meta-theatrical madness

Respected thesp tragically descends into a unique kind of dementia. 

(via actress Kika Markham's memoir of life with actor-husband and left-wing activist Corin Redgrave, here reviewed by ultra-thesp Simon Callow)

"... When he was playing Pericles at the Globe, he had a major heart attack, while delivering a speech in Basildon on behalf of some evicted Travellers. He recovered physically, but never fully mentally...  Though Redgrave could still speak, his memory was destroyed; its disappearance meant the loss not only of his past, but of theirs.... This sort of thing is tragic for anyone, but when it happens to an actor, it takes on a particularly lurid quality because everything becomes a form of theatre. "Lovely to see you," says Redgrave waking up one morning. "Your nose is very nice." "Do you know who I am?" she says. "Of course I know who you are." It's as if, she says, they are reading a script by "someone masquerading as Beckett". When the nurse asks what he would like to eat, he says, "Shotgun". Great line. On another occasion, still in the hospital, in his gown, he becomes upset because he doesn't have his makeup towel or mascara. "When do we start the dress [rehearsal]?" he demands. The theatre is the only remaining reality for him: he tells a fellow patient, Ann, that she needs to check her lines. The play, it appears, is Three Sisters: Redgrave tells her that he doesn't need to look at his lines as he has been understudying the play all his life. He rages at his therapists: "People pay to see me … I am special."

"The metatheatrical nightmare continues; King Lear, Shakespeare's supreme account of the breakdown of a mind, threads its way through the book. Redgrave had appeared in the play as a boy, saw his father's famous performance in it, played Lear himself....  He even recorded the play for radio, before doing it at Stratford....  As if living out the play, full-blown madness erupts within him; he becomes cantankerous, violent. In an insane parody of his former political position, he believes that Kika and his sister Vanessa are state agents, and demands police protection from them; in the end he is taken into hospital.... 

"But this too passes, and he resumes some semblance of normal life. He becomes extraordinarily emotional and rather naive – a long way from the Corin any of us had known.... 

"Markham quotes brilliantly from RD Laing – "we are acting parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception"...." 

Corin Redgrave, absolutely thesp-tastic 

Kika Markham in a great Dennis Potter Play for Today