THEY WOULDN’T LET ME out of Eton until I acted. That was what they said: I needed to take part in one of their formal dramas before they’d punch my
ticket and release me into the wild.
It sounded ridiculous, but theater was deadly serious at Eton. The drama department staged several productions each year, and the year-end production was always the most major of them all.
In the late spring of 2003 it was Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
I was cast as Conrade. Minor character. He was, perhaps, a drinker, perhaps a drunkard, which gave the press all sorts of clever openings for calling me a drunkard too.
What’s this? Bit of typecasting, is it?
Stories wrote themselves.
Eton’s drama teacher said nothing about typecasting when he gave me the role. He just told me I was Conrade—Have fun with it, Harry—and I didn’t question his motives. I wouldn’t have questioned them even if I’d suspected he was taking the piss, because I wanted to get out of Eton, and to get out of Eton you had to act.
Among other things, I learned from studying the play that it was wrongheaded, and reductive, to focus on Conrade’s alcohol consumption. He was a fascinating guy, really. Loyal, but also immoral. Full of advice, but essentially a follower. Above all, he was a henchman, a sidekick, whose main function, seemingly, was to give the audience a laugh or two. I found it easy to throw myself into such a role, and discovered during dress rehearsals that I had a hidden talent. Being royal, it turned out, wasn’t all that far from being onstage. Acting was acting, no matter the context.
Opening night, my father sat dead center in a packed Farrer Theatre and no one had a better time. Here it was, his dream come true, a son performing Shakespeare, and he was getting his money’s worth. He roared, he howled, he applauded. But, inexplicably, at all the wrong moments. His timing was bizarrely off. He sat mute when everyone else was laughing. He laughed when everyone else was silent. More than noticeable, it was bloody distracting. The audience thought Pa was a plant, part of the performance. Who’s that over there, laughing at nothing? Oh—is that the Prince of Wales?
Later, backstage, Pa was all compliments. You were wonderful, darling boy.
But I couldn’t help looking cross.
What’s the matter, darling boy?
Pa, you laughed at all the wrong times!
He was baffled. I was too. How could he have no idea what I was talking about?
Slowly it became clear. He’d told me once that, when he was my age, acting in his own school performance of Shakespeare, Grandpa turned up and did exactly the same thing. Laughed at all the wrong times. Made a complete spectacle. Was Pa modeling his own father? Because he knew no other way to parent? Or was it more subliminal, some recessive gene expressing itself? Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last? I wanted to know, and I might’ve asked, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever raise with Pa. Or Grandpa. So I put it out of my mind and tried to focus on the good.
Pa is here, I told myself, and he’s proud, and that’s not nothing. That was more than a lot of kids had.
I thanked him for coming, gave him a kiss on each cheek. As Conrade says: Can you make no use of your discontent?
