A Moan about Manzi’s and Mums
Why do we feel such a pang of nostalgia and sadness when a favourite landmark closes its doors for good? There is no sight sadder in the West End at the moment than the bleak emptiness that is now Manzi’s Restaurant on Lisle Street.
Manzi’s was more than a fish restaurant, it was an institution, and somewhere that guaranteed a sense of everything being all right with the world even if it wasn’t. The waiters were rude and the food was ordinary. But it was Manzi’s, and it was part of the ritual of going to the theatre, as Bertorelli’s and Chez Victor once were.
It also had a secret saucy side to it. A publisher once told me that there were salons privees upstairs that you could hire for romantic purposes after a good, or at least merry, lunch. How did she know? She blushed to answer and we ordered our coffee.
More importantly, Manzi’s was the favoured lunch spot of Anthony Pye-Jeary, chief executive of De Wynters, the theatrical marketing and publicity business, when flying solo between meetings and not schmoozing clients or colleagues at the more fashionable restaurants.
Where will Pye-Jeary now go for his single fish dish, his sole sole? I shall have to launch a far-reaching enquiry if not send out a search party. Pye-Jeary and Andrew Lloyd Webber once planned on opening together an upmarket cheeseboard and charcuterie joint along the lines of the old, long-gone French Club in St James’s. Now might be the time to strike.
Apropos of charcuterie, I once reviewed Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil in their home barracks on the outskirts of Paris, an address known as the Cartoucherie (an old bullet-manufacturing plant).
Unfortunately, in the excited rush to the typewriter (this was in pre-keyboard days), I referred to this venue as the Charcuterie, which at least allowed me to defend the blunder by claiming that a lot of the actors were hammy.
The opening of The Vortex with Felicity Kendal and Dan Stevens reminds us how extraordinary a play it is, how modern and how timeless. The Coward role, Nicky Lancaster, is the first European mixed-up yuppie — “I’ve grown up all wrong” he cries, referring to his drug habit, his general decadence, his spoilt brattishness, his latent homosexuality.
Coward’s themes of incestuous dependency, maternal abandon and the absentee father figure are perennial in our drama, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Ibsen and, in May, Polly Stenham’s award winning That Face, trailing gongs and glory on its way to the Duke of York’s.
I already envisage a battle to the death for top whacked-out mum honours between the glorious Miss Kendal and the soon to be ferocious and slatternly Lindsay Duncan. And tickets to either show might make a witty, if slightly ungracious, present for Mother’s Day this weekend.
