Petherbridge’s Weekly Post

BREAKING THE MOULD: A SONNET

2012-01-22T22:44:00.000Z

Ungrateful he, who pluck’d thee from thy stalk,
Poor faded flow’ret! on his careless way.

Coleridge

WEST HAMPSTEAD WINDOW ON THE EAST

2012-01-09T04:13:00.050Z

In a dim corner of my room for longer than 
my fancy thinks 
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me 
through the shifting gloom.

OSCAR WILDE

Photo by EP

In 1958, not long after Colonel Nasser had successfully snaffled the Suez Canal, my first wife and I sailed through it on our way to work in New Zealand. I remember I was reading Wuthering Heights on deck, visualizing Howarth and the moors so close to where I had grown up, whilst observing camels on the canal banks. I fear we did not see the pyramids, but I spotted the mummy case of Tutankhamun just the other day, a mere four minutes’ walk from my front door, having happened to look up at a window. I must see if I can find out more about this apparently convincing replica: reminding me that one can’t help feeling we have intruded on and despoiled the young king’s preparations for the afterlife.

Photo by EP

The zigzag decorative motif trimming the window was, as it happens, invented by the Egyptians around 1500 BC; it symbolizes water and, by chance, the terrace in the photograph backs onto a disused reservoir. This unusual discovery inspired me to compose an impromptu sonnet:

It’s mild today but simply not the best
This usual walk around our mundane streets
Of Hampstead yes, but with the prefix West
Surprise! There is a breath blown from the East
Not Kilburn, no, nor Cricklewood – simoon
I’m walking in the Valley of the Kings
Hot wind, hot sand – I see Tutankhamun
That window, there’s his mummy, of all things.
In sympathy the window sports zigzag
Egyptian, from four thousand years BC
His mummy’s replica may be ragtag
But zigzag is symbolic, historically
Of water: so I end this aide-mémoire
The house is backed still by a reservoir.

Five minutes away in the other direction is the grave of James ‘Wilson Pasha’ Wilson, marked by a little Ptolemaic temple. Wilson was for many years Chief Engineer to the Egyptian government, and in 1895 the Khedive of Egypt raised him to the rank of Pasha for services rendered to the state.

Photo by EP

Just opposite the entrance to the graveyard on Fortune Green Road, and in appropriate bright sunshine, here is another edifice showing some eastern influence:

Photo by EP

It was built around 1886 for the monumental mason John Cramb and is described, in a book on Victorian and Edwardian cemeteries, as ‘a three-story advertisement decorated in an eclectic style that combines Byzantine and Egyptian with an exuberant disregard for historical proprieties.’

‘Why is it that its [Egypt’s] name, its history, its natural peculiarities and its monuments, affect and interest us in quite a different manner from those of the other nations of antiquity?’ wrote the Egyptologist and novelist George Ebers in 1878. The Victorians were fascinated by Egypt and two of the period’s most prolific painters of Egyptian themes had connections with West Hampstead. Hampstead Cemetery is the final resting place of Edwin Longsden Long RA, whose visit to Egypt and Syria in 1874 had a profound influence on his subsequent work, e.g. ‘The Egyptian Feast’ (1877).

Detail of ‘The Egyptian Feast’.
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford

Long also painted a portrait of Henry Irving as Hamlet in 1880, an engraving of which hangs in our front hall. (One may recall that Irving’s friend and business manager of the Lyceum, Bram Stoker, wrote a thriller called The Jewel of Seven Stars involving grave robbers of Egyptian relics and a mummy’s curse.)

Photo by EP

Frederick Goodall RA died at his home in West Hampstead after being declared bankrupt in 1902, despite having been one of the most popular painters of contemporary Egyptian life in the late nineteenth century. He made two visits to Egypt, the first in 1858-9 and the second in 1870-1. On both occasions he travelled and camped with Bedouin tribesmen, and to give his paintings authenticity brought back to England with him Egyptian sheep and goats.

‘Subsiding of the Nile’ (1872)

I have remembered three Eastern connections closer to home, as it were. First there is the photograph I took of the Bedouin camel boy I met on my research pilgrimage to Syria in 2005, the year I wrote and performed my play about Simeon Stylites.

Photo by EP

Then there is review I received in the Islington Tribune of my Old Actor in The Fantasticks in 2010, written I discovered by an Irish-Egyptian journalist named Roisin Gadelrab: ‘A genius turn from Edward Petherbridge as the crumpled, ageing Shakespearean luvvie whose every gesture, word or weary sigh was pure comedic gold.’

But closest of all is the little khaki-bound Bible my father took with him to Egypt in 1914 and which is now preserved in my West Hampstead home. There is no photograph of my father as a soldier. He avoided being captured by cameras, always saying, ‘I don’t take a good picture.’ The Ever-Ready safety razor he used all his life was issued to him when he joined up. He was sixteen and scarcely in need of it. Rehoboth Sunday School gave him the Bible, inscribed in purple ink:

Presented to Willie Petherbridge
On the occasion of him joining His Majesty’s Forces during the Great European War
1914 to

To what? – he must have wondered. I am sure his poor eyesight rendered the tiny print in the Bible illegible, but he could see to work at stabling and transporting cavalry horses in Egypt. That is all we ever knew about his war experience until his dying day at the age of sixty-four.

Photos by EP

______________________________

The Melting Pot
The watchmaker wore an Afghan Hat
‘Not for religion – tradition’
He sorted my clockwork quick off pat
And off I went, in addition
I needed stamps from the Indians
Who run HM’s Post Office
Earplugs I got (from China I suppose)
Though they fit my English orifices
The shop by the way, was Iraqi owned
For erudition I started to hanker
And bought the London Review of Books
From the man who comes from Sri Lanka
I popped into the Tube station
Overseen by that gloomy Pole
Beethoven wafted through the air
And I must say, on the whole
I like being an Englishman
Here in NW6 … to be finished at a later date
I’ve used up all my tricks.

Photo by EP

The phrase ‘melting pot’ was popularized, in fact, by another West Hampstead resident, Israel Zangwill, whose play The Melting Pot was a hit in the United States in 1909-10, particularly with former President Theodore Roosevelt.

Zangwill painted by fellow West Hampsteadite Walter Sickert (c. 1896-98).
National Galleries of Scotland

I end with a snapshot of our modern-day melting pot, a West Hampstead ‘montage’ I achieved by snapping through the window of a local men’s hairdressing salon.

West Hampstead Reflections.
Photo by EP

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

2011-12-31T23:02:00.002Z

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Oscar Wilde

iPhone self-portrait by EP

Two weeks ago a lady sweetly accosted me at the Riverside Studios after a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest and told me she would remember my Dr Chasuble’s attempt to imitate a buzzing bee, in my duet with Miss Prism, to her ‘dying day’.

I imagined that nobody remembered my young Algernon Moncrieff from the New Zealand Players’ production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1959, and I may well be right. The following memory, recounted in an email I received the other day, is appropriately described as ‘quirky’:

My niece and I saw your matinee yesterday and loved it all. … One quirky memory which might amuse you. I had no idea of who the cast were when we came yesterday, on the spur of the moment, and when I saw your name it took me back to 1959. I remembered I had rather taken your name in vain, back then in Blenheim, New Zealand, when I was an 11-year-old schoolboy. On the day in question our teacher had required us to perform an adlibbed impromptu and entirely unrehearsed sketch of whatever we chose and I was, I think, in the role of some kind of interviewee. I was asked my name, and I had to adlib, in character. The context required something rather grandiloquent and magnificent and I blurted out ‘Edward Petherbridge’. I got a big laugh from my classmates, and I remember feeling very guilty that I had got the laugh on false pretences because it was actually a real person’s name, whose feelings might be hurt, and it was not right to get a cheap laugh. I think I can recall that I had just been taken by my parents to see the NZ Players and that it must have been the name of one of the actors in whatever it was we then saw. My niece, to whom I recounted this yesterday, has subsequently Googled and found that it was indeed you and that you were playing Algernon! So can I now apologise, after 52 years, for my impertinence. It is just possible, of course, that you have been unaware all this time of this lese majeste.

The cast of The Importance with Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland.
Photo by Francis Loney

Happy New Year to all my readers and to the people who unwittingly provided me with this New Year card of white winter roses in the gloom outside their interesting West Hampstead window; lese majeste again, as an Englishman’s home is his castle!

Photo by EP

THE REAL MIRACLE

2011-12-25T12:31:00.000Z

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a
miracle
every inch of space is a miracle.

Walt Whitman

To prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin

Imagine a Gothic chapel in the snow. Well, I say Gothic – late nineteenth-century. It’s a cemetery chapel, quite near our house, and it was done up for Christ’s birthday, as it were, last year, with candles and a bit of holly and, I think for the first time, a carol concert was held in it. I wrote this occasional poem:

Note: John Clement Bell, of Clayton and Bell stained glass, lived in Kingdon Road, West Hampstead and is buried in our local cemetery. Sir Walford Davies, who succeeded Elgar as Master of the King’s Musick, lived in Fawley Road, whilst his friend Frederick Rothwell, who, as organ builder to the Queen, was commissioned to rebuild the organ in St George’s Chapel Windsor, had his workshop just across from the cemetery in Fortune Green Road.

A HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!

Photo by EP

RAILWAY SONNETS

2011-12-20T02:35:00.006Z

West-End, of late years, has ceased to be an obscure nook, with a few houses almost hidden in trees. London, as on all other sites, has thrust itself in, and planted handsome houses of merchants and professional men, and opened up the secluded scene of former rude revels into a pleasant suburb of the great Babel.

William Howitt, The Northern Heights of London (1869)

Last Monday, my day off from The Importance, I had the pleasure of opening a wonderful new exhibition at the National Library of Scotland, where my daughter Dora works as a curator in the Foreign Collections. The exhibition is called ‘Beyond Macbeth: Shakespeare in Scottish Collections’.

On the last leg of my train journey north, I composed this sonnet, which, owing to time, I omitted from my speech:

Just fourteen lines, a sonnet’s worth I need
It’s four now of the clock and growing dark
The Bard he would be petrified – the speed
This Eastern Train is going to hit its mark
An ancient church tower, past it I was hurled
And yet our modern day doth have its limits
It seemed a good deed in a naughty world
But Puck got round the earth in forty minutes
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
Tell that to Britain and the Europeans
Just four more lines I’m writing, now let’s see –
Oh God bless Scotland’s hard-pressed Librar-ians
For what this precious horde today bequeaths
Is Shakespeare: if we choose, he lives and breathes.

Photo by EP

Postscript

The Importance of Being Earnest had its Press Night on Thursday, 15th December. Read the splendid reviews for the show and for Edward’s performance as Dr Chasuble on the Latest News blog.

K.R.

RIVERSIDE REFLECTIONS

2011-12-11T04:16:00.000Z

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Baudelaire

Photo by EP

Oh! No wonder modern life is so tiring! I keep thinking it’s my age, but having forgotten to take my Kindle on the Tube with me to the Saturday matinee (that is a sign of age), I bought a copy of i, the Independent digest and a snip at 30p, and by the time I had reached Hammersmith I had read yet more confusing opinions about Prime Minister Cameron’s ‘Non’ to Europe; a scant précis of the state of the British Arts; and an account of a rather enormous Bronze Age discovery in the Fens – of boats, spears and swords, to say nothing of clothing, found in the silt and peat of the old course of the river Nene in Whittlesey. Items that would ‘normally have been long since decomposed have been pulled out of the earth by archaeologists in pristine condition.’

As an actor one is conditioned to get one’s imagination round what one reads; perhaps one mistakes anything printed for a script. In any case, I was soon reading the words of David Gibson from Cambridge University’s archaeological unit: ‘It is giving us a 3-D vision of this community that we see very rarely in the world, let alone in this country.’ The site of the settlement is thought to have burned down around 800 BC.

The harsh, unlovely world of Hammersmith Tube station, which is really a shopping mall, gives out onto the confusing traffic island, dominated by the notorious flyover.

Photo by EP

Eventually one gains a sight of the river and the bridge.

Photo by EP

The dressing rooms at Riverside Studios are airless and too warm, but I was soon taking part in the regular vocal warm-up. The psychic warm-up to put oneself into Wilde’s world of 1895, a mere eight years after the opening of Hammersmith Bridge, is one’s own responsibility as one ties the laces of one’s shoes or mutters the odd line, stares at oneself in the mirror.

The bridge has been in constant need of repair and fortification ever since it was built, but Wilde’s play is as sound as a bell and a living delight, even surviving the addition of songs. Tonight the audience not only laughed at Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble’s restrained love duet, but mollified the laughter with sympathetic cries of ‘Ah!’ and ‘Oh!’

I have been reading on my Kindle Henry Arthur Jones’s drawing-room comedy Dolly Reforming Herself, first performed at the Haymarket thirteen years after The Importance premiered in London but somehow less ‘modern’ and certainly more morally simplistic. The Importance is just as hedged about with moral conventions, of course, but Wilde himself isn’t and the play sparkles and lives.

Euripides
by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico (1921)

Kathleen tells me The Importance is partly inspired by Euripides’ Ion of c.413 BC, that Wilde’s famous ‘handbag’ episode has its origins in the recognition scene surrounding the basketwork crib of the orphaned Ion. Wilde’s admiration and affinity for the ‘modern’ Euripides – who was attacked by the conservatives of his day and equally so in Victorian times – was a fascinating aspect of his own enlightened and humane thinking. In the commonplace book he kept at Oxford, he wrote:

And we who toil in the heated quarries of modern life may perhaps—or is it only a fancy—gain some freedom of soul from his genius who was the great humanist of Hellas, the cor cordium of antiquity.

So we are not so far away from those Bronze Age artefacts. Perhaps the word ‘pristine’ should also be attached to Wilde’s perfect comedy?

Tomorrow Wilde’s grandson is coming to our matinee.

Postscript

Another modern drawing-room comedy inspired by Euripides’ Ion was one-time West Hampstead resident T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. As a young actor in the 50s, The Confidential Clerk, which had at least one long speech for the foundling Colby, furnished me with an excellent audition piece.

Joan Greenwood and Douglas Watson in The Confidential Clerk,
Morosco Theatre, New York, 1954. Greenwood played Gwendolen in
the 1952 film version of The Importance.

LOOKING TO ONE'S LAURELS BY THE FIRESIDE

2011-12-04T06:35:00.002Z

Youth, large, lusty, loving – youth full of grace, force, fascination.
Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace,
force, fascination?

Walt Whitman

Photo by EP

I hope you won’t find it cloying when I say that it has struck me afresh what an extraordinary job it is being an actor and what extraordinary creatures actors are. In all modesty I exempt myself; for this is by way of being a hymn to young actors, whereas I find myself in the inescapable default position of veteran.

The point I am making is how touching it is to find these youngsters so at home with their craft, plying the ancient trade in the time-honoured ways with such beautiful young heads on their supple shoulders. Transformation is their stock in trade. I noticed a moment when one of our young company failed, not for the first time, to find the right note to enter into a number. ‘Oh, how am I to get that!’ the actor lamented, suddenly looking tired, pale and disappointed whilst listening to the MD’s advice. But then, simultaneously, the voice successfully sang the opening bars and the face came alive as if some internal light had been turned on.

I was also touched today when, during a break, my stories of ‘the old days’ seemed to hold a young actor’s interest. I realize that it was the equivalent of my young self hearing the green-room talk of an old thespian harking back to 1910, only fifteen years away from the very first night of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Toulouse Lautrec’s watercolour portrait
of Wilde in 1895

In 1895 Wilde, comparing English actors with their French counterparts, wrote: ‘The English actors act quite as well; but they act best between the lines.’ (That was thought a modern fault in my young day in the mid-1950s, and still is today!)

Having praised the few English actors capable of the superb elocution of the French, ‘so clear, so cadenced, and so musical’, Wilde opines: ‘Yet there is more than one of our English actors who is capable of producing a wonderful dramatic effect by aid of a monosyllable and two cigarettes.’

Irene Vanbrugh as Gwendolen Fairfax and George Alexander as Jack Worthing in the 1895 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, from The Sketch magazine. V&A Images

Of the cast of An Ideal Husband, his current success in 1895, he wrote: ‘I am charmed with all of them. Perhaps they are a little too fascinating. The stage is the refuge of the too fascinating.’

Put this fascination into a rehearsal room at ten in the morning after a long Tube journey, add music, composed and played by two young, good-looking musicians (we are yet to add the percussionist), add dance, and the effect may not be too fascinating, but it can lift one to what I would describe as a state of workaday euphoric.

_________________________

On Friday, Phyllida Crowden and her actress daughter Sarah hosted a lunch in celebration of the life of my old acting colleague Graham Crowden. Oliver Cotton read a witty and affectionate tribute, quite the height of the occasion, held in a lovely wainscot-lined eighteenth-century upper room in Lexington Street, Soho. I composed and recited this occasional little verse:

Click to enlarge.

Postscript

A few related links you might find interesting:

Reflections on The Importance of Being Earnest by Edward Petherbridge

‘Hear Here for Gyles and Ted’, a blog by Michael Coveney

Interview on YouTube with Edward and Gyles Brandreth

SOUND BYTES

2011-11-27T10:16:00.004Z

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

Photo by EP

I have been searching through over fifty years of unsorted sound; my backlog of cassettes is a chaotic Tower of Babel, containing chanted lines of old parts, family recordings of Christmases past and golden summers. I even have some tape over forty years old of my elder son. There is dictation from the days before I taught myself to type, and of course the odd radio play. Actually Emily has a very thorough set of her old radio plays. I still remember her wonderful rendering of the line ‘Take me home’ at the end of Michelle Magorian’s Back Home (1995), which recently, on waking, I heard repeated on the radio and which you can hear in my homemade radio talk One’s Own Voice.

This afternoon I decided it would be a treat to hear Bernard Shaw’s play Candida, with Hannah Gordon in the title role, Christopher Guard as the young poet Marchbanks, and myself as the Reverend James Morell. The performance was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 1977 and I find it has been repeated no less than seven times in the last two years on Radio 7 and Radio 4 Extra, without my knowing! My treat was to sit with the afternoon sun pouring through the windows, Shaw’s astringent, witty and sometimes very touching dialogue pouring out of my battered old radio cassette player whilst I finished off my painting of The Allegory of Acquaintance.

Photo by EP

It strikes me that Candida, the ideal woman whom everybody is in love with, and Marchbanks the young poet are genuinely, refreshingly ‘new types’ and remain so. Gordon and Guard are superb. It strikes me, too, me what a world of difference there is between Wilde’s Canon Chasuble (whom I’m currently rehearsing) and Shaw’s Reverend Morell, both in their own ways unique as well as being clerical clichés, both in love, both delightful to play. I am disappointed in Shaw for not appreciating The Importance of Being Earnest, but the light touch and the emotional imagination with which he creates the story of his characters in Candida is wonderfully alive.

Athene Syler played Miss Proserpine ‘Prossy’ Garnett on stage in 1937, and told me in her ninety-ninth year that, in the scene where she is tipsy, having tasted champagne for the first time, Shaw wanted her to trip over the mat on her exit. ‘I refused to do it’, she said. ‘“I’ll show you what I’ll do”, I said. And I made for the door from down left to up centre in a sort of controlled curve and got a round every night!’

As I listened, and painted, I imagined … well the play of course, all oddly familiar yet coming as a series of dramatic surprises, and Shaw himself walking up the road to our local train station, which, as we know from his diary, he did at least once. And I read the other day in Trent’s Own Case, the 1936 whodunit written by E. C. Bentley not five minutes’ walk from the same station, his Police Detective Bligh describing Shaw as his favourite ‘literature of escape’ – a phrase coined by a gaolbird who recommended Shaw to the detective:

‘I had to interrogate a prisoner some years ago about a certain matter. A confirmed criminal he was. They used to call him Pantomime Joe, on account of the cheek he used to give everybody from the dock … Joe was an educated man, and it was no surprise to me, when I visited him in his cell, to find him reading a book from the prison library. He showed it to me – Plays Pleasant, by G. B. Shaw. “What’s this?” I said. He grinned at me. “This is the literature of escape, Blighter,” he says, using a silly nickname he and his sort have always had for me. I thought that sounded a funny sort of reading to be put in the hands of a man who spent half his time in gaol, but he explained his meaning.’
‘And what can that have been?’ Trent wondered.
‘Why,’ the inspector said, ‘Joe meant, and I agree with him, that Shaw takes you right out of the beastly realities of life. I can tell you, after a hard day at our job, with all the spite, and greed, and cruelty, and filthy-mindedness that we get our noses rubbed in, it’s like coming out into the fresh country air to sit down to one of Shaw’s plays. … And there’s never a dull moment. Every dam’ character has something to say; even the stupidest ones. … Who ever had the luck to listen to anything like it in real life? I tell you, it’s a different world.’

The recommendation charmed me and I realized this afternoon how fresh an escape Shaw still is, and the characters all do have something to say and say it so well. True escapism, as I observed only last week in speaking of A. L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book, never lets you go.

And talking of prison and libraries, I’ve been re-reading Oscar Wilde’s letters to the Daily Chronicle, written after his imprisonment, with his plea that prisoners should be provided with good books:

Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every human and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane. (23 March 1898)

The painting is an attempt at mythography, inspired by Titian, and – as in Titian’s Allegory of Prudence – there will be a Latin motto added by next week. It is a story of another West Hampstead happening: our dog effecting an introduction to one of our notable elderly characters who recounted tales to me of his young and exotic self. I had seen him about the place for twenty-eight years but never spoken to him until Bean introduced us!

Photo by EP

Postscript
You might like to visit the newly styled homepage of Peth’s Staging Post which features a lovely new portrait of Edward by Bronwen Sharp.
KR

A GENTLEMAN'S GENTLEMAN

2011-11-21T06:26:00.001Z

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness.

Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820)

Season of mists ...

and mellow fruitfulness. Photos by EP

SUNDAY, 20th NOVEMBER

It has saddened me on this perfect autumn day to hear from Harriet Walter that Richard Morant, who of course played Bunter in our Dorothy L. Sayers Mysteries, has died at the age of sixty-six.

Actors make so many transient, relatively intimate working relationships with one another and, so often, move on. I had only come into chance contact with him once since those days and, as usually happens, we took up the reins of our good humour and comradeship as if we had just finished a scene together.

The first time Richard and I worked together was in a BBC TV

production of The Merchant of Venice. I played Lorenzo and he Solanio.

I do not recall from 1986 that we discussed the relationship of officer and batman in the trenches as it developed into man-about-town and gentleman’s gentleman, amateur sleuth and technical assistant. The books had given us chapter and verse and we seemed to come to an understanding, a modus vivendi by some process of osmosis. We developed a supreme tact between us. I remember something about Richard that seemed reliable, benign, with always the twinkle of a possible smile.

Here is just a handful of our scenes together. In the one in which I am tying my bow tie, I remember we made up most of our dialogue.

BLUE NOTES

2011-11-14T05:47:00.003Z

And they buried him in the citie of David among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both towards God, and towards his house.

2 Chronicles, 24:16 (1611 King James Bible)

Photo by EP

Some mornings this last week have been grey and the poor shred of a no longer protected ancient orchard, hemmed in by the local railway line and overrun with Japanese knotweed, was hardly visible and more disregarded than ever.

The train journey to Barnes for Importance rehearsals is convenient in theory but often very long in practice. Never mind! Since A. L. Kennedy mentioned and quoted from my book, Slim Chances, on her Twitter page on 27 October, I have sought out and been reading on my Kindle her latest novel The Blue Book and thus enriching my daily commute no end. In fact I have often been annoyed at the disruption caused by my arrival at Barnes station.

Photo by EP

It is one of those almost folly-like stations, Victorian cottage Gothic with impressive chimneys.

The strange, delicately intense – hopeless adjectives –‘fierce’ would do as well and still convey nothing of the world of The Blue Book … anyway it is a world that has been separated from Wilde’s Act 2 and the charms of Cecily’s garden by a ten-minute walk through Barnes Common, which is pleasant enough in the mists but positively uplifting when the summer decides it is not yet over.

Photos by EP

Failing sunshine, there is nothing like a good couple of hours of a full-cast singing rehearsal to lift the heart.

Actually I thought it might not be too late to lift the spirits and take up Tai Chi this morning when I was observing a local exponent on the edge of our green. Tai Chi is related to the martial arts, but a world away from the martial deportment I had been watching in the Remembrance Day ceremony minutes before, televised from Whitehall.

The remnants of the foundations of a WWII air raid shelter were dug up on the green recently; hardly anyone knew what they were. I happened to notice a Jewish boy happily kicking a football nearby.

Photo by EP

On Saturday night in Trafalgar Square, when I emerged from a late-night viewing of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, there was another exhibition of grace on the wide pavement in front of the National Gallery Portico.

Kathleen reminded me today that the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is the only tombstone in Westminster Abbey’s floor that one cannot walk over.

I remembered a moment from The Blue Book which I will dare to quote here:

They used to say that there was one time when a king would have to salute a private soldier and the soldier could ignore him – which is when the private soldier is dead.

The Burial of the Unknown Warrior. Painting by Frank O. Salisbury, 1920

King George V and, behind him, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII),
the Duke of York (later George VI) and Prince Henry.

BITS AND PIECES

2011-11-05T20:07:00.015Z

Without assuming that the world, or a tiny fraction of it, awaits my weekly blog, I feel I ought to post something, come what come may, by each weekend. I have done two days of research and development on the King Lear project, and start rehearsals for the musical of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest on Monday: perhaps I scribbled whilst Rome burned, attempting a drawing class the other morning … I say if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing not very well, as long as it’s the best you can manage at the time.

The art school is the former home of a forgotten but once famous late Victorian and Edwardian playwright, Henry Arthur Jones. Kathleen tells me that Oscar Wilde quipped: ‘There are three rules for writing plays. The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same’.

The top-floor studio of Hampstead Art School in Kidderpore Avenue.
Photo by EP

Saw Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass on Friday night, done superbly well. It was for me a somewhat late conversion to the extraordinary talent of Antony Sher.

The children used to like a supper called bits and pieces; my diet has included this last few days bits and pieces too numerous to mention and piecemeal work on my painting. Here’s a hasty snap of work in progress showing a stab at the young Oliver Cox. One of Kathleen’s last achievements before flying back to Sydney on Saturday night has been to Latinize my motto for the ‘Allegory of Acquaintance’: canis meus erat qui me in hunc antiquum militem induxit, triginta annos hospitem exoticum (‘It took my dog to introduce me to this old soldier, thirty years an exotic stranger’).

And talking of bits and pieces, I end with an attempt in sonnet form to justify my temerity in approaching Lear:

How can one have the courage to approach
The magnitude of Lear’s history
And yet the actor’s pride’s beyond reproach
For all the play’s great depths and mystery
Its raw, severe and storm-lashed language springs
Alive on to the paper to be spoke
Its tender limpidness so gently wings
While limps and swerves the Fool’s dry bitter joke
All tailored to the actor on the stage
To strut his flawed path, recognized and shared
By followers in youth and seasoned age
The audience, all captive and ensnared
All bound by mere pretence and play, to see
That pity for a while can set us free.

Benjamin West’s depiction of Lear and the Fool in the storm scene,
commissioned for the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s plays -
a project conceived in Georgian West Hampstead.

BLOG 100

2011-10-31T21:20:00.000Z

A modern house, he saw, perhaps ten years old. The place was beautifully kept with that air of opulent peace that clothes even the smallest houses of the well to do.

E. C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case

I was touched when some of my regular readers sent messages. There had been an unexplained long lull in my so-called weekly postings and the messages expressed the hope I was well. I responded to them and then posted my ninety-ninth blog.

I must not be intimidated by the task of this, the hundredth. At least I have some news and have the delicious chance to be thinking about two plays at once, the greatest tragedy in English and what many think of as the most perfect comedy. It may not be wise to tamper with perfection but, from the moment I heard the duet for Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble in a new musical version of The Importance of Being Earnest, I was smiling away my last scruple. This is the week in which I will have my first rehearsal of that duet with Susie Blake and meet with Paul Hunter under the joint auspices of the RSC and his company Told by an Idiot, just the two of us in duet form to tamper with and explore the colossal structure of King Lear.

My younger incarnation of Dr Chasuble, for the Actors’ Company in 1977.
Photo by Sophie Baker

Meanwhile I have been preoccupied with the research into West Hampstead, or should I say Kathleen’s research. I said to her last week, on the strength of the breadth of her discoveries, that perhaps our book should be called West Hampstead – Hub of Empire, and that was before she discovered that Cecil Rhodes in 1873 bought ten new brick houses ‘prettily situated’ three minutes from West Hampstead Railway Station; he was twenty years old and had capital made from Kimberley diamonds he wanted to invest. We need to discover which houses they were and whether one of them was the house in which E. C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley wrote Trent’s Last Case, the detective novel which was the inspiration for the Peter Wimsey stories of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Bentley’s house in Lymington Road. Photo by EP

E. C. Bentley by Hugh Goldwin Riviere, 1915.
National Portrait Gallery

Bentley was a groundbreaker, introducing not only the idea that his hero was not a superhuman mastermind but also a man involved in a romantic love story within the complexities of the plot. It was a plot, we are told, he worked out on his daily walks from West Hampstead to Fleet Street where he was a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. It was no doubt easier to be creative and think strategically in the London streets circa 1911 with only the noise of horse traffic, even though there were twice as many Londoners as had been counted in the census of 1851.

‘Traffic’ at West End Green, circa 1905

What would Bentley think of me now, not walking but Tubing it into the centre (as he could have done of course), but thrilling to his astonishing twists and insights in electronic form on my Kindle? What would he make of the Dog Roses I managed to ‘paint’ on my iPhone as I sped underground to play Sophocles’ Tiresias near London Bridge, a painting inspired by the blooms in the cemetery he too must have known.

Postscript

Bentley was also the inventor of the ‘Clerihew’, which The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary defines as ‘a humorous pseudo-biographical quatrain, rhymed as two couplets, with lines of uneven length more or less in the rhythm of prose.’ And so I leave you with my very first clerihew:

Trent’s Last Case, by E. C. Bentley

Was the first case to introduce love themes, very gently.

In similarly tender hue

I dedicate this clerihew.

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST

2011-10-23T17:45:00.133+01:00

               Through the sweet-briar, or the vine,
               Or the twisted eglantine;
               While the cock with lively din,
               Scatters the rear of darkness thin.
                                   Milton, ‘L’Allegro’

The Metropolitan railway bisects West Hampstead terraces.

Photo by EP

I believe I am coming up to my hundredth blog, though I admit the title ‘Weekly’ has been a misnomer lately. The truth is I have been leading a double life, which takes twice as long as a straightforward single one. I doubt that any of you lives such a simple thing as a single life, however blameless you may be.

I can’t walk or bus about London NW6 where I live without musing about the people who lived here before me and the delicious names of the places where they walked, so that I am half in the present and half in a series of pasts. Who could not wish that this dense, brick-built suburb of London still had a turning called ‘Sweetbriar Walk’, or that the young Queen Victoria could still be seen strolling between the hawthorn hedges bordering the meadows of West End Lane, having taken a drive in her horsedrawn carriage from her palace, up what was once the ancient Roman Watling Street. Walking to the Tricycle Theatre in neighbouring Kilburn the other night to see a play, in Kilburn High Road, aka Watling Street in fact, we passed a house where the Vorticist painter David Bomberg lived in the 20s and 30s, and I marvelled again, not only that this railway-riddled suburb was once the subject of Constable’s sylvan idyll with a shepherd lad, but that its dense regimented terraces of houses has not succeeded in creating regimented people.

If we think of West End Green as a suburban vortex (it began life as a village green and is now a traffic island for all its stately plane trees), then a mere 500 yards up the road there is a little vortex of history in our kitchen formed by three fridge magnets: Romney’s Lady Hamilton (fancifully portrayed at the spinning wheel), c. 1785; Bomberg’s ‘Mud Bath’ of 1914 - both artists we know traversed the Green; and our magnetic London Underground bottle opener, reminding us of West Hampstead’s Tube station opening as early as 1879, harbinger of Bomberg’s mechanized future which fractured Romney’s handmade past.

Photo by EP

As Ezra Pound, another quondam habitue of West End Green, put it: ‘All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All momentum, which is the past bearing upon us, race, race-memory, instinct charging the placid, non-energized future.’

Kathleen Riley, who has been editing this blog from the other side of the world in Sydney, but is now here, walked with us into the grime and noise of nearby Kilburn High Road last night to see the Cold-War play A Walk in the Woods, and there we were in another past, the Geneva woods, fascinated by two nuclear disarmament negotiators, one Soviet, one American. We had done the same journey the night before to the Tricycle Cinema to see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which took us in enchantment to a world before the moon had been reached or The Bomb dropped.

As we walked back home we were not three minutes’ walk away at one point from the 1920s house where until only six years ago the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Joseph Rotblat lived. Having worked on the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb, he pulled out and eventually concentrated on harnessing nuclear radiation for medical purposes, meanwhile founding, with Bertrand Russell, the Pugwash Conferences, following the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, which sought to urge international leaders to resolve their disputes through peaceful means.

The ‘semi-detached’ house on the left is Rotblat’s former home in Asmara Road and the unlikely headquarters of the Pugwash Conferences.
Photo by EP

The week before we’d walked past the L-shaped Annesley Lodge on the corner of Platt’s Lane and Kidderpore Avenue, designed by C. F. A. Voysey in 1896, an Arts and Crafts breakaway from late Victorian brick-built conformity. Voysey’s father, the Rev. Charles Voysey, for whom the house was built, was also a breakaway from conformity; he was condemned by the Privy Council for heresy, having denied the doctrine of everlasting hell. What would he have thought of the unimaginable man-made hell, discussed endlessly in the Geneva woods and in the West Hampstead headquarters of the Pugwash Conferences?

Annesley Lodge. Photo by EP

So you see we walk through our research every day as well as trawling the internet and delving into the archives of local history. Along the way we encounter poets, painters, parliamentarians and peace-brokers, magicians, musicians, magnates and modernists, conjurers, clowns and clerics, harlequins, hypnotists and heretics …

Photo by EP

There may be no time like the present but the past is currently our parallel universe. This morning we even walked on a pavement bordered by a descendant of sweet briar on our way to the old railway sidings, now a Peace Park, where we read the words of a Mayor of Hiroshima inscribed on a paving stone.

Photo by EP. (Click to enlarge image)

VOICES ON A WARM OCTOBER NIGHT

2011-10-02T05:47:00.106+01:00

There is no index of character so sure as the voice.

Benjamin Disraeli

October 1st, 2011: I took this photograph on my iPhone just after 7 o’clock this evening, so you see how our London nights are drawing in, though our day was perfect, breaking all records for October – and it promises to be at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit again tomorrow. This corporate steel and glass rises at the junction of Hampstead Road and Tottenham Court Road.

Photo by EP

Its humble nextdoor neighbour is a modest brick building with a door leading to a tiny fringe venue, the Camden People’s Theatre, where a company called Improbable were doing the second of two nights of their latest improvised experiment in The Still.

Photo by EP

I had a particular reason to talk my way into tonight’s sold-out performance; I had met the director Phelim McDermott at the nearby Pret a Manger for lunch yesterday along with Paul Hunter, my clown companion in The Fantasticks. We were discussing the forthcoming workshop Paul and I are doing on the subject of King Lear, and hoping Phelim would be able to join us in our experiments.

Myself as Henry and Paul Hunter as Mortimer in The Fantasticks.
Duchess Theatre 2010. Photo by Francis Loney

As it turned out, tonight was more relevant than I could have hoped because the noted ‘Voice Dialogue facilitator’, John Kent, was interviewing the voices of the actors … well, I gather we might all have many voices, many people that we are, but it was fascinating to hear improvised interviews with two selected selves of each actor, as they strove to explain their function in, and their relationship with, the lives of the main self (whose seat was left vacant whilst the other self stood aside and did the talking, if you take my meaning.

According to Improbable’s website: ‘Pioneered by Drs. Hal & Sidra Stone, Voice Dialogue is a revolutionary process that allows us to become aware of the many different selves that influence the course of our lives.’ This technique is used in the corporate world of glass and steel as well as in experimental fringe theatres.

There was, of course, a more successful element of performance, not to say comedy, in the excerises than one might have expected had we been next door with executives on a development course. Even Matilda Leyser’s baby to be was a prominent character. Phelim’s two poles were a rather puckish, sly mischief and a hangdog shamed reluctance; hers, no less physically manifest, fidgety retreats into laughter and four-square, no-nonsense career woman. But, despite this element of performance, there was a sense of honest inquiry and revelation in the experimental proceedings.

I began to wonder to what degree a king might be himself part-fool and take the advice and criticism the fool is licensed to give, and conversely, a fool part-king. Most of all I began to wonder about the authentic voice, which of one’s many voices was the one to be attended to. For the actor, when attempting to take on the mantle of another person, the problem is further complicated. I found the authentic voice so difficult to find as I sat at my kitchen table saying Lear’s lines, attempting to honour the poetry, the rhythm and yet discover, too, the cadences of ‘natural’ speech, in fact to make King Lear – as I might say – one of me.

Lear and the Fool. Double self-portrait.
Charcoal on paper, 2006

My work on King Lear was begun whilst there were snowdrops in Hampstead Churchyard in very early 2007. Hence this rejected attempt at fulfilling a commision to supply my Lear in image form for publicity purposes before I quite knew who he was.

Photo by Arthur Petherbridge

I am intrigued by news of some distinguished voices that sounded just ten minutes’ walk away from my kitchen table, and not far from Hampstead Churchyard, albeit a century ago. Ernest Rhys, founder of the Rhymers’ Club and the Everyman’s Library of classics, recorded this extraordinary tale of a most memorable literary encounter in his West Hampstead home:

Ernest Rhys

At our house in Hermitage Lane – called ‘Derwen’ after the old oak tree staring in at the window – to which we had moved from Hunt Cottage, we often had gatherings of young poets, resuming the nights at the Old Cheshire Cheese of the Rhymers Club. …

The most memorable of these nights was one when the late D. H. Lawrence, then a completely unknown poet, came with Ford Madox Ford (who was editing the English Review). He had written to say he had discovered a wonderful new poet in a young country schoolmaster somewhere in the Black Country, and wished to bring him along. …

When the two entered the room together, they made a strong contrast. Ford always had the air of a man-about-town used to town occasions, while Lawrence looked shy and countrified; perhaps a little overwhelmed by the fanfaron of fellow poets heard in the room, with W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound dominating the chorus. …

‘Derwen’ today, complete with oak.
Photo by EP

During the supper, Yeats, always a good monologuer, held forth at length on this new way of bringing music and poetry together, and possibly Ezra Pound, who could also be vocal on occasion, may have felt he was not getting a fair share of the fun. So, in order to pass the time perhaps, and seeing the supper table dressed with red tulips, he presently took one of the flowers and proceeded to munch it up. …

The plan of entertainment on these occasions was a simple one. Every poet was supposed to bring an original poem and read or declaim it aloud. Willie Yeats was a capital opener of the feast, and that night we asked him, as he said he had no new verses to read, to recite ‘The Lake of Innisfree’; but he said he was tired of that lovely lyric, and read us instead a later one which begins:

‘She lived in storm and strife,
Her soul had such desire
For that proud death may bring …’

Rhys continues his account of the evening at some length and says that Pound, sounding like Henry Irving with an American accent, declaimed his Ballad of the Goodly Fere.

I sat at my own kitchen table and listened, via the online Poetry Archive, to Yeats intoning ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ and Pound his Cantos. They both seemed to believe that poetry came from a different place and had to be chanted with fulsome vibrato and a small range of notes as in an incantation or prayer. I now wonder, as they slipped in and out of this manner of speaking round the supper table, if they consciously became at one moment The Poet and at another the man again. Nowadays one would be embarrassed to be caught out speaking in a ‘poetry voice’. But isn’t it strange that grown men of genius could sit round a table and allow the poet in them to speak so portentously, religiously when we know that the poems are much nearer to our common lives than that, and sound, for all their word music and wonder, just like the real us.

AN ALLEGORY OF ACQUAINTANCE

2011-09-20T05:26:00.002+01:00

A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative. Keats

A sneak preview of my latest work in progress, which I have titled An Allegory of Acquaintance. At the centre, as you will recognize, is my second portrait of my neighbour Captain Cox.

The painting is partly inspired by Titian’s Allegory of Prudence which hangs in the National Gallery – one of two paintings around which Alan Bennett masterfully constructed his play, A Question of Attribution, about Sir Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Cambridge Spy.* Blunt was a role I played on stage and on radio. In the play he identifies Allegory of Prudence as a ‘puzzle picture’ and remarks: ‘Appearances deceive. Art is seldom quite what it seems.’

In place of Titian’s three beasts (a wolf, a lion and a dog) I have painted Ambassador Bean, who of course was the catalyst of my acquaintance with Captain Cox. The third human head will be the young Captain’s in profile.

* Speaking of Cambridge Spies, another notable former resident of West Hampstead is Kim Philby on whom Bennett’s play The Old Country is based.

WEST HAMPSTEAD'S COLONIAL OUTPOSTS

2011-09-09T07:24:00.001+01:00

   Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
   Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
   Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
   Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
         T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Rainbow over West Hampstead. Photo by EP

Amongst the notable former residents of West Hampstead Kathleen and I have discovered, in researching our local-history slim volume, is Sydney Olivier, the first Baron Olivier, Secretary of State for India in the first Labour government, and uncle of Laurence Olivier. We lighted upon the fact of his one-time residency of NW6 in a letter he wrote to H. G. Wells in 1906 when the two were working together to amend the basis of the Fabian Society. The letter is headed 12 Dene Mansions, West Hampstead. This block of flats replaced Laurieston Lodge, which once housed Sir William Woods, Garter King at Arms, in the days when Queen Victoria took her country walks in West End Lane.

Sydney Haldane Olivier by Bassano, 1930.
National Portrait Gallery, London

At the time, Olivier was Principal Clerk of the West African and West Indian departments of the Colonial Office. Soon after he was appointed Governor of Jamaica. With Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Olivier had been a member of the Hampstead Historical Club (previously the Karl Marx Club), and Shaw writes a vivid appreciation of his friend and fellow Fabian:

I first met Sydney Olivier when we were both in our twenties, and had from different directions embraced Socialism as our creed. I had come by the way of Henry George and Karl Marx. He had begun with the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, and was as far as I know, the only Fabian who came in through that gate.

He and Sidney Webb, Comtist at second hand through John Stuart Mill, shared the duty of resident clerk at the Colonial Office. ... There was no question then of peerages to come for either of them: by plunging into Socialism they were held to be burning their boats as far as any sort of official promotion was concerned, though as founders of Fabian Socialism they soon took The Cause off the barricades, and made it constitutional and respectable.

Sydney Olivier and Charlotte Shaw.
Photographed by Bernard Shaw, 1899.
National Trust

Olivier was an extraordinarily attractive figure, and in my experience unique; for I have never known anyone like him mentally or physically: he was distinguished enough to be unclassable. He was handsome and strongly sexed, looking like a Spanish grandee in any sort of clothes, however unconventional. ...

Though Olivier came to positions of authority by sheer gravitation, he could never have become a popular idol, because his mental scope, like that of a champion chess player, enabled him to see the next five or six steps in an argument so clearly and effortlessly that he could not believe that anything so obvious need be stated. ...

This excess of mental and muscular power was accompanied by an excess of nervous power which hampered him as a public speaker. He spoke only on special provocation, and always had to wrestle with his speeches rather than deliver them comfortably. I once asked the chief of the Observatory on Mount Vesuvius why the energy wasted by the burning mountain was not utilized for industrial purposes. He replied that there was too much of it to be manageable. That was Olivier’s case.

I have painted a new portrait of my neighbour, the former Indian Army officer. Oliver Cox was a captain in the Bengal Lancers from 1940. He was born in the Azores to missionary parents around the time Sydney Olivier was elevated to the peerage by Ramsay MacDonald. But temperamentally he was not a socialist, judging by his attitude to the trade unionists whom he encountered in his work in English factories in his teens, before embarking on his military career. He says he was criticized for working too fast.

But if there is little of the Fabian in our Captain Cox, there is perhaps something of the wild colonial boy. According to an article in the Camden New Journal in 2008, he was a crack shot with a pistol and used to cook grey squirrels in a casserole when he was living off the land in Cheshire. He responded to this article with some indignation:

SHOCK was my reaction to the inaccuracy of John Gulliver’s article (Squirrels are the dish of the day, November 6). I was in the Bengal Lancers (not the Bengali Lancers, as you misquoted). Furthermore your reference to my “enjoying them in the woods near Paris” still carried the subject the grey squirrel, rather than referring to my last sighting of the European Red. Oliver Cox, NW6

PERSPECTIVES IN TIME

2011-08-22T04:55:00.054+01:00

Time present and time past 

Are both perhaps present in time future, 

And time future contained in time past.  ...

Footfalls echo in the memory 

Down the passage which we did not take 

Towards the door we never opened 

Into the rose-garden.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Photo by EP

Forgive the sitter’s hand, portrayed with a technique that manages to be both tentative and laborious at the same time, but I have not yet finished. The sitter is none other than the erstwhile officer of the Indian Army (with his exotic tales of the British Raj) whom our dog, Bean, managed to introduce me to, as you may remember, in July of last year. I passed the captain again only last week in the same spot on the same street, and asked him if he would allow me to paint his portrait. Yes!

I have worked from photographs I blush to admit, and the painting depicted on the wall is a portrait of my captain, Captain Cox, as a young man. I thought it might be good to include it in my composition, though it is not displayed in the room where he sits. I felt it would lend a perspective in time.

Talking of exotic portraits, I suddenly noticed one in the form of a mural or a sophisticated piece of ‘graffiti’ this very day. It is of Billy Fury, the famous singer of the 1960s and 70s.

Photo by EP

A local politician wanted to bestow some sort of appellation on a long unnamed alley that joins two main roads near here, simply for ease of identification in reporting crimes that take place in it!

Photo by EP

It is claimed that suggestions were invited, and Fury came up winner. Round the corner in the next street there used to be a Decca Recording Studio where Fury recorded some of his big hits. Laurence Olivier and full cast recorded an LP of Othello there in the early 60s, too, to which I contributed two lines, crowd noises and a tin-whistle continuo in the Cyprus scenes. By the way the road sign was stolen within days, but Billy Fury Way is now out of reach without a ladder.

Continuing the roll call of remarkable residents of NW6 (Kathleen and I are in search of the remarkable in West Hampstead so as to compile a local-history slim volume), Kathleen has discovered that a distinguished modernist poet, feminist and futurist spent her childhood and adolescence around another corner not far away – one Mina Loy, friend of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara; married to Arthur Caravan, the Dadaist poet and pugilist; proclaimed by the New York Evening Sun the exemplary ‘modern woman’; and admired by Ezra Pound and by T. S. Eliot, who, with his wife Vivien, lived in the same local street with his in-laws upon his marriage in 1915.

Mina Loy’s childhood home. Photo by EP

Loy certainly set herself apart in composing an apology of Genius:

Lepers of the moon

all magically diseased

we come among you

innocent

of our luminous sores …

I discovered a couple of finials atop a house nearby the enormous one in which Loy had grown up. I understand the dragon is a new addition though the weather vane dates from 1883, like the house … perspective in time again!

Photo by EP

And perspective in a prehistoric monster in suburban privet:

West Hampstead topiary. Photo by EP

Postscript

A minimalist estate agent’s near West End Green.
Photo by EP

On the way up the road from my quest today, a fifteen-minute walk, I counted fifteen estate agents, most displaying photos of flats – swish minimalist interiors hidden inside their Victorian brick facades; the words ‘Gone’ or ‘Under Offer’ were much in evidence.

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

2011-08-11T14:17:00.009+01:00

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the

world that we feel with our hearts and imagination. Leigh Hunt

Sunday, 7th August

Preparing for my birthday this last week, I decided, beautification being my quest, to tidy and clean some bookshelves. I wanted to perform a cull – easy really because I have not always been discriminating in buying books in the first place. I made two knee-high piles in the hall, volumes that would be shared out amongst our five local charity shops.

Today a friend and neighbour brought me a late gift saying: ‘I am between jobs so I’ve bought you a book from a local charity shop.’ Yes!

It would have made a good story, but fortunately my two piles were still in the hall and his parcel contained a very fresh copy of The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl, which, according to the Guardian, ‘ranks among the finest books ever written about Shakespeare’s life.’

Photo by John Haynes

I could stop writing now, on good authority, and take up the tale tomorrow: you see I heard a recording of Graham Greene on Radio 4 just recently in which he claimed to work for an hour to two hours a day and to write ‘two hundred words – a hundred these days.’ But what words! Some years ago I agreed to play Greene’s whisky priest in a revival at Chichester of the 1950s dramatization of The Power and the Glory. It was a marvellous leading part if not a great play – the adaptation was not by Greene himself but by Denis Cannan. Before rehearsals started, I began to read Greene’s novel. The first page did not advance the plot; I seem to remember something about a fly on a mule’s neck, but that one page, I realized, contained a world’s more substance than the entire play I had just agreed to do. Naturally there is nothing by Greene in those piles in the hall.

Photo by John Haynes

That’s well over 200 words. Tomorrow I will write about a thin booklet I have delightedly kept, in fact newly rediscovered as I’d thought it lost. You almost certainly won’t have heard of it but it too contains a world …

Monday, 8th August

The booklet of eighty pages is called Brothel in Pimlico and is a collection of 1960s advertisements that appeared in the Observer and Sunday Times in the Roy Brooks section of Houses for Sale. It is a memorial to Brooks whose entertaining and astonishing style as an estate agent was simply to tell the truth. For example:

WANTED: Someone with taste, means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill-repute in Pimlico. It is untouched by the 20th Century as far as convenience for even the basic human decencies is concerned. Although it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof, it is still habitable judging by the bed of rags, fag ends and empty bottles in one corner. Plenty of scope for the socially aspiring to express their decorative taste and get their abode in 'The Glossy' and nothing to stop them putting Westminster on their notepaper. 10 rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard. £4,650 Freehold. Tarted up these houses make £15,000.

Photo by EP

The world of houses has haunted about the turn of my 75th year. Kathleen (Riley) gave me The Cottage Homes of England, a handsome volume published in 1909 and containing reproductions of more than sixty of Helen Allingham’s exquisitely natural watercolours, a feast of interesting roofs and chimneys, hollyhocks of course – it is always summer – and a text which asserts:

Detail of ‘Backs, Godalming’ by Helen Allingham

If you wish to find the typical English home, you must leave the cities behind you, and go out into the country; you must pass by the mansions of the great and the prosperous homes of the middle classes, and you will find it in the humble cottage … it is the cottage, more homely than the inn, more sacred than the church, that we remember best.

Be that as it may, when I mentioned the name of Graham Greene to Kathleen the other day, she reminded me that she had spent last Christmas in the Cotswold cottage to which Greene and his wife Vivien had moved in 1931, when London was getting too much for their strained finances:

We had found a thatched cottage (that pastoral Georgian dream of the industrial twenties), with a small garden and orchard, up a muddy lane on the edge of Chipping Campden. It was to rent for a pound a week (the limit of what we could afford) and we moved our few belongings there … There was no electric light and the Aladdin lamps smoked if we left them for a few minutes alone. There certainly were rats, they pattered and rustled and squeaked in the roof and they remained noisy in our thatch until a man consented to come with a ferret and drive them out. (Greene, A Sort of Life)

‘Little Orchard’, Chipping Campden. Photo by KR

You may remember the heavy snow of our white Christmas. No rats for Kathleen and her parents, electricity of course (and a copy of The Power and the Glory on the bookshelves), but the pipes were frozen when they finally made it there through the drifts, and after two days they had to be found an ‘emergency’ cottage in which to spend a more homely and sacred Christmas.

There are, I might add, only a few degrees of separation between the world of Roy Brooks and that of Helen Allingham. Here is another ad in Brooks’s legendary idiom:

James Duffus of Dalclaverhouse, gentleman, offers his elegant 3rd floor CHEYNE ROW CHELSEA FLAT, which has gone up in the world since CARLYLE opposite complained of his neighbour’s chickens. Drawing rm of great dignity with electric light points for family portraits, which can be obtained in the Fulham or King’s Rd. 2 bdrms. Fit wardrobe for kilts. mod b&k. Lse. 95 yrs. G.R. only £50. £5,550 TRY OFFER. Little enough for an address that sets you apart from the common herd.

Helen and her poet husband William Allingham were close friends of the Carlyles, and only yesterday I was looking at Helen’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle seated in his Chelsea drawing room. The painting is part of an Allingham exhibition which, I was amazed to find, is currently being held at Burgh House in Hampstead (where I held the recent exhibition of my work).

It is about half an hour’s uphill walk to reach Hampstead ‘proper’ from where I live in West Hampstead and what a walk it must have been in Helen’s heyday, before the rail and Tube joined the two villages and created a maze of red brick where once:

The ground along which West End Lane undulated, the fine old trees that overhung it in places and the grassy slopes to the left, with their old-fashioned hedgerows broken by elm and oak trees and brightened in spring and summer with whitehorn and elder bloom, left us a glimpse as it were of the fields once stretching away to what were then Kilburn Meadows, but which now underlie a town.

John Constable, ‘West End Fields, Hampstead, noon’, ca.1821-22.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Felton Bequest, 1909

It was in Kilburn Meadows one evening that Keats recited his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to a companion ‘in a low, tremulous undertone’. Keats’s friend, the poet Leigh Hunt, once lived at West End, the old name for West Hampstead, ‘out of the stir and smoke of this dim spot, which men call London’ and in what he described in a letter to Henry Brougham in 1812 as ‘really and bona fide a cottage, with the most humble ceilings and unsophisticated staircases; but there is green about it, and a garden with laurels.’ And on the gate appeared his name on ‘a fair brass plate’. An account from a book published in 1902, by which time West Hampstead was completely built up as the railway commuters’ suburb, insists that ‘the small triangular bit of green … still preserves its rural aspect, with two little tumbledown, creeper-covered cottages overlooking it’, and where the shops now stand ‘a row of magnificent elms’ lined the street before West End Hall.

Hampstead Cemetery, 2010. Photo by EP

Of Fortune Green and its immediate environs, north of West End Green, the book tells us: ‘On the west side it is completely lined with small new houses. The Green at the top still remains open for the geese to hiss and cackle over at their will. The Hampstead cemetery lies on the north. This consists of about 20 acres of land, and two-thirds of it was consecrated by the Bishop of London in 1876.’

West Hampstead terraces off Fortune Green. Photo by EP

Gypsy encampment, Fortune Green, 1887

Cock and Hoop inn, ca 1890

I love the description of the bus route, West End Lane leading down to the Tube, as a deep-hedged, tree-shaded alley. It still winds, having been formed by horses finding the easiest way up, so that one can never anticipate whether a bus is coming or not. On the edge of West End Green we are told there was still in 1896 the old Cock and Hoop inn, by which time the modern streets of terraced housing had been up for three years.

The bucolic idyll presented by West End and neighbouring Kilburn – soon to be encroached upon by the railway – is also described in an 1859 issue of The Gentlemen’s Magazine:

That part, properly called Kilbourn, which gives name to a beautiful suburb, has its stream flowing through some of the most charming sylvan scenery in the neighbourhood of London; and the jaded inhabitants of that vast human hive can do no better than refresh their weary senses by a stroll at its side. … The stream crosses the road and pursues its way through a meadow to West-end, by the ‘Cock and Hoop Tavern,’ remarkable for its shade of dipt lime trees, a shelter from both sun and rain. West-end has the quiet seclusion of a village; the brook is here concealed, but it follows along the course of the street, on the left side of which, in a garden wall, is a conduit head; passing this it soon reappears in the fields, meandering towards the Edgeware-road in the line of the railway now constructing.

‘Hampstead, from Kilburn Road’, ca 1878.
With the steeple of St John-at-Hampstead in the distance

And the same vantage point today ...

As I hear tonight news of the urban riots in London – even in Hampstead – I read that in July 1819, extra constables were called to West End Fair to detect and apprehend the various gangs, armed with bludgeons, who attacked defenceless individuals – pushed people down, robbed them of their watches and money, stripped them ‘of even their wearing apparel, and left them nearly naked’. Violence had erupted at the Fair seven years earlier, too, when the clown from Saunders’s corps of horsemen and tumblers fell into an altercation with a group of ‘peace-officers’ who drew their cutlasses and attacked him. The poor clown barely escaped with his life.

Some lads, just emerged from the local gym, discussing the riots with the
police in Fortune Green Road. Photo by EP

I trust our local Sainsburys and Tescos are unscathed and that no cars have been torched. The night seems quiet from where I sit – as quiet almost as when the inhabitants of West End Hall claimed to have heard the cannon at Waterloo (the British guns were made in the old Bowling Iron Works, which had been a ten-minute walk from where I was born in Bradford). I will think of the rainbow that glowed in the rain and sun about 7 o’clock and I will read Hunt’s poem about rain in the night, perhaps heard through his window down at West End:

Nought will I have, not a window-pane,

’Twixt me and the air and the great good rain,

Which ever shall sing me sharp lullabies;

And God’s own darkness shall close mine eyes;

And I will sleep, with all things blest,

In the pure earth-shadow of natural rest.

Tuesday, 9th August

Photo by EP

I did not hear the smash of glass last night as a window of the local Carphone Warehouse was forced out onto the pavement, five minutes walk away in Finchley Road. No sign of a clown in West Hampstead, but this evening I saw a juggler quietly practising on Fortune Green and, as the sun went down, who could not but be struck by the stately dignity of the plane trees.

Photo by EP

Finally, I was also struck by some words on the back cover of the Roy Brooks’s booklet: ‘If we took the brakes off and used some of the half million on the dole, 1963 could bring a good home for every young couple and get some of the old ’uns out of their hovels.’

But somehow the eccentric 60s socialist estate agent’s vision of solving housing problems – any problems – by recourse to something in the nature of Soviet five-year plans seems a far more romantic notion than roses round a cottage door or being able to put Westminster on one’s notepaper or going in search of ‘ancestral portraits’ in The King’s Road. I note that a sixteen-year-old lad who commited robberies at West End Fair in 1819, when those bone fide cottages still stood, was hanged ... but how many millions did Lenin and Stalin’s utopian schemes kill?

Helen Allingham, ‘At a Cottage Gate, Dorset’

REMARKABLE ROOMS

2011-07-31T11:04:00.003+01:00

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I love plain, uncluttered white rooms, such as this one in the Museum of Modern Art in Bonn.

It was an hour before closing time when I arrived (one day in September 2008) and I had most of the white rooms of portraits to myself. There were many German Expressionist paintings and contemporary conceptual pieces. The gallery itself was perfectly plain and clinically white, with white daylight evenly illuminating the rooms from scientifically arranged windows above, so that the well-spaced canvases in the deserted rooms looked as if they had been taken from the hurly-burly of the artists’ studios and sectioned under some benign Bonn Mental and Artistic Health Act.

The stout man in the red jumper was a security attendant and kept emerging kinetically round corners as he kept his eye on me.

I encountered more clinical white galleries and ‘sectioned’ art in Munich.

I have designed theatrical shows for minimalist white rooms, though I have never possessed one in life. Yet one unremarkable, far from white room, in which I spent an hour or so once, seemed to have been the spiritual home that had been awaiting me and into which I had stumbled without a search. I was preparing for an appearance at the custom-built amateur theatre in Bradford, which I knew well from my amateur days, a pearl amongst ‘little theatres’. I knew where the small paint shop and scene dock was and, needing to touch up a piece of my scenery, I nipped down and found some scenic paint and a brush and got to work amid the general scenic clutter of ladders and flats, stored props and cans of paint, and felt suddenly that I could make a life’s work in this room.

LET'S FACE IT

2011-07-23T13:17:00.003+01:00

Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

As promised, a new cinematic concoction:

SEEKING A NEWER WORLD

2011-07-18T06:50:00.005+01:00

My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Tennyson, Ulysses

I can’t decide whether the Brushes app is a red herring in my career as a part-time painter or not. The iPhone ‘paintings’ I did, partly whilst travelling on the Tube to and from London Bridge and Antigone, were absorbing and made the time fly. I think my attempt on iPad to realize an illusory childhood vision of mountains, which I was disappointed to learn were ‘all clouds and sunset’ as my mother explained, is one I should make again in real paint. (N.B. As a boy soprano at Rehoboth Methodist Chapel I would sing Mendelssohn’s ‘Oh! For the wings of a dove’.)

My gallery seat [in the Alhambra Theatre] afforded me the best view of Bradford, and indeed of life, I’d ever had – not counting a magnificent range of hills and mountains bathed in pink and golden light, which had revealed itself one evening a year or two earlier, down the cobbled road at the corner of our street of back-to-backs, soaring up on the other side of the railway lines and beyond Bowling Park. I fully expected to be reaching the foothills next morning and exploring the streets and lanes, where, I imagined, donkeys pulled carts up through quaint mountain villages. I was thrilled that, after all, the great and beautiful world I’d become aware of by repute had turned out to be only a tram ride away. But no; the journey was impossible, as my mother explained when I persuaded her to come out to the corner and look: ‘It’s only made of clouds and sunset, Edward.’ (From Slim Chances)

____________________

This partial preview of Sara Kestelman as Coco may seem coy, but I am saving up the whole iPad portrait to accompany a written piece.

URBAN LAMENT II

2011-07-15T05:02:00.000+01:00

This is not the foreshadowed new film, but a pithy sequel to my first good-humoured urban lament, which seemed to strike a chord. Once again filmed covertly on location.

IN THE ROUND, PART 2

2011-07-11T03:18:00.001+01:00

Thank you for your warm appreciation of last week’s excerpt from my National Theatre Platform in March. Here is another, from the final few minutes:

‘Comedy’, after I had just applied the final brushstrokes.

Kathleen and I have a new film ‘in the works’, which we hope to share with you soon.

IN THE ROUND

2011-07-05T04:22:00.004+01:00

The National Theatre Archive has made available to me a recording of my Platform in March to launch Slim Chances. Two cameras were lurking in the upper reaches of the Cottesloe as I performed ‘in the round’ to a full house.

Was it in the attic that I bumped the back of my head? The evidence should have been covered with make-up, but I had no dresser to check me front and back before I went on in improvisatory mode at six o’clock … onto the set of The Holy Rosenbergs due to be performed that night – a living room in Edgware, North West London.

Here is an excerpt or two from the forty-five minute Platform. (As the volume is slightly challenged, the video might best be heard through earphones or external speakers.)

I would just like to say in closing that I read all your comments each week and find them touching and encouraging by turns.
E.P.

____________________

Just a reminder that signed copies of Slim Chances are available from Edward’s website along with a limited-edition pack of postcards and greeting cards produced for his Burgh House exhibition.

K.R.

ANCIENT YET MODERN

2011-06-26T16:20:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tiresias, reputed to have been 300 years old, is the latest, and I hope the most advanced, in my studies of old age. The very first was my award-winning performance of a poet in a retirement home, which I played at the age of seventeen with the aid of white greasepaint and powder in my hair. The Bradford Association of Youth Clubs shield for Best Performance of 1954 is small but impressively classical, with the winged figure of Nike holding what I can claim as my second laurel wreath; I had won the previous year too.

But before you laugh, the adjudicator in 1954 was an august sixty-one and knew about acting and creeping old age first hand, having played Viola in Twelfth Night at the Old Vic in 1927, graduating to Gertrude to the young Olivier’s Hamlet ten years later. Esmé Church as the principal of my drama school most certainly must have recommended me on the strength of my performance of the old poet to play the aged butler Frith in Rebecca – my first professional performance – in the Halifax Rep, when the company needed some cheap acting students to make up the numbers.

I don’t have to act decrepitude or dulled senses anymore, but there are advantages: I was alone in not detecting the smell of dead rat the other night under the upstage left corner of the rostrum of the Antigone set underneath the dank railway arches that form the Southwark Playhouse. In fact, concurrently on Sundays I was playing Greff in the musical Coco – Chanel’s sixty-year-old lawyer with a wife and young mistress … this required some effort of youthful characterization – a true ‘character’ part.

Having delivered Tiresias’ prophetic coup de grâce to Kreon, I was speaking my last lines to him – ‘I am a good archer, you will not slip through the heat of my arrows’ – and was just about to be led off the stage by Ruben, the younger of my boy guides. It was the last performance of the Antigone run and Doug, the elder of my guides, was watching the performance from the second row: by law, minors are protected from the tyranny of seven or eight performances a week and have to alternate. You would think as a grown-up, after seven performances of Tiresias a week for a month, I would have securely got the hang of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation, but not a performance had gone by without me supplying my own minor variations, occasional snippets of substitute translation, and this last performance was no exception.

However it is a variation of gesture I am concerned with here and Wertenbaker and Sophocles give one free rein in the gesture department. In rehearsal, as well as striving to be in the magic NOW in which all drama, ancient and modern, takes place, one was always haunted by the nebulous echoes of ancient classical utterance and visions of classical gesture. These are both indefinable of course. Actually Classical Acting was defined for me unforgettably, not by an imagined glimpse of masked actors performing a sunlit matinee at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens ca. 442 BC, but by an Old Vic top-floor dressing room conversation one night in 1965. Leslie, an elderly dresser, entered dramatically into a discussion being held by bit players in one of those longeurs between spasmodic appearances made famous by Stoppard. We were talking about Christopher Fry’s play, The Dark is Light Enough, which Les seemed to believe was a classical play, at any rate his sudden intervention was ‘Bit of the Othello touch that – The Dark is Light Enough.’ It was a conversation-stopper. We had to know what he could possibly mean. (Olivier’s Othello was in the NT’s Old Vic repertoire at the time.) ‘The Othello touch,’ he persisted.

‘Leslie, what do you mean?’

‘The Othello touch,’ he went on in his elderly cockney croak. ‘You know – the long robes and the pointin’ and the flailin’ about.’

I had remembered this conversation when our Antigone costume designer had suggested Tiresias should have a long cloak and showed an illustration of a sort of patchwork Afghan bedspread that might have been from a Kabul catalogue. It was with some pride that I saw it was of an infinitely less impressive design than the actual one I happened to have bought perhaps fifteen years ago from an intriguing little shop off Shepherd’s Bush Green, an Aladdin’s cave of Arabian fabrics and garments and high-quality tat. I was dubious about wearing such a garment in a production that featured modern military fatigues (and even, to my surprise at the dress rehearsal, an overture of helicopter and a suicide bomb). When I dug out my magnificent patchwork, I was a little dismayed; it had become moth-eaten, appropriate one might think for a prophet who is so old that even in the most up-to-the-moment production his wardrobe might predate the mothball.

Mothballed acting is another thing: how to reconcile the world of passports, suits and video cameras, which I found myself parachuted into as a late recruit to the company; how to merge in as Tiresias, divining signs from the way meat burns on altars and the inability of the gods to receive the smoke. Then, when a young director suggests a passage could be less ‘rhetorical’, one suspects one is being cautioned for acting.

But it is not vox I am talking about, it is gesture. I confess that Olivier’s Old Vic Othello had haunted about me in the Bermondsey rehearsal room, white-haired and wispy though I am. The shades of Thespis and his successors in their masks, Olivier in his black make-up, all had waited with me in the gloomy off-stage corner under the arches. They had been present even on nights when I had felt that curious nerveless indifference that can invade an actor before his entrance – a sure sign that that elemental existential energy had better manifest itself from somewhere or one will be left with … technique and no mystery.

I had been doing an archer’s gesture to accompany the line, ‘I am a good archer’. On the last night, on impulse, I abandoned it, stood still and said the line rather more simply, sotto voce. When we got off, I talked about the moment with my guide, young Ruben, who said it was good, better in fact, because, he said, the words seemed more important and I had already done a turning movement a few lines earlier and it was better only turning once. Out of the mouths of ‘screenagers’ one has perfected praise.

But Doug was my first guide and did the most performances and when we came off after the matinée – his last performance – he immediately embraced me. His succinct evaluations of how the scene had gone, observations about the pace or the momentum had always been welcome, encouraging, never impertinent or patronizingly tactful. They had even been amusing. After a preview he marvelled at my ability to make the bits I’d invented sound ‘just like the rest of it’, at the same time remarking how lucky he was to be working with an actor of my experience.

Prophesy in the theatre is a dodgy business. Have my teenage laurels been crowned? I can’t prophesy what might come of the fact that the octenagarian Sir Peter Hall was in the audience of that last matinée. But the very young seem to me to be full of promise and their wisdom palpable … of course, as a species, we humans are no wiser than the Ancient Greeks, however much I have been impressed by Ruben and Doug’s instinctive mastery of the iPhone (married to their ignorance of Peter Hall) But, after all, what are fame and transient laurels – what is the difference of a few decades when one is working on a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old script?

AN ANTIDOTE TO LONDON BRIDGE TUNNEL VISION

2011-06-19T23:26:00.001+01:00

Coco and Antigone have ended, the heady cocktail of 60s Broadway musical and ancient Greek tragedy, but Life and Art continue, and, having last week graduated from the iPhone to the iPad's slightly larger virtual canvas, I present here my very first iPad painting - in the making as it were.

AU REVOIR COCO

2011-06-13T00:04:00.000+01:00

Sunday night again and no chance of a blog worthy of the name, though, walking up to Pret a Manger at The Angel this morning in light drizzle from the Coco warm-up at Sadler’s Wells, I had all manner of ideas in my head. It is such a novelty to feel positive and content with the world whilst traversing London’s wet pavements, so much so that I thought I should just make a quick note of it here. I’d even bought a ludicrously expensive notebook so as to compose a poem over my crayfish and mango sandwich and probiotic yoghurt, but the magic faded as I realized it was past one o’clock and the first of our two shows was 1.30.

Coco is over now. I shall miss it … wouldn’t mind finding myself doing a lost musical every Sunday from now ’till my doomsday. The cast and director were adorable and only rarely maddening and Sara Kestelman’s Coco an absolute gem. I needed to get that off my chest, forgive me. A blog about something will eventually follow …

Meanwhile, continuing my experiments on the tiny canvas of an iPhone, I offer you my living bouquet of wild dog roses. I have a pact with fourteen-year-old Doug Wood, who guides my blind Tiresias; we set each other subjects to be illustrated, which explains the word at the top of the picture.

LATE CONNECTIONS

2011-06-07T13:28:00.001+01:00

The glory and grunge of an actor's weekend

ESSAY AND MOVIE

Four performances really this last weekend. Crawled out of bed on Sunday morning after Saturday’s two performances of Antigone, and by 10.40 a.m. was on the stage of the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells in a run-through of Coco, which we hadn’t performed for a fortnight. Then, after a sandwich and probiotic drink from Pret A Manger at The Angel (and buying new black socks from M&S and life-enhancing capsules from Holland & Barrett), did the 4 p.m. performance which was introduced by Alan Jay Lerner’s widow. She gave the kind of fresh extempore, effervescent talk that only a confident and practised ‘old pro’ can give. She was about to see Coco for the first time ever, and I shall relish for a long time her picture of Katharine Hepburn outside the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway, sitting on a girder, which was about to be craned up to the top of an unfinished building, and successfully begging the builders not to use their drills so that the audience could hear her voice at the matinée.

Under the London Bridge viaducts we have no power to stop the trains, but the basso profundo rumble is good underscoring for Greek tragedy in a way that the penetrating insistent high tenor yakyakyakyak of drills could never be (somehow I managed to rehearse O’Neill’s Strange Interlude through it years ago). The trains are the least of it: deep in the warren of tunnels beyond the foyer and the auditoria (two of them) there seems to be a microclimate. Arriving hot and slightly bothered by our flaming start to June last week, at first one was relieved by the dank chill, only to find that the costumes had been invaded by the damp, even though they are kept in the white plastic tent we have been upgraded to now that Priestley’s They Came to a City has closed. There is a small convector heater, but the atmosphere is more surreal than it is dank, as if, in the dark of the tunnel outside there is taking place some silent midnight garden fête – a fête worse than death.

TIRESIAS. iPhone Self-Portrait

Lifting my cloak to avoid a particular puddle, I approach the ‘wings’ for my eight-minute spot as Tiresias, my bare feet treading gingerly on the ancient, uneven concrete – I believe the Ancients invented concrete, but I find myself longing for the heat of the Ancient Greek sun in the floor and in the walls as I perch on a rickety chair in the, dare I call it an ante room’s gloom amongst the detritus of past productions – lighting stand and nameless brick-a-brac. The chorus chants and I imagine myself in a mask at Delphi or Athens with an audience understanding the tunes and lyrics as well as an elderly C of E congregation responds to the resonances of Hymns Ancient and Modern. And yet, as ever, it is the great NOW the actor has to create, and indeed the play demonstrates that, for all out trains and Shards (that unfinished marvel is hard by), for all the proud announcements that Antimatter has been observed, we are the same race, the same flawed people we were 2,500 years ago. And so, even as I talk of the gods being unable to receive our prayers or the fire from the burning of meats, I am aware that this is a tragedy that gets under our modern guard and inspires us with pity and horror. Horror such as the queues of punters outside the neighbouring tourist trap, the London Dungeon, will never have the privilege to luxuriate in.

Stop Press

Peth’s Staging Post, Edward’s official website, has undergone several ‘renovations’ and updates in recent weeks. The updates include the addition of an iPhone Gallery (with examples of Edward’s paintings executed with the ‘Brushes’ app). AND signed copies of Slim Chances are now available in the Merchandise section, along with a limited-edition pack of postcards and greeting cards featuring Edward’s paintings and photographs.

K.R.

VOX HUMANA

2011-05-30T07:05:00.000+01:00

O, how wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul. The intellect of man sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God revealed himself to the prophet of old in the still, small voice ... The soul of man is audible, not visible.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion

I started my Sunday by stumbling upon my wife Emily, thrilling in the last scene of a radio play she recorded years ago, and ended it listening to myself as Shakespeare. Musing thus on the subject of The Voice, I present here a short illustrated radio talk:

Courtesy of BBC iPlayer, you can hear Dreams and Censorship in its entirety as well as the full final episode of Back Home.

Sony Radio Awards, 1992. Photo by Tony Jones.

TWISTS AND TURNS

2011-05-22T07:28:00.001+01:00

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson

A retrospective compilation of my production of Knots for the Actors’ Company in 1973, featuring some rare documentary and rehearsal footage and part of the original score:

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone premiered last week at Southwark Playhouse. Here is my Tiresias, in rehearsal and in performance:

With Jamie Glover as Creon.
Photos by Bronwen Sharp.

But today, Sunday, I return to Sadler’s Wells, Coco and Paris in the 50s.

____________________

This Wednesday, 25th May, Edward will be a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek, hosted by Libby Purves. He will be discussing his role in Antigone and his recently published book Slim Chances.

The programme airs from 9.00 to 9.45 a.m. If you’re unable to listen in at this time, or if you live outside the UK, you can ‘listen again’ on BBC iPlayer.

K.R.

DANCE WE MUST

2011-05-15T08:29:00.000+01:00

The plot can be hot, simply teeming with sex

A gay divorcee who is after her ex

It could be Oedipus Rex

Where a chap kills his father

And causes a lot of bother.

Dietz and Schwartz, ‘That’s Entertainment’

This Sunday afternoon we have our first performance of Coco at Sadler’s Wells, and on Tuesday night Antigone opens at Southwark Playhouse. So it has been a very full, somewhat ‘dichotomous’ week, flitting – via Thameslink and the Jubilee line – between Chanel’s Paris and Sophoclean Thebes. On Friday I sandwiched a rehearsal of Antigone between two sessions of Coco. The day before, I fitted in a haircut to satisfy my two disparate characters – a challenge for any barber, as for any actor. I am still struggling a little with Teiresias – even the smaller parts in these huge Greek tragedies need more maturing and marinating, musing and sheer practice time than is available. But for all our ancient and modern travail in the rehearsal room, the play comes over powerfully; it is wonderfully constructed and moving at the end.

I first played Teiresias thirty-seven years ago in my own production of Euripides’ Bacchae for the Actors’ Company. On the eve of playing the blind seer a second time, and in view of my current unique mergence of Greek tragedy and musical comedy, I append here an extract from Slim Chances on the theme of Bacchic and Broadway choruses:

‘Dance we must,’ says Teiresias and it is important that the play should be almost always on or over the threshold of dance. The chorus certainly dances; even Pentheus, once he is under the god’s spell, is essentially dancing. Only the messengers, gravely, do not dance, and the cessation of any possibility of dance pervades the conclusion of the play with a terrible desolation, so that Dionysus himself has at last an awesome, shocking stillness. He appeared high up in a massive golden cloak and his stillness was accentuated by the curious ecology of the Wimbledon Theatre which invariably caused the stage smoke to hang about him in utterly still streaks of cloud, lit as if in a sinister sunset.

As anybody who has tried knows, the chorus is the most difficult thing to get right in staging Greek tragedy. Harold Hobson, when he saw our production at Wimbledon, declared it far more successful than the National Theatre’s two years earlier; he was particularly impressed with the chorus, believing we had created the requisite Dionysiac spirit as opposed to the Old Vic’s ‘Fraserian savagery’. ‘Yet they do this,’ he said, ‘without manifestly forgetting their civilized origin. They belong to a race which conceivably could have built the Parthenon, or written the lyrics of Sappho.

There is no template for the Bacchic chorus. I’ve explained my acquaintance as a seventeen-year-old drama student with the challenge of the Bacchanal. It was a godsend that Sheila Reid and Helen Cotterill were both singers and could dare to hazard a way of singing some of the chorus’s lines. They adapted the kind of close harmony they used in popular songs. I can hear them boldly singing as no man or woman had ever sung, ‘Thebes you are blest!’, miraculously betraying neither their tune’s nor their harmonic’s origins, nor striking any note of the pretentious.

At the reverie stage of my researches, and in a negative light, I remembered an opera chorus I had seen a long time ago. What struck me about them was that, in spite of their robes, one could too easily imagine them all going prosaically home on the bus afterwards. By contrast, as I write, I am remembering some dancers standing on a sunny street corner in New York in the 1980s, all dressed, it seemed, in their wacky rehearsal wear, but each carrying a change of clothes in a trendy bag; special creatures communicating, not so much in their banter and gossip, but by the way in which they inhabited that piece of sidewalk, but mostly because of the way they inhabited their own bodies. It would not have diminished their collective or individual personalities a jot if they had dispersed by disappearing onto public transport – they were part of the street life after all – but the hours they spent dancing, whilst other New Yorkers went about their business, had marked them.

Photo by Edward Petherbridge.

There is, I discover, an unlikely parallel between the ancient chorus at the first performance of The Bacchae two-and-a-half millennia ago, which I have tried to imagine so many times, and the opening number of A Chorus Line, which I have just now revisited on YouTube. I saw the American cast in London and walked as if on air out of the theatre, despairing of ever having anything in common with anyone who did not love the show.

A performance of A Chorus Line, 1976.
Photo by Martha Swope.

The YouTube audience seemed to have passed, through dint of familiarity with the show, to the status of ecstatic acolytes at a quasi-religious festival; they burst into applause within seconds of the opening number (teams of dancers looking like the ones I saw on the street, auditioning for jobs in a Broadway chorus line), but this was not the only ‘Bacchanalian’ attribute of what I was seeing on the potent little screen. Fate seemed to be a character and a demonic demigod too, a glorious one, driving the dancers to perform heroic terpsichorean feats whilst they found the breath to sing, letting us in to their internal stream of consciousness: ‘I really need this job – please God I need this job,’ recalling Teiresias’ line, ‘Dance we must!’ The audience saw the auditioning dancers as victims of Broadway, superb in their struggle both to beat and join it, and finally – as no one can ever forget who saw the show – triumphant in spangled costumes, singing the praises of some wonder leading lady we could neither see nor care about. They were the apotheosis of the show, celebrating the sacrifice to the God of Broadway, as we were compelled to acknowledge the worship was glorious.

_________________________

A short video compilation of images from my Actors’ Company production of The Bacchae and its companion pantomime piece, The Beanstalk:

Postscript on Coco

Our wonderful Coco (a role created by Katharine Hepburn) is Sara Kestelman who, incidentally, is featured on the £1 postage stamp in the recently issued Royal Mail commemorative set to celebrate the RSC’s 50th anniversary; she is depicted as Titania in Peter Brook’s production A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970.

Another member of our company is musical veteran Myra Sands, a vivid sartorial presence amid the chilly Victorian stone high Gothic of St Martin’s, Gospel Oak. She rides a bike to and from rehearsal, but does not wear a helmet and needs, she says, to make sure she is seen! She kindly posed for this iPhone photo:

TWIXT COCO, CRINOLINES AND CREON

2011-05-10T00:40:00.001+01:00

A little glimpse into my current dual rehearsals.

LIVING AND REHEARSING IN THE MOMENT

2011-05-02T02:44:00.008+01:00

Bean has snuggled on the sofa beside me and is happy to let me stroke her head, from her nose, between her eyes, up over her head and down the back of her neck. She has no idea that she has featured in a number of my weekly postings, is a key figure in one of my paintings and even in my book, no less than in a chapter on acting in Shakespeare and in another on Euripides’ Bacchae.

Detail from my self-potrait with Harlequin and Pierrot.
Acrylic on canvas, 2011.

When I talk to Bean she invariably puts her head on one side as if trying to interpret my words. I in turn interpret this as the equivalent of us humans trying to fathom the meaning of the universe or the will of God. But then I also try to imagine what it is like to be her – is she, with her head on one side, trying to imagine what it is like to be me?

Bean on Hampstead Heath.

I can cup her little skull easily in my hand, but it is not easy to conceive of what it is in her ‘mind’ and what it’s like to live in the moment as completely as she does – ‘rich in the simple worship of a day’ as Keats put it one May Day nearly 200 years ago. I suppose that Pavlov’s cruel experiments made his dogs remember the dangerous past and fear the future, turning them into neurotics.

I set out to write a short rehearsal diary this evening and don’t quite know how I got onto this, unless it is to do with the mysterious state of being one enters, or hopes to enter, in rehearsal and performance. One remembers the painter J. B. Yeats describing Isadora Duncan dancing on stage:

I saw her (from her own box) dancing in the biggest theatre, and on the biggest stage in N. York – a figure dancing all alone on this immense stage – and there again you felt the charm of the self-contained woman. Several people said: Is it not like watching a kitten playing for itself? We watched as if we were each of us hidden in ambush. (In a letter to his son, W. B. Yeats, in 1908.)

To come to the privilege of rehearsing a Greek tragedy and a Broadway musical in tandem, I have been struck that in the one rehearsal I have had of the blind prophet Teiresias, as I got ever so slightly into my stride, I had a tendency to ‘sing’ the verse of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation, whereas in singing Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics in Coco, I have often had the urge to speak.

The tower of St Martin’s, Gospel Oak.

Coco is being rehearsed in a chilly, fully operational 1865 gothic Church of England church in Gospel Oak, and Antigone in a converted warehouse in an industrial estate in Bermondsey. Stanislavski wrote a book called Building a Character: without denigrating the Russian master, I feel that what’s required is not the construction of two beings different from me, but rather two different aspects, perhaps wildly different aspects, of myself.

What I believe I have to do is what Bean does whenever she comes back into the house so eagerly, or goes out of the house – greeting the familiar street and sniffing the air for evidence with febrile anticipation. Yes, that level of enthusiasm and living for the moment, but with no hint of how slavishly, doggedly I have had to work for hours to get the blind prophet’s lines into my ageing brain!

______________________

In Memoriam

Roy King, husband of Hilary King and co-creator of the Red Pear Theatre Company in Antibes, who died on Sunday morning in his sleep.

Red pear blossom from ‘La Timonerie’, Antibes.

______________________

Postscript

Just to let you know that there have been several updates to Edward’s website in recent weeks, including an exciting animated book trailer for Slim Chances and the addition of a News link (marked in red on the menu). Edward’s Latest News blog contains details of his forthcoming concurrent appearances in Coco at Sadler’s Wells and Antigone at Southwark Playhouse.

K.R.

ARTHUR PRINCE REVISITED

2011-04-27T07:26:00.001+01:00

Almost exactly one year on from the original version, I re-filmed my first Graveyard Ditty (and indeed my first short film) on location in Hampstead Cemetery. The new footage was captured in one long take just a few weeks ago on a glorious spring afternoon - not by webcam this time but by video camera - and was first screened at Burgh House on the evening of my private viewing.

In the spirit of the poem, perhaps I will re-shoot my energetic cemetery run each spring.

THE IMMORTAL MEMORY

2011-04-23T19:41:00.000+01:00

On this, the Bard’s birthday, I append an excerpt from the Shakespeare chapter of my book, Slim Chances:

We can’t revisit Whitehall to sit with King James at The Tempest, nor, despite Sam Wanamaker’s crusade, revisit the Globe. However, at one rainy matinée of Henry V in 1997, from high in Wanamaker’s reproduction of Shakespeare’s wooden O, I caught the essence. The rain ran directly off the thatch onto the necks of the groundlings who had ‘prime’ front-row positions with their elbows on the very stage, the gutter and drainpipe not having been invented in Shakespeare’s England. The purists have been defeated and gutters installed, and who knows if a Wimbledon-type rain roof may follow, but from my seat undercover in the second balcony round the side, the management of rainwear and even umbrellas was part of the show, and the age-old jokes by the French about the English weather can seldom have gone better since a wet afternoon in the Golden Age. There were cessations in the rain. It surprised me that there are no battle scenes at all; three comics take a Frenchman prisoner, as I remember, and yet one believed in Agincourt, merely on the strength of a beaten drum sounding from somewhere behind a door or curtain.

When Mark Rylance’s Henry prayed quietly and alone on the eve of battle, he walked to the very front of the platform and knelt with his head bowed and his fingertips placed at the top of his forehead. The lady in the trendy mustard-coloured rain cape, the couple who had been crouching under a broken umbrella so as not to block anyone’s view, in fact a small detachment of groundlings stirred themselves and, unobtrusively, stepped back from the centre of the platform to give due reverence and room to the King. Miraculously, I, leaning over the balcony, and slightly behind Mark, heard every word of ‘O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts!’

The four-hundred-year-old play, history itself, the fabric of the theatre (some of it built of oaks that were saplings when Shakespeare was alive), the actors, the audience, all were held in one great theatrical NOW.

A very happy Easter to you all!

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST

2011-04-20T07:59:00.000+01:00

I awoke to the weather forecast, 25 degrees Celsius was being promised for central London, that’s 77 degrees Fahrenheit! Did a bit of study on my part in Coco (one of this season’s Lost Musicals at Sadler’s Wells) under a sunshade in the garden, then, after a light lunch, carrying six signed copies of my book, each weighing a kilo, I took the Jubilee line direct to Green Park. I wheeled the books in one of those compact trundle cases and walked from the Tube to the Royal Academy to meet Hilary King of Antibes so that she could take my literary consignment back to our disappointed book-launch customers.

A revised version of the drawing you first glimpsed at the end of my Antibes film.
One of several executed on the 'Brushes' app on my iPhone.

To tell the truth, I sat on a step in the shade of the forecourt and did the signing. We had planned to see the Watteau drawings, but a hitch – the size of the wheelie case exceeded cloakroom rules. A uniformed concierge took pity on my age and plight and looked at the nearby door with the gilt letters spelling ‘Academicians’. Well I do have a white beard and was sporting an artistic-looking straw hat. Yes, he was actually suggesting the case could be stored inside that august door as a special favour and against regulations. I fear it was on the strength of the fact that he thought I had a resemblance to Rolf Harris (another artist/entertainer who wouldn’t mind being elected as an RA), though the concierge had the grace to say I was better looking.

Watteau, ‘Two Dancers’, ca. 1716-17.
Black, red and white chalks on cream paper.

A great bonus when we walked into the dimly lit rooms of exquisite drawings was that they were wonderfully cool. I felt as if I had landed in the most privileged place in London, but to tell the truth once more it was my second visit – the first being last week with Kathleen Riley who yesterday, sadly, went back to Australia, from whence she will continue to edit my short films and blogs, but not wield the camera as she did at Burgh House and in Antibes. The wonders of cyberspace mean she will still be at my elbow!

A POSTCARD FROM ANTIBES

2011-04-12T13:51:00.000+01:00

LATE AND EARLY STAGES

2011-04-05T00:39:00.000+01:00

As promised:

URBAN LAMENT

2011-04-04T23:26:00.001+01:00

Stay tuned for a longer film about my exhibition at Burgh House last week ...

STOPGAP

2011-03-28T00:42:00.001+01:00

Now it’s a race against time to complete an additional painting or two, and shoot some video footage, for my Burgh House exhibition, which opens this Wednesday.

I enjoyed the National Theatre Platform last Wednesday. The challenge of presenting myself to the audience on four sides was stimulating and fun, though the bookshop running out of books was less amusing for the many who were left disappointed.

I hope to post something interesting in the next three days. Meanwhile, here is one of my photographs that I intend to display at the exhibition – taken at a morning rehearsal of the Chinese State Acrobats on their visit to the Coliseum Theatre in London some twenty years ago. What a way to start a morning!

CHINA DIARY

2011-03-19T23:41:00.000Z

More photographs from our British Council tour of the Far East in 1982, this time focusing on China.

A busy week ahead. I look forward to seeing at least some of you at the Platform on Wednesday.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS RE EDWARD'S BOOK

2011-03-18T05:43:00.007Z

As many of you know, Edward’s Platform at the National Theatre takes place next Wednesday, 23rd March, at 6 p.m. in the Cottesloe Theatre. This event sold out very quickly, but the NT has just released some more seats. So if you missed out on tickets first time round, you can phone the Box Office on 020 7452 3000 or book online.

Edward’s book, Slim Chances, will be officially released in June, but the Platform is the first in a series of events this spring at which Edward will be signing exclusive pre-release copies.

On Thursday 24thMarch, starting at 7 p.m., Edward will be at England’s Lane Books in Hampstead where he will talk informally, read from his book and answer questions.

Click to enlarge poster.

From 11 a.m. on Saturday 26th March, Edward will be signing copies of Slim Chances in store at Waterstones in the O2 Centre, Finchley Road, London.

An exhibition of Edward’s artwork will be held at Burgh House in Hampstead from 30th March to 3rd April. This will include paintings and drawings featured in the book as well as several new and never-before-seen works.

Click to enlarge poster.

For those of you unable to attend these London events, Slim Chances is already in stock and available for immediate dispatch from Amazon UK. The book is listed on all other Amazon sites around the world and in some cases available for pre-order.

N.B. The news ‘feed’ on Edward’s home page is temporarily out of action, but for updates on the book and related events, please visit the Slim Chances page at Peth’s Staging Post.

Kathleen Riley

HOT OFF THE PRESS

2011-03-14T06:30:00.001Z

At teatime last Thursday I received the first copies of my book, Slim Chances.

Front cover

This morning I go to the National Theatre, the Cottesloe, to see the set of a new play called The Holy Rosenbergs, which will be in situ on the stage when I do my book-launch Platform on the 23rd. Apparently the set, surrounded on four sides by the audience, is a of a middle-class kitchen in North London, the very setting in which I wrote a lot of the book: I thought of making a naturalistic entrance with a bag of shopping from Waitrose.

A sneak preview inside

____________________

The people of Japan are in all our thoughts at this incomprehensibly catastrophic time for their country.

Myself as Feste and Emily as Viola.
Photo by Chris Arthur

By way of a small tribute to Japan’s rich cultural fusion of ancient and modern, and in remembrance of happier times in its history, I offer this short photographic retrospective. I took these photographs in 1982 when Emily and I were on a British Council tour of the Far East, performing in the London Shakespeare Group’s production of Twelfth Night. Emily played Viola and I Feste.

The video ends with a sound recording I made of a young Japanese student who recited for us Puck’s epilogue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

METAMORPHOSES

2011-03-07T03:51:00.064Z

Ever-inventive nature continually produces one shape from another. Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase ‘being born’ is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while ‘dying’ means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sum of things remains unchanged. Ovid, Metamorphoses XV

Having decided, at the age of seven, to become an actor whilst watching my first pantomime from the third row of the Bradford Alhambra’s balcony (a position that afforded me the best view of life and of Bradford I’d ever had, from the back-street credibility of Norman Evans’s Dame, to the twelve little local girls as ‘The Sunbeams’ and Kirby’s Flying Ballet in the transformation to Fairyland), I had only two transient changes of heart. One lasted but a few days, and I can date the volte-face from the fact that my head was level with the kitchen sink as I watched a plumber perform a kind of transformation scene in our stone-floored scullery, with real fire effects from the blow lamp, as he created a marvellous new bulbous, silvery join in the cold-water pipe (we had no hot one) about six inches below the brass tap.

Detail from my painting of the Bradford Alhambra, 2009.

The real-life role of plumber turned my young head, seemed an attractive way of fitting into the adult world, but I returned to my first love. However, I did once play a plumber on the stage; it was in a little two-handed sketch, written by a fellow student at the Northern Theatre School in Bradford’s Chapel Street. I was called in to rescue the heroine’s (and author’s) earring from the bathroom basin’s waste pipe (somewhere on the Continent) and there was a romantic twist. I seem to remember the main acting opportunity was my realization, whilst miming the business with the waste pipe – my realization that … well I can’t recall exactly, but it was some metamorphosis of my identity, sparked off by the heroine’s prattle.

Whilst this scene was taking place in our acting studio, a reclaimed wool-sorting room at the top of a Bradford warehouse, David Hockney was across the town in a converted chapel, the Bradford College of Art. I never met him then, nor any of the art students, but my second change of heart had been a desire to become an art student myself.

My stage design for The Tempest
Grange Grammar School, ca 1952.

Mr Green, my grammar-school art master, told me that my two O-levels in Art and English Language would be deemed insufficient, as I would naturally not expect to earn my living as an artist and would have to teach. But I soon abandoned the effort to cram for more qualifications, left school and took myself into town, one snowy Wednesday half-day off from my job in a shop, to audition for Miss Esmé Church at the Northern Theatre School. There my rendition of Richard II’s ‘What must the King do now?’ was convincing enough to require no academic credentials as back-up. (See Postscript below.)

It was not until doing two RSC seasons in Stratford in 1996-97, and living a bachelor life away from London and the family, that I decided, as I turned sixty, to develop what had been only the most spasmodic dabbling in ‘Art’. I did it, I think, by beginning to act the part of someone who could draw, perhaps no more audacious a strategy than pretending to be a king when I was sixteen in Bradford.

Back in London I found time to attend life-drawing classes. ‘A self-taught artist is one taught by a very ignorant person,’ said Constable. And one is usually left to get on with it in this most exacting of disciplines, though one tutor did hint that I should be guided more by the ‘negative space’ – the shape of the spaces between limbs. I realize that Hockney’s consistent advice to art schools to teach Life Drawing and Perspective is less and less heeded these days. My own daughter’s Fine Art foundation course devoted a mere week to life drawing.

My forthcoming exhibition, ‘Early and Late Stages’, will have a few ‘readymades’, found objects (plumbing would not be out of place) and perhaps a video or two, but nothing Conceptual … unless one counts the trick of conceiving of oneself as an Artist, an artist of the type current before plumbing’s big moment in modern art – Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, otherwise known as ‘The Fountain’ – only six years away from its centenary! My excuse for the number of self-portraits is that I am the cheapest, most patient, most proactive model I know. I often feel disappointment with a tinge of amazement at my results, indeed that I get results at all with these improvisations. If, despite my uncertain technique, they have life, it seems, at best, to be a wayward life of their own; a metamorphosis.

Bean and I with my newly painted self-portrait, ‘Exit’.

Postscript

I can never hear the Elizabethan madrigal ‘The Silver Swan’ without thinking of my drama school class of 1953 singing it in a converted wool warehouse in Bradford ...

THE FOUNDLING

2011-02-26T21:59:00.002Z

A poem I composed just over a week ago during a quest for Found Art.

Today I planned to write a poem
And find a ‘found object’

My treasured object at the moment – I found,
A year or two back on a stall in Church Street Market
The old man, already ephemeral himself,
Sold it to me from the ephemera box –

It’s a tiny snap, I think from the First World War,
Faded now and creased,
But blurred from the instant the shutter clicked
On a grey dull day
There is a low building, mud, and a woman in a long skirt
Carries a bucket from a well
Beyond her – horse-drawn vehicles wait and soldiers I am sure

Somebody thought the scene worth capturing,
The disappointing result worth keeping,
And knowing the time and place
Did not think to write them …

And so the house clearers came and salvaged it.

For all its nebulous anonymity
Or because of it – I’m glad I rescued
This orphaned piece of history.

*****************************

Today. Today I planned to write a poem
And find another ‘found object’
Set off across the green, noting the sprouting daffodil stems
And the lack of spring in my step

The 328 duly arrived, sedately.

I boarded, sat, opened my notebook
Mused, pen in hand
But soon
A little girl and her mother boarded
Moved to sit in front of me
The querulous child
Stood
Wanted to take off her jacket
‘No!’ tussled the harried mother.

Screaming doesn’t help composition.

‘What a nice pink rose you have in your hair’
I said. The girl stopped crying – smiled
Looked at her mother and back at me
Bashful, mute.

‘Thank the man’, the mother said.
‘I’d like to wear a pink rose like that
But perhaps not in my hair’, I said.
Quickly, as the bus rocked us down Kilburn Park
I did a crude pen sketch of her – a squiggle for the artificial rose.

Gave it to her ‘That’s the best I can do on a bumpy bus.’
She smiled again
After a while, peaceably sitting down
Holding the scrawled likeness in her hand. I watched her face
Reflected in the glass shielding us from the bus door
Her long gazes at the picture.
Before I got off, after half an hour of quiet
(And still no poem) I said ‘Goodbye –
Sorry it’s not a better drawing
Shall I write your name on it?’
Her mother in her foreign accent offered ‘Rosalie’

‘Rosalie on the 328 bus
17 FEB 2011’

Goodbye.

I didn’t write a poem
Nor did Portabello Road’s ephemera boxes
Offer a poetic found object
Perhaps I’ll walk on the edge of the Thames again.

For all the sketches, paintings, photographs
Of soldiers …
There is no peace.

Postscript

Speaking of the 328 bus, I append a reading of an earlier poem:

Budapest 1992

2011-02-20T23:39:00.003Z

The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. Ezra Pound

To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. Henri Cartier-Bresson

A ‘prequel’, if you like, to my film Shadows of Budapest. In 1992, I was in Budapest to shoot an episode of Maigret. The state film industry had collapsed and we were there taking advantage of the facilities and local skills, and the city stood in for Paris before its stone was cleaned.

PIGEON HOLES

2011-02-14T11:16:00.001Z

I have been reminded that, after an argument a year or three or four back about clutter, I wrote this poem after filling up the pigeon holes. I am currently engaged in trying to de-clutter the room around it and envisage a triumphant journey to our local recycling bins at dead of night.

I met a New York actress a decade ago who had a sideline as a professional de-clutterer. In sorting out one client’s affairs, she discovered he had a forgotten bank account with $10,000 in it.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

DEGREES OF KINGSHIP

2011-02-04T05:25:00.002Z

How many degrees of separation does the famous concept stipulate? I imagine that to have been named after a famous public figure doesn’t count, but I was named after King Edward VIII who, just four months after my birth, abdicated.

Dr Alfred Blunt, Bishop of Bradford.
Portrait by Bassano, February 1936.
National Portrait Gallery, London.

And my older brother, in his policing days, once had occasion to deliver a document to Bishop Blunt, the Bishop of Bradford, who answered the doorbell himself and accepted delivery from my brother’s hand; the very Bishop Blunt who had blown the lid off the Edward and Mrs Simpson scandal, and you could say precipitated the abdication, when in a speech to his Diocesan Conference he spoke of the King’s ‘need for grace’ and was duly quoted in Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus.

I have mused on this today, having seen the film The King’s Speech, in which the abdicating Edward has a supporting part, so to speak. I might well have had a supporting part in the film myself, a tiny one – the Harley Street specialist who, in the tradition of Demosthenes and Henry Higgins, makes the hero and future King George VI hold marbles in his mouth. I am glad to say that one of my old colleagues, Roger Hammond, played it – convincingly – I remember bumping into him at the audition. But he played it in a way I could never have done as he must weigh at least 20 stone, and was therefore a good contrast to Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who wins the day. Rush is more my build and incidentally trained in the Lecoq school of mime, as I did. We met for the first time in 1998 in my dressing room in Newcastle’s Theatre Royal, after I had played Master Ford in Ian Judge’s RSC production of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Geoffrey had spent the day on location as Philip Henslowe in Tom Stoppard’s screenplay Shakespeare in Love – Tyneside pretending to be Bankside.

Talking of degrees of separation, what award-ceremony madness nominates Colin Firth alone? Is it beyond the wit of those who decide these things to see that one might as well separate Laurel and Hardy as Firth and Rush; the relationship is everything! I see that Rush is named as an executive producer in the credits and I wonder if he had something to do with the brilliance of the script, for the way his character is depicted going about his treatment of ‘Bertie’, a method the real-life Logue invented himself, is utterly convincing, dramatically and psychologically fascinating.

Not least of the film’s delights – along with the strange pleasure of frequently being moved to tears – is seeing familiar bits of London in a new light, an empty Westminster Abbey at night for instance – awesome. But here once again I claim kinship with kingship. Some years ago, my wife Emily and I gave a recital in the Abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber, the room in which by the fireplace King Henry IV died:

It hath been prophesied to me many years,

I should not die but in Jerusalem;

Which vainly I suppos'd the Holy Land.

But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie;

In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

(Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2)

The Jerusalem Chamber, Illustrated London News, 1902.

After supper the Dean showed us past the open door of a bathroom, as I remember, and through an adjacent ancient door, directly into the historic Abbot’s Pew, and suddenly at 10.30 at night we were looking down from our oak perch above the south aisle onto the silent nave of the deserted Abbey. There was the intermittent glimmer of the traffic’s headlights moving beyond the dark stained-glass windows, but otherwise the impression was of venerable age, the weight of history carried lightly in the soaring grey Gothic columns as the Dean talked of the almost 150 years it had taken to complete what we saw, whilst the stone, builders and masons were being financed by monarchs we only knew as Shakespearean characters, Richard II and Henry V. All this we experienced in the dim light from where, when it was a monastery, Abbot Islip once kneeled.

What happened is one thing, History and Historical drama another …

Linking back to the actual man Logue, who controlled George VI’s stammer and held a night-time Abbey rehearsal with him on the eve of the Coronation, it so happens that he was killingly handsome, especially when young.

Lionel Logue with Myrtle Gruenert at the time of their engagement in Perth, Western Australia, 1906.

It also happens that the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide where he was trained, and assisted elocutionist Edward Reeves, was the very place where one Charles Gordon, who was my voice teacher at drama school, taught during WWII. But that is not enough and doesn’t have a sufficiently Royal ring to it to be the tag to this Royal Blog. Except that the degrees of separation can be narrowed. Kathleen Riley discovered Charles Gordon’s secret career! He never divulged to us that, along with his performances as a baritone, he was an accomplished campanologist and was advertised as ‘The Monarch of the Bells’. In fact, in May 1937, he posted an advert in The Stage in which he billed himself:

I also recognized some of the exercises ‘Bertie’ was put through from the room in Chapel Street, Bradford where Charlie taught us, only a short walk away from St George’s Hall. In 1933, on a certain raised terrace on the flank of the Hall, my father and brother Billy found a position from which to see to advantage the arrival in our city of Edward, Prince of Wales. Just four of the prince’s words – ‘Something must be done’ (about the plight of the unemployed miners in Wales) – had endeared him to working people, but apparently angered elements in the Establishment.

And it was flanking that same building in 1954 that I waited to see Queen Elizabeth II on her way to lunch at our Town Hall.

Town Hall Square, Bradford, 28 October 1954.

By that time I was becoming quite fluent in what we called The Queen’s English, though I had taught myself, with the help of BBC Radio, from the time when it was still The King’s. I end Happy and Glorious!

***************

In the year of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, 2002, Emily and I presented a show or our own devising called Pomp and Force of Circumstance, which included this poem about the momentous events of 1936:

ADDING A NEW DIMENSION TO THE EXISTING UNIVERSE

2011-01-24T07:27:00.000Z

   What seest thou else
   In the dark backward and abysm of time?
   The Tempest, Act i, sc.ii

An expanded version of my poem about the infinite mysteries of the Universe, from Big Bang to Bubble Theory and Beyond:

REMEMBERING SUSANNAH YORK

2011-01-17T05:04:00.003Z

I am saddened to hear of Susannah York’s death. Her special radiance survives in her film performances, but just now I am remembering watching her from the wings one night in Stratford, being superlative as she spoke Gertrude’s speech, ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook’ (Hamlet Act IV, sc.vii), describing Ophelia’s death to Laertes and the King. It is a justly famous purple passage, but all the more difficult to let it seem, as well as beautiful, poignant and dramatic, a natural progression in the story – the Queen describing a catastrophe she has just witnessed to Ophelia’s brother and her own husband.

Alex Jennings (Hamlet) and Susannah York (Gertrude), RSC, 1997.

That same year in Stratford, she played Mistress Ford to my Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I last worked with Susannah in 2007 when we found ourselves with that special actor’s warmth and affection that rekindles when looking back on old and perhaps difficult times. We did a public ‘rehearsed reading’ together of the musical Alvaro’s Balcony at Her Majesty’s Theatre; I think it was just one read-through, a cup of tea and then we had an invited audience. I was impressed, as we chatted between times, that she seemed to be working for important causes. Although she was not in the least ‘starry’; on the contrary, down to earth, rather inclined to be a little nervous but with the right kind of humility. She managed that day, with seeming ease, to pull out of the bag an authoritative and charismatic performance.

WORDS OF WELCOME

2011-01-16T00:59:00.000Z

   A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep
   And I could laugh, I am light and heavy. Welcome.
   Shakespeare, Coriolanus

For visitors to my website, old and new alike, I have created a brand new video prologue which I also share with you here:

My book, Slim Chances, is now in the final stages of production and, among other recent updates to Peth's Staging Post are details of events at which pre-release copies will be available in the spring.

Until very soon.
E.P.

APOLOGIES

2011-01-14T00:04:00.000Z

Apologies for the uncharacteristic gap this week. Book deadlines have loomed (and been met) and plans for the National Theatre Platform on 23 March are afoot.

Hope to make up for my momentary silence this weekend.

Updates to my website will also appear very soon, including the latest news on the book's publication and related events.

Stay tuned.

My Best Wishes,

Edward Petherbridge

Meanwhile a sneak preview from Slim Chances. Can you spot my thirteen-year-old self?

My 4th-Form class, Grange Grammar, Bradford,
September 1949.
Click to enlarge photo.

WINTER ROSE

2011-01-01T14:05:00.000Z

A very happy New Year to you all!

A (BELATED) BOXING DAY CRACKER

2010-12-27T17:04:00.000Z

DECEMBER ROSES

2010-12-19T21:50:00.001Z

How peaceful can coexistence be?

Chilling the blush of the rose

Drawing faint heat from its cheeks

The crystalline coldness melts

Unique designs are lost.

This trinity is miracle enough

Beetle, Bud, Ice.

What god would intervene?

This the majestic cruel purpose?

Snowing again

I trudge across our street

To visit the rosebud

How has its fairness fared through the icy night?

Unwithered!

Half hidden now, bowed, bearing its
wintry yoke

Yet blushing still –

And there

A sign of industry – geometry

A gossamer glint

A single thread

Taut at a logical angle.

And yes the tiny spider, black

Nestles in the jewelled white and waits.

Silence.

Walking on; dark tyre tracks on the
further road

Traffic cautious, labouring.

_______________

He Missed The Bus

As usual (or as often as not) turning the corner
I look across the Green – snow white today – to see
Yes, the 328, my bus
Lumbering to the stop
A sprinter might catch it
Or on a good day
A dash and a hop and I would
But this morning …

It’ll do me good, the exercise – cardiovascular
The plane trees, noble, oh spectacular!
Smoky in swirls of snow
Tower, stand, as I go
Crunching, slipping
Smiling at strangers in
Our common plight
Traversing this world of white.

Missing the bus has been a habit.
I’m good at making a virtue of it.

DEEP AND CRISP AND EVEN

2010-12-13T21:04:00.002Z

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

(A. E. Housman's translation of Horace Odes 4.7)

_______________

GAYTHORNE ROAD, WEST BOWLING

As a boy in Bradford, I lived just 100 yards down the street to the left. I seem to remember the trams kept running in the great snow of 1947. I delighted in walking to school on the top of the piles of snow formed by the road clearance and remember making something like an igloo on the road outside our house and having a ledge for a candle inside it.

Researching the pages of a 1959 copy of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus at the British Library Newspaper Library in Colindale today, I spotted a letter of support for the snow shovelers who had obviously been vilified in the readers’ views column. It ran: ‘Try turning up at 7 a.m. with a cup of tea and a slice of dripping and bread inside you and holes in your socks and shoes that take water … and £1.13.6 (about £1.60 today) at the end of the day for your trouble.’

I suppose a wool warehouseman like my father – the lowest-paid wool workers – would get, at most, £7 a week then. A modern tiled fireplace was being advertised in the same paper for £8.17.6; I suppose the instalment would be at least a pound extra.

These additional ping-pong balls will remind us of what is yet to come!

SPRING

SUMMER

SONG OF THE KITCHEN-TABLE LEAR

2010-12-06T02:33:00.001Z

Each a good egg or an empty shell

What can these portraits silently tell

Something of culture or civilization

These wafer-thin waifs sans fertilization?

Storm in an eggcup – Lear and his clown –

One's kept his Motley, one's lost his crown.

There's drama revealed in all faces and shells

That's what this Breakfast double act tells.

********

These eggshell self-portraits of Lear and the Fool were inspired by images of the Clown Egg Collection, which a friend recently sent me. The collection, which records every clown's make-up on an eggshell, is owned by Clowns International and is on display in the Clowns Museum at Wookey Hole Caves near Wells in Somerset. These fragile artefacts are portraits in miniature of famous clowns.

WINTERTIDE

2010-11-28T19:19:00.000Z

Blow, blow, thou winter wind.

It looks as if I will be sending you seasonal snow scenes very soon. Hoping meantime that my Budapest film suffices until my next posting midweek.

Meanwhile, this shows what you can do to amuse yourself and the children with felt-tip pens and ping pong balls. I have kept these from several Christmases back and next time will send you Spring and Summer.

AUTUMN

WINTER

SHADOWS OF BUDAPEST

2010-11-25T04:15:00.001Z

My first iPhone film!

(N.B. The video is possibly best viewed in small screen to avoid delays in loading, but you can double-click to enlarge.)

SHADOW PLAY

2010-11-21T05:41:00.000Z

For shadow play of Budapest

Time has made its acid test

So there will be a slight delay

Before my shadows have their say

But have no fear – I’m all agog

We’ll catch the clock up with the blog.

E.P.

____________________

For those of you who may have missed my ‘kitchen-table’ meditation on King Lear, commissioned by Vulpes Libris for their inaugural Shakespeare Week, here it is – partly filmed in Budapest!

NOTES FROM ABROAD

2010-11-14T21:28:00.001Z

Heroes' Square, Budapest

Surreal supper in solitary splendour in the hotel with Harry Potter on TV and Mike Gambon's Dumbledore speaking Hungarian, which seemed right as I last worked with Mike here in Budapest. The screen was a thumbnail size at arm's length, if you follow me, but dominated the empty dining room. It was an appropriate warm-up for tomorrow, when I confess Jeremy Irons's Borgia Pope: good and evil doing battle on the small screen.

I was a filmmaker myself today, using my iPhone camera. I actually caught a Hungarian architect, who talked in halting English to me, singing 'It's a long way to Tipperary' – he learnt it at school. We saw an exhibition together. I may be going slightly mad in my solitude here, but I have seen some good art and photography and conned my lines.

I offer two pictures of the kind of Hero you see here. The nymph has nothing to do but try in vain to reach up and plant the laurel on the hero's brow. It strikes me this is rather the way Lear thinks of his daughters in Act I, scene i: 'Which of you shall we say doth love us most?'

The Museum of Fine Arts currently has a large exhibition on Klimt and the origins of the Vienna Secession. According to the lushly illustrated catalogue, Klimt was influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement, and I was pleased, indeed felt at home, to see William Nicholson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Whistler and Burne-Jones in the amazingly comprehensive line-up. The museum is cavernous and the upstairs rooms, where I glimpsed the permanent collection, are reached by a marble staircase that makes London's V&A seem positively cosy. And Hungary has a population of just 10 million!

Next time I hope to show you my Hungarian film!

VINTAGE SEER AND YELLOW

2010-11-09T12:57:00.001Z

As promised. (Double click to enlarge screen.)

RETURN TO BUDAPEST

2010-11-07T22:11:00.001Z

We know that Anthony Hopkins reads through and speaks his film parts a hundred times before he gets to the studio. This element of intense preparatory study is the thing that connects the actor performing before the oil and gas footlights of the 18th and 19th centuries with the film actor today finding his mark and his key light. In the ‘old’ theatre, rehearsal was at a minimum, especially in the classics, where the staging was standardized. Leading actors made their special ‘points’, even sending a junior actor ahead on a tour to explain the business they were going to do and so avoiding rehearsals with a provincial company altogether. When a leading actor was preparing to burst onto the West End stage, the great bulk of his preparation was in his own study, not only learning his part thoroughly but also working out exactly what he would do with it.

It is not outlandish to turn up for filming on Day One of a project and find one has committed one’s key scene to the cameras by lunchtime or by 9.30 if it’s TV. In film acting, there is a heady sense of improvisation and discovery and living in the moment, but it had better be backed up by one’s own careful preparation.

I’m about to go to Budapest to confess Jeremy Irons’s Pope Alexander VI (in the Showtime series The Borgias). The last time I met him was last Christmas when he came to see his son Max playing the younger me in Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase and we chatted afterwards, backstage by the fire escape at the Old Red Lion in Islington.

I was last in Budapest in 1992 where I had flown in to play the eponymous role in Maigret’s Boyhood Friend. Our Stanislavskian preparation, Mike Gambon and I, might have been done nearly thirty years earlier when we were inmates of the walk-ons dressing room at the Old Vic, home then of the National Theatre. I certainly remember schoolboy mischief leavening the boredom of our very slender acting duties.

I had just gone direct from Budapest Airport to a make-up caravan to discuss a moustache, and there was Maigret/Gambon on the street corner. We greeted each other briefly, like boyhood friends, and the next day were filming in the back of a police car, with me under suspicion for murder.

Eventually we caught up over a hotel supper. So much of our talk was about ‘the old days’, as if we were speaking of gaslit footlights. Though they were the days when we rehearsed The Royal Hunt of the Sun – Mike playing a Spaniard, I an Inca – for at least twelve weeks?

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, National Theatre, 1964.
Photo by Angus McBean.

Mike and I parted early that night … we had our parts to study for the morning.

_______________

ALSO THIS WEEK

Coming shortly: a new webcam poem, an autumnal meditation and celebration.

Meanwhile, a recent picture of Bean, happily ignoring my self-portrait to charm and entreat the artist.

INTERVIEW WITH EMILY RICHARD

2010-11-01T00:07:00.000Z

Emily and Edward at home in their London garden, circa 1985.

As you may have seen, Edward is a follower of Ruth Johnston's excellent blog Cocktails and Feminism. This week Ruth has posted an interview with Edward's wife, Emily Richard, in which she gives a candid and fascinating insight into her career as an actress, which is by turns funny, moving and inspiring.

The interview includes lovely rare images of some of the stage productions in which Emily and Edward have appeared together over the years.

You can read the interview with Emily here.

And don't miss Edward's Halloween blog posted below.

Kathleen