Gielgud's Letters
By John Gielgud
Orion
Reviewed by Michael Hurst

Until I read this book, John Gielgud was for me a pale imitation of his more athletic contemporary Laurence Olivier. Like many people, I had relegated Gielgud to a somewhat ethereal, more poetic branch of the acting craft. He had, to my mind, a musical voice and (famously) meaningless legs.

This marvelous collection of his letters, however, reveals him to be an actor, no, a player, of extreme discipline and passion, a witty, opinionated, generous and shrewd thespian with a delightful and unexpected sense of naughtiness and a keen eye for "manch"--his own word for young men wearing corduroy.

The letters span almost the entire 20th century and, as the great events of that period unfold, we see them as if filtered through the lens of Gielgud's somewhat rarefied sensibilities.

He is a direct link to the great theatrical tradition that began with Shakespeare's players and developed through the work of such legendary exponents of the craft as Garrick, Kean, Sir Henry Irving, Mrs. Siddons and Ellen Terry (Gielgud's great aunt).

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the letters is their candour and generosity. They are full of advice to fellow actors, sympathy and support (as at the death of Olivier, for example), and singular opinions of people and events coloured by his own predilections and fancies.

He is wonderfully honest about his homosexuality (many of the letters are to his gay friends and partners) and reveals himself a man capable of great love.

This book is a great read. I freely admit to a strong personal identification with the material, especially considering that, as I read it, my own expression of that great theatrical tradition was well under way in that I was both directing and playing the title role in my own production of Macbeth.

But the book will appeal not only to actors. Gielgud was a great humanist and a gifted artistic soul. He lived into his 90s, outliving all his contemporaries (such as Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Alec Guiness) and his partner of 35 years.

At the end we see a courageous old man rattling about his house, fully aware of what age is doing to him, full of wonderful memories involving luminaries such as Noel Coward, T S Eliot, Marlon Brando ("seems a nice young man") and Cecil Beaton, and full of nostalgia for those halcyon days before the world went mad.

"Old age is no picnic", he writes in his final letter. It is terribly moving--as if the world had no more use for him. And, in a way, it didn't. Elevated as he was, as connected to brilliance as he was, the man John Gielgud was still just that--a man. It is this profound sense of the ultimate loneliness of each, the bedrock of the human condition, that left me both elated and sad as I finally put the book down.

•Hurst has been at the forefront of Auckland theatre and film for more than 20 years.

"Several books on the go. One is by Ted Hughes--Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I'm also reading Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton; that's a science-fiction book. Moonzoo by Paul Hewlett. And I've just finished Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I'm reading Hughes because I'm doing Macbeth soon and I'm always looking for new and interesting interpretive angles on Shakespeare. I'm also reading Eliot's The Wasteland for my book club. It's highbrow for a book club and we're all a bit aghast at the fact that we've chosen that, but we found that our discussions got more and more intense over works that we were reading, so we decided to look at this and see if we can make some sense for us out of it. I'm loving it, because as I come to things like The Wasteland as an older person rather than in my twenties, I see more in it--the possibility of possibilities is what is amazing about The Wasteland."