Albert Finney and Rosamunde Pilcher

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Alan Sillitoe, Albert Finney, Christopher Marlowe, Cornwall, German TV, Henry Fielding, Room at the Top, Rosamunde Pilcher, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Tamburlaine, Tom Jones

Albert Finney RIP – I think I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning before I saw the film (it will have had an A or an X certificate and I wouldn’t have been old enough to get into the cinema) but remember realising that the novel was something different.  And Albert Finney on film as Arthur Seaton was, well, definitive.  (I don’t know where my own copy now is, but seeing that old Pan paperback pictured this week I noticed that it really did say on the front “Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party”: I’d thought that that was just a cliché, but no, it was really used.)

An aunt took me to see Tom Jones at the cinema – another amazing Finney performance – and my copy of the book has my name and ‘1966’ written in it in her best calligraphy.  I see that the book cost a massive 8/6 – a lot for a schoolboy, so maybe she gave it to me.  I don’t know which I did first – see the film or read the book.  I’m sure I missed a lot of Henry Fielding’s jokes but I do remember the excitement of seeing as an A Level English student what a skilled writer could do with irony and description and character.  And why not go on for 800 pages?  Why stick at the 180 or 200 my usual reading matter then had?

My third Finney/literature moment was seeing him on stage at the National Theatre as Tamburlaine in 1976.  I’d read Tamburlaine and had wondered how this prolonged bombast-fest could possibly be staged (and what constitution the actor in the lead role must have!).  Well, Albert Finney was magnificent.  He made it work.  Christopher Marlowe would, I’m sure, have been delighted to see this massive anti-hero brought so compellingly to life.

Rather a different writer was Rosamunde Pilcher, who has also left us this week.  She sold 60 million books!  60 million.  Think of the sheer quantity of the pleasure she brought to her readers.  And that pleasure spread far and wide: a happy part of my Czech mother-in-law’s week would be watching Rosamunde Pilcher’s stories made by a German film company, in the most glorious Cornish settings, with Czech subtitles.  I don’t remember seeing those programmes in England but they have gone down well in Central Europe. Lots of red phone boxes and letter-boxes to remind the viewers where they are.

Must read The Shell Seekers one day.

So thanks, Albert Finney, and thanks, Rosamunde Pilcher.

 

Lovelives affected by the Old Vic

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Laurence Olivier, Memories, Old Vic, The Royal Hunt of the Sun

 

As part of its celebrations to mark its 200 years of existence the wonderful Old Vic theatre in London’s Waterloo has asked playgoers to send in personal memories of productions there.

Quite independently, two of the ninevoices have done so, Val and Ed. You can find us if you go to https://www.oldvictheatre.com/200/your-stories and scroll down.

The stories do rather give away our ages. More importantly, they show how going to the theatre can affect your love life, for better or worse ….

The Old Vic is still asking for more memories. So send them in – they don’t have to be amorous in content!

Some Shakespearean memories this anniversary day

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Czech, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Midsummer Night's Dream, President Kennedy, Prof Martin Hilský, Richard III, Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night

Back in 1967, with all of an adolescent’s assurance and pomposity I wrote in my A Level English exam that King Lear was too great a play actually to be successfully staged. It makes me cringe somewhat to think of that now, but it must have impressed the examiners as they gave me a good grade. And it is true that I have in fact never seen Lear on stage. I fear that I would not see it done well enough. A couple of years back I tried to get to the Ian McKellen production – surely that would have been top class, I thought – but it was sold out.

Two nights ago I went to a talk by a Professor* who has translated ALL of Shakespeare into Czech, in which he told his spellbound audience how he went about it and what the difficulties and the joys are in that huge task. In it he said that he put Lear among the best plays ever written, by anybody, with its massive themes of folly and loyalty and disloyalty.

It was while my father was driving me home after seeing Richard III at Stratford in November 1963 that we learned of the death of President Kennedy. We turned on the car radio and heard the voice of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then the Prime Minister, paying tribute to the President. An evening of dramatic deaths became all too real.

I had not thought much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my teens, thinking that it was all about fairies and with not much happening. But then at college I saw a student production and came out of the theatre feeling that it was so good to be alive. Not many plays have done that – fingers of one hand? – but that was one of them.

Some reservations? In that study of how power corrupts, Measure for Measure, the amazing coincidences that solve the plotlines do grate somewhat: did the Bard lose interest, or run out of time, and just bring in a deus ex machina or two (dei ex machina?) to finish it? And I admit to not actually enjoying The Taming of the Shrew, and to having seen so many Twelfth Nights that I won’t mind if I go to my grave not having seen any more.

But a great King Lear …………?  Yes please.

*Prof. Martin Hilský, of Charles University in Prague, awarded an honorary MBE for his services to literature

‘Mr Foote’s Other Leg’

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Ian Kelly, Samuel Foote, Simon Russell Beale, theatre seat prices

There is still three weeks in which to see Mr Foote’s Other Leg at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket in London. Simon Russell Beale plays Mr Foote and does so magnificently. It’s on till 23 January. The play is by Ian Kelly.

Samuel Foote actually lived, and I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him.  One book I must now get is the award-winning account of his colourful life, in and out of the theatre, that Ian Kelly wrote before the play. It’s called Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, tragedy and murder in Georgian London, and is published by Picador.

Foote began his public life by writing a best-selling account of the murder of one of his uncles by another. He had an early failed marriage, was sent down from Oxford for (among other things) a bizarre practical joke at the expense of the Provost of his college, and became a flamboyant personality in London coffee house society. He was a comic actor, good at impersonation; a playwright, famed for his satire; and an impresario at the Haymarket Theatre itself, adept at evading the licensing and censorship law of the time. Another strange practical joke (at the hands of royalty) costs him his leg – and eventually, perhaps, his reason. A savage satire on a celebrity Duchess landed them both in court, her charged with bigamy and him with sodomy.

The other actors in the play are great too.  The author of the play, Ian Kelly, plays Prince George (and then George III). Dervla Kirwan is the celebrated Irish actress Peg Woffington and Joseph Millson her lover the great actor David Garrick. Jenny Galloway plays Mrs Garner, the maid-of-all-work who has actually kept Foote’s theatre together for years: she has a great speech in which she lauds those who work backstage, as against the actors with their airs and graces. Micah Balfour plays Frank Barber, a freed slave from Jamaica who becomes Foote’s assistant, with much mutual puzzlement when Foote and Garrick are playing Othello.

There are many jokes (and insights?) to do with the world of the theatre.  There is much Shakespearean stuff.  There are comments on the role of the press (ostensibly in the 18^th century, but also of today).

At first I thought they were speaking too quickly for me to catch it all but then either they slowed down or I caught up, and all became well.

If you go, here’s a tip:  if you have time, before it starts read the timeline of Samuel Foote’s life in the programme.  That will elucidate much of what’s happening (especially at the end).

You also learn from the programme that one reason why Samuel Foote’s plays are not performed nowadays is that he sometimes wrote them with leading roles for a one-legged actor, with subsequent casting difficulties …

We went as a New Year’s Eve treat. As has been our experience at the Haymarket before, our seats were upgraded.  We had bought seats in the Upper Circle but found ourselves in seats with an excellent view in the Royal Circle.  (Haymarket seats are not cheap!)

In the words of the programme, “The play – like the book – is a comedy about theatre folk that also offers a huge panorama of 18^th-century life.”

‘And Then There Were None’

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Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, BBC TV, whodunits

I was in the happy position over Christmas, watching the amazing And Then There Were None on BBC TV, to be able to compare stage and TV versions of this classic Christie story. A group of ten strangers (each with a deadly and guilty secret in their past) find themselves cut off on an island, invited by the mysterious and apparently absent Mr U N Owen; they are then serially murdered, in the same sequence as in the nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys.

A group of us saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall in October, as part of their ten-months-long nationwide tour. (How well they must have known their words by the end!)   The cast included some names familiar to those of us of, er, more mature years: Paul Nicholas (star of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends), Mark Wynter (‘60s pop star, with hits such as Venus in Blue Jeans), and Deborah Grant (John Nettles’ ex-wife way back in Bergerac), to name but three.

The stage version gave us atmosphere and a storm, and the sense of being trapped. Unlike a film it couldn’t show us close-ups of bodies on jagged rocks, or transport us in momentary flashback to the Western Front or the drowning of a boy. But it did have the excitement of live theatre. Our group had a happy outing; I couldn’t remember whodunit, and the ending surprised me just as it had when I’d seen a film version years before. (This may have been the 1974 one with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer et al – this story does seem to appeal to all-star casts).

One of the motifs of the story is that there is on display in the house a group of ten toy soldiers. After each death the remaining characters discover that one of these has disappeared. That is easily effected in a film, but how did it happen on stage? In the interval I asked a fellow member of the audience, and he told me he’d seen one of the actors (one who was killed shortly afterwards) surreptitiously put one in his pocket. Maybe whichever cast member was nearest the toys at the time had the job of secreting one.

In our family we’re still enthusing about the TV version, shown on Boxing Day and the two successive nights in one-hour chunks. Wow! The atmosphere, the tension, the menace – and the absence of the semi-humorous tone you often get in Christie films – more, more! One by one the cast are killed, and they know it and can see it coming, and they fear each other. No supersleuth is there to explain the complexities of what is happening and to unmask the villain.  They just get killed, all ten …

I can see that some folk will have found too long the ominous pauses, but not us. To see Toby Stephens, Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and the rest put on their turns was just right for the dark evenings after Christmas when the festive supplies of food and drink need to be finished off.   I can’t see it myself, but the female half of our viewership were also much taken with Aidan Turner’s torso. Once displayed, why it then had to reappear quite so often I don’t know.   Yes, you guessed it – this was the role Oliver Reed played in the 1974 film: I can’t remember whether he kept showing us his chest.

Knowing who did it didn’t spoil my pleasure – indeed, it was fascinating to see the story unfold with that knowledge. What was difficult was not letting anything slip that would give the game away to my fellow viewers. Reader, I managed it.

The Twittersphere raved about the production – and the aforesaid torso was the detail most mentioned in that raving.

My favourite tweet was “They’ve really upped the stakes in the latest series of Big Brother.”

I don’t know why the BBC changed the skeleton in the policeman’s cupboard. In the play (and, I think, the original book) he has been bribed and has committed perjury, resulting in an innocent man being hanged. On TV he has instead kicked a young gay man to death in a police cell. One can only speculate why this change was made. 

Sometime I must read the novel to see how the Queen of Crime herself imagined the story. And to find out how it was that Mr U N Owen came to know all these terrible secrets.

I’ve heard it muttered somewhere that next year we may get Witness for the Prosecution (which I also saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at the Assembly Hall a few years ago). Bring it on!