Star bangled manners, on stage and off
The Abbey in Dublin has been quietly developing a relationship with Sam Shepard, thanks to the midwifery of actor Stephen Rea, who became a close friend of the playwright when he spent a few years in London in the early 1970s.
The Abbey has just announced that Shepard has written a new play, Ages of the Moon, specifically for Rea and his brilliant fellow Celtic thesp Sean McGinley for a world premiere by the Liffey next March. Meanwhile, Shepard’s Kicking A Dead Horse starring Rea heads for New York next month before fetching up at the Almeida in September.
I was pondering the valour and intelligence of most actors I know after spotting a particularly crass remark by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard the other day: something about what pleasure it always gave him to see an actor receive his or her come-uppance in the public arena.
It’s a very British media thing this, the resentment towards the despised “luvvies” whose preeminence in their field makes people like Gilligan seethe with envy and self-important superiority.
On Monday night I went straight from the Bush Theatre — where Joseph Fiennes and Ian Hart, two wonderful actors, are appearing in a quirkily imperfect play about sex offenders in Iowa, 2,000 Feet Away — to host a question and answer session with the cast of Pygmalion at the Old Vic.
Every single member of the cast — with emphatic apologies for absence from one or two — took the stage after a long, four-act performance to share their thoughts on Shaw and the world of his play with an interested audience of a few dozen punters.
None of them had to do this, none of them got paid for doing it. But Tim Pigott-Smith, Michelle Dockery, Barbara Jefford, James Laurenson and the rest spoke generously and wittily until the stage management asked us to kindly leave the stage shortly after 11pm. Not only that: Sir Peter Hall, the director, came in specially after dinner to join us, too.
And yesterday I enjoyed an extremely merry catch-up lunch with my friend and colleague Georgina Brown in the Wolseley. The celebrity count was fairly low, Lloyd Grossman switching tables in the inner sanctum to have what appeared to be two lunches, while David Lan of the Young Vic was being entertained by some big hitters on the arts funding front.
But the two actors in the room who most delighted us were Jonathan Pryce and Denise van Outen, two big stars with uninflated egos who are not only more intelligent and interesting than most of us critics who write about them, but outstandingly gifted artists in their own right. Why would old mother Gilligan take any pleasure in their come-uppance, should anything so awful ever happen to them?
Georgina and I shared our main courses, they were so delicious (monk fish and risotto, and a cheese souffle with thin chips) and then shared a dessert of banana split. We didn’t want any more, having seen Jo Fiennes in the Bush play gorge on waffles and maple syrup and double helpings of hamburger. How Fiennes stays in character while remaining so thin is a mystery and a marvel to behold.
The unsinkable dolly Brown then scooted off on her bicycle, parked by a lamppost right outside the restaurant, while I headed off to a meeting in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and later joined my colleagues at Whatsonstage to watch the Italy v France football match in a lively Tottenham Court Road bar.
The outcome of an Italian victory was horribly inevitable after France’s best player was injured and a defender sent off for committing a foul and conceding a penalty kick. There was none of the pulsating excitement or incredible plot twists, though, of the Czechoslovakian defeat by Turkey at the weekend; the Czechs were winning by two goals with fifteen minutes to play and then Turkey scored three times.
Theatre rarely gets as exciting as that, though my only five-star outings of the year so far come mighty close: Philip Ridley’s Piranha Heights at the Soho, Anthony Neilson’s Relocated in the Theatre Upstairs, and the reggae musical The Harder They Come at the Playhouse.
Oh yes, and Vanessa Redgrave (four star plus) in The Year of Magical Thinking at the National. But she’s probably one of those actors Andrew Gilligan can’t wait to see get her come-uppance any day soon…
