DANCING IN THE SHADOWS

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us ...

WAITING FOR GODOT 

Today is the day of Roger Rees’s funeral in New York. He leaves behind his companion of more than thirty years and spouse since 2011, the writer and producer Rick Elice.

I simply want to post a phrase or two from an email I sent Roger after seeing him play Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket with Ian McKellen in 2010.

As you can imagine I have always fancied myself in your part since 1956 was it? I conclusively relinquished it to you tonight and was constantly surprised, disarmed and engaged, there is no one who can dance in the part and go into the fearsome shadows with your seamless ease … Your relationship [with Ian] is very believable and the audience love you both …

Roger as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot

ROGER REES (1944-2015)

Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

Late as it is, I must mark the passing of Roger Rees. I visited him when I was working in New York last month; he was in hospital and on the last occasion, just two weeks and a day ago, he was sitting up in a chair surrounded by friends. I asked if I might read from my book, part of the chapter on Nicholas Nickleby, the section entitled ‘In Praise of Roger Rees’.

Today Emily and I find words inadequate. We will only venture that a light has been extinguished, but those of us who knew him, those who ever saw him, will see the lasting afterglow.

Roger and Emily as Nicholas and Kate Nickleby

THE POWER OF GOOD

If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it.

Sir Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) 

Soon after arriving home from New York I heard on the radio the news that Sir Nicholas Winton, the ‘British Schindler’, had died at the age of 106. Sir Nicholas is, in fact, one of the leading lights of the book Kathleen and I are preparing on West Hampstead. He was responsible for the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the brink of WWII in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport. He was born in West Hampstead and grew up at ‘Stonecroft’, 5 Cleve Road, a house designed by Banister Fletcher (whose monument can be seen in Fortune Green Cemetery). The house had some twenty rooms and many German Jews sought temporary refuge there from 1937 onwards. It was young Nicholas’s first-hand experience of their plight that inspired him to do something to help refugees and particularly child refugees.

Nicholas Winton’s childhood home in Cleve Road.
Photo by EP

In nearby Priory Road, Wellesley Aron spent part of his formative years; he rescued refugees fleeing the Holocaust, was a creator and teacher of courses on peace for schoolchildren, founder of Habonim, which became the largest Zionist Youth movement world-wide, and a founding member of the Arab/Jewish community of Neve Shalom.

Another West Hampsteadite, journalist Yvonne Mayer, worked with the largest influx of refugees in British history, the Basque children. West Hampstead also had a special school, the Sheriff Day Nursery in Sheriff Road, for children of families who had fled the Nazis. The principal was a Dr Lily Collinge who had a doctorate from Berlin and was herself a refugee.

One young refugee in NW6 who made a name for himself was the Austrian poet Erich Fried. He had been a child actor, the leading child actor in plays by Ferdinand Raimund. When the Anschluss occurred in 1938 he founded a small youth resistance group that distributed anti-fascist literature. His parents were arrested by the Gestapo for exporting currency and during the interrogation his father was fatally kicked in the stomach. Fried fled to London via Belgium and formed a self-help refugee group that brought seventy people to England before the war, including his mother. He took lodgings in an attic room at 67 Priory Road, West Hampstead, which he shared with another exile, Stefan Brill, and in which a group of young German and Austrian refugees regularly met in the spring of 1940.
He published his first volume of poetry in 1944. In the 1950s and 60s he worked as a political commentator for the BBC German Service and translated works by Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.

SILENCE FULL OF MUSIC

People imagined they heard the actions they saw. The gestures alone supplied the place of the sweetness of the voice, of the energy of speech, of the charms of poetry.

Giovanni-Andrea Gallini 

A short film Kathleen and I made in New York, when I became an unofficial part of an installation by Parisian artist Philippe Parreno, his largest in the United States to date. The venue is the extraordinarily cavernous space of the drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory.

Part of the installation at the Armory.
Photo by EP

And another view.
Photo by Kathleen Riley

WEST HAMPSTEAD ON WEST 45TH STREET

I’d like to see America but I’m afraid to risk it. As soon as I got over Mr. Frohman might request me to sit in a box at the performance of one of my plays.

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

Daniel Frohman

New York, New York and the Shubert Archive. This is what Kathleen introduced me to on Thursday afternoon. It’s tucked up right at the top of the Lyceum Theatre on West 45th Street, in what had been the apartment of the theatre’s producer-manager Daniel Frohman. The Lyceum is Broadway’s oldest continually operating legitimate theatre and is currently on a waiting list for major renovation. The ‘old smell’ was apparent from the moment we stepped from the hot sidewalk inside the grand lobby.

Lyceum lobby. Photo by EP

Lyceum auditorium. Photo by EP

There are various original furnishings in Frohman’s converted eyrie: his desk which you can just glimpse below (and at which Kathleen and I sat to do our research); a marble plant stand with a faint view of New York skyscrapers behind it; and two original Tiffany panels, imported from the Belasco Theatre, which lend a rather splendid period air.

Photos by EP

There is also a little cubbyhole built into the wainscott, which, when opened, affords a view right down from the top of the gods onto the stage. Legend has it that, when his actress wife, Margaret Illington, was in a show, Frohman had a habit of waving a white handkerchief from the cubbyhole to signal that she was overacting. But it was a singular view of West Hampstead we had really gone to see.

In 1919, the long-running West End musical The Boy transferred to the Shubert Theatre in New York under the title Good Morning, Judge. The show was based on Pinero’s play The Magistrate and transposes the action of the first act and final scene from Bloomsbury to an affluent middle-class home in West Hampstead. Quite an extraordinary view of the suburb we know so well, even in London, but from this particular vantage point … almost surreal.

In a programme for the play, which the Archive holds, we spotted an extraordinary advertisement for summer furs. I can tell you that the heat and humidity of the current Manhattan summer would certainly not induce me to wear an elegant seasonal fur or even a light vest under my shirt. When one thinks of all the corsets and heavy underclothes people endured in the early years of the last century! They must have been tough as old boots those New Yorkers before the age of air-conditioning and more forgiving undergarments.

Tomorrow’s matinee is our last in New York but I leave you for now with three very contemporary views of this wonderful town.

Photos by EP

GREETINGS FROM NEW YORK

As promised, pictures of the clapboard relic near my Upper East Side lodgings and two of its neighbours which also date back to the pre-Civil War era when they were probably surrounded by open fields. Tales of My Perfect Mind off-Broadway to follow in the coming days.

Photos by EP

BOUND FOR NEW YORK

Yesterday we had our last London rehearsal before My Perfect Mind opens in New York next week. Our rehearsal venue in Shoreditch was next to the wondrous Geffrye Museum, which specializes in the history of the English domestic interior. The main body of the museum is set in Grade 1-listed almshouses built in 1714 by the Ironmongers’ Company, with a bequest from Sir Robert Geffrye, twice master of the Company and former Lord Mayor of London. For almost two hundred years the almshouses provided homes for around fifty poor pensioners. The museum was founded 200 years later in 1914.

Before I embrace the hyper-energy of Manhattan, I leave you with a few glimpses of the gentle oasis that is the Geffrye. In the lovely dappled light of an English summer’s day, it shines like a good deed in a naughty world.

Photos by EP

And this is a watercolour of the Geffrye façade by Phyllis I. Dimond, housed in the V&A’s  ‘Recording Britain’ collection of topographical watercolours and drawings made in the early part of the Second World War.

Today we fly out and I will soon be able to send you a picture of the pre-Civil War clapboard survivor across the street from my New York digs. Until then …