There is, following the deaths of first Paul Scofield and then Tony Church, a real sense of the end of an era. Peter Hall rang me to eulogise Church and commented sadly on losing so many friends and key colleagues, not forgetting the delightful backstage boffin Michael Hallifax, one of Hall’s core admin team when he moved the National onto the South Bank in 1976.

Hallifax will be remembered at the NT on Tuesday in the Olivier stalls window they call “the cathedral” which seems appropriate for so elegantly episcopal a character and might be doubly so, later on, for Church.

I hope the Northcott, Exeter, as well as the RSC, arrange something celebratory for Church. After writing Church’s obituary for the Guardian I was kicking myself for not making the Howard Brenton link the day after Brenton’s Never So Good opened to the most positive reviews I think that erstwhile so-called firebrand has ever received.  

Church commissioned and presented a version by Brenton of Measure For Measure set on a cricket field. I think the director was Jane Howell, who also directed the Northcott premiere of Edward Bond’s Bingo in which John Gielgud played Shakespeare (to Arthur Lowe’s candescently funny Ben Jonson) when the play was re-mounted at the Royal Court.
 
This sense of sadness has been remarked to me, too, by David Warner, who is not a sentimental man but who feels the passing of his old RSC friends like Ian Richardson, Scofield and now Tony “The Established” Church as he calls him, very keenly indeed.

Church was losing his sight towards the end of his life but insisted on being in Stratford for the farewell performance in the old theatre before it was demolished. Warner says that Church, aided by his son whispering the lines into his ear, recited Prospero’s valedictory speech and had a profound effect on all present.

All of which puts the unaccountable arrival of Peter Pan in Spanish in the West End into bizarre relief. I whizzed by a lunch party at the Wolsey to catch the matinee opening this weekend and tried to explain why I would want to forsake the company of Christopher Biggins for an Iberian Pedro Pan, let alone an Iberian musical version of Pedro Pan; I couldn’t.

Still, it was fairly funny up to a point. All aboard the “Ole Rioja” the pirates shouted, like some manic toast, when what they really meant was all aboard the Jolly Roger.

I sat next to a bemused Benedict Nightingale who kept muttering that he could have been at home watching Chelsea play Middlesborough on the box. Ben then seemed distinctly reluctant to stand up with the rest of us and sing in Spanish that he really did believe in fairies. I don’t see why; there’s a few of them who play for Chelsea, after all.
 

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