His More is modernised into a champion of the individual conscience

His More is modernised into a champion of the individual conscience. The play’s first reviewers rightly drew analogies between the protagonist’s principled silence and witnesses who took the Fifth Amendment when appearing before the Un-American Activities Committee.Gently reasonable, humane, ruefully humorous, witty and understanding, even on his way to the scaffold, Martin Shaw rises most movingly to the challenge of portraying a character whose strategy is largely the passive-aggressive one of postponing martyrdom with sophisticated legal quibbling and obdurate resistance to revealing the grounds of his objections. The actor also gives admirable hints of the impassioned inner life that eventually bursts through the dam of More’s tactical reserve in the climactic trial scene. This is a most reluctant hero, and at one point Bolt even has him alluding to Brecht’s notion that it’s a happy land that does not need heroes.There is also a quasi-Brechtian commentator, the Common Man (played here with a drolly deadpan subversiveness by Tony Bell) whose time-serving, job-hopping instinct for survival is designed to highlight More’s integrity.Of course, the hero’s disinclination to be a hero merely emphasises his natural credentials for this status. There is something very English, he argues, about the uncomfortable ambiguity of this figure: the tolerant, sceptical author of Utopia was a man who was also quite content to inflict torture on heretics.Robert Bolt airbrushes out all trace of this dogmatic heresy-hunter.

The RSC is on the point of opening the London transfer of Thomas More, the collaborative play (in which Shakespeare had a hand) that incurred the displeasure of the censor, partly because of its positive portrait of a Catholic hero. Pipping this revival to the post, though, comes Michael Rudman’s shrewdly acted and engrossing production of A Man For All Seasons, the hugely more familiar 1960 Robert Bolt play.
In his recently published diaries, Alan Bennett astutely suggests that writers have tended to be soft on Thomas More. If you find the subject of martyrdom “more-ish” (so to speak), then you are in luck, for this week sees the premiere of two West End revivals of plays about Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who preferred to go to the scaffold rather than compromise his principles and support Henry VIII in his divorce-motivated split with Rome. After becoming a huge star in Germany, she returned to Britain in 1997 on tour and with a sell-out concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Their friendship continues and is memorialised in perpetuity in a show you could say was written as her wedding mass.. But she needled away at Lloyd Webber’s heart, even if the British public never stopped thinking of her as a Jezebel There were rumours of extramarital affairs. More importantly, nothing would ever come between her and her career.

She never wanted children.Lloyd Webber married Madeleine in February 1991, and Brightman re-built her career, first by performing her ex-husband’s music all over the world in concerts. His third wife, Madeleine Gurdon, whom he met through his horse-loving neighbours in Watership Down, and with whom he has three more children, now says that Sarah Two really should have been a jolly nice short fling and have done with it. Brightman’s top register expressed the weird, orgasmic side of his bestial act of possession, summarised in his insistence that she yields her darker side to the power of his music.Looking back, one can see that Lloyd Webber only possessed Brightman for as long as she was in Phantom. The Phantom needs Christine to be his singing alter ego, and his title song becomes a journey of seduction in which she beings vocalising strangely at his behest. Lloyd Webber’s father, the composer William Lloyd Webber, had died in 1982 an embittered alcoholic, a brilliant musician whose style in composition was out of step with the times.Sarah Brightman’s talent and his own father’s admonitory failure exerted a dual pressure on Lloyd Webber’s appropriation of the story and became its creative engine-room. Whereas in Gaston Leroux’s novel the Phantom insists on Christine singing Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, Lloyd Webber made the Phantom’s own opera the work to be performed in the second act.

If they had been truly happy, we would never have had Phantom.”There was another element of pathos embedded in the score, which is on constant switchback between the surface sunshine of romantic opera and the heart of darkness in the Phantom’s lair: the angel of music figure who sits on Christine’s shoulder and represents her dead father. One of the most interesting things ever said on the subject was the late Maria Bjornson’s observation – she designed Phantom, brilliantly, to Hal Prince’s specifications of drapes, black-outs and dark Turkish corners – that the composer knew all about unrequited love: “Sarah never gave him the whole of herself and I’m sure that is what also bred this need to write this musical. Lloyd Webber was lost.By the time he came to write Phantom, Lloyd Webber was married to Sarah Two but not fully reconciled to her flightiness, or perhaps proliferating sexiness. Sarah Two was a free spirit and gave off the unmistakeable scent of forbidden fruit. Lloyd Webber had never really played around all that much and indeed had been constantly critical (and perhaps jealous) of his lyric-writing partner Tim Rice’s fabled lady-killing successes.