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A few years ago, that whimsical and touching actor Edward Petherbridge suffered a stroke while rehearsing the title role of King Lear in New Zealand. He was almost unable to move, but could remember every word of Lear’s lines. You might expect this theatrical re-enactment of the trauma to be a misery memoir or a tale of courage in adversity, but it is neither of those things.

Co-written by Petherbridge, his co-star Paul Hunter and the show’s director Kathryn Hunter (who once famously played King Lear herself), this is a show of constant invention and delight.

We get a lot of King Lear, with Petherbridge delivering the mad king’s lines with a rare, spellbinding gentleness, but as the actor himself has said, the show is like watching a masterclass on King Lear under the influence of LSD. Even the stage design is tilted at a crazy angle.

Petherbridge, now 76 and fully recovered, revisits his childhood in Bradford, and delivers entertaining theatrical anecdotes about his time at Olivier’s National Theatre. He even does on-stage paintings of Lear and his daughters that are part Jackson Pollock, part Rolf Harris.

This is also a show about putting on a show, and one that frequently strays into fantasy, with Paul Hunter playing, among many others, a lunatic brain doctor in a terrible wig convinced he is treating the real King Lear, as well as giving touching performances as both Cordelia and Petherbridge’s mother. He also offers some hilarious impersonations of Laurence Olivier.

My Perfect Mind is a show unlike any other and one that captures Petherbridge’s endearing personality, both as an actor – who can forget his extraordinarily moving Newman Noggs in the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby? – and as a man.

Charles Spencer, TELEGRAPH, 8 April 2013

Photo by Alastair Muir

In 2007, the veteran English actor Edward Petherbridge went to New Zealand, expecting to play King Lear. But within a couple of days of starting rehearsals, he had a stroke and his hopes of tackling this exacting Shakespearean role were dashed — though the lines were all intact in his memory.

My Perfect Mind explores this episode and its implications. It is the work of Told by an Idiot, a company with a gift for inventive physicality. Taking its name from one of Lear’s self-diagnoses, a fearful statement about his crumbling sanity, it mixes tomfoolery and pathos.

Petherbridge blends autobiographical recollections with snatches from his unseen Lear, shaking them around to create an unlikely but juicy cocktail. Paul Hunter plays several characters: among them are Petherbridge’s doctor and mother, as well as Laurence Olivier and a theatre director whose manner put me in mind of Rhys Darby’s hapless fixer Murray Hewitt in Flight of the Conchords. The results are charming, sometimes very funny and occasionally bizarre.

On a sloping set designed by Michael Vale, the two actors evoke a lopsided world. This is obviously an image of Petherbridge’s post-stroke existence but it’s also a vision of the peculiarities of theatre. My Perfect Mind sometimes feels like a critique of stage lore and actors’ arcane practices — from the conventions of the rehearsal room to the limitations of mime — and as such it will probably appeal most to theatre junkies.

Certainly there are moments where the show edges towards being a parody of a high-concept dramatic provocation. Yet it is much more than that, suggesting among other things the way performers are haunted — not just by the achievements of their predecessors but by ghostly intimations of where their own careers might have led.

It’s a celebration of theatre’s special capacity to “stab at the truth” in a way that often seems difficult in real life.

There is a carefully managed chaos in Kathryn Hunter’s production. Paul Hunter treads a fine line between zany charisma and clownish excess.

Meanwhile, Petherbridge gives a layered performance that combines candour, wit, quizzical vagueness and a dry dignity. His understated yet heartfelt work is essential to the success of this playful and highly unusual piece.

Henry Hitching, EVENING STANDARD, 8 April 2013

LONDON REVIEWS OF MY PERFECT MIND

Six years ago Edward Petherbridge flew to New Zealand to play King Lear. But two days into rehearsals a stroke paralysed this fit septuagenarian’s right side. The irony was that, just before his birth, his mother also suffered a stroke and achieved recovery with ferocious determination in defiance of contemporary doctors.

The same determination gripped her son seven decades later and he made a good recovery with — to his surprise — the whole of the Lear text still word perfect. But he was unlikely to get the chance again: his first outing was in an awful fey musical called The Fantasticks, which bombed in 2010. Reviews were lousy, but I remember how he stole the show in an hilarious caricature of an ancient actor “proving that, to portray a terrible old ham, you need a serious, un-hammy old pro".

He struck up a friendship with Paul Hunter during that doomed venture, and they cooked up the idea of a two-man show weaving in the stroke story, some Lear speeches and bits of Petherbridge’s early life in Bradford.

I had expected something affecting, a bit solemn and memento mori, even though Kathryn Hunter, who has rattled the cages by playing Lear herself, is director and co-creator. But add to that Petherbridge’s gift for dry self-parody and Paul Hunter’s quirky company Told by an Idiot and it all becomes wilder and funnier.

On a crazily sloping stage, with a trapdoor through which the pair crawl grumbling from time to time, the disjointed, almost hallucinatory format veers and crashes around with deliberate (stroke-like) confusion. Hunter becomes a comedy psychiatrist, doctor, cab driver, crass Kiwi director, Goneril, Cordelia, the Fool, a childhood ballet mistress and — affectingly, despite the hairnet — Petherbridge’s mother. When he first struggles silently to walk along a hospital corridor she crosses silently, doggedly supporting herself with a chair: a role model from long ago.

Hunter also dons a striped blazer as a talent show compere, while the silver-haired, rangily distinguished adult Petherbridge discards Lear and adulthood to become a nine-year-old of long ago, piping a nonsense rhyme. It’s a beguiling oddity, its serious core thrown away in one line amid the foolery. Our hero says that it is “easier to stab at the truth in the theatre than in real life …” And so it is.

Libby Purves, THE TIMES, 6 April 2013

Photo by Manuel Harlan

This two-man show is the oddest of mixes: part trawl through the life and times of the classical actor Edward Petherbridge, part Shakespeare recital, part theatrical in-joke and part metaphysical meditation on the frailties of old age and the extraordinary abilities of mind and body to renew themselves. Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind is an exquisite piece of tomfoolery, inspired by Edward Petherbridge’s experience of not playing King Lear. It offers a playful and moving exploration of life as an ongoing performance. It is infected by gleeful madness.

The facts are these: in 2007, Petherbridge travelled to Wellington in New Zealand to fulfil his long-cherished ambition to play Shakespeare's mad monarch. But two days into rehearsal, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed. Remarkably, he was still able to remember every word of King Lear.

Played out on Michael Vale’s tilted stage – a world that’s off-kilter and difficult to physically negotiate – and directed by Kathryn Hunter (who has played both Lear and the Fool), the show mirrors the relationship between the foolish king and his wise fool. Paul Hunter plays a series of fall guys, from a German psychiatrist to a Romanian Shakespeare professor, and Laurence Olivier, who advises that the essential requirement for an actor who plays Lear is a Cordelia who weighs very little. There is a running gag that all these impersonations are “borderline offensive”.

In fact, the entire show gurgles with merriment as it skewers luvvydom, pokes fun at conceptual art and offers tongue-in-cheek advice to theatre-makers on how to treat the audience: “You've got to shove it up their arses before you shove it down their throats.” The theatrical in-jokes would wear thin, were it not for the fact that Petherbridge’s mixture of bravado and frailty brings real heart to the enterprise. So, too, does the untangling of his relationships with his mother, who herself suffered a stroke two days before he was born, and his brother.

It’s a show that invokes the ghosts of Petherbridge’s childhood, the ghosts of all those actors who have played Lear, and the ghost of the performance that Petherbridge never got to give. The result is a funny, moving reminder that however much we aspire to be the king, we are all fools in one way or another.

Lyn Gardner, GUARDIAN, 7 April 2013

Photo by Manuel Harlan

My Perfect Mind, if anything, is a homage to the actor’s life and this remarkable man who, after being struck down by one of the most dangerous, debilitating diseases has come back fighting fit. The fact he’s not just come back from this, but written about it with such humour, eccentricity and joy, is what we found ourselves applauding. 

LONDONIST

The ‘very fond, foolish old man’ speech is deeply touching and shows audience members what New Zealanders missed out on. Long before that, the evening opens with a kind of Germanic prologue as a doctor of some indeterminate type with a terrible wig warns us to anticipate a bad case of Edward Petherbridge Syndrome. In fact, the evening turns into a charming example of that syndrome, showing the veteran actor to good effect, particularly when his perfect comic timing is called upon.

BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE

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EDWARD ON RADIO 3's NIGHT WAVES

Listen to a fascinating interview with Edward on last night’s edition of BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves. The interview begins at 34:37 and ends at 47:40. Edward’s fellow guest is cultural critic and clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis. Together they discuss the neuroanatomy of memory in relation to the stroke Edward suffered six years ago on the eve of playing King Lear.

EDWARD IN THE SUNDAY TIMES

Those of you in the UK, or who subscribe to The Sunday Times online, can read Bryan Appleyard’s interview with Edward in Culture this Easter Sunday – ‘Lear and yet so far’.

There is also an appreciation of My Perfect Mind by Kathleen Riley at Vulpes Libris.

CROWNED WITH 5 STARS IN LIVERPOOL

View from Hope Street.
Photo by EP

My Perfect Mind opened at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre on Tuesday night. Among the latest reviews are two that award this funny, moving and very special piece five stars.

What came out of all the heartbreak, physiotherapy and intense work Mr. Petherbridge had to overcome was this stunning and incredibly beautiful production that in the case with all great works, left the audience laughing with the two actors but also more importantly empathising, a rare treat for any play to deliver in such great quantity. …The moment when the audience realises that Mr. Petherbridge has put himself through physical and emotional pain barriers in recreating this towering monument to his life and the words of King Lear and it all boils down to one focused hand gesture, a piece of theatre that in the end meant everything and proved everything. My Perfect Mind is not just incredible, powerful and life affirming, it is the fitting testament to human endeavour and the ability to come back from the brink of uncertainty. Liverpool Sound and Vision (Read full review)

Audiences in Unity Theatre were truly privileged as they were treated to a delightful evening, entertained by distinguished actor Edward Petherbridge. Throughout the night, wonderfully captivating recitals of scenes from the great Shakespearean tragedy King Lear were woven into depictions of key moments from Edward’s life, as well as other antics found along the way. … A truly enjoyable play, humorous in all the right places, with an uplifting feeling of hope and resilience at its heart. Liverpool Student Media (Read full review)

And new from Whatsonstage:

Mr Petherbridge is an actor of wit and elegance; a raised eyebrow can convey so much. He has obviously taken to heart his dancing teacher’s advice of ‘economy and selection’. Paul Hunter plays every other role with such great comic skill. 

My Perfect Mind will occasionally make you laugh out loud, smile, chuckle and in some of Lear’s final minutes may make you cry. What a moving Lear Mr Petherbridge would be. It is good to have him back on stage.

 (Read full review)

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King.
Photo by EP