SHEDDING THE RIGHT LIGHT

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1831)

A slightly belated film in honour of the Bard’s birthday.

 

On the subject of suburban and Shakespearean activity, Sir Frank Dicksee (1853-1928), President of the Royal Academy, who painted this famous Pre-Raphaelite image of Romeo and Juliet, is buried in our local cemetery. He and several members of the Dicksee family, all of them artists, lived and worked in West Hampstead. 

Painted 1884. Southampton City Art Gallery

His cousin Herbert Dicksee had as his most frequent model the young Gladys Cooper who is also buried in Hampstead Cemetery.

Gladys cooper as Juliet and George Clarke as Romeo.
Photo by Bessano

Spring in Hampstead Cemetery. Photo by EP

POSTCARDS TO THE BARD

            Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,

            Thou, who display’dst a life of common-place,

            Leaving no intimate word or personal trace

            Of high design outside the artistry

            Of thy penned dreams,

            Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.

Thomas Hardy, ‘To Shakespeare’ (1916)

London is decidedly chilly; I remember last year I photographed our bust of Shakespeare near our lilac blossom for his birthday, but I fear it won’t be fully out by Monday.

Photo by EP

I can’t quite believe I managed this idealized Bard Birthday ‘painting’ last year, using my index finger and the Brushes app on my iPhone.

I have taken fright lately about working on the iPad and iPhone, though I did manage an abstract not long ago and what could represent an enchanted Forest of Arden.

This last week I went to Large Glass, an art gallery in the Caledonian Road, to hear A.L. Kennedy (author of The Blue Book) talking about her postcards (the gallery has currently a fascinating exhibition of postcards and has, since February, been running a series of related talks). Alison managed to give us a potted history of her life. None of her own postcards, projected on a screen, were specially memorable, and I suspect she could have given an equally engrossing talk with a random collection of objects – a pair of shoes, an old note book, a favourite pen – doing a riff on each. 

Image courtesy of Large Glass

Stratford-upon-Avon was introduced via what she admitted was the most ordinary postcard view, but what she said about it was touchingly personal. Her first taste of professionally performed Shakespeare was in the intimacy of the Other Place, the original tin hut of blessed memory. I would like to read a transcript of the talk (it may have been recorded); I won’t attempt to paraphrase her words, but it was the power of Shakespeare’s words, their sound that thrilled the young girl down from Dundee. At first she was surprised to be in a shabby hut and not a ‘proper theatre’, then the RSC’s big guns came on: Richard Pascoe, Alan Howard et al.

She loved the vast reaches of the main theatre too and spoke particularly of its smell and lamented its radical rebuild. In fact, on a recent visit they were actually in the process of gutting the building and her wry threnody of the familiar smell drifting along waterside mingled with the building’s dust is something I will not forget. 

Mind you, for all one’s fond memories, it was a dreadful mammoth Odeon of a place and the back rows of the gallery seemed miles away. I remember the Head of Voice, Cis Berry, getting the company to spread so that we were dotted about all over the stage and the empty auditorium, speaking the Bard to one another over the wastes of empty plush in fervent attempts to colonize the territory with an amalgam of projected clarity and intimacy.

Speaking of postcards, we have this framed one of Emily as the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost, bought from the front-of-house shop at Stratford. (It was during the run of Love’s Labour’s Lost that our daughter Dora was christened in the very church in which Shakespeare was baptised and buried – the church seen in A.L. Kennedy’s postcard above.)

The last written words I will give to Frank Benson, as famous for his cricket teams as for his Shakespeare. Even in this night-scented hymn to Stratford and the Bard, he manages a reference to the town’s playing field.

From Shakespeare’s Heroines (1926).
Click to enlarge

But perhaps the last spoken words should be the Bard’s.

Postscript

At 7.45 this Sunday evening (UK time) on Radio 3 you can hear A.L. Kennedy’s documentary Art and Madness, to which Edward contributed. The programme runs for forty-five minutes and ‘questions the clichéd link between madness and creativity’. For those of you in other time zones, you can still listen in via the Radio 3 homepage.

KR

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS, PART II

               We shall not cease from exploration

               And the end of all our exploring

               Will be to arrive where we started

               And know the place for the first time.

                                                                     T.S. Eliot

Steps in Time, South Bank. Photo by EP

Home and Hearth. Photo by EP

A Happy Easter to you all!

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS, PART I

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

Charles Dickens

Part II coming soon ...

POST IMMINENT

Apologies for the hiatus in weekly posting. A bumper Easter edition of the blog, in two cinematic parts, is coming very soon. STAY TUNED.

Photo by EP

DUET FOR KING AND CLOWN

And take upon ’s the mystery of things …

KING LEAR, Act V, sc. iii

Monday the 19th March is a red-letter day, the first day of the second exploratory workshop I am doing with Paul Hunter on King Lear, and the latest phase in a project conceived during the short West End run of The Fantasticks in which we formed a successful comic partnership. 

The workshop is so open ended, based as it is on our relationship in the famous musical, and the bald fact that three years before I had been cheated out of playing King Lear in New Zealand by the stroke I suffered after the second day of rehearsal. 

In preparation for the week ahead, and as a possible prelude to the show, I have composed a sonnet encapsulating my dual journey with Lear and the peripeteiac nature of the King’s story and my own.

‘Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester’ 

It seemed that in my seer and yellow years

A Christmas gift would add me to the roster

The lineage: four hundred years of Lears!

That winter, hoped to get the part off pat 

Interpreted, there at my kitchen table

‘Come, come, I am a king; masters know you that’

In spring and summer, just as I was able

My leitmotif was Lear whatever part 

Slipped in and jostled me for my devotion 

The foolish king was closest to my heart

Until my heart, the fool, denied me motion.

The gilded butterflies are in, and I am out

No cataracts and hurricanoes spout.

Self-portrait as Lear. 
Charcoal on paper

Meanwhile, work on the book Kathleen and I are writing about West Hampstead’s astonishingly rich history continues apace. We discovered the other day, in the British Library archives, a rare, very early Victorian drawing of a grand West Hampstead mansion set in idyllic parkland. The caption reads: ‘House sketched at Westend near Kilburn, for the top of a bill for letting it, by Mr Oberson. G. Scharf 1839.’

Image courtesy of British Library

The artist is George Scharf senior who, a year before, sketched William Macready and his Fool Priscilla Horton in King Lear at Covent Garden, the first time Shakespeare’s unaltered original had been performed in London since it was played by Shakespeare’s company and the first reappearance of the Fool in 150 years.

Depictions of King Lear are something of a West Hampstead tradition. It was, after all, in Georgian West End, with David Garrick’s Lear within recent living memory, that the first illustrated folio of Shakespeare, was born. Just a few streets up from the site of its birth, I have been working on my own contribution to that tradition, and share with you here a detail or two from my painting of Lear and the Fool in the Storm.

SENTINEL OF TIME

When I do count the clock that tells the time ...

Shakespeare

Photo by EP