Critics honour Tom Stoppard
The critics’ circle annual award for distinguished service to the arts was given to Tom Stoppard at a convivial lunch in the National Theatre yesterday. Sir Tom, gracious to a fault, even revealed that he had followed Charles Spencer’s advice in writing a play about Syd Barrett, the fallen angel of Pink Floyd, who turns up in Rock ‘N’ Roll.
Spencer, as drama section chairman, repaid the compliment by saying that he always went to work in honour of Stoppard’s shambolically attired critics in The Real Inspector Hound: “You’re not going to the theatre looking like that, are you?” his wife asks as he sets off from the suburbs.
But Spencer also paid fine tribute, pointing out that for all his brilliance, Stoppard was fundamentally a humanitarian libertarian who was increasingly vociferous about human rights and freedom of speech.
The lunch — salmon, guinea fowl, apple crumble — was hosted by film critic Marianne Gray, president of the circle, who revealed that Catherine Cookson couldn’t be with us because she was having a baby.
This was a big surprise until we realised she had meant to say “Catherine Cooper,” our events organiser. But the slip was catching. Spencer referred to a scary character in The Devil Wears Pravda, obviously some satanic creature sheathed in a deceptively truthful armour-plating, and then Stoppard leant across the table and asked Georgina Brown how was life on the Obs (she’s on the Mail on Sunday)…
It was all becoming slightly surreal, but in a good way. It reminded me of the first time I met Stoppard, when I was on the FT, and he’d acceded to an interview request. He said, “I didn’t really want to do this interview, but I wanted to see what you looked like.” And he also said that he avoided the publicity circus whenever possible, unable to envisage Samuel Beckett, say, ever appearing on Call My Bluff.
This mixture of wariness and charm is of course instantly attractive, and the lunch went off superbly well, everyone being made to feel perfectly at ease in the presence of the great man.
Stoppard reminisced about recently walking down Fleet Street and feeling such a pang of nostalgia for the newspapers that no longer exist there. And even some of the old critics, maybe, who were represented at the lunch by Peter Lewis, once of the Daily Mail, and Irving Wardle once of The Times and latterly the Independent on Sunday.
Over drinks, Lewis told me of grand old Philip Hope-Wallace of the Guardian refusing an invitation to an out of the way theatre with a great cry of: “I refuse to visit that upholstered sewer: send de Jongh!” (Nicholas was at that time the paper’s arts correspondent and served as deputy both to Hope-Wallace and later Michael Billington.)
Another happy discovery was that Marianne’s husband is the publicity guru John Reiss, chairman of Premier PR, whose colleagues Janine Shalom and company we deal with as journalists on a daily basis. Reiss put his skills to practical use by snapping Stoppard with the critics on the Lyttelton terrace balcony as we all basked good-naturedly in the lunchtime sun.
I came down to earth with a terrible jolt in the afternoon. First I had to rush home and sort out a kitchen crisis over a new oven delivery. Then I went to Armageddon. Well, I went to the theatre, the Almeida, to be precise.
My local North London line station at Gospel Oak was teeming with police, vans and motorbikes as they swooped on a crowd of suspected knife-carrying drug pushers. And at Highbury and Islington, the area was sealed off following a chemical leak scare in the Cock pub just by the station. You could not move for fire engines and other assorted emergency vehicles.
You can imagine with what might relief, therefore, I crept into the Almeida to watch a play — and what a play! –about the last days of Judas Iscariot, Jesus Christ, the crisis in faith and the small matter of the political and religious destiny of the universe.
