With thanks to John Random for the 1992 pictures, such as the one above.
It was with great sadness, although not surprise, that I learnt, on 11 March, that Chris Stanton has died. He had been battling and eventually reconciling himself with terminal cancer for a couple of years. It was a fitting coincidence that I learnt of his demise, through the NewsRevue alum community (specifically, via Chris Rowe), as I came off the real tennis court at Lord’s.
I first met Chris at the Canal Cafe Theatre in the spring of 1992, when I started writing for NewsRevue and while Chris was performing in John Random’s Spring 1992 run of the show.
Chris Stanton was the very first professional performer to deliver my lyrics to a paying audience. A rather morbid number, entitled California Here I Go:
Not one of my best, but one of my first…and my goodness, a performer of Chris’s quality could make the most of whatever material he was given.
Later that run, the cast, with Chris Stanton up front and exceptional, performed another of mine, You Can’t Hurry Trusts. A much better – indeed still relevant – lyric for a topical satirical review, though I say so myself:
Chris Stanton’s professional career continued to thrive and take off as the 1990s went on…as did mine of course, but his was a performing career whereas my career was a more conventional one. I saw little of him for 20 or so years after our involvement with NewsRevue waned, by the end of the 1990s.
Chris was reluctant to join us at Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners, although he did perhaps turn up once or twice in the early part of the 20th century.
Coincidentally, our paths crossed again some 20 years after Chris’s involvement with NewsRevue ceased, in 2016, when I took up real tennis at Lord’s and ran into Chris in the dedans gallery.
Real tennis is a wonderful game, still played virtually unchanged since medieval times, ideal for those with a sense of comedy. As I said back in 2016:
Unless you are very gifted at the game (which I am not and Chris was only a little more gifted than me), you have to be prepared to look absurd at times, the game is so complex and confounding. Yet addictive.
I did write up my first on court encounter with Chris, en passant in 2016.
Real tennis players are sometimes referred to as “realists” but I think there is an “absurdist” element to it for us comedy types. I especially enjoyed saying, panto-style, “it’s behind you” to Chris, if he ended up (as oft we do) confounded by the eventual landing point of that hand-made, not-quite-round ball in that crazily-shaped court. Ironically, of course, Chris was doing a fair bit of panto in recent years, before he was taken ill.
We are a geeky lot too, so “the book” for real tennis scores is a global database that records the results of every match. Here is my head-2-head of recorded games with Chris; he will have given me handicap points in each of these matches; fewer as the years went on:
I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen Chris for a while – I thought he might just have been busy with work or off games with an injury – until I ran into him at Lord’s last summer on a test match day and he explained to me (with some surprise that I didn’t know) that he had lung cancer (one of the non-smoker varieties), was undergoing treatment but was probably just staving off the inevitable. By that time, Chris seemed reconciled, I’d even say at peace, with his fate. Certainly that was the way he presented me with the facts of the matter.
My last memory of spending time with him will be an abiding one and speaks volumes about the man. Towards the end of last summer, we had a 40th anniversary party for NewsRevue at the Canal Cafe Theatre. The event included the extant show and a “smoker” – the latter being a form of party we often had in the 1990s at which performers and writers would do party pieces for one another.
Chris rose to the challenge and asked to perform two of his favourite pieces at the piano: A Loan Again (by Ian Christiansen I think) and John Random’s wonderful 0898 song, the latter being a very witty, quickfire number – I hope John doesn’t mind me upping/linking his classic lyric.
Chris said to me, earlier in the evening, that he was worried that his lungs no longer had the capacity to carry him all the way through 0898 without a breather. I said that I was sure it wouldn’t matter if he did need a breather; we were a gathering of friends.
Of course, commensurate professional that he was, Chris somehow got through the song without missing a beat or pausing for breath once. It was a masterful performance, not least in the circumstances.
I don’t suppose my report of his tenacity comes as news to anyone who worked with Chris throughout his long and successful acting career, nor to anyone who did battle with him on the real tennis court.
In the language of real tennis, Chris was a “better than half a yard” sort of bloke; news of his demise has made me (and no doubt many others) feel “worse than the door”.
Or in the language of the stage, Chris Stanton was a stellar performer whose passing has temporarily made me feel wooden as I write.
But such super memories. Thank you, Chris Stanton.
Postscript: The Coincidence Magnifies
Within a day or so of posting this tribute, I learnt that Chris Rowe, the Newsrevue alum who notified us about Chris Stanton’s demise, is also a member of the MCC and also a real tennis enthusiast. Indeed, it was through Chris Rowe that Chris Stanton got involved with real tennis at Lord’s.
Here is a poster from the Newsrevue 1991 Edinburgh show, in which both of the gentlemen appeared:
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