Pullman prologue to the Piano party
What use is sitting alone in your room? There’s no option, really, at this time of year, but to come hear the music play. Which I did big time last night, first at my literary agent’s party in Soho and then at our office do near Oxford Circus.
Mind you, I had something to celebrate anyway. Our son rang from a snowy New York where he said he had proposed to his girlfriend at the top of the Rockefeller Centre and had been accepted. He did so on his birthday, which he happens to share with Beethoven, Noel Coward and Christopher Biggins, so I hope the genius of all three shines on their future life together.
The A P Watt gathering in Soho House was a wonderfully eclectic crowd including Arthur Smith — who confirmed he will be gracing the Critics Circle awards at the end of January; “one of my favourite gigs” he said — Junk novelist Melvin Burgess, journalists Nick Cohen and Andrew Anthony and such eminent literati as Andrew O’Hagan, Helen Dunmore and Philip Pullman.
Pullman, a man of almost suffocating modesty and pleasant charm, told me how some minor health problems had necessitated his resignation from the National Theatre board, where he has served with such distinction these past few years.
He reiterated his view that he could not imagine a better stage version of His Dark Materials than the one we had and that he never ceased to marvel at the ability of Nicholas Hytner to go straight to the heart and the point of every scene in rehearsal.
Pullman’s a great Shavian and is justifiably proud — in a modest way, of course — of having persuaded Hytner to take a second look at Saint Joan and Major Barbara and then arrange for them to be done as well as they were.
His association with A P Watt goes back to his Oxford days with head honcho Caradoc King, with whom he was in Exeter College. I’m always forgetting names, but I rarely forget a face. But as I left the party, I was hailed by a chap called James Wilson whom I simply could not place. He said we had been exact contemporaries in the same college and that he now wrote historical novels.
I was so flabbergasted that I fell into a passing taxi and hurried to join the Whatsonstage office party which had been in full swing at a karaoke bar and was now settling down in the back room of a Pitcher and Piano venue.
The food was better than okay, the wine flowed and we all gave each other presents. One of mine was a voodoo doll which I can turn into anyone I please by adding a photo, drawing on designs with a fabric pen and then sticking in pins for my hex.
Whom shall I honour with this diabolical treatment? The President of the Society of London Theatres? Simon Cowell? Blanche Marvin? The Mayor of London?
It can’t be the latter, for my son’s fiancee is the younger sister of one of Boris Johnson’s few remaining deputies, Kit Malthouse, and before he, too, resigns (perish the thought) I hope to engage Boris in a campaign to abolish programme charges in West End theatres, reduce all ticket prices, open all theatres on Sundays, improve all bar service and compel managements to make theatregoers feel more welcome when they honour them with their business.
I see I’m now starting to form a few New Year resolutions. They’re on hold for now, though, as I plunge once more into the party maelstrom. Now, who will I spot in Joe Allen’s this lunchtime, I wonder?