OLYMPIC RESONANCES

Prometheus was punished, and indeed all of mankind, for Zeus sent Pandora with her box of evils to compensate the advantages of fire; but Zeus never took back the fire. … Still, the march of knowledge and technique continues, and with it the social and moral travail. No one can be sure that mankind will survive this painful course, especially in an age when man’s knowledge of nature has far outstripped his knowledge of himself. Yet we can be sure that man will take this road and not forsake it; for although he has his fears, he also has eternal hope. This, it will be remembered, was the last item in Pandora’s box of gifts. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Revolution in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present

This photograph is the perfect coda to Friday night’s Olympic opening ceremony, which featured huge smoking chimneys rising from the ground to symbolize the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution and our Promethean progress from pleasant pastures.

(Click image to enlarge)

Here my brother Bill (second from the left) and his teammates pose with a sports shield in the playground of their elementary school, circa 1933, and in the appropriate setting of working-class Bradford, complete with smoking mill chimney in the background. They were, I suppose, beneficiaries of what Jacques Rogge praised in his ceremonial speech, namely Britain’s inclusion of sport ‘as an educational tool in the school curriculum’.

In fact the person responsible for introducing P.E. into the school curriculum was Swedish-born Martina Bergman-Österberg, who in 1885 established the first physical training college in England, in none other than West Hampstead. A significant campaigner for women’s suffrage and emancipation, she is also credited with the introduction of the gymslip as female athletic wear, releasing women from the constraints of the corset, and for introducing a prototype of netball to England – first played in West Hampstead!

The house in which she lived and founded the college was called ‘Reremonde’ and still sits proudly on the corner of Broadhurst Gardens, now sporting a blue plaque and part of the architectural and cultural melting pot that is modern West Hampstead.

Photo by EP

Another former West Hampsteadite of sporting distinction has an unusual place in Olympic history and indeed the women’s suffrage movement. Eustace Miles, who was born at West End House, won a silver medal in real tennis at the 1908 London Olympics, the only time jeu de paume was an Olympic medal event.

A man of eclectic talents and interests, he was an advocate of vegetarianism, or as he called it ‘fleshless food’, and with his wife started the Eustace Miles Restaurant in Chandos Road, near Charing Cross Station. So famous was the restaurant that it was referred to (and parodied) in E. M. Fortser’s Howards End (‘It’s all proteids and body-buildings, and people come up to you and beg your pardon, but you have such a beautiful aura.’) It was also a favourite meeting place for the women’s suffrage movement and breakfasts were often held there to celebrate the release of suffragette prisoners from Holloway.

From The Bystander, 7 August 1907

I close my short homage to the Olympic spirit and its local resonances, past and present, with my ‘Cultural Olympiad’ trophies from the early 1950s with their depiction of Nike, winged goddess of Victory, together with our very own new season’s West Hampstead grapes in praise of the Greek god Dionysus.

Photo by EP

I was awarded these shields for performances given in the little custom-built theatre constructed for the workers in Lister’s Mill in Bradford, dominated by its soaring chimney. This is a picture of the mill before it was salvaged from dereliction and converted into luxury flats.

Photo by EP

And here is an architectural detail I photographed in the last five years, after the restoration and clean-up. Dark and satanic it may have been, but it was also classical or at least Renaissance in style!

Photo by EP

A reprise of my iPad recreation of my childhood vision of a magical sunset over West Bowling. I painted it with my Brushes app this time last year whilst preoccupied with another legacy of the ancient Greeks, Sophocles’ Antigone.

ORBITING BABEL

I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day’s declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.

W. B. Yeats,  The Tower (1928) 

I have had some personalized greeting cards printed very reasonably by Snappy Snaps and featuring my two finished portraits of my neighbour, Captain Cox. 

The Latin motto reads: Canis mei gratia emeritum hunc cognoscebam,
triginta per annos mihi exoticum peregrinum (It’s thanks to my dog
 that I became acquainted with this old soldier, for thirty years an exotic stranger to me)

My local branch’s printer was out of order so I went three Tube stops south to St John’s Wood, the same firm and design of shop but in a street from another world, a world which seems to ooze money. As I browsed about the high street, the confusion of languages was even richer than in my local high street, which is a good thing if one reads what God thought of the single language of the Tower of Babel. Well-dressed young families were easing themselves in and out of large expensive cars. The houses advertised in the estate agents’ windows were of an elegantly earlier period and at least three-and-a-half times as expensive as their West Hampstead counterparts. The cards I’d ordered were the same price as my more local shop but at a nearby gents outfitters there was a pair of quite ordinary jeans in the window, sale price £199 reduced from £285.

Photo by EP

I noticed an Oxfam charity shop across the road, hemmed in between the boutiques, and sure enough the window display was up market, too, tastefully minimalist with some choice books, a nice mirror and a classy gilt ladies’ evening bag. Out of curiosity I went inside, with a minute to closing time, to price the jeans if they had any, and to my astonishment actually bought a nice pair for £10.99! On the price tag there was a photograph of a smiling little boy clutching a goat and the words: ‘£10.99 buys a milk goat for a home for street children in Tanzania.’

Photo by EP

Soon I re-encountered a lady who’d been in Snappy Snaps yesterday when I had discovered she’d been a BBC radio producer; even so she was as ignorant of my illustrious radio past as I was of hers. This afternoon, as the rain had stopped, we sat down at a street café and chatted for a while and she told me about her absorption in Buddhism and the grand masters she had been fortunate enough to know and how the ‘reality’ around us was merely a dream. 

Now it so happens that I had been reading about the Buddha in H. G. Wells’s Short History of the World whilst commuting to Windsor last week and had been rather shocked to learn that he (the man who became known as the Buddha) had crept out of his home in the night and left his sleeping wife and newly born son so that he would be free to live and seek enlightenment. The rest is history as the saying goes, except one wonders about the untold history of the wife and fatherless child.

An illustration from Wells’s Short History showing the Dhamekh Tower
in the Deer Park at Sarnath, site of the Buddha’s first discourse after his enlightenment 

I would like to be able to make a decent essay out of these and other of the week’s happenings – I have, after all, been listening to the father of essayists (and indeed the first ‘blogger’), Montaigne, on Radio 3 this week – but it is late and I will leave these snippets hovering with the addition of one more. I saw our Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, claim that Anish Kapoor’s Olympic Orbit tower was ‘much more unique, more complex, more interesting than the Eiffel Tower.’ Kapoor’s Orbit bears a striking resemblance to the Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist Tower (or Monument to the Third International). It too was based on the Tower of Babel and was intended to eclipse the Eiffel Tower in height and as a symbol of modernity, though it was never built.

Tatlin in front of a model of his Tower in 1919

and Kapoor with a model of his Orbit

A scale model of Tatlin’s Tower was erected in the forecourt of the
Royal Academy last November as part of its exhibition
Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935.
Photo by EP

Comparative towers, the price of houses, of jeans and milk goats … and I’m not dreaming!

Postscript
On the subject of towers and their ‘local’ associations, this watercolour of St Aldate’s in Oxford and the famous Tom Tower of Christ Church College was painted in 1896 by Fritz Althaus, who lived in Iverson Road, West Hampstead.

The Tower, whose bell ‘Great Tom’ still tolls 101 times each evening at 9.05, was also for three years the central view from Kathleen’s window in Oxford.

Photo by KR

PPS

The good news is that the waist of the jeans is slightly loose on me.

BELL, BOOK AND BOWER

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.

Tennyson,  ‘Locksley Hall’ 

Photo by EP

Louise Gold as Miss Prism and EP as Dr Chasuble

Postscript

Next weekend on BBC Radio 4 Extra you will have three opportunities to hear a wonderful adaptation of Shaw’s Candida from 1977, starring Edward as the Reverend James Morell and Hannah Gordon as his wife ‘Candida’. To be broadcast at 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Saturday 7th July and at 4 a.m. on Sunday 8th. For those of you outside the UK, you can listen online.

And a reminder that you can keep track of Edward’s latest news (including stage appearances, TV and radio listings and reviews) on his designated News blog.

K.R.

REVIEWS AND COMING ATTRACTION

Photo by EP

A new film blog to follow shortly. Meanwhile fresh plaudits for the Windsor reprise of Edward’s singing Canon Chasuble:

Written by Douglas Livingstone with music by Adam McGuiness and Zia Moranne, its songs could have been written by Wilde himself: they are witty, tell a story, are perfectly in keeping with the era and the original play and provide some of the funniest moments. One such occasion is the duet between distinguished actor Edward Petherbridge as the doddery Dr Chasuble, and Louise Gold, founding member of The Spitting Image team, as governess Miss Prism, imitating birds and bees as they sing of their love which ‘all began in a garden’. … Presented with more than just a little nod to an old fashioned variety show and not a touch of pantomime, with lime lights, ornate flats around the proscenium arch and a good dollop of melodrama, The Importance of Being Earnest has certainly grown up since its Hammersmith preview days and if it doesn’t go into the West End, as is rumoured, London’s theatreland will be the worse for it. 

UK Theatre Network (Full review)

Musical highlight, however, is the mock coyness of ‘It All Began in A Garden’, cleverly performed by Louise Gold as Miss Prism and stage veteran Edward Petherbridge as Dr Chasuble, which has the audience in stitches. A jaunty, jocular, little gem of an evening ... Very British, very Windsor – and very good. Oscar would have approved! 

Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle (Full review)

Photo by EP

The show is in its final week at Windsor and closes on Saturday 7th July. To book online, click here.

Stay tuned!

K.R.

THE WEIGHT AND LIGHTNESS OF HISTORY

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. 

H. G. Wells

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Aldous Huxley

I have been thinking globally recently, of the splendour of Greece (Ancient of course), of the Common Man’s life under the Roman Empire, but yesterday we did our final rehearsal-room work and tomorrow The Importance of Being Earnest rehearses on the stage of the Theatre Royal Windsor. I failed to make this precious, fitfully sunny Sunday creative, or even recreative, and certainly it was not global: chores mainly, though I managed three acts of charity.

First I decided to de-clutter my wardrobe and give a dinner suit away to a local charity shop. They seemed only faintly pleased, but perhaps they were surprised that I wanted to check its pockets first. What should I find but a name badge in the breast pocket: ‘Edward Petherbridge, Guest Speaker’. There was a crest that I recognized – Reigate and Banstead Borough Council – and I remembered then that I had actually bought from this same charity shop the very suit I was giving them back. It had been an emergency replacement because I’d found at the last minute that my old suit didn’t really fit (it had been so long since I had appeared in evening dress). On the way out of the shop I saw a very smart shirt with a Jermyn Street label, a snip at £6.50, so I bought it. When a lady called at our house later in the afternoon looking for support for St John’s Ambulance training courses in schools I though here was my chance to be charitable without an ulterior motive. 

But I still have the feeling that I have frittered the day away. I think it is because I came across a prop book in the rehearsal room last week, a slim volume called A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. I told Kathleen how fascinated I was by it, and a copy arrived in the post two days later.

H. G. Wells, 1934. Photo by Howard Coster.
National Portrait Gallery

‘The Neanderthaler, according to Prof. Rutot.’
An illustration from Wells’s A Short History

I feel feckless when I am not making it my business to read such a handily succinct account of everything from the first stirrings in the primeval mud, through the evolution of man, the great personalities and eras up to the particulars of 1922 when the book first appeared (there have been additions in my Penguin paperback by Wells’s son and Raymond Postgate, taking us up to the mid-1960s). 

The book has made the long Tube journeys to rehearsal in Clapham a pleasure, and I was astonished to find in the Independent the other day, a photograph of 37,300-year-old Neanderthal cave art and the claim that ‘4% of every modern European’s genome is traceable to Neanderthal origins.’

‘The Panel of Hands’, El Castillo Cave in northern Spain above
and detail below

Once again I feel disturbed that my life is not more … how can I put it? Elemental? True the little role of Canon Chasuble, with the added treat of his duet with Miss Prism, doesn’t seem on the surface to draw on my 4% of Neanderthal, but any rehearsal worth its salt requires one to live more concentratedly, essentially, and one only has to flick through Wells’s world history, or the Independent for that matter, to realize just how very fortunate one is and to be fired with the determination to make the very best of one’s infinitesimally small role in the great scheme of things, just as soon as one has de-cluttered one’s wardrobe, puzzled over those papers and sent them off to the accountant, etc., etc. … 

Cartoon by Herbert Samuel Thomas.
National Portrait Gallery

Just a few weeks ago Kathleen and I had the pleasure of a private viewing in the Houses of Parliament of some paintings executed by a former resident of West Hampstead, Victorian artist John Rogers Herbert. On our way out we stood under the magnificent hammer-beam roof of vast Westminster Hall, commissioned by Richard II and completed the year he was deposed, 1399, under which grew up the major institutions of the British state and Elizabeth II recently sat down to a celebratory Diamond Jubilee lunch. This medieval roof, the largest of its kind in northern Europe, seems to bear the weight of history lightly, but nonetheless impressively.

Photo by EP

JUBILATIONS AND DRESSING UP

Photo by EP

‘Up to a thousand boats will muster on the River Thames in preparation for the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant.’ So says The Times today in its Jubilee Weekend Guide.

In 1956, three years after Elizabeth’s coronation, Kenneth Tynan wrote marvellously about a rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’. The occasion was the first visit of a theatre company from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember the almost feverish anticipation whipped up by those critics who had been to East Berlin and, as I stood at the back of the circle in the Palace Theatre, I heard the tantalizing fanfare the little pit orchestra of the Berliner Ensemble, weaned on Kurt Weill, made of our national anthem. It was played delicately, as if for a marionette theatre, and with a touch of Handel about it. If we felt our queen and country were being ridiculed, Britain could take it and enjoy the sophisticated, elegant joke. In any case, it was an improvement on the standard pit orchestra rendition. Tynan saw it differently:

The orchestration is backed by a trumpet obbligato so pompous and feeble that it suggests a boy bugler on a rapidly sinking ship.

Which brings me back to tomorrow’s enormous flotilla. We have had the last laugh. The Berliner Ensemble sails on of course but no longer as the cultural flagship of the German Democratic Republic. Of all the revolutionary demonstrations we have seen of late, none have been so benign and bloodless as the tearing down of the Berlin wall.

It so happens that I woke to the words of Gyles Brandreth this morning; he was on the monarchists’ side of the Today debate on Radio 4.

Then I arrived at Clapham for a rehearsal of the musical of The Importance of Being Earnest where he was already singing Lady Bracknell’s part in the number about the handbag. Later he told me he was gong to be the last person to board the last boat in the flotilla and that behind him would be the London Symphony Orchestra. The clue to the success of our Royal Family is, he had said on the programme, the combination of fairytale and history. He and Steve Bell (for the opposition) got nicely tangled in the last moments of their war of attitudes. Gyles had been talking about crowns and fancy costumes being no more real than the Archbishop of Canterbury’s earlier gushing words. ‘Nothing  is real’, and Steve Bell chimed in ironically, pity he didn’t sing: ‘Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.’

Photo by EP

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ for National Anthem? Well, no. Perhaps they were both missing, or avoiding, the point. Only last night Kathleen and I were looking at a coin of the realm and marvelling that even one of the most recent date still bears the inscription DEI. GRA. REG. FID. DEF. (DEI GRATIA REGINA FIDEI DEFENSOR), which, as all good subjects know, meaneth ‘By the Grace of God, Queen and Defender of the Faith’. Perhaps that is something to get hung about.

Photo by EP

Weather permitting, there is to be a community lunch on our green tomorrow. I rather liked seeing it at its quietest tonight: two young oriental men gracefully practising tai chi and a muslim praying to Mecca, though curiously he seemed to be facing south towards the River Thames.

Celebrations in Kilburn for the Royal Wedding, 1981.
Photos by EP

EXPENSIVE EFFECTS ON BANKSIDE

As flies to wanton boys ...

KING LEAR

My voter apathy was such that I didn’t respond to British Actors’ Equity’s invitation to the Peacock Theatre to show solidarity with the Belarus Free Theatre, at home forbidden to act in anything but the official language of Russian, always under threat of prosecution and worse and reduced to giving fugitive performances in private apartments. But I did fork out the top price of £35 to see them act King Lear at the Globe on Bankside. I have no idea whether their high profile champions, Stoppard, Spacey et al, were there too, because the only centre seats left on the day were in the top balcony, a star- and celebrity-free zone.

Grunge was the style: the portions of the kingdom handfuls of earth which the young Lear shovelled into the held-out skirts of his daughters, who had sung their love in Eurovision mode accompanied by the Fool on the piano. A dramatic chance for Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ we thought until we noticed her singing along with them. For reasons that were not clear she too sang solo but gained nil point.

The French King was a doddering grotesque, from an expressionist cabaret, but then Gloucester was a wheelchair-bound incontinent – the business of his arc of urine being captured with difficulty by his bastard son in an enamel bed pan (some laughter from the groundlings for this inexplicable dumb show) accompanied the father considering the faked evidence against the legitimate Edgar who eventually appeared with a friend, both helpless with weed-induced mirth. There was little sign of the longer speeches; they whizzed by, cut and at conversation pitch. What happened to the curse, ‘Blow winds’, ‘Poor naked wretches’, or any of the speeches in the storm? But then the main protagonist here was the blue tarpaulin, waved about by an insistent singing chorus who chucked a plastic bowl of water over Lear. Edgar, meanwhile, had disguised himself as Poor Tom by smearing himself with his own excrement; everybody in the storm took off their clothes in sympathy with his nakedness. I decided this what not King Lear by any stretch of the imagination and exercised my freedom to leave. I don’t know how these actors got out of the authoritarian Belarus, but were I a critic I would find it hard to attribute praise to them that might lend them credibility when they get back.

The irony for me was that the production bore all the hallmarks of the authoritarian eastern European director. One remembers tales of Lubimov flashing his torch from the back of the auditorium to warn the actors that they were too slow, and I vividly remember him in a television documentary demonstrating a piece of business to Ron Cook which by that time I had already seen Cook slavishly reproduce in his performance in Crime and Punishment. I also remember Michael Billington, having been captivated by Lubimov’s Hamlet in Moscow, being disappointed when he saw the same production in English with English actors and realizing how cut about and diminished the play really was under all the pyrotechnics.

I suppose it’s easy in a liberal society to carp when theatre companies don’t aspire to Shakespeare’s greatness but appear instead to be using his material to hang theatrical effects on. This clearly works for some people because one online critic thought the Belarus Free Theatre had given us one of the greatest Lears London had ever seen and that the production comprised one coup de théâtre after another. An example of this was the scene in which Lear confronts his two daughters and they are already conspiring against him and stripping him of his followers. Shakespeare has him humiliatingly caught between their wiles. The cruel domestic politics of this were here replaced by kinetic capers, the daughters embracing Lear around the neck so that he could spin them round in an accelerating turn that threatened to have them parallel to the ground. The business told us nothing of Shakespeare’s scene. These so-called coups de théâtre were really radical replacements and, in this case, the coup was a mere spin-off.

Photo by Simon Kane

And all this borne just along Bankside from where the day before one had endured the Damien Hirst exhibition. I had seen Hirst’s sharks and cow and calf and his spot paintings and pharmaceutical displays before, and I suppose I subjected myself to them again in the hope of seeing what all the fuss was about, since more than one critic had extolled their magnificence even if they didn’t seem able to find particularly resonant adjectives to come to their aid. Can I be right in remembering that Hirst was quoted as saying that he got bored doing the spot paintings and farmed them out for others to do? All one can say is that I got bored after seeing the first. And to reduce what was once a living shark to a pathetic piece of almost punctured plastic seems to me to remove all the mystery from both life and death. And I would far, far rather find myself back with my children at a butterfly farm, wondering at life than looking at his collections of death made into opaque ‘stained-glass windows’. Surely this is curators’ art. Can you imagine anybody you would like to know having a room large enough to accommodate a family comfortably and yet being prepared to house Hirst’s chemist shop? It all seems to me to be a cabinet of curiosities for the pretentious. And yet was there something faintly pleasing in his wall of coloured cooking pans?

Photo by EP

I watched the people coming out of the exhibition for a while. It was impossible to distinguish them from people leaving a supermarket, or perhaps a theatre. People do have a way of wearing their enlightenment, or even disappointment, rather lightly. But eventually two men came out and one said to the other: ‘I expected it to be more … fabulous.’

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, the weather has brought out the best in wild and civilized West Hampstead. A fox takes his ease just over our garden fence and a couple watch the distant white-flannelled cricketers on UCL’s playing fields.

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

Postscript

My friend Kathleen Riley, who manages to be at my elbow and in Sydney at the same time, is actually in London this month and I had the pleasure of attending the Platform to launch her book The Astaires: Fred and Adele in the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, which packed the stalls and spilled over into the circle. Kathleen, aided and abetted by Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred’s daughter (looking remarkably like her father) and choreographer Matthew Bourne, with interlocutor Al Senter, held us all spellbound. But I confess that, although the long queue for signed copies afterwards was equally impressive, I enjoyed a more thinly attended event at our local bookshop in West End Lane where she and I, dressed to the nines for the occasion, held a heart to heart in public about the glories of her book. 

The Astaires is written with all the rigour you’d expect from a classical scholar and all the flair you have no right to expect to be combined with the whiff of Broadway and the West End of the interwar years. It seems Kathleen recreates the entire era whilst sitting next to an open trunk containing two pairs of famous dancing shoes.