Trevor Nunn has always said that he won’t write his memoirs, or autobiography, but that one day he will set down his encounters with remarkable people, and he gave a good taster of what we might expect in his extraordinary article about Michael Jackson in the Sunday Times this week.

It’s a revelatory piece about Jacko as Peter Pan; entering the pop star’s temporary environment in a Sydney hotel in 1987 Nunn describes as like keeping vigil in an intensive care unit.

So overpowering is the unreality of the meeting that the director suspects at first that he is the victim of another Ken Campbell hoax (Campbell had briefly bamboozled “Trev” and the theatrical profession with his Royal Dickens Company caper a few years previously) and that his velvet-clad host is a brilliant impersonator of the world’s most famous man.

Jacko had summoned Nunn because he’d heard about his “crazy experimental musical enterprise” Starlight Express and wanted to “share ideas.” He went into manic squealing overdrive when he learned that Nunn had also produced Peter Pan.

He yearned to fly over the audience and of course he was already living the role anyway in his Neverland ranch populated with Lost Boys who inhabit the same room as Peter and sleep in the same huge bed…Nunn is convinced that the allegations of sexual molestations — from which Jackson was acquitted — were untrue.

Peter Pan was not a part Jacko wanted to play, concludes Nunn: his obsession was about the person he wanted to be.

If and when Trevor ever stops working in the theatre and gets down to these memoirs, we shall no doubt read about Ian McKellen, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tom Stoppard and John Barton.

But I doubt if any of the stories will match his surprise encounter with Wacko Jacko, and the account of the night he travelled with him to the Sydney stadium in a huge Dormobile with black glass windows and took his place beside the sound operator in the best position in the auditorium. On the next day, as requested, he gave the star notes; he was never contacted by him, or his people, again.
 
The best theatrical memoirs are those that bring alive the art form and recreate either the joy and mystery of performance, or the detail of a vanished era. I’d never heard of the music hall impressionist and former pantomime star Helga Stone, but on  holiday in the Isle of Wight — I had no idea how wonderful the place was; I’ve been tramping the coastal paths and swimming in the sea for days! — I found her book, Never the Same Girl Twice, in the Ryde tourist information office.

Helga Stone retired to the Isle of Wight and her book is published by a small printer inNewport. But this is much more than a vanity project; it’s a treasure trove of anecdotes and vivid documentation of life on the road, the early days of radio situation comedy — with her family, Helga was in Breakfast with the the Murgatroyds on the BBC Home Service, precursors of the Groves and the Huggetts — her bizarre marriage to the great comedian Sid Field’s agent, and pantomime seasons up and down the country as both principal girl and boy. 

I’ve also been reading with pleasure, although it’s far more self-consciously written, Doreen Hawkins’s account of theatrical adventures in wartime, Drury Lane to Dimapur.

The value here is not only the close-up of a working life in the provincial weekly rep that is now vanished, but her supporting role in the life of her husband Jack Hawkins, whom she met in India after volunteering for ENSA — the Entertainments National Service Association.

Jack Hawkins died in 1973 and next year will be his centenary, a date worth celebrating. We don’t seem to produce that sort of craggy, authoritative, deep-dyed decent sort of actor any more; maybe there’s no call for them. But his performance in The Cruel Sea, one of the best British war movies ever made, alone ensures his immortality.
  
I heard about his second wife’s book (Hawkins was first married to Jessica Tandy) from his son, the actor Andrew Hawkins, who has helped his mother put the book together and managed a fine job of complementing Jack’s own autobiography, Anything for a Quiet Life.

I don’t think, somehow, that any biographer planning a wrap-up volume on Michael Jackson will be borrowing that title.
 

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