REMEMBERING SUSANNAH YORK

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

                    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

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

A very happy New Year to you all!

DECEMBER ROSES

     I

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?

     II

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

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

  
    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.