Announcing the recruitment of Sian Phillips to replace Michael Ball (overweighed with commitments, and lots of pies) on the Theatre Book prize judging panel, we were told that this fine actress was “no stranger to boos.”

We should have been told, of course, that she was “no stranger to books” — as she’s published three volumes of autobiography. But the hastily corrected misprint is already one of my favourites, if not one of hers.

No Stranger to Boos, might indeed be a good title for Sian’s fourth volume, along the lines of Diana Rigg’s No Turn Unstoned, in which she cheerfully reports John Simon’s review of her performance in the nude scene of Abelard and Heloise: “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.”

Ah, those were the days, when insults had good witty provenance and an air of majesty. Rigg’s book is a wonderful repository of the best of them, but it doesn’t include Groucho Marx’s message to a writer friend: “I saw your play last night in adverse circumstances. The curtain was up.”

It does, though, include Clive James’s droll summary of a television Shakespeare: “The Winter’s Tale was worthily done, but one gets uncomfortable for the actors when they are surrounded by cubes and cones. You can’t quell the fear that if one of them sits on a cone instead of a cube, then the blank verse will suffer.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 10:49 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.