The life-threatening experience of having a stroke has led to a remarkable, autobiographical play by Edward Petherbridge, the British actor who was the original Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the original Lord Peter Wimsey on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery!
My Perfect Mind--which runs through Sunday as part of the 2015 Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in New York and is co-written by Petherbridge--explores the actor’s life, career and stroke, which occurred in 2007 during rehearsals for a production of King
After undergoing therapy, he resumed his acting career and starred in a production of The Fantasticks in London with Paul Hunter; although it was panned, it brought him and Hunter together. Petherbridge suggested the two create a two-character version of Lear, while Hunter suggested that they create a play about not doing Lear, which is what My Perfect Mind is. Its title is taken from the end of the fourth act of King Lear, when the king encounters his daughter, Cordelia.
Petherbridge--who co-wrote the play with Hunter, who he said plays every character in it from Sir Laurence Olivier to his mother, and with Kathryn Hunter, its director and the first British actress to play Lear, which she did in Leicester in 1997—called My Perfect Mind “a consolation prize. I’ve had the most wonderful journey on this show. The voyage of discovery feels still new.”
He said his and his co-writers’ approach was “kind of free-wheeling. Kathryn got us to explore various necks of various woods. Things pop up in a kaleidoscopic way. When we stopped shaking, we found we had a picture. It has a great deal of playfulness attached to it, comic improvisation.”
Doing the play, he added, has been part of his “ongoing rehabilitation. I still feel even after all this time that I’m being rehabilitated, that I have a duty to keep going.”
Petherbridge is also a painter; he and the British painter and his contemporary, David Hockney, were both born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. A painting he did of his brother was shown in the 2014 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London. He has also written a book of autobiographical essays, Slim Chances and Unscheduled Appearances. And he was nominated for two Tony Awards, for his portrayal of Newman Noggs in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby and for his portrayal of Charlie Marsden in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; he also won Olivier and London Drama Critics Awards for the latter in London.
