Men behaving Bardly
Anthony Holden meets up with Peter O'Toole to binge on snooker, Shakespeare and cricket

Observer

Sunday July 11, 1999

It is a hot summer Sunday afternoon, and I am sitting with Peter O'Toole in the inner sanctum of his west London home, watching the World Cup cricket final dwindle towards its dismal demise. Ostensibly we are here to talk about Shakespeare, of whose life and work this fellow actor-writer is a formidable scholar, but for now we can't help breaking off to wonder whether the Pakistanis might just be throwing the match.

'Crazy buggers,' muses the cricket-mad O'Toole, a fine opening bat, ex-fiery bowler and qualified MCC coach, as yet another wicket falls. 'Either that, or these Aussies are on wheels.' This, I have come to learn, is the ultimate O'Toole compliment. There have been times this afternoon when even I have been told I am 'on wheels'. Were it not for the blazing heat in this tiny, curtained room - in my shirtsleeves I am red-faced and sweating, while he sits there serenely in cricket sweater, cravat and quilted jacket - I might have been caught in a blush.

One moment it is Shane Warne who's on wheels; the next, contrary to the received wisdom, it is Shakespeare the actor. Conventional scholarship suggests that the Ghost in Hamlet was 'the top of his performance', that the Bard was a considerably better writer than actor. 'Bollocks!' booms O'Toole, with a flourish of his Gitane-leaden cigarette-holder, rising from his chair for what promises to be another thrilling demonstration. 'He was one of life's Mercutios. Can't you just see him doing it?' There follows, for my solitary delight, a brief vignette of O'Toole playing Shakespeare playing Mercutio. 'See what I mean?' Slowly, he re-emerges from character. 'That man was on wheels!'

O'Toole, if you ask me, is the one 'on wheels' at the moment. At 66, despite more than his share of illness, he is as well-preserved as any sexuagenarian I have ever met - those lean good looks, flashing blue eyes and flowing locks are still as dazzling as they were almost 40 years ago in Lawrence of Arabia. The only exercise he gets these days is 'walking behind the coffins of my friends who take exercise'. Yet, even in the privacy of his own home, the presence is still immense, the voice magical. As he talks expertly about the theatre, constantly illustrating his points with anecdotes, mini-performances, tales of Garrick, Kean and Irving, I can't help feeling what a loss he has been, since comparative youth, to the stage.

One of the great Hamlets, Petruchios and Shylocks of his age - whatever your verdict on his celebrated Macbeth, recently rehabilitated on the Telegraph letters page - he has pretty much forsworn the stage (apart from some irresistible Shaw) since the mid-Sixties, 'when they invented something called the di-rec-tor'. The word is not so much spat out as taken between thumb and index finger, ground to a pulp and flicked contemptuously towards the bin. 'They never used to exist, you know. There were simply people called producers until the likes of Hall and Nunn came along and took over the whole show. I can see no reason why those who can't act, by their own confession, should take it upon themselves to tell us trained professionals how to ply our trade.'

So students of acting 'on wheels', anxious to see a great performer left to 'get on with it' by a savvy director (Ned Sherrin), should book now for the uncommon privilege of seeing O'Toole plying his trade. Later this month he has agreed to make a rare return to the stage in a part he loves - that of Jeffrey Bernard, the late journalist, raconteur and drunk, in a revival of their friend Keith Waterhouse's delightful saloon-bar comedy Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

There is a special poignancy to this latest revival, the first since Bernard's death. But why, 10 years since he created the role, is O'Toole returning to it now? I have heard that he wants to commit his performance to video and TV? Another wave of the cigarette-holder. 'Bad boy. Back to Shakespeare!'

As the last Pakistani wicket falls, we move into the fourth hour of a two-man show of inspirational if exhausting intensity. This is our third such meeting in as many months, all devoted primarily to the poet, playwright and actor we both love. The private O'Toole, these days a self-styled recluse - whose beloved 16-year-old son Lorcan (Irish for 'Lawrence') is the only person permitted to take precedence over the books 'with whom I now share my bed' - is proving generous with his time and expertise.

We first met in April, via the good offices of our mutual friend Kenneth Griffith (another fine actor lost to the stage since the advent of di-rec-tors), who had mentioned to his lifelong chum that I was writing a life of Shakespeare. 'So what are you up to?' O'Toole began with a quizzical grin as a couple of hours chez Griffith turned into six, interrupted only by a brief interval at the local pizza parlour. 'Disputed!' he would cry fiercely as I advanced my various theories, punctuated only by the occasional 'Bollocks!' which gradually softened to a 'Yes, hmmm, in-ter-est-ing... I'll check that out for you. Have you read...?'

This man really knows his stuff. After four years drowning in Shakespeare scholarship, in an attempt to reduce it all to a popular, accessible, yet academically sound biography, I was being steered this way and that by an actor who had got deeper beneath the writer's skin than most academics I had ever read or conversed with. As we enthused and argued, with Griffith playing genial referee, O'Toole spoke movingly of his friend Moelwyn Merchant, the Shakespeare scholar whose recent death he mourns 'every day'.

Was I, too, lucky enough to have such a mentor? Well, actually, yes. For more than a decade I have been close to the eminent critic Sir Frank Kermode, especially the past few years, while we have both been writing (rather different) books on Shakespeare. 'Kermode? The editor of the Arden Tempest? Now there's a great man,' said O'Toole. 'God, I'd like to dispute a few of his footnotes. Do you think you could introduce me?'

So meeting number two took place a few weeks later, over lunch and snooker at Kermode's London club. Amid the occasional double-figure break - of these three fiercely competitive snooker players, O'Toole inevitably emerged the winner - the finer points of Caliban and Sycorax vied for attention with plants into the corner pocket, mutual memories of the Navy and fond recollections of Diana Wynyard, Gertrude to 26-year-old O'Toole's 'Angry Young' Hamlet at Bristol, and one of Frank's lasting pin-ups.

At one point, amid a vivid discussion of the dark and dangerous streets of Elizabethan London - to O'Toole, 'a veritably Oriental city' - I rashly ventured surprise that Shakespeare never set a single play in the capital. O'Toole grabbed me by the sleeve, and fixed me with those eyes. 'All his plays', he hissed with frightening intensity, 'are set in London.' I threw Kermode an inquiring look. 'Well, of course,' he smiled gently, 'he's absolutely right.'

As that new friendship was launched on its merry-looking way, soon to be continued on high table at King's College, Cambridge, O'Toole kindly offered to look over my first draft. Which brings me here today for this third meeting, with the cricket gradually relegated to the background as he makes many an acute suggestion. Despite an intensive three-week 'study period' before rehearsals - during which he vanishes to a secret haven, to master his role in complete solitude - he has finished annotating my manuscript.

'Just saying this... you don't have to take the slightest notice, of course... but you've missed a trick here on Marlowe. Do you know Louis Macneice's poem "Suite for Recorders"?' I admit I don't; I am treated to a recitation; we both blub, not for the first time; it is now in the book. I am again implored to be kinder about the Bard's Henry VI trilogy (and have since received further postcards hammering away at this theme). 'And what's this I've written in the margin?' As dusk falls, he leaps up to peer at his own handwriting in the lamplight. 'Oh yes. Another "Bollocks". Now my theory of the Sonnets...'

...turns out to be very interesting, not to say highly original, and should be left to O'Toole himself to publish - perhaps in the next (and third) volume of his slowly unfolding, Irishly eloquent memoirs, Loitering with Intent. With perfect timing, we get to the last page just as Lorcan comes in with a friend. A budding cricketer and actor, the young O'Toole has invited his father to play the Ghost in a Harrow production of Hamlet. 'Clever choice, eh? Shakespeare's own part!' Proud dad is mulling the offer. 'Bloody good actors, these kids. I go to every production. If you want to see boy actors playing Shakespeare's women, that's the place to go. There was this Cleopatra... spoke the lines beautifully... and dead sexy.'

On my way out I am given a tour of his study, where a picture of our man opening the batting at Headingley is given pride of place between the only two volumes permitted permanent residence, Shakespeare and the Bible - the two greatest books in the English language, we agree, published just 12 years apart.

I am then allowed to wield the sacred, custom-built cricket bat, and invited to admire a treasured photograph of Edmund Kean's tombstone. From his pocket he produces Kean's ring, a gift from our pal Griffith. But back to Jeffrey Bernard. Why does he want to do it again? 'Well, the Old Vic, you know... special place... all that history... but, above all, the language. Wonderful language. You must bring Sir Frank. He'd love it.'

I will, of course, and we'll all dine out afterwards, over Shakespeare (and, no doubt, Waterhouse) on wheels.

• Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell starts on 27 July at Old Vic Theatre, London SE1 (0171 494 5372)