Part life story, part celebration of the Bard’s timeless words, Justin Hay’s one-man play My Own Private Shakespeare is founded on an intriguing idea. Telling the tale of a Shakespearean actor who finds his own world collapsing around him, it highlights how the universal themes of the Folio still resonate with the trials and tragedies of the modern age.
It’s never quite said, but the story’s surely autobiographical – at least in its essentials. Over the past decade, Hay has suffered many slings and arrows, and he tells the tale of those years with admirable candour. Each scene is neatly constructed – told in the present tense, as a miniature short story – and there’s a vividness to the language which fully evokes the circumstances and, at times, the shock and befuddlement of being surrounded by them.
At times of trial, as we come to learn, Hay turns to Shakespeare. Interspersed with his narrative are soliloquies and scenes from the Bard’s collected works, each of relevance to the seemingly real-life events being described. Not all those interpretations are entirely conventional: I liked the unusual take on Lady Macbeth, played here with a touch of vulnerability. Some are performed quietly, some are almost screamed; but the extracts are all delivered with a kind of measured gravitas, in that particular burnished style we recognise as “Shakespearean”.
But there’s the rub. This could be, should be, a deeply affecting story – of a man struck down by random blows of chance, and of his dogged fortitude in the face of adversity. Yet it lacks the rawness and vulnerability to make us truly feel it. Just occasionally – when Hay spoke, for example, of lying in hospital listening to a drill bite into his own head – I winced at his pain, truly felt the compassion I was longing to share with him. But for the most part the story’s told with studied precision, emotions mediated by a theatrical mask.
And it feels like the show may not quite have adjusted to the intimate space it’s performed in. Hay’s actorly delivery would work well on a bigger stage, but close-up it carries a hint of artifice – putting further distance between me in the audience, and the heartfelt narrative being told.
The final scene is touching, going a long way towards explaining all that has gone before, and the core point about the eternal relevance of Shakespeare’s canon is well-made. If you love the text above all else, I think you might love this play. For me, though, it was a little too much like a lecture… intellectually interesting and lucidly explained, but short on intensity and drama.