Old Ideas, New Visions

By A. H. Gost

            When I first watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, I thought to myself, Patrick Stewart must have been a theatre actor because he is projecting his voice like he’s on a stage instead of a sound stage. I had no idea how right I was; in Making It So, Sir Patrick is well past page 300 before his life reaches Star Trek (aside from a few anecdotes). The bulk of his entertaining memoir is dedicated to the theatre. Set when stage theatre was popular entertainment, government subsidized so people of all classes could watch, young Patrick used a life on the stage to process the complicated emotions of a difficult childhood, growing up in poverty with a father who took his disappointment with life out on his family.

            But his family and several teachers supported his rise through the acting life, able to start younger than he was supposed to thanks to an early growth spurt allowing him to fake his age (it’s hard to remember how tall Sir Patrick is when so often standing by even taller co-stars). This is the story of twists and turns and threading his life through the eye of the needle needed to rise in any artistic profession. He befriends people known mostly to those who still love the theatre and some most people would have heard of: Sir Ian Holm, Sir Ian McKellen, David Tennant, and Vivien Leigh. It is weird and wonderful that people as varied as Tom Hanks, Salman Rushdie, and Ronald Reagan turn out to be Star Trek fans.  

            It’s hard for me to believe now that a small industrial town would have had multiple stages playing to full houses, a part of a nationwide environment both artistic and economic giving actors the experiences needed to rise through the ranks of companies in hopes of perhaps reaching the Royal Shakespeare Company, but Sir Patrick brings it to life. That cultural institution explains why my parents and I turn to Britbox and PBS as our favorite streaming services, as British TV has benefited from using the stage to find and cultivate talent from all over their country. Sir Patrick didn’t have to move to London to start his artistic career the way American actors move to New York or L.A.; the United Kingdom cultivated acting talent the same way most countries cultivate athletes, with teams all over the country and in every school. Today we are so blind to the local cultural institutions supporting the national ones that even the jacket of my copy claims he had his “start” at the Royal Shakespeare Company, or perhaps the person who wrote the blurb didn’t bother reading the book (I could write an ultimately futile essay about my issues with advertising departments, but that’s a story for another day and they will probably be replaced by A.I. anyway). 

            Making It So is funny and sad, proud and modest, and several times Sir Patrick is willing to admit his own errors in life. Since I am a fan of Star Trek but never joined fandom, I learned a lot about his private life that had been dragged into the public eye by the sort of magazines I decline to read, but also the story behind the press stories.