Standing in line with a Calendar Girl

The most elegant, and most senior, of the Calendar Girls, Sian Phillips CBE, was standing at the bus stop on Friday night waiting for the Number Nineteen to take her home to Islington.

She looked, as she always does, absolutely immaculate, in a beautiful coat and scarf, hair perfectly cut, deportment incomparable. In many ways she’s the embodiment of what an actress should be: glamorous, mysterious, unassailable. And she goes home on the bus.

She said what a happy time Calendar Girls had been and that the phenomenon of the show on the road was like nothing she had ever experienced in her whole career — and that goes back over fifty years, when she first played Hedda Gabler at a charity matinee in the Duke of York’s followed by Saint Joan at the new Belgrade, Coventry. 

How did she get on with her fellow cast members? “Oh, we all get on, but we hardly socialise,” she said before changing the subject. We talked of how much more exciting it was to travel on buses rather than the tube, and then my Number Twenty-Four came along and I hopped aboard, and we drifted apart, blowing kisses over our shoulders.

Ten minutes earlier and I would have missed her, but I’d lingered in the Soho Theatre for a drink with colleagues Jane Edwardes, Lucy Powell and Dominic Cavendish. Jane said she was reviewing the show for the Sunday Times, and we’ll soon be able lose count of the number of reviewers that paper employs without actually seeming to have a delegated theatre critic. 

Dominic had only seen the second half of the Soho’s entertaining bill of quickfire dramatic reponses to the economic crisis; he’d been round the corner at the Lyric monitoring the vigil of Michael Jackson fans gathering outside Thriller Live.

I apologised for not having yet caught his George Orwell show at the Trafalgar Studios (where it plays for one more week). He wasn’t that bothered: the Whatsonstage review had been brilliantly perceptive enough to keep him very happy, he said.

Jane updated me on plans for the Critics’ Circle farewell lunch for Nicholas de Jongh next month. Apparently Nick had wanted to invite forty theatre professionals to the private dining room upstairs in Eleanor’s Etoile in Charlotte Street, but had been told he could only have two guests, otherwise there would be no room for his lamenting colleagues.

It will be interesting to see who these two guests turn out to be. I would put good money on any pairing from Thelma Holt, Steven Berkoff, Bill Kenwright and Stephen Daldry — with perhaps even a special dispensation allowing him to have all four of that unholy quartet. I wonder if I can possibly make a special case for Sian Phillips?