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| FEATURES | BY JANE WRIGHT |
 William Blake at Hampstead, 1825, by John Linnell  Actress
Ruth Rosen.  God Creates
Adam, by William Blake, 1795-1805. |
The book is Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 biography of poet, artist and visionary William Blake, one of the copious volumes Ruth has devoured for her one woman show. Man Without a Mask is at the New End Theatre next Sunday and Monday, as part of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival. She calls her performance a dramatised reading, her own selection of Blake’s poems, prose and letters from 200 years ago. Ruth specialises in re-animating genius. “The delightful part is finding out about the person,” she says. “And the performance, of course. If you know what a poet is like, you can understand where his poems are coming from.” That’s why she tracked down the Gilchrist, Blake’s first great biographer. “I have to go right to the source,” she says, “and do real detective work.” Last year she researched and performed Keats at the poet’s former home in Hampstead and last month the poems of the artist William Turner at the National Gallery. She took Virginia Woolf on tour with biographer Michael Holroyd, and read contemporary poet WS Graham at the National Theatre with Harold Pinter. Yet she insists, among the 100 remarkable, real-life subjects she’s performed to date, William Blake is someone special. “He’s one of my great passions, a hero,” she says. “The spirit and the soul was the only thing that mattered to him.” Man Without A Mask was inspired by Blake’s painting of Elohim (or God) Creating Adam. Ruth explains: “His pre-occupation, indeed his whole philosophy, was that afterwards, the Creator repented, because Adam was frail flesh, like you and I, and not the spirit. Blake spoke to the English nation like an Old Testament prophet. But a prophet without honour. He was never published in his lifetime and literally lived in his visions. “He wrote: ‘Profit never ventured across my threshold’ and the artist John Linnell discovered him in obscurity and neglect. Yet now Blake’s prints sell for millions. “He was 200 years ahead of his time,” says Ruth. “His obsessions were our New Age preoccupations with healing and the soul.” The son of a prosperous London hosier, Blake’s friendship with Linnell brought him to visit Hampstead, where Linnell lived at North End and sketched the ageing visionary in 1825. “Blake is so modern,” Ruth continues. “He said: ‘To the eyes of a man of commerce, a tree is a green thing that stands in the way’. Well, if I were queen of Hampstead today, I’d try to stop a lot of building and make as much green space as possible. “I don’t think he was mad. People always say that about original thinkers who break utter new ground and don’t conform.” She tells how the poet’s wife, Catherine, had to sit at his side night after night “not moving hand or foot”, while he poured out his visions with fierce concentration. “She was his handmaid. After he died, she said ‘Mr Blake was a God.’” South African-born Ruth came to Hampstead with her late husband, Johannesburg psychiatrist and sculptor Ismond Rosen. She says: “My husband was a genius and a beautiful man. He was much older than me, like a father figure, and I was in his thrall.” But she rejects that she is recreating this relationship by filling her life with giants from the past. “When I was bringing up my children, I fell into dramatised readings as a way of working without having to go away on tour. But now I’d like to go back to acting with others in the theatre,” she says.” Despite Ruth’s “lifetime in Hampstead”, the “abject misery of apartheid”, which horrified her childhood, never left her. She took part in a myriad protest readings for the African National Congress in London and refused to perform in her native land before the release of Nelson Mandela. And what would she say to William Blake, if he could sit with her now? “To see what his work was really like, I’d ask him to speak or sing some of his poems.” n Man Without a Mask is at the New End Theatre, Hampstead on May 11 at 8 pm and May 12 at 3.30 pm and 8 pm. |
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