The news that Rain Man starring Josh Hartnett and Adam Godley will open ten days later than scheduled means that I now have no excuse for not going to Eurobeat at the Novello, the show that was clashing on the same opening night.

The delay must mean that the producers are waiting for a change in the weather, or for Josh Hartnett to learn how to act on a stage; he hasn’t done so, apparently, since drama school.

Rain also stopped play at Lord’s on Sunday, where the resurgent England team under Kevin Pietersen’s captaincy squashed South Africa in a 50-over contest that, after delays and stoppages, was reduced to thirty-nine, then thirty-three, and finally just twenty overs. That we had any match at all was something of a miracle in the inspissated gloom. 

Mind you, the gloom was not nearly as inspissated as most of the chaps in the hospitality boxes.

This really was a day for the drowning of sorrows, and quite a few cats. And a good opportunity to wander round the ground and bump into theatre types in the bars and meeting points.

First spot was publisher Ion Trewin, son of the late  J C Trewin, whose critical muffler adorned more first nights than I’ve had hot dinners. Like us, Ion was in the Warner Stand, so named in honour of Sir Pelham (Plum) Warner, former president of the MCC, no relation to Jack, but grandfather of the brilliant writer and analyst of myths and fairytales, Marina Warner.

By lunchtime — and still no sign of a ball being bowled — we had come across West End executive Bill Taylor, formerly of the Really Useful Group, now booking Strictly Come Dancing all round the country and the new musical Sister Act into the Palladium; and Ian Ritchie, genial chairman of the City of London music festival and his wife, Kathryn, who runs the London Symphony Orchestra.

And then, lurking behind us in the enclosed Warner Stand bar, we found Robert Noble of Cameron Mackintosh’s office and Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures company. Robert introduced us briefly to Cameron’s doctor, who didn’t look all that well himself but immensely cheerful with it. Then Robert started muttering about the dance critics and what they’d said about Bourne’s new Dorian Gray dance drama in Edinburgh. I said I’d go along and see for myself at Sadler’s Wells next week.

By the time play started, I was rather sorry we had to sit down and watch it. The day proceeded merrily under glowering skies which darkened even further as we left the ground and I checked my messages: Ken Campbell had been found dead at lunchtime in his home in Epping Forest. That really did put the kybosh on it. It never rains but it pours.

I loved Ken Campbell but he used to make me nervous. More than that, he once reduced me to a gibbering, tearful wreck in the bar of a Nottingham Hotel where he assaulted me verbally for being a critic. I fully understood his point of view but didn’t want it rammed down my throat quite so forcefully.

Anyone else who did the kind of work he did would not get away with it. But Campbell was a sort of genius, with a great gift for enthusiasm and seeing the humorous side of ridiculous phenomena.

Take nubbing for instance. Nubbing is the lost art, practised by Victorian actors, of inventing nonsense speeches in Shakespearian-style blank verse to cover their memory lapses. There was a time in his recent improvisatory work that Ken seemed to be on the verge of creating a whole new comic style of acting by subverting traditional customs and methods. 

He was requested by Mark Rylance at the Globe one year to devise a competition of acting by categories, as in “best laughing entrance,” “best out of breath messenger entrance,” and “best prolonged death scene.”

I hope he didn’t execute one of the latter on Sunday, but it sounds as though he just passed out with a heart attack; the dogs were all relatively happy and recently fed, so the end could not have been too grisly or indeed prolonged.

I want to know one day what the Shakespearian scholar Stanley Wells thinks about Ken’s theory of Angus in Macbeth. He was convinced that Angus was originally a much bigger part, but that the actor consigned to it failed to realise this.

Angus, Ken thought, was a dwarfish double agent, who also popped up as the Old Man and Third Murderer in other scenes. But the actor was deprived of his lines by the author when Shakespeare realised with terrible foreboding during rehearsals that he might have to play the part himself; the small actor simply wasn’t up to it.

So there really are no small parts, only small actors. And how small, come to think of it, was Shakespeare? Too big for Angus, or too small?

“When that I was but a little tiny boy, with a hey ho, the wind and the rain…for the rain it raineth every day.” And the rain man cometh, but not as soon as we thought. Is this a clue in Twelfth Night? And is Josh Hartnett guilty of flouting the superstitious rule of never opening an umbrella inside a theatre? I think he needed Ken to see him through the first night with a few tips on “best rain soaked West End debut.” 
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.