Janie and I are very keen on Frank McGuiness’s plays and this one is a good example of why that is so.
It sounds like the scenario for so many Irish plays – a family gathers to celebrate a birthday in a remote cottage in the West of Ireland…just take my word for it that this one is/was special.
Our first theatre visit of that year, to the tiny New End Theatre in Hampstead. Wicked difficult to park around there and I seem to recall a very cold, perhaps even slightly icy evening.
The evening was a bit of a “West Fest”, with roles not only for Benedick as writer but also second-cousin-by-marriage Prunella Scales and young Jerusha West performing.
I remember observing to Janie that Prunella Scales had seen me perform in front of far larger audiences than that of the New End. When I was in Alleyn’s School plays, the West Family (Tim, Prunella and Sam, the latter being two or three years below me at the school) would relentlessly turn up to watch. Those evenings must have been an enlightening experience for that theatrical family I am sure. But I digress.
Benedick’s play was actually a sequence of monologues. As such, I recall it lacked dramatic intensity and coherence as a single work, but the miniature stories were well written and were quite interesting performance pieces, especially Prunella’s one.
Janie and I were really taken with this play/production. On my log I gave it a one word review:
superb.
Peter Morgan writes these historical/biographical plays really well and Michael Sheen seems well fitted to the lead roles in them, be the role Tony Blair or David Frost.
Actually the whole cast was excellent, with especially memorable performances by Frank Langella, Kelly Shale, Lydia Leonard and Corey Johnson.
Michael Grandage was doing great work at the Donmar at that time.
There is a superb Donmar educational resource available for this production, now in the public domain but not well publicised, which I have scraped to here and/or the image link below:
Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frostnixonposter.png with the same attribution and for the same fair use reasons as stated on Wikipedia.
We saw the original Donmar run quite early in its life – perhaps even still in preview or just after the press night. The play/production was extremely well received, deservedly so. A link to reviews can be found here.
The piece transferred big time and also was made into a film. Janie and I were delighted to have seen the original production before the big fuss broke out.
When reviewing the 2005 Ashes series, the great commentator, Richie Benaud, would relate tales from letters he had received from senior people, captains of industry even, describing hiding behind the sofa unable to watch the denouement of some of the tighter matches, such was the level of emotion invested in these incredible multiple-day sporting events that we call test matches in cricket.
The Edgbaston test, which several of us fortunate folk known as the Heavy Rollers experienced live in part, was such a match. While our live experience, which started so brilliantly for us the night before…
…was over as a live experience for us at stumps on Day Two, of course it continued for us as a television and radio experience for the next couple of days.
Before that, someone (often it was Nigel), will have helped me get at least part of the way, if not all the way, to Birmingham New Street for my train and I probably got to Janie’s place around 9:30/10:00 at night for a shower and then some deep sleep.
No doubt Janie and I played tennis in the morning, ahead of hunkering down with the radio and/or television for most of the Saturday.
It was a seesaw of a cricketing day if ever there was one. England looked to have surrendered their second innings for too little, then Australia similarly found it difficult to avoid frequent dismissals.
But Janie and I could not stay at home all day and watch cricket – we had tickets for a dinner and show at The Kings Head, Islington: Who’s The Daddy, a satirical farce. Not the sort of show that Janie would normally want to see, except that this show was largely about a larger than life journalist/editor named Boris Johnson and his affair with fellow Spectator journalist Petronella Wyatt. Without reaching to breach any professional confidences here, Janie had professional reasons (as well as idle curiosity) to see this show.
Janie and I set off for Islington quite early, with England in a good but not yet totally secure position. Michael Clarke & Shane Warne were at the crease together albeit seven down but accumulating runs. I think the only reason that the match was still going on at that hour was because England had taken the extra half hour to try and finish the match, but that idea didn’t seem to be working. I’m pretty sure Janie did the driving, thank goodness. We were listening intently. We parked up near the theatre and sat listening to the last couple of overs. Then Steve Harmison bowled THAT ball to remove Clarke on the stroke of stumps.
That Steve Harmison ball at the end of Day Three is at c22’30”.
Janie and I were in celebratory mode as we entered The Kings Head. Australia still more than 100 behind, just two wickets left…what could possibly go wrong?
No matter, we were in a great mood. England were on the verge of a vital win…
…or were they?
I’m pretty sure we played tennis again, early, on the Sunday morning. Then we hunkered down in the near-expectation that England would quickly take a couple of wickets and we could relax for the rest of the day.
It didn’t quite work out that way
I must say that I personally never got to the “hiding behind the sofa” stage, but there was a lot of oohing and aahing, that’s for sure. I started off watching in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom so I could put my feet up and await what I thought was the inevitable win…then I wasn’t so sure…then I starting to think it was an inevitable “yet again” loss on the way.
Janie kept insisting that it would all come good in the end, but once the lead had been reduced to 20-30 runs, she couldn’t sit still nor could she bear to watch.
By the time the England victory came, I was, by then, absolutely convinced that England were about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
But in the end we celebrated, Janie reminding me that she had been insisting that it would come good for England all along. Yeh, right.
I had , in a moment of extreme lucidity disguised as madness, procured, the previous autumn, six tickets for Day Five of The Oval test, just in case England were able to take the 2005 Ashes series to the wire. I had kept very quiet about this purchase, just in case the social workers of The Children Society, on learning of this purchase, conspired with a couple of doctors and had me put away for gross insanity.
A coupe of hours after the Edgbaston victory, it felt like the right moment to fess up to this purchase. I called Chas, who was in one of those “trembling voiced Chas” states, but he did make some informed comments on the outcome of the match and immediately said yes to the idea of joining me and Daisy at Day Five of the Oval test, should the series come to that.
I told Chas that I intended to call Nigel next.
Chas told me that it might be best to leave it another couple of hours or more. “I called him a few minutes ago and he still could barely speak”, explained Chas.
Nigel in full flow
Nigel doesn’t lose his voice lightly.
I did speak with Nigel later that day, who was still somewhat of a quiver. It is a shame he wasn’t able to join us at the Oval, but still that Oval story will make for another excellent Ogblog piece, not least because it will be awash with Charles Bartlett’s colourful pictures.
Frankly, we remember little about this one. A gentle comedy, is the description. We might have been gently getting over the terminal dullness of our preceding evening’s visit to The National to see Luther.
Here’s a clip from The Gazette & Herald from August, when it opened in Scarborough:
We pushed the boat out to see this one. Friday night at the National Theatre – we both had busy Friday schedules well into the afternoon.
Was it worth it, I hear you cry.
So dull, we walked at half time
Seemingly not.
I have a feeling this was the occasion when we bumped into my friends from Lambton Place, Bryan Rostron & Sunny, with their pal Paul Foot. You don’t mess with investigative journalists like Bryan and Paul – we confessed to the fact that we were going to sneak away after the drinks interval.
We wanted to like this play/production. We are partial to John Osborne, although well aware of the fact that his good is very very good, but not all of his drama is of the highest quality. This one felt like a history lesson in a rather dull (to us) aspect of history.
I also felt badly about walking out on Timothy West. He had, after all, sat through hours of dull stuff with me in it on more than one occasion without walking out at half time:
Returning to Luther, it was, of course, a fine cast and a fine production. Rufus Sewell in the title role. Richard Griffiths, Timothy West, and Maxine Peake in supporting roles, Peter Gill directing with a young Josie Rourke assisting.
Our single word verdict sums up how we felt about this production.
Top notch cast: Penelope Wilton, David Calder, and Matthew Marsh; ably supported by Alibe Parsons, Christian Dixon, Brid Brennan, Edward Hughes, Michael Hadley, Anna Maxwell Martin, and Peter Guinness. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Here is a link to the Theatricalia entry for this one.
Charles Spencer, while admitting that this is not his sort of play, spoke very highly of the production:
…so made a bee-line for Zinnie Harris’s next play – this time at the Royal Court.
The subject matter of Nightingale and Chase – a woman being released from prison, was very interesting. I’m not sure this one quite worked as theatre, though.
Not many actual reviews, but you can trust our friend Michael Billington to give such a production the full works and to remind me why we wanted to like this one more than we actually did:
Janie and I must have been very keen to see this one – a rare sojourn to the South Bank on a Friday evening for us. In those days we still found it hard to finish our work on a Friday and get to a place like the National Theatre in good time. We had both strategically kept the afternoon light, appointment-wise, I can see.
I believe we saw a preview at the Cottesloe, but the production had already stormed-it at Edinburgh a few week’s earlier.
I liked it, Janie hated it.
Split jury. That said, I recall that we were both a little disappointed by this play/production. Not that I thought it was poor – I liked it – but I recall us both thinking that it didn’t quite live up to the hype.
Fine cast, direction and production, as you might expect. Billy McElhaney, Michael Moreland, Michael Nardone, and Maurice Roëves starred, John Tiffany directed. Here is a link to the Theatricalia entry.
Charles Spencer gave the Edinburgh run a glowing review in the Telegraph…
Roll the clock forward a few weeks and a few hundred miles south. Michael Billington somewhat summed up why he felt that Gagarin Way didn’t work so well just a few weeks later at The National.
