This was a great production of great play. Paul Scofield as the big man, Vanessa Redgrave as the long-suffering wife, Eileen Atkins, Michael Bryant, a great supporting cast, Richard Eyre directing, what was not to like?
Janie doesn’t tend to like “classics” but tends to makes an exception for Ibsen. This production was no exception to her exception.
As is often the case, the Lyttleton did the play no favours, too big and set back for intimacy yet not quite big enough or shaped right to be the big stage. But when the only criticism one can muster is that, the fact is that this was a great night at the theatre and I am so glad we saw this production.
That was the record in the log and that is faint praise. A superb cast including Alan Howard, Bernard Cribbins and Anne-Marie Duff . Richard Eyre directing. What’s not to like?
Some rare long intervals between visits to theatre and concert hall that summer, all down to the dawning of my business Z/Yen, which took up ludicrous amounts of time including weekends.
We do like a bit of Pinter. I was especially keen to see this one. I’d never seen the play performed live; this 1994 production was the first London production since the West End production in the 1960s. But I had seen the wonderful 1980s TV version with Pinter himself as Goldberg.
I’d also previously seen excerpts from the play performed live; not least by my own school mates in the late 1970’s when Dan O’Neill was selected for the role of Goldberg ahead of me because he could do a much better Goldberg accent than me. I don’t bear grudges but I do retain a sense of unjust cultural appropriation to this day, not least because I still cannot do a Goldberg-style accent. I played Aston in The Caretaker instead, but I digress.
I wrote in my log and I remember this production as such too. In 1992 I was still going to this sort of production with Bobbie as long as she was available, which most often she was, despite her protests that mebooking stuff so far ahead meant she couldn’t/wouldn’t guarantee her availability.
Bobbie was there for this one.
I’m pretty sure I had seen Bobbie the night before as well. The diary simply says “clubbing” which, as I recall it, meant a West End evening with Bobbie and several of her law reporter friends.
I remember the evening of Friday 13 March 1992 clearly, because I almost lost my life earlier that day on the M11, driving out to see Schering, when a lorry shed its load of timber on the two-lane motorway ahead of me and I had nowhere to go (other than into a central reservation barrier to the right or into the vehicles to my left) so I slowed down as much as I could through the timber and then vehicularly limped to the hard shoulder to have my broken car and shaken me rescued.
I must have bored everyone shitless with my Friday 13th story that previous evening and for sure the events of the day and evening of 13th were small beer compared with the drama that unfolded at The Lyttelton on the Saturday Night.
Very good. Performed in scouse accents if I remember correctly.
I suspect that the second note had something to do with a little Bobbie annoyance at the use of scouse accents to depict Neapolitans. Ian McKellen as scouser seemed a little strange to our ears too, but of course the bloke can act. Clare Higgins as his missus, Richard Eyre directing, fine supporting cast…what’s not to like?
Bobbie & I were both very keen to see this one – hence our appearance on the first Saturday after press night, booking the tickets long before.
We weren’t disappointed. My log reads:
Superb. The setting was 1930’s style and they made a movie based on this production.
Below is a link to a National Theatre clip:
While below is a clip from the 1995 movie:
Janie would have got less out of this than Bobbie and I did – she is not so keen on Shakespeare, Sir Ian McKellen nor Dame Maggie. (The latter was not in the National Theatre stage production – Susan Engel played Queen Margaret.)
At the time of writing, strangely, I have recently seen Alun Armstrong again, I think for the first time in those 30 years, in The Cane at the Royal Court:
Billington on Borkman Sat, Jul 13, 1996 – 30 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
