Redgraves remembered
It was the centenary of Michael Redgrave’s birth last March, but I don’t recall reading much about it. Hooray for the Chichester Film Festival, then, which has been running a season of his films (and of Vanessa’s), including the film of the National Theatre Uncle Vanya which started life on the stage of the pleasant cathedral city.
Redgrave’s Vanya has never been bettered — not by Nicol Willliamson, Michael Gambon, Stephen Dillane or Simon Russell Beale, all tremendous in the role — and his sadder than sad comical performance was a jewel set in the silver sea of Olivier as Astrov, Joan Plowright as Sonya, Sybil Thorndike as the old nurse and Max Adrian as Waffles.
Chichester screened this film, alongside the glorious Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes, The Browning Version, The Importance of Being Earnest (Redgrave as Jack, Michael Denison as a definitive Algy, Joan Greenwood and Dorothy Tutin delightful as Gwendolen and Cecily, and Edith “a handbag?!” Evans, of course) and such wonderful rarities as Dead of Night, in which Redgrave played a ventriloquist possessed by his own dummy and — this Saturday, introduced by his son Corin — The Stars Look Down, a politically engaged film by Carol Reed set in a Northern mining community.
It’s curious how quickly forgotten Redgrave seems to have become, save for the efforts of his own family and the recent biography, Secret Dreams, by Alan Strachan (it’s ironic, too, that neither Laurence Olivier nor John Gielgud has a book about them half as good as Strachan’s).
He was ill for the last fifteen years of his life and enjoyed no Indian summer similar to that of Alec Guinness or Peggy Ashcroft. But what a consummate actor he was, no-one better at projecting the anguish of failure or the frailty of the human heart.
You looked into his soul as if through a sheet of clear glass, and I think Vanessa has this quality, too, though she’s far more emotionally resilient an actor. She’s invariably the best thing in recent British movies like Venus or Atonement, but her early performances in Antonioni’s Blowup and Ken Russell’s The Devils are not only magnificent in themselves, but part of screen projects that were outstanding works of art.
I watched Blowup for the first time in years the other morning at the festival, and was transfixed by its beauty, its eeriness (the sound of the trees in the South London park is a master stroke of composition) and the sexiness of the actors: not only Vanessa as the enigmatic beauty hugging her breasts to herself along with the truth of what happened; but also David Hemmings as the impish David Bailey-style photographer, Sarah Miles as his languid wife, John Castle as her painter lover, and Jane Birkin as a romping groupie in the photographer’s studio.
I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so, but Peter Bowles as the newspaper editor is not quite in the same class of sex appeal, but he’s very good in the party scene where he’s more stoned than the length of Chesil Beach.
The festival takes place in a modest hall on the fringe of the city, not too far from the theatre, and a delightful day out it provided, too. I gave a talk, which went fairly well, to a small but perfectly formed bunch of buffs and locals and spent an enjoyable hour or so in the bar afterwards with my friends Cynthia and John and the artistic director Roger Gibson.
I’m sorry I missed the cinema’s recent retrospective of the work of producer Kenith Trodd, including television plays by Dennis Potter, Simon Gray and Stephen Poliakoff. One of the films shown was Gray’s Old Flames, starring Stephen Fry and Simon Callow and containing direct allusions to theatre critics, even mentioning the poor creatures — myself, Billington and I think Wardle — by name, and not in a nice way.
Live critic-baiting was taken up for a while by Stephen Fry who once wrote a newspaper column containing an embarrassing scene at the Gates of St Peter where my ghost arrived for admission. “And what did you do?” enquired the rock. “I criticised things,” I replied, weakly. Whereupon St Peter exploded and cast me below into everlasting fire.
I must remember to come out with something more ingratiating when the time comes. I’ll start doing charity work immediately. Will Stephen say that he once played Oscar Wilde, and how far will that get him?
Actually, that Wilde film contains one of Vanessa’s few off-colour performances, as the Irish mother of Oscar, intoned drably in a stage Irish accent. Otherwise the film’s a beauty, though I’m not sure whether Fry is just perfect as Wilde, or not acting at all. He’s not all that convincing in Reading Gaol, which is where he really does seem to start acting.
The rest of the cast, especially Michael Sheen as Robert Ross, Jennifer Ehle as Constance, Tom Wilkinson as the Marquess of Queensberry and Jude Law as his son and Oscar’s nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas, are all superb.