Tony Robinson, Sir Ian McKellen, Getting Married — Part 1

It’s been a busy old time here in Stratford recently, and it all started with Tony Robinson’s one man show, A Cunning Night Out, at the Civic Hall.

Now, I like Tony Robinson. I liked him as Baldrick in Blackadder, and the enjoyable annoyance factor on Channel 4’s Time Team; and the hugely enthusiastic presenter of TV’s The Worst Jobs In History. But when you see him live he really is alive, and fun, and rude, and heart-warming, and funny, and serious, and rude, and a rather superb member of the human race, and very rude.

And Tony is roughly the same age as me, and Hilary, which made his stories and references so much more meaningful, and so full of that bitter-sweetness that is nostalgia.

From the moment the house lights went down and he entered through the black drapes of the Civic Hall he never stopped talking either – unless he was showing a piece of film that had him, well, talking – which drove the show along at a terrific pace, where, in a verbal autobiography, he cleverly dropped in important theatrical and cinematic information, along with a few big names, quite a few big names, as well, as he also describes in his book, My Life: In Words And Pictures.

“ It was 1959 and I was 13 years old when I landed the part of the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s Oliver.”

“ The interesting thing about Oliver was that, in a way, it wasn’t dissimilar from The Beatles or John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger or Peter Blake’s paintings in that it was a huge cultural assertion in the teeth of transatlantic stuff. In the same way that John Osborne was so different at the Royal Court Theatre, Oliver was a totally different musical. All the successful musicals before had been American – Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe – but Oliver was not only British but London working class, and there was a particular pride in being involved in it. Following that, there were loads of British musicals – I did Stop The World I Want To Get Off, for instance, with Tony Newley.”

Tony was considered by his schoolteachers to be hugely talented, although they thought him obsessed with what he knew already, and less than interested in what he could still learn. They also wanted him to go…

“…into what was called the Oxbridge stream and try for Oxford or Cambridge. There was no way I could have done that. I think my parents would have liked me to turn into Michael Palin, which might not have been a bad idea…”

Well, he didn’t, and let’s be honest, one Michael Palin is enough surely. But what Tony Robinson did do was keep trying, and trying to handle his emotions: feeling he was over emotional in everything he did, which, when theatre director, Sir Peter Hall, told him he was not emotional enough, rather confused him to say the least; so he effectively became flippant and hippy, and dreadfully unfunny – and, in his own admission, a big smoker of pot, which doesn’t help on the comedy front — as if to somehow suggest he had no emotions. The consequence being that eventually he created characters who, on the surface, seem to have no feelings, no emotions, but are, once opened, full of the stuff. Such was the essence of the character of Baldrick, which is perhaps one of the greatest comedy characterizations of the last fifty years, and far more the creation of Tony Robinson than the writers.

“ It wasn’t as if it was the first major telly I’d done, but it was the one that stuck. I think it’s fair to say the first series was a bit of a flop and the BBC weren’t going to do any more – it was only two years later when Michael Grade became head of BBC One and John Lloyd our producer, went to him and said ‘can we try Blackadder again, because it’s crazy for the BBC to have made that investment and for us not to exploit it?’ Grade agreed, provided we only got half the budget we’d been given for the first series. It wasn’t as though we did Blackadder and suddenly my life changed but, out of meeting Richard Curtis and doing Blackadder, I was asked to do lots of bit parts in Alas Smith & Jones and was invited to do Who Dares Wins for Channel 4. With those three shows, I’d had a big introduction to the entire comedy mafia of that time. Rather than playing for Dagenham & Redbridge, I was suddenly playing for Manchester United.”

He was suddenly where he wanted to be, and where he belonged.

If you get a chance to see Tony in his one man show do so because you’ll learn a lot about him, life, and yourself, and not least your emotions, for the simple reason that he challenges long held assumptions, beliefs, and fears.

And if you come across his book, Tony Robinson, My Life: In Words And Pictures, buy it and read it.

To Be Continued…

Second Thoughts Present Hamlet

The Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon, 7th - 10th March, 2007

I’m looking forward to seeing this show, directed by Estelle Hand. I shall be reviewing the production on Thursday.

In the meantime you might like to read Estelle’s notes:

Why an all female company for Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet?

Fifteen years ago I saw the all female Sphinx Theatre Company perform Hamlet. I was intrigued when watching the play how quickly involvement with the plot overcame any initial novelty of the cross-gender casting. Since then I have hoped to have the opportunity to re-visit this theory in production.

Edward Hall, who recently directed an all male version of The Taming of the Shrew was asked the question, ‘Why don’t you employ women?’ To which he replied. ‘If you want to start an all female Shakespeare Company then do it.’ He further commented, ‘Actors by their nature are pretending to be something they’re not and whether they are pretending to be Hamlet or pretending to be a woman, essentially to me there is no difference.’

Shakespeare, who was denied the participation of women on stage, created many male protagonists with a unique combination of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities and Hamlet in particular. It is this subtlety of characterization which has drawn many female actors since the 18th century to play the role. Over fifty female Hamlets have been performed. The first was probably Mrs Siddons from 1777 onwards; the most celebrated, Sarah Bernhardt 1899, and the most well-known contemporary portrayal, Frances de la Tour 1979.

Finally, would Shakespeare himself approve of ‘gender bending’ less complicated than in his day his male actors having to impersonate a woman pretending to be a man? I think he would find it now entirely credible, and only fair, to allow women the chance to tell Hamlet’s story upon the stage.

North Face of Soho

Stratford-upon-Avon Civic Hall

There’s no doubt that Clive James is as good a talker as he is a writer - and he’s a brilliant writer - and as funny on his feet as he is on the printed page, which is a pretty good combination. Last Thursday evening (9th November) at the Civic Hall, he entertained a capacity audience for well over the allotted time of ninety minutes, which, according to James’ driver means he’s enjoying himself as much as the audience.

These so called ‘audiences’ are invariably little more than a showcase for a celebrity to sell a new and usually badly written book, which often results in a half-hearted, and lack-luster affair, where the celeb in question recounts all too familiar anecdotes, the veracity of which is often questionable. They are there, not to talk to and entertain an audience (who will have spent £15 - £18 on a ticket) but to fulfill the demands of a publisher’s contract.

Like the rest of them Clive James has a book to sell, but in this case it’s a rather good one called North Face of Soho, which is the fourth in his series of Unreliable Memoirs. And he got stuck into selling the thing from the start with an off-handed antipodean wit that could drag the required £17.99 out of the most scrooge-like of pockets. And let’s remember that James is a writer, so writing, and, when he gets the chance, selling books - his books - is what he does for a living. And you get the impression he has, and still does make a pretty good living.

A good living that was undoubtedly helped along by being one of the most familiar figures on our TV screens, interviewing the likes of Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton. That is until 2001 when mainstream TV (with the exception of becoming a ‘professional’ guest on just about every chat show going, and where, if the host loses the plot, he’ll ask himself questions) didn’t want his kind of literate and engaging shows any more. And as James made it clear on Thursday - after his documentary about Cuba was shelved by a 12 year old executive producer - it was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. He now hosts a chat show for Sky from his own living-room.

And you will see in this new and intimate chat show the irreverent wit and highly cultured base from which James has built his reputation over the last forty odd years; an irreverence and culture that was also the basis of his audience on Thursday, which dealt hilariously with everything from smoking, drinking, weight, sex and the balding man, a discourse on Australian culture, plus some wonderful readings from his new book, especially one about men’s fashions and the world of the 1970s…

” If, during the course of this volume, I refer to my mode of dress as if I looked outstanding, the reader should grasp in advance that standing out, in that period, was unusually hard to do. We all looked like that: or, at any rate, the younger men did. The Duke of Edinburgh never dressed to get attention. If he didn’t, why did we? It is a very hard thing to evoke an era. Pick up a notebook and a pen right now, stick your head outside the door, and command yourself to evoke your era. How, for example, would you capture your era’s atmosphere of squalid menace in public places? Where would you start? As the sixties slithered into the seventies, the streets were still almost incomparably safer than they are now, but the post-punk body-piercing hoodies of today look diffident, almost self-effacing, compared to the young males of that time. With few exceptions, we all looked more amazing than anything seen in Britain since the Restoration brought in horned wigs and stilt heels. You can’t really tell from photographs how universal the bizarrerie actually was, to the extent that nobody noticed because everybody was doing it…

” The fashion dictated long and thick sideboards to the hair, as if the head had been joined on each side by a small sofa deprived of its covering and tilted on end. There were velvet jackets, flared trousers, zip-sided boots. With the possible exception of the hair, all these elements entailed a lavish use of industrially generated materials, especially polyester. It meant that the average young male was carrying a greater proportion of artificial fabrics than an airliner’s interior…

” My own range of shirts included an electric blue number that made the unwary spectator’s eyes ache. As its proud owner, I thought it looked particularly good with a cravat. The cravats I favoured were of a chemically derived material printed with a paisley pattern…They sometimes delivered electric shocks when touched, but so did almost everything else I was wearing. When charged up by walking on the right kind of nylon carpet, I could be seen in the dark…”

Lovely stuff.

A good piece of advice Clive James gave on Thursday night is that would-be interviewers and chat show hosts must never ask a question of a guest and then answer it themselves, because, quite naturally, it leaves the interviewee nothing to say. Good basic advice that sadly - during the question and answer period toward the end of the evening - fell on the deaf ears of a well known local journalist who gave an embarrassing two minute answer to his own embarrassing five minute question. I shall read his next column with interest.

It was a super evening with some very thoughtful nonpcness that went to the humorous heart of things. I, along with my two old friends Lawrence and Byron, enjoyed it hugely.

Congratulations to Fiona, Claude, and the rest of the gang at the Civic Hall for getting Clive to Stratford.

If you want to see Clive’s new chat show from his own home click onto Clive James dot com.