Antony's Elbow Ever since that beau sabreur, Mr. Osbert Lancaster,
nearly cut the top off one of my fingers with his broadsword during an undergraduate production of King Lear, 1 have taken a keen interest in stage fights. Mr. Michael Redgrave, who was talking about them the other night, made one realise how grave are the occupational hazards which beset the Shakespearean actor. He himself has twice inflicted head-wounds on a colleague— once, as Laertes, on Sir Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and once, as Macbeth, on an American Macduff in New York. He has had his eyeball grazed, I forget in what role, by Mr. Richard Burton and his torso has often been abraded by collapsible swords and daggers which failed to collapse when he committed suicide. But he says that it is stage-falls which do you most damage in the long run, because every night—to say nothing of matinees—you hit the ground with exactly the same parts of your body. It is different, he thinks, for clowns and tumblers, who don't have to fall in the awkward ways that realism, demands and who, not being mainly preoccupied With the portrayal of character, can concentrate on their acrobatics. I imagine that the rostrums and flights of steps which are now so endemic on the Shakespearan stage increase the shocks and stresses to which a conscientious actor must subject his frame.
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