Big Man Leaves the Building
My friend David Robins died last Saturday and many people in the theatre will miss him. For the past fifteen years he has been grants director at the John Lyon’s Charity, supporting the educational programmes at the National, Royal Court, Hampstead and Donmar Warehouse theatres, as well as countless schools’ projects and initiatives.
Prior to that job, he worked for the Prince of Wales Trust. And prior to that he was an academic sociologist, underground journalist (on the International Times, Ink and the early Time Out), dedicated squatter and all round good guy.
He always remained the good guy, but he changed. He manned the barricades during the Paris evenements of 1968. He knew Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the situationists. But he’d also seen Paul Scofield as King Lear and Beckett’s Endgame. And he renounced Marxism long before it was fashionable, let alone necessary, to do so.
I sat in the bar of the Royal Court last night, next to the great portrait of Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, remembering his life with our mutual friend Peter Ansorge. They were both at Kilburn Grammar School together and visited the Aldwych (home of the RSC) and the Court as sixth-formers. “We saw the first Saturday night performance of Chips With Everything here,” said Ansorge. “The seats in the upper circle were five bob each and Tynan’s review appeared the next day.”
David’s working class Jewishness was important to him, but not more important than a good pickle or the World Cup, especially if Brazil or Italy were playing well. His dad was a barber, and a boxer, and he loved the street-fighting spirit of writers like Brecht and Norman Mailer, jazzmen like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, singers like Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
He also had this amazing knack of making it seem as if all the disparate parts of his life flowed from the same source, so that his work with the charity was no different, really, from having a good meal, or arguing about the theatre, or fixing a toilet. He was brilliant at DIY, chess, computers and friendship.
He was also the most charismatic of men, a really sexy guy, and I don’t know anyone who ever met him who didn’t, in a way, love him. His widow, Anna, can take great comfort in that as she picks up her important work as an art historian, and his children, Daniel and Sophie, will be great ambassadors for his memory. Dan works in an architects’ office and Sophie has joined the Young Writers programme at the Royal Court…her dialogue is already starting to crackle.