Wide of the Mark altogether now

In sniffing out homophobic tendencies where none exist — put it this way: Graham Norton can make jokes about leather pouffes because he’s obviously gay but I can’t because I might not be –  my old friend Mark Shenton has committed a notable clanger in suggesting that my book The Aisle is Full of Noises was withdrawn as a result of legal action taken by Milton Shulman after I dubbed him a kosher butcher.

That implies an accusation of anti-semitism Mark is unwise to have touched on. I suggest he starts checking his own copy before he spends all day policing other people’s.

Shulman’s grounds of complaint were that in stating how wrong he’d been in print about Brecht, Osborne, Pinter and Beckett when they first crossed his bows, I was impugning his professional reputation.

This was funny enough in itself — beware the fate of the self-important critic, Mark — but doubly amusing as I went out of my way in that book to promote the idea that the job of a critic was not to be “right” but to be interesting.

The lawyers settled on a couple of letters and two big dinners for old Milt and the book was withdrawn but only after it had almost exhausted its limited print run.

The remaindered “samizdat” copies were snapped up by outraged well-wishers at £5 or £10 a copy (Michael Codron, Sonia Friedman and Ruth Mackenzie each bought four; Jack Tinker, Amanda Harris, Nick Curtis and Kathy Dacre two each; and the huge roll-call of single purchase freedom fighters included Dominic Dromgoole, Giles Havergal, Jane Maud, Charles Osborne, Keith Baxter, Stephen Unwin, Sharon Kean, Millie Rowland, Mary Evans, Kate Horton, Peter Holland, Roger Wyand QC, Julie Peasgood, Pippa Markham and Claire Armitstead…I’ve got a little list!

To have gathered such an ensemble of talent in my cause was both surprisng and pleasing, and I hope Mark has as many friends left if and when the day dawns when he should need them. 

Having marvelled at last year’s top ensemble from Steppenwolf, London is suddenly rich in two of the best ad hoc ensemble companies we’ve seen in ages.

And they are both appearing in plays set in 1936: Burnt by the Sun at the National and Dancing at Lughnasa at the Old Vic.

I was wary of seeing Lughnasa again, having enjoyed Patrick Mason’s original production so much both in Dublin and London. I need not have worried. Anna Mackmin’s revival is a corker and I’ve no doubt arrangements are already in hand to move it on elsewhere in the early summer.

In the interval, Michael Billington suprised me by asking me had I head of Andrea Corr, who is playing the youngest of the five sisters. I explained about The Corrs. Another blank look. You see, we really all don’t exist on the same planet.

I greeted Brian Friel and his delightful wife Anne, both of whom feature large and lavishly in the above-mentioned banned book. Friel’s fairly frail these days — mind you, he has been for years; it’s the tough Irish peasant stock, you know — and I was mightily relieved that Kevin Spacey didn’t usher him to the stage at the end and give him a bear hug similar to the one he gave Alan Ayckbourn at the end of The Norman Conquests, sending him flying.

Brian’s now a beaming 80 year-old and I asked him how he was. As usual, he deflected the question. “I think we’re in for a treat,” he whispered, sliding back in his seat to make contact with his long lost family of aunts in a faraway Donegal summer