IN THE WORKS

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.

KING LEAR,  I.i.36

My two-man King Lear project with Paul Hunter starts rehearsing only in December but now has the advantage of a director in Kathryn Hunter, who has played both Lear and the Fool (she was, in fact, the first British actress to play Lear on the professional stage)! She and I had a very stimulating couple of hours together the other day. 

Here is a very recent charcoal sketch I did of Paul and me and a photo of a five-year-old terracotta study I did at a pottery class – ‘Lear and the Fool in the Storm’, which I fear I destroyed.

The show, which has the working title My Perfect Mind, will tour early in 2013 with a London premiere in spring. Dates and venues will be posted on the News blog in the New Year.

A new blog is imminent and I leave you with a sneak preview in the form of a photo I took in Moscow nearly thirty years ago.

SUMMER'S LATE LEASE

Because the sun is much too sultry
and one must avoid its ultry-violet ray.

Noël Coward,  ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ 

Just recently, whilst working in my loft, I rediscovered two still-life drawings I did from summers past.

Late in the season, summer has blazed forth again. I spent a still and sultry Saturday afternoon in my hammock, under the shade of the umbrella glimpsed in the first pastel, reading Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. The book, which is heavily autobiographical, is set in a special prison ‘institute’ in the suburbs of Moscow at the end of 1949. The inmates are engineers and scientists who have been arrested in Stalin’s purges. Many major inventions and improvements in Soviet weaponry took place in these prison research institutes or sharashki. Here, in contrast to the ordinary concentration camps, the prisoners were adequately fed and clothed and ‘enjoyed’ better working conditions.

Gustave Doré’s depiction of Limbo

The title of Solzhenitsyn’s novel alludes to the first circle of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Limbo, where the souls of the pagan philosophers and poets, and other virtuous pre-Christians, dwell in relative freedom. Unlike the other circles of Hell, this realm has verdant meadows, clear skies and clean air.

Limbo as depicted by Delacroix on the cupola of the Palais du Luxembourg

As in most things – even matters infernal – there is a West Hampstead connection. The first full English translation of The Divine Comedy was published by the Reverend Henry Francis Cary in 1814. He lies beside Samuel Johnson in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Johnson and Cary’s separate recuperative quests for an Elysian realm this side of eternity brought them to the green fields and healthful air of West End village, long before the coming of the railways.

West End Fields by an unknown artist

Cary’s translation of Dante is said to have influenced Keats’s ‘Hyperion’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and, according to Leigh Hunt, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. It also influenced Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Crossing the Bar’. Keats carried Cary’s translation in his knapsack on a tour of Scotland in 1818; Ruskin is supposed to have carried it with him always; and I have occasionally carried it on the London Underground – an underworld undreamt of by Dante or Cary – as the translation is stored miraculously in my Kindle.

As I dozed in my hammock and the enveloping summer heat yesterday afternoon, just up the hill from where, 200 years ago, Leigh Hunt sought bucolic bliss in his ‘little, lull’d abode’, I echoed in spirit his prayer for the earthly comforts of Musae, libertas, otia, libri, Hortique sylvesque – Muses, freedom, rest, books, gardens and woods.

A patch of Elysium in modern West Hampstead.
Photo by EP

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