Although the Young Vic has announced its May collaboration with Sadler’s Wells on Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, poet James Fenton, who is scripting the dance theatre piece, is playing down its chances of success.
 
He was almost disclaiming any involvement at all at last night RSC opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Novello, though to be fair his mind was elsewhere. Today is the funeral of fellow poet Mick Imlah, and Fenton is deeply upset about it. He is also down to read an upsetting Tennyson poem, so he beat a hasty retreat from the Novello at the interval. 

Imlah, a fine poet, was only 52 when he died of motor neurone disease. He was a good sportsman, too, and devilishly handsome. Fenton said that women fell in love with him, men fell in love with him and he, Imlah, fell in love with women. James volunteered a rueful smile about this. I could think of nothing to say, so tried, “That’s the way the cookie sometimes crumbles.”

Fenton does have RSC history. He wrote the lyrics for Les Miserables which no-one wanted to sing, so they hired Herbert Kretzmer instead. But the contract was signed and Fenton has becomes very rich indeed on the royalties, the best paid unsung lyricist in the world.

He is a deeply serious and erudite chap, of course, and did a three year stint as Sunday Times drama critic before becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford and receiving the Queen’s Medal in 2007. He’s unlikely to want to be the next Poet Laureate.

There’s an exhibition of photographs of Fenton and other chums of Martin Amis currently showing in the National Portrait Gallery. When you consider that Fenton, Amis and Christoper Hitchens were all rising stars on the New Statesman in the early 1970s and the magazine has just done away with its arts and literary editors, you really can see which way the wind is blowing.

Pictures from an Exhibition is to be directed by Daniel Kramer, whose revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy for the Young Vic and the ENO has just won a South Bank award. The publicity suggests that this “graphic, intensely visual” piece will throw new light on “the pains and passions of Mussorgsky’s intimate life.” Gosh, I jolly well hope so.

I reminded Fenton that he was following in some fascinationg footsteps. Brian Friel wrote a play about Janacek’s love affair and inspiration for his second string quartet, Intimate Letters, and the music was played alongside the performance.

And just the other day Katie Mitchell directed Stephen Dillane reciting T S Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Donmar, and the Beethoven quartet that inspired them was played live after the interval.

We are obviously starting on a new trend, and it may not be too long before the Menier presents the true love story of Robert and Clara Schumann with a portfolio of the wonderful piano music they made together; or perhaps Cameron Mackintosh will revive Moby Dick in a big splashy production accompanied by Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 10:21 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.