as actor, director and playwright will be revealed in his latest book, My Life in Pieces – “hundreds of thousands” of words written over the past 30 years collected into something Mr Callow describes as a “sort of autobiography”, which is out next month.

Pictured: Lee Montague from the Friends of Heath Library with actor Simon Callow