Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 49
Photo Essay: Actor Sir Patrick Stewart
1. In his dressing room, Stewart is making out a chart (in green) specifying where he is
to make his entrances in the many different scenes of Antony and Cleopatra. During
each performance he must leave the stage many times, going to his dressing room to
change costume before reentering somewhere else each time. He feels safer with this
“cheat sheet” on his dressing-room table to remind him of the location of each new
entrance. © Robert Cohen
Patrick Stewart, now Sir Patrick
Stewart after being knighted by
Queen Elizabeth, is known worldwide
because of his 176 episodes as
Captain Jean-Luc Picard on television’s
Star Trek and his continuing role of
Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men
films, but he began his continuously
ascending acting career with sixteen
years of playing largely classical
performances with England’s Royal
Shakespeare Company (RSC), and has,
during the course of a fifty-year career,
performed in more than 100 stage
productions on Broadway, London’s
West End, and regional American
theatres including Minneapolis’s
Guthrie, Washington’s Shakespeare
Theatre Company, the New York
Shakespeare Festival, and Los
Angeles’ Ahmanson and Huntington
Theatres. And his post–Star Trek
stage career is certainly his greatest,
including stunning performances in
the major Shakespearean roles of
Othello, Macbeth, Prospero, Claudius,
Malvolio, and Mark Antony (in Antony
and Cleopatra), and as Shakespeare
himself in Edward Bond’s Bingo at
London’s Old Vic. More recently, and
internationally, he has played Robert
in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre
on Broadway, and—on both Broadway
and London’s West End, a double-bill
(with Ian McKellen) in which he played
Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot and Hirst in Harold Pinter’s
No Man’s Land on alternate nights.
With numerous cinema and television
credits along with his stage work,
including lead roles in the recent Green
Room (2014) in films and Blunt Talk
(2015) on TV, Stewart is convinced
that each medium can be a lead-in
to all the others. “Sitting in all those
thrones of England on the stage at
Stratford-upon-Avon was nothing
less than a preparation for sitting in
the captain’s chair of the Enterprise,”
he said in an interview in 2007.
“This is an exaggeration, of course,
but there are parallels,” he insists,
referring to his two long-standing
artistic “homes”—England’s RSC and
America’s Star Trek.