Tramp on the Heath
Sometimes you just have to put your foot down with a firm hand, bite the bullet, clear the diary and do what you promised yourself to do many moons ago.
In the case of a tramp on Hampstead Heath with Irving Wardle, the great former drama critic on The Times and the Independent on Sunday, it was a promise made in 1989. At least that’s when Irving told me we made the tentative arrangement.
As he’s just caught up for lunch with Iain Mackintosh, the theatre architect and producer, after making a putative date in 1987, I suppose we’ve done rather well.
Still as fit as a fiddle at 78 years of age, Irving hasn’t changed a jot over the years. Wiry, inquisitive, slightly nervy — Jonathan Miller once asked me. “Is Wardle still twitching away in that anorak of his?” before diagnosing a severe case of “anoraksia nervosa.”
We tramped for an hour and half and ended up with a refreshing pint of Adnam’s ale in the Spaniard’s Inn. Irving still walks for miles — he had to give up the running after cartilage trouble– plays the piano, dotes on his granddaughter, attends conferences, writes articles and pages of dialogue for his own amusement.
It was a real treat to talk of old friends, new enthusiasms, the success of the National Theatre, the careeers he has known intimately over the years — Christopher Fry, Harold Pinter (it was Irving, no less than Harold Hobson, who stuck up for The Birthday Party from the off), Simon Gray and George Devine.
His step-father was an intimate of James Agate, the legendary critic on The Sunday Times before Hobson, who used to swish around town in his opera cloak and go from the race-track to the concert hall to the theatre to the Cafe Royal in one continuous sweep of self-aggrandising activity. “Why do you do it?” someone once asked him, plaintively. “Fame, dear boy, fame is the only spur.”
Irving has always struck me as the ultimate antithesis of Agate, and indeed of any stereotyped notion of what you might mean by a dramatic critic. He’s alwyas been quietly spoken, unmalicious (until really pushed), lucid of thought and impeccably well informed, with a deep and abiding memory of performances all over the world down the years.
We hugged and parted and promised to have another tramp some time soon…maybe in 2020?