HOT OFF THE PRESS

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                     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: