In a US Playbill I found a full page appreciation of one of the greatest performances I will ever see - Ian Charleson's heroic HAMLET at the National Theatre in October, 1989, less than three months before his death from an AIDS-related illness. I had not noticed it before but as I read it I was amazed to see that it matched exactly my thoughts on Ian's acting - and it has laid quietly in a storage box all this time for me to finally discover it.
Ian was only 40 when he died and we were all robbed of the performances he never gave; he is so frozen in time it is strange to think that he would have been 68 this year but one has only to look at his contemporaries Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow and Robert Lindsay to know he might still have been delivering great performances. Just thinking of Shakespeare alone, we lost his Prospero, Lear, Claudius, Titus Andronicus, Leontes, Malvolio, Oberon, Macbeth and Richard II.
So thank you Richard Allan Davison, wherever you are... and of course, thank you Ian. Goodnight Sweet Prince...
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