BREAKING THE MOULD: A SONNET

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

Coleridge 

WEST HAMPSTEAD WINDOW ON THE EAST

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KR