Seasonal notes: it’s a Christmas wrap!
The best thing about Christmas is the daily delivery of cards, the news from friends and the pleasure of decorating the house. The worst thing is sudden bad news, to whit that of Adrian Mitchell’s death on Saturday at the age of 76. Like Ken Campbell, the year’s other too early departing genius, he seemed ever youthful, indestructible, child-like in the best possible way.
Mitchell was a marvellous and unpretentious poet whose impressive theatre work included a key collaboration with Peter Brook on Marat/Sade and US at the RSC in the mid 1960s, and joyous associations with with Declan Donnellan on the National’s Fuente Ovejuna and Adrian Noble on the RSC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A free talent and an incorrigible free thinker, Adrian lit up like Christmas day every time you met him.
Anyone who says they don’t enjoy this time of year I regard with the deepest suspicion. The streets are alive with happy anticipation, the air tingling with joy, the day closing in round the glowing fires before it has even properly begun.
Bar humbug, bar credit crunch, bar misery. My past few days have involved joining in with people making the best of it, a feeling intensified this year that we may as well, as next year is going to be even gloomier than the last few months of this one.
Joe Allen’s isn’t feeling the pinch — yet. The place was packed on Thursday lunchtime and the office parties in full swing included those of the Health Minister, Alan Johnson, Susan Whiddington’s Mousetrap Foundation which does such a good job arranging cheap West End tickets for schoolchildren, and Peter Thompson’s publicity agency.
Tommo’s been poorly lately, and we critics and arts journalists have been missing his rebarbative commentary on the passing scene and our own endeavours with a keen sense of deprivation, mingled with relief.
My own lunch guests are the effervescently elegant Gina Rothschild, widow of the great great (great?) grandson of William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and their friend Desmond Connolly, once of the Royal Court press department and latterly a facilitating cog in the wheel of Canterbury social life.
Gina and Desmond are en route to a matinee of La Cage aux Folles. I’m mildly envious that they are about to enjoy one of my favourite shows of the year (the others, if you stand me up against a wall, were August:Osage County, Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch and Chita Rivera in cabaret at the Shaw). There’s nothing for it but to console myself with Eggs Benedict and pecan pie.
On the train to Stratford for the RSC’s new Don John, I sit with Sean Foley of the Right Size and his wife, Alice, who are busy checking through a translation of a new French comedy, Tick Tock, Sean is soon to direct in the West End. He tells me he hasn’t finished with Joan Rivers yet: they are planning to work together again on the autobiographical stand-up play she did in London in September; and yes, he still thinks she’s the funniest woman in the world.
Sean and Alice are making a party night of it in Stratford, and I say I’ll see them at the Courtyard opening as I swing through the town centre which, as night falls, boasts not only the prettiest Christmas lights you’ve ever seen, but also a French farmers’ market in Rother Street as well as a local traders’ seasonal fayre in the high street.
If you don’t feel jolly now, you never will, and I spot Benedict Nightingale scurrying between stalls anxiously surveying present-buying opportunities. Some toiletries and a hairbrush for himself, perhaps?
Michael Boyd and Vicki Heywood have invited the critics to a pre-show minced pie in the Dirty Duck. No sign of Ben. He must be still scurrying about, or indeed currying about, in one of his favoured Indian restaurants.
Chris Gray of the Oxford Times updates me on the local pantomime scene and Sam Jackson, the Duck’s manager, who has fought a heroic battle against bowel cancer, and an overweight condition, tells me he plans to run in the town’s half-marathon on the Shakespeare birthday weekend next April. I promise to join him, and that’s my first unshakeable resolution for the New Year.
I hitch a lift back to London with Michael Billington. We have so much to talk about we’re parked at Hammersmith Broadway not only before midnight but before we’ve barely scratched the surface. He is my oldest, and dearest, friend on the beat.
On Friday I swing by the rehearsals of the sensational new musical version of Spring Awakening to interview the director, Michael Mayer, whose last show in London was Thoroughly Modern Millie, a somewhat different type of show; I don’t remember a celebration of sexual self-pleasuring in that one. Mayer’s a dynamic character, and a wonderful gossip. Interestingly, he says he’s not doing the Wedekind play because of the play, but because of the chance it offers to experiment seriously in musical theatre.
The weekend is spent in two of my favourite theatrical havens and watching a screener version of the new film collaboration between Stephen Daldry and David Hare, The Reader.
At Wilton’s Music Hall, the grimness of the play, The Cordelia Dream, is magically offset by the delights in the bar of seasonal music, mulled wine, superb food and good company. The latter is made by John Nathan of the Jewish Chronicle and we travel west together afterwards, he home to Turnham Green via Hammersmith, me onwards to the Orange Tree.
The Orange Tree has been one of the theatres of the year, no question, and they finish up with a forgotten gem by Henry Arthur Jones, Mary Goes First, which hinges on a perceived slight among rival snobs at a private dinner.
Again, the bonhomie in the bar, and the overspill of pleasure in the adjacent excellent Young’s pub and indeed Carluccio’s brasserie, confirm the venue as one of my top current theatre destinations; who’d swap it for the filth and vulgarity of Shaftesbury Avenue?
The Reader is a severely disappointing version of Bernhard Schlink’s great novel, slow and pious, and confusingly non-chronological; in the book, the time shifts happen in the narrator’s consciousness. Made literal, they become clunky. Kate Winslet ages (not very well) as the illiterate SS guard, while her teenage lover played by a brilliant young German actor, David Kross, ages into Ralph Fiennes at his most tight-lipped and enigmatically irritating.
Even then, Fiennes incomprehensibly wears a succession of unconvincing wigs that are as bad as Winslet’s in the final prison scenes. How can film producers spend so much money on getting such simple things so wrong?
I’m told that the other current Winslet movie, Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband Sam Mendes, is brilliant. The treat awaits — I hope — amid the pile of seasonal goodies and presents in the sitting room. Happy holidays!