From Hamlet to the gold watch

By Irving Wardle

Jonathan Pryce, who returns to the Almeida to play Shakespeare’s King Lear in August, is the latest in a long line of British actors to have the role bestowed on them like a gold watch, marking a lifetime’s distinguished service and the prospect of imminent retirement. It is both an honour and a death sentence; and the lesson to be learnt from Ian McKellen and other recent Lears is not to leave it too late. Old as he is, the king must have something to lose.

At 65 Pryce has got his timing right. He looks ravaged, but still has a quarrel with the world. No one, as yet, is likely to write his work off as magisterial. He remains the most eye-catching actor of his age group, both for what he does and for what he is. When I first saw him, in Brenton and Hare’s “Brassneck” at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1973, he personified danger; he had the psychotic’s sparkling eye and every gesture carried the threat of violence—which fully erupted in his nightmare portrait of Gethin, the class-war stand-up comic in Trevor Griffiths’ “Comedians” (1975, also Nottingham). Then came the 1980 “Hamlet” at the Royal Court (above), in which Pryce amazingly doubled as the Prince and the Ghost of his father, taking the play to a new level of anguish.