In some ways, I’m the missing link.
As Ginny said, the first time I met Adrian was 20 years ago, when I didn’t cast him as Feste.
What she didn’t tell you was that later that day I booked Ginny herself and we’ve been an item ever since. I guess I felt that one Schiller at a time was wisdom.
And so here I am, a crossover between Adrian’s professional life and his family life, between his public world and his private. It’s a good place to be.
I soon met the rest of their family. And they welcomed me and my two lads in the kindest way imaginable.
And since then I’ve turned up at endless family do’s: mostly happy, sometimes tense; often serious, but more often utterly joyous.
And soon, Adrian became a dear friend: he wasn’t just Ginny’s brother, he was my brother too.
My bro as we’d call each other.
He’d be in and out of our flat, cadging a bed and leaving a trail of mobile phones, house keys and hats behind him, but endlessly holding forth, making us laugh, cooking delicious food, lecturing us on his latest bit of desperately arcane knowledge and then, in a way which many of you will remember, the two of us would stay up into the small hours and, deep into the second bottle of red, sort shit out.
It always came as a disappointment that the next morning the shit was still there.
The world needs you more than ever, Adrian Schiller. Time to sort shit out.
We bonded over personal things too. He was very kind to me when I got ill and I tried to help him through some dark moments of his own. He successfully led Laurie astray and tried in vain to educate Bea. And he showed an amazing connection with Joey—like so many of us, I think he learnt from Joey’s silence—and we’d talk about the challenges faced by people with learning disabilities. I’m certainly there to support Milena and her and Adrian’s gorgeous Gabriel.
I finally cast Adrian a few years later, as De Flores in The Changeling. God, he was scary, but so also was he careful to show an outcast, someone who didn’t really belong—some of the same qualities that shaped his amazingly good Shylock on this very stage.
He next worked with me at the Rose with Christmas Carol. In a brilliant company (assembled by Ginny) he played a stack of parts, but I’ll never forget the tech when he insisted on playing (and singing) Jacob Marley as Bob Marley.
And then, as we’ve seen, Adrian became a professional Jew. Jew-ish, indeed.
In fact, the last thing I directed him in was Barabas, the title role in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It was a bonkers project but Adrian played a deeply logical response to the dazzling hypocrisy of Christian persecution, while also showing a rare passion in his growing rage.
And it’s on that theme that I’d like to end by talking a bit about my play The Gift, which I wrote for Adrian a few years ago.
The play is a fusion of two families’ stories—Adrian’s father’s arrived in England from Austria in 1938, and my Mum (who’s here this evening) came from Hamburg in 1936.
The main character, Gustav Hirsch, is a distinguished German-Jewish gynaecologist who has come to England with his three children, but without his beloved wife.
In creating Gustav, I was inspired by Adrian himself. I wanted to catch some of his contradictions, in all their productive brilliance.
Thus:
· Gustav/Adrian is convinced that good science and rational thinking will usher in a better world, while simultaneously embracing the irrationality of art—high art, low art, all kinds of art—and the consolations that it brings.
· Gustav/Adrian is deeply serious about the things that matter, while relishing an irrepressible sense of the absurd. Indeed, the absurd helps him get closer to the serious. Laughter reveals the truth.
· Gustav/Adrian is deeply committed to his family and everything that family means, while also knowing that the only family that really matters is the human family.
I remember one evening Adrian sitting on our white sofa like a middle-aged Orpheus playing Bach on his guitar, and it struck me then that he embodied something rare, a set of characteristics which are almost extinct. He felt like a torchbearer for a time when artists were also scientists, when deep thinkers could laugh at themselves, when mighty brains knew that being clever wasn’t everything, when people whose love for their family and their colleagues was only matched by their dedication to making a better world.
Both in his inheritance and in what he saw around him, Adrian knew about racism, ableism, cruelty and bullying, but he observed it with incredulity that anyone could indulge in such behaviour. It wasn’t just hateful to Adrian, it had no reason to exist. It was utterly ludicrous.
And that, ultimately, was grounds for optimism.
People would sometimes call Adrian an ‘eternal student’, usually as a term of affectionate reproach. I think I did so myself.
The Right would call him a ‘citizen of nowhere’, a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, a ‘wandering Jew’, even. And we know where that language leads.
But the fact is that Adrian, and people like Adrian, point the way to a better world, a happier world, a more open-minded world, which embraces difference, refuses to subject himself to a greater power, and celebrates instead the best of life, in all its richness and beauty, its kindness and frailty, even its Bacchanalian silliness, and urges the rest of us to do the same.
And for that, and so much else, I’ll always love you, bro.
May your memory be a blessing.
(Spoken at Adrian’s Memorial, Sunday 13th October, 2024)