My Perfect Mind

The blurb for My Perfect Mind tells us that the wonderfully whimsical classical actor Edward Petherbridge (who could ever forget his enchanting Newman Noggs in the RS C’s Nicholas Nickleby decades ago?) was a few days into rehearsals for the role of King Lear when he was felled by a massive stroke. One arm flopped forlorn and unresponsive. And yet, miraculously, his Lear remained word-perfect within his bruised brain.

So I was anticipating this show to be a luvvie-style triumph-overadversity misery memoir. It’s much richer, quirkier and, above all, more theatrical than that.

Co-written by Petherbridge, the show’s director, Kathryn Hunter (who once played Lear herself) and Paul Hunter, who shares the precariously steeply tilted stage, which suggests life’s ups and downs – its title comes from a scene in Lear when the king emerges from the depths of his madness and believes he sees Cordelia, the beloved daughter he cruelly misjudged and banished.

‘I am a very foolish fond old man… I fear I am not in my perfect mind,’ he says, with a humility and humanity that never fails to break your heart.

In the course of 90 unbroken minutes, Petherbridge, his wispy hair snowy-white, in jeans and a white Nehru-collared shirt, resembling a very old and very beautiful tortoise, slips in and out of Lear’s speeches. Occasionally Paul Hunter plays Lear’s fool (brilliantly) and a terrifically touching Cordelia.

Then, out of Petherbridge’s fragmented, fragile mind, following his stroke, memories bubble up. Pulling on a brown hairnet, Hunter plays Petherbridge’s own mother, who suffered a stroke a couple of days before giving birth to baby Edward. She scrubs the doorstep of the Bradford house where he was born with just the one arm she had use of.

Popping on a hairband, Hunter becomes the dancing mistress who encouraged little Edward to play ‘the autumn leaf in the wind’. No wonder, when cast as Lear he said, shivering, that the king ‘is an oak, and I’m more of an ash tree, or a silver birch’. And ghosts of other Lears appear: a hilarious Olivier, whose advice is to find a Cordelia who weighs as little as possible, and a barn-storming Wolfit.

But what this piece poses in the end is the question of who are we if not the sum of all our experiences, challenges and influences, of the various roles we are called to play, different in every situation, some of them more truthful than others?

‘This is not the King Lear I wanted to be,’ says Petherbridge. Ditto the rest of us. We all want to be kings; but we are lucky if we get to play fools.

Until 27 September at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, London SE1: 020-7922 2922; then touring until 21 November: www.toldbyanidiot.org