Pete Postlethwaite’s posthumous apologia, A SPECTACLE OF DUST (W&N) begins with a love letter to Liverpool, his spiritual home.During the early part of the 1970s, at the start of his acting career, Liverpool’s magnetism pulled him back again and again.“At the time the city was the most creative, vibrant, exciting, dangerous and magical place on earth.”
It was in Liverpool in 2008 he leapt at portraying Lear, Shakespeare’s lunatic liege, in a troubled production that preyed upon his health.Before becoming an actor, Pete toyed with the idea of becoming a priest then a PE teacher. But the theatre trumped all such vocational vacillations, even usurping his Catholic faith. “But in theatre, we were learning about spirit and soul, about humanity. The text of our plays became my bible. They became my hymns. They became the priests and nuns of my existence.”
Never unemployed, something of a miracle for a jobbing actor, things haven’t always been ship shape and Bristol fashion. Shortly after graduating from Bristol Old Vic, he joined the Everyman theatre, and on a tour of Wales, Bristol fashion became ship-wreck with an appalling attack of paranoia, not helped by rehearsing through a dense fog of booze and hashish haze.
There are heaps of Hollywood stories, but the style of the book is the essence, not any showbiz goss and gloss.However, the general film fan will be intrigued to hear about such cinematic triumphs as In the Name of the Father, The Usual Suspects and Brassed Off. Postlethwaite’s has such a distinctive voice in the narrative of his story that even if you had never seen him on stage or screen, you know exactly how he sounds, and what he stands for.
As surely as it begins as a love letter to Liverpool, the book ends as a love letter to his family.Suspicious of actor autobiography and having an instinctive mistrust and downright dislike for board treaders’ biographies, Pete pontificates and proselytises against celebrity and persuades that he has no desire simply to “cash my story in , to commodify my life”. “
My life isn’t about transcending difficulty; it’s about love and belief. A long time ago I realised that acting wasn’t just a silly game. It has meaning, it has the power to shape and improve lives. But there’s one thing that’s always been above the creative and political in my life: family.”
On reading this book, it’s actually his death is about transcending difficulty. Writing the tome as he contemplated his tomb after being diagnosed with aggressive and inoperable cancer, this memorable memoir becomes a memento mori.To lift from his beloved Lear, “to shake all cares and business from our age…while we unburdened crawl towards death”.
Richard Cotter
2nd August, 2011