There is a story — it has been around for hundreds of years — of an actor playing Shakespeare’s malevolent Richard III, with that long opening solo speech, who was barracked by the audience’s shouts of “You’re drunk!” He is supposed to have responded directly and just as bluntly “If you think I’m drunk, you wait till you see Buckingham!” Because the leading man and the colleague who played his supporter on the road to power had been on the razzle together.
Occasionally the story is “modernised” — told apocryphally about whatever prominent player is then associated with the bottle…
The Wimbledon season takes me back to other summers, and especially to the men’s final in 1982 between Connors and McEnroe, which I watched at Denville Hall with my old friend the actor James Dale. He was very excited by the tennis and didn’t seem to be suffering as I was from the warmth of the TV room, over-heated so far as I was concerned for the retirement home’s elderly residents!
If Jimmie’s name is remembered now it is probably for his genial performance as Dr Dale — husband of Mrs Dale the Diarist — for nine years, on radio…
Cartoonists have often depicted a performance in progress with a kind of repetiteur’s hood in the centre of the front of the stage (what used to be called ‘the floats’, from the days of footlights). The prompter is beneath the hood, apparently shouting a line at a forgetful cast. It is of course easier to get everything into a sketch this way than depicting who and where such a functionary traditionally would really have been: the ASM — Assistant Stage Manager — in the corner (the prompt corner, to the actors’ left) and ‘on the book’. That is to say…
You couldn’t get any work if you weren’t an Equity member and you couldn’t get an Equity card unless you had some work. This was a widely repeated paradox, or double-bind, about starting as an actor when I was young. We all, in turn, of course, disproved it.
It was remembered in a newspaper column this week by James Whale, who is a journalist and broadcaster and who was called Michael Whale until he had to join Equity long ago, when there was already a Michael Whale. He quit the union when closed shop rules became illegal in the ’eighties…
Queen Victoria had been dead for fifty years by the time I was old enough to have heard of her. That being so, it seems odd to me that in the popular culture of the nineteen-fifties in which I grew up, ‘Victorian’ was such a term of opprobrium. More understandable in the ’twenties perhaps, with the inevitable pendulum swing of attitudes being that much more recent. Well, ‘Victorian’ still is opprobrious to some extent, but ‘fifties’ has joined it as shorthand for anything archaic and disapproved of!
I was a bit surprised to read an article by journalist and editor…
On my currently rather obsessive television quiz, “Pointless”, the presenters have a habit of getting waggishly annoyed if a contestant comments that the subject of a question is “before my time”. They will point out that events such as one’s parents’ births essentially pre-date us, but we learn to remember when they happened. True up to a point, but they sometimes underestimate how much our generation has to do with the content of our general knowledge. For instance, I was astonished when presenter Alexander, whose own range of knowledge is awesome, failed to recognise Nikita Khruschev in a round of…
There is really only one subject at the moment — how near are we to pre-pandemic life? We have thought we were at this point several times, and “slipped back”. Well, we’ve had our hair cut now. The papers assume that what we think of as normality is freedom to jump on a plane. I feel old.
Actually, sometimes I feel young. John Humphrys suggested in his column that in the ’60s everyone had memories of the Second World War. He is very little older than me, who was as I am always telling people, born between VE Day and…
Well, the restrictions are easing, and we are getting back to ‘normal’. Perhaps. Who knows? I haven’t just twiddled my thumbs for a year, but I do feel an element of suspended animation being eased. There are so many things I have put off, some on the simplest level, like sorting my correspondence tray. I haven’t put on weight, surprisingly, and I haven’t been drinking too much — unsurprisingly, because I don’t drink alcohol at all any more. It makes me too tired.
I have started to take more interest in the general news. Even in the world of the…
“I talk of dreams” says Romeo’s friend Mercutio “which are the children of an idle brain …” Idle in the sense of dormant I suppose, if we mean dreams that come to you in sleep. And interesting in the way that they bring thoughts and sensations to the front of your mind. I can’t believe they are all significant. I dream of people and things from what you might call the outer edges of my memory. And sometimes just the opposite. …
“I dread to think how old your children, Richard and Jo, are” wrote a friend to me in a catch-up email, expressing the universal ruefulness about the passing of time.
I saw my doctor this week, and during the inevitably masked consultation she, being a very pleasant person, struggled to express herself courteously. “Your skin gets drier when you, er, when you become …” “Old” I supplied firmly, and she laughed. Nothing wrong with being in my seventies — a lot of people I have known, some well, have not been granted that privilege.
Of course I would prefer the…
Roger Sansom
Roger is an actor, and lives with his family in Greater London
