When Harry Met Willy
Murray Melvin is not the only actor to have told me that Harry H Corbett’s Richard II for Joan Littlewood at Stratford East was the finest performance he has ever seen by anyone on a stage. That view was corroborated in last night’s television play The Curse of Steptoe in which Harry wrestled with his conscience for “selling out” to sitcom.
Clare Higgins popped up as Littlewood to tell Harry that he was a Richard “for the masses” and that he knocked Gielgud and his cronies into a cocked hat.
Harry’s dad in Steptoe, Wilfrid Brambell, elicited a more tragic comparison with Gielgud when he was shown being nicked for cottaging in a men’s lavatory. Corbett died aged 57 in 1982, Brambell in 1985. The play — a sort of “Terry Johnson by numbers” number – barely scraped the surface.
At the root of it lay two themes: the loneliness of the long-running television star, and the conflict between theatre and the small screen as a source of new drama and great performances.
Philip Davis’s brilliant little buttoned-up Brambell suggested a world of etiquette and repression soothed with alcohol, while Jason Isaacs’s Harry hinted at both monstrous talent and monstrous frustration. Roger Allam was a smooth as silk televison producer, Tom Sloan, and Rory Kinnear one of the scriptwriters, Alan Simpson.
Despite being compellingly watchable, the predominant sound was of boxes being ticked. The raw bleeding heart of drama was absent, and wrapped up anyway in a “production values” obsession with period detail and nostalgia. But this BBC4 series promises more performance treats with Ken Stott playing Tony Hancock and David Walliams of Little Britain, Frankie Howerd.
By the end of it we shall be asking ourselves the same old question. Is there any such thing as a happy comedian?
Zoe Tapper played Corbett’s first wife Sheila Steafel. I am delighted to see that Steafel — a brilliant comedienne and indeed zany in her own right –is appearing as Fanny Brice’s mother in Funny Girl this summer at Chichester.
Corbett is rightly remembered for his wonderful performance as the bolshie younger rag and bone man, but his character’s dreams of getting out of a rut and into a better life, always comically frustrated, were part of the actor’s own sense of failure.
He never played Hamlet, though he did play a gravedigger to Paul Scofield’s directed by Peter Brook, and that must have rankled. Richard II speaks his own epitaph: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Jason Isaacs muttered this line a couple of times in Corbett’s sitting room. It was not the same, or as sad, as hearing it on a stage, or in the right context.
This wonderful actor is memorialised only in the Corbett Theatre at the E15 Acting School. I always assumed that he had to put the “H” in his name because of the fame of the Sooty and Sweep puppeteer, Harry Corbett. When asked what the “H” stood for, he would reply with exaggerated Cockney defiance, “H-anything.” And I dare say he got fed up with being asked if he was Ronnie’s dad, too.
