Happy Travels, Happy New Year
My immediate manor extends from Gospel Oak to Belsize Park, and within its boundaries this morning, at the very last gasp, the veritable fag end, of the year, I bump into the two television travelling Michaels, Palin and Wood, within ninety minutes of each other. Even the most committed adventurers in our midst are taking a short domestic breather.
Michael Palin is spreading good wishes and undiluted bonhomie in the local newsagents. He is nothing but nice, this man; no wonder Maggie Smith had only one way of describing him on the two film sets they shared: “The Saint.”
Michael Wood is walking the dog on Haverstock Hill, not even relishing the success of his wonderful BBC series about travelling through India. “All the acclaim doesn’t find you the next job,” he says, reminding me that he and his wife run their own small documentary film production company.
He is more optimistic about the RSC doing Shakespeare’s “lost” play, Cardenio, which he flagged up in his Shakespeare series a couple of years ago. I dutifully beetled off to Oxford to see a student production of the piece. It was terrible.
My own travels this year pale in any comparison with the two Michaels, but I seem to have made up for it over the Christmas period with a lightning tour of West Yorkshire to see friends and relations, taking in Harewood House, the Eccup reservoir, Saturday shopping in Halifax covered market (two stiff outdoor brushes for £6; you can’t say fairer than that), a birthday party in the Calder valley, dinner in the Roundhay Fox at Headingley, a tramp round Golden Acre Park near Adel.
My plan for tonight is to see in the New Year at the top of Parliament Hill Fields with a bunch of neighbours and a couple of bottles of champagne. Weather permitting, the view of the fireworks from the Eye to the City will be spectacular, far exceeding anything those old chums of Guy Fawkes were hoping to see when they dashed up to this same vantage point on the night of the Gunpowder Plot.
I’ll make a few wishes for the New Year, too: that the Bristol Old Vic and the Northcott, Exeter, survive in rude artistic health; that someone younger than either Jude Law or David Tennant plays Hamlet; that someone produces a really good pantomime in central London; that some fresh new critical voices emerge (no sign of any); and that the Arts Council takes far less notice of the current critical orthodoxy that the future of British Theatre lies with Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, Filter, Told by an Idiot and the rest.
Anyone who saw the two best productions of the year — the Maly’s Platonov at the Barbican and the Katona Joszef’s Ivanov at the Dublin Theatre Festival — knows that truly great theatre is rooted in the hearts and souls of great actors in a deep-dyed scientific ensemble ethic of the sort we simply don’t have in this country.
And when you read the most depressing statement of the year — Marianne Elliott’s in an interview over the weekend that she has no interest in running a theatre building or a permanent company, preferring to flit from one project to the next without any fixed objective — you realise that however good the theatre may be in this country — and it is fairly good — it will never be great again.
Michael Boyd at the RSC has an inkling of this, but you can hardly see him fulfilling his ambitions in the current climate and constitution of the company he runs. Oh, one last wish: that he proves me wrong!