Mentor and Friend

BY SANDY NOTMAN, FRANCE
Anthony Cornish was both mentor and friend. I first met him at a Summer School at Munsbach, where he gave me the first of his lessons in directing. I had just finished directing a production of Richard III in Brussels and was feeling rather good about myself, but he quickly chopped my legs off at the knees and started me at the beginning again. I found it was more what not to do, rather than what to do. He had the belief that there were one or two who were reasonable directors and they needed help, but there were also those who, no matter how hard they tried, would never make directors and with them he spent so much more time as he was very afraid that unless he did, they would ruin and hurt those whom he considered a director’s greatest asset, the actors. I took his advice on the director’s relationship with actors to heart and it has stood me in good stead. Whenever I found myself at a crossroads or in a quandary over a particular aspect of direction, I would always ask myself what Anthony would say or do. Sometimes I would ring him and talk something through with him. He would always help. Looking back, I wonder how on earth I ever put anything on before meeting Anthony. We became good friends. I remember him ringing me up from London and telling me to get over to London for the next weekend as Patsy Rodenberg was giving a Workshop, at the London Theatre Museum, on Marlowe’s verse. Of course, I dropped everything and went. I was so glad as when I came to direct Hamlet many years later, that workshop came so useful when directing the Player King. He gave so much and took very little. He would often come and stay with my wife Judy and myself, in Brussels, particularly when running one of his weekend Workshops for the Brussels Shakespeare Society. I remember once, visiting New York, I was doing a consultancy for the U.N. I was having supper in a small restaurant when I ran into a British girl and we stated chatting. On hearing that my passion was theatre, she said, “do you know Anthony Cornish?”, and we spent the rest of the evening talking about Anthony. He was much loved. I am now retired and live in my little house in a corner of South West France, but there are memories of Anthony all around, on posters, in programme notes and in notebooks. Judy and will always remember Anthony with deep affection.