From the Starship Enterprise to the Shakespearean stage, Patrick Stewart was always very much in command.
What a loss.
I was skeptical about Star Trek: The Next Generation when it first appeared — what heresies would be coming our way? But even if The Next Generation took itself much more seriously than its predecessor and, not a plus, was considerably more preachy, I was soon won over. Good writing and a grand collection of characters will do that, even if I feared for the crew’s medical care: “Bones” > Beverly.
The Next Generation was much more of an ensemble production than the original, but Patrick Stewart’s Picard, channeling, he said, his experience of playing kings on stage, held it together. “Make it so,” and the cast/crew really did. Stewart’s age may have helped. He was 47 when he first played Picard, twelve years older than William Shatner when we first met Kirk. And then, of course, there was that voice.
It says something about Stewart’s presence that, in one of his most compelling, if brief, roles — as Karla in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (a role he later reprised) — he was silent.
Long before Picard, Stewart established himself in Britain on stage and on screen, and it is always a pleasant surprise when rewatching some old film or TV program to run across the captain in some unexpected spot, Arthurian England (in Excalibur, one of the greatest retellings of that story), say, or ancient Rome in I, Claudius).
I was lucky enough to see Stewart onstage five times (plus once at a New York City crosswalk!), all memorable, twice in his one-man A Christmas Carol, twice as Prospero, and once in the best Macbeth I have ever seen, which I reviewed here.
I noted how it:
. . . revolves around an extraordinary performance by Stewart, a light year or two away from the Starship Enterprise, but still very much in command. From the moment that we first see him, he dominates the stage, sometimes obviously, as a military man reveling in victory, sometimes subtly as he steels himself for regicide or, finally, despairingly, as he yields to defeat.
I remember three moments in particular. Macbeth calmly buttering slices of bread as he arranges for a murder, the fury with which, with all in ruins, he rejects suicide (“why should I play the Roman fool”) and, inevitably perhaps, Stewart’s rendition of the finest and bleakest of all the Shakespearian monologues (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”).
But, as I mentioned, he was Prospero, too:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
R.I.P, Sir Patrick.
And thank you.