Good evening for mourning Thursday
How grimly appropriate it was that La Fura dels Baus, the great head-banging Catalan theatre company, should open their remarkable production of Le Grand Macabre at the ENO on the day of two funerals and a major memorial in the arts world.
The moral of the Ligeti opera, which is loosely based on a long forgotten play of the Flemish dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, is that we should eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.
That was certainly a suitable epitaph for writers Keith Waterhouse and Mike Stott, whose funerals yesterday in London and Rochdale marked the passing of two great lovers of life and humanity in all its shapes and sizes.
Waterhouse’s virtues as both writer and drinker have been gloriously celebrated in print and Soho bars since the day he died, but Mike Stott has slipped away with too little notice.
The author of the hilarious comedy Funny Peculiar — which in summary could be, and often was, boiled down to “fellatio in the Pennines” — was a deep-dyed northerner, like Waterhouse, living most of his life with his family on either side of the Pennines, specifically in Todmorden these past thirty years, and also in the south west of France, where he loved to go mushroom picking.
Stott’s decade was the 1970s when , apart from Funny Peculiar, he wrote several highly acclaimed television plays including the BBC2 comedy series Pickersgill People (the cast featured Prunella Scales, Bryan Pringle, David Bradley, Bernard Hill and Antony Sher) and countless radio dramas, as well as plays for Hampstead Theatre.
Stott had started as a stage manager for Alan Ayckbourn at the old Library Theatre in Scarborough and lived in London for ten years — his best friends were two other great Mikes, Leigh and Weller — where he was a house dramatist at the RSC in the mid 1960s, working closely with Peter Brook on US, the Vietnam War protest show, and The Tempest at the Roundhouse.
Funny Peculiar, with a brilliant cast led by the late Richard Beckinsale, Julie Walters and Matthew Kelly (oh, yes, our Matthew was a really fine comic actor long before he was a game show host), opened at the Liverpool Everyman in 1975, moving down to the Mermaid and the West End in the following year.
But oddly enough, the play was actually premiered in Germany, at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, where the British director Peter Zadek was the man in charge. I can’t imagine that oral sex in a grocer’s shop and a provinvcial hospital ward would have been all that funny in German — nothing too quirky or unusual about it, probably — but it was a riot in Liverpool and London.
Stott never stopped writing — two plays a year, usually, on radio — but his glory days were long gone. His last West End play was Ducking Out, a Lancashire transplant of an Eduardo de Filippo play in 1982 starring Warren Mitchell.
This was a mordantly funny domestic comedy set on a housing estate — I described it at the time as a “Spaghetti Northern” — with Mitchell as an obstreperous old paterfamalias outflanked on all sides by a cast of actors most of whom now, sadly, are also dead — Leslie Sands, Gillan Barge, Diane Bull and Kevin Lloyd.
So, by a strange coincidence, the two playwrights best known for translating de Filippo — Waterhouse, with Willis Hall, wrote the National Theatre hit Saturday, Sunday, Monday for Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright — were buried on the same day.
I spent the morning at a memorial for JDF Jones, legendary foreign editor at the Financial Times and also the editor of the first (and best) ever Saturday weekend section on a national newspaper, in St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street.
The music, mostly Mozart, was gorgeous, and JDF’s Welsh origins were suitably honoured in a reading by his son from Under Milk Wood and a rousing chorus of “Bread of Heaven” that would have echoed famously round Cardiff Arms Park in the old days.
One notable absentee from the service was Lucia van der Post, whose father, the travel writer Laurens, was celebrated, warts and all, in a fine biography by JDF. Lucia always felt that a great friendship — hers and JDF’s — was betrayed in the shocking frankness of some elements in the book, an ironic testament to its aptness.
The worst anyone could say of JDF was that he took not a blithe bit of notice of budgetary constraints when, as a managing editor, it came to signing expenses claims and arranging first class travel. No-one like him now!
But one of his closest colleagues, FT writer Jurek Martin, suggested that none of us really knew him, this man of mystery out of Wales by way of Africa. He always sat at his desk, usually with his feet on it, as if he owned not just the office but the whole building. And as an arts editor he encouraged us to think that the world was our oyster, too.
He would have loved the new ENO production of Ligeti’s astonishing opera, but he would have enjoyed his dinner afterwards even more.