BILLIE WHITELAW, 1932-2014

Photo by EP

I know that we both took acting classes for young amateurs in the same upper room in Bradford - a disused wool-sorting room it was in Chapel Street, the least theatrical street imaginable but the cradle of a surprising number of theatrical careers. She must have preceded me by about three years. But we were to play husband and wife (Ferdinand Gadd and Avonia Bunn – character names to conjure with) in Arthur Wing Pinero’s magical backstage comedy Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ at the National Theatre in 1965/6.

Trewlawny of the ‘Wells’, NT, 1965. L to r: Louise Purnell (Rose Trelawny); 
Graham Crowden (Augustus Colpoys); Billie Whitelaw (Avonia Bunn);
EP (Ferdinand Gadd). Photo by Angus McBean

I last saw Billie when I was invited to a function at the actors’ rest home Denville Hall a few years back. We had not seen each other since 1976 when I was in a reading of a script by her husband Robert Muller at their home. At Denville Hall, after a lapse of over thirty years, in a way she looked just the same but she told me she had a condition that made her balance unsteady. We chatted as we helped  ourselves to tea at a buffet and she quite naturally – in parenthesis – went into a short section of Not I and then continued reminiscing about Beckett and Pinero – one might say two figures at opposite poles of the drama. I remember the quiet speed and clarity of her speech as she gently launched into the part for which she is still famous. They played a clip on the radio last night and I heard every word, not something one can say about every rendition of that ‘impossibly’ challenging role.

Samuel Beckett with Billie Whitelaw in Not I at the Royal Court in 1979.
Photo by John Haynes

UNFINISHED MASTERPIECES

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained 

Heart of the Gothic Quarter, Barcelona.
Photo by EP

ADVENT

    The Advent wind begins to stir
    With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
    It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
    And in between we only see
    Clouds hurrying across the sky
    And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
    And branches bending to the gale
    Against great skies all silver pale …

John Betjeman, ‘Advent 1955’

These photos of the last two dates on our tour, Scarborough and Barcelona, tell their own contrasting story in light.

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

On my return to London, having recovered from a well-timed cold, I took myself to the the National Gallery by Tube to see Rembrandt: The Late Works. On the homeward journey these were just some of the Santa Clauses I saw making their way up the escalator to Trafalgar Square. Two brave ones ran up the stairs.  

Photo by EP

The hotel at which I stayed in Scarborough had once been owned by Charles Laughton’s brother (Scarborough was Laughton’s birthplace, and Edith Sitwell’s no less!). And there’s a connection between this seaside resort, Rembrandt and West Hampstead. The surrealist artist John Armstrong lived in a room near Fortune Green, NW6 in the early 1920s. In 1936, the year I was born, he was the designer for the Alexander Korda film Rembrandt, with Laughton in the title role. The same year he created a mural for Tom Laughton’s Royal Hotel in Scarborough.

L. One of Armstrong’s costume designs for Rembrandt.
R. Laughton as Rembrandt

Furthermore, in 1936, Charles Laughton opened the Odeon Cinema in Scarborough – for years now the home of Ayckbourn’s theatre-in-the-round, the Stephen Joseph. 

It has a studio theatre where My Perfect Mind played, fashioned from the dress circle of the Art Deco cinema.

Photos by EP

CURTAIN CALL

Barcelona, an admirable city, a city full of life, intense, a port open to the past and future.

Le Corbusier 

The autumn tour of My Perfect Mind has ended in true Catalan style with two shows at the Teatre Lliure (Catalan for ‘Free Theatre’) in Barcelona. We had a lovely reception with capacity houses both nights – entrades exhaurides (sold out) in fact!

In this city of opulent eclecticism, where Roman ruins coexist with Gaudi’s Modernista flights of fancy, the state-of-the-art 400-seat auditorium, in which we performed, is housed in an impressive heritage building, the old Palace of Agriculture constructed for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition.

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

Edward being interviewed at Teatre Lliure

A few of the tweets that greeted our Spanish two-night stand:

Riure inteligentment a ‪#MyPerfectMind al ‪@teatrelliure. Boníssim.

‪#MyPerfectMind Brillantísima e hilarante. Dons monstruos en el Lliure. Geniales!

Brillant ‪#MyPerfectMind al ‪@teatrelliure. Classe magistral d'humor i discurs corrosiu.

It is by no means the end of the road for My Perfect Mind as we have another international ‘gig’ lined up for next summer. More of that anon along with more pictures from Barcelona ...

FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, 9/11/89

Fragment of the Berlin Wall.
Photo by EP

STATE OF THE ART, PART THREE

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust 

Belatedly the finale to our State of the Art triptych:

And as British Summer Time has not long ended, a short round-up of the PA (Petherbridge Academy) Summer Exhibition:

Portrait of Proust, aged twenty-one
by Jacques-Emile Blanche

Having been absorbed for the past couple of months in the world of George Eliot, I am at last reading the greatest twentieth-century French novel, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). And I’m reminded of a limerick I wrote when I was beleaguered for days on a dull film set in a south London backwater, doing an episode of a police series for TV. Worried at on point about some continuity issue with my breast-pocket handkerchief, I was told it didn’t matter for the next shot because I was going to be in the back of it.

    To the back of the shot I am used

    Where my image is vague and diffused

    I do not demur

    At being a blur

    But I could be at home reading Proust.

As it happens, Proust was as absorbed as I by the novels of George Eliot and once admitted to the diplomat Robert de Billy ‘two pages of Mill on the Floss reduce me to tears.’ 

HALLOWEEN

So mild has this Halloween been

The warmest one ever recorded or seen

We should be brainstorming

About global warming

Should we go for the party that’s Green?

Photo by EP