Getting personal in the theatre….

As they often reminded me, two of my now-colleagues - Ian Shuttleworth of the FT and Simon Edge of the Daily Express - were contemporaries of mine, and once starred together in a production of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, which I reviewed. And apparently gave the central plot device away. (Ian can even quote my review back at me: I had described him as looking like a “benign Sheridan Morley”. Of course, I didn’t know Sheridan in those days - though he, too, would later become a colleague to both of us - so I’m not sure why I thought the real Sheridan was less than kindly, by comparison.)

As Charles Spencer notes in his Daily Telegraph review today, “Gray movingly shows how innocence is bruised by time. Idealism dwindles, hope sours, friendship is betrayed. These are truths anyone in middle age knows in their heart, but which most of us try to forget. Emerging from a matinee performance into bright sunlight, however, I suddenly found myself overwhelmed by a sense of my own past and of what had been lost on the way.”

And though the play is set in an earlier era to my own Cambridge - in the play, the men still have to don gowns to walk about in public, which we never did - I was still able to recognise myself in it. The students in the play found a literary magazine (one they continue beyond Cambridge) - and I remember that my first student journalism gig was writing reviews for a weekly magazine called Broadsheet, one of the other contributors to which was Peter Bradshaw, now film critic of The Guardian! And the character of a gay, Wagner-obsessed don - played by Dreyfus - who is appointed a senior moral tutor (someone who supposedly looks after an undergraduate’s “moral welfare”) reminded me of my own moral tutor, Michael Tanner, who is still a don of my college (Corpus Christi) but is also now opera critic of The Spectator (so, unlike the character in the play, is very much still with us!), and the extent of whose moral tutelage was the exchange of knowing smiles as we passed in the quads….

The play movingly charts the passage of time over 18 years for the characters; but now that my own life has moved even further years away from going up (“matriculating”, they call it in Cambridge) in 1982 to a quarter of a century later today, I, too, can see echoes of disappointments - but also of achievements. OK, it may not have been much of an ambition - but yes, I am now doing what I set out to do all those years ago!

And if Ian Shuttleworth - or Shutters as we now universally know him — never went on to be a professional actor, he found his own calling as a critic on another student magazine, Cantab, that was a rival to Stop Press, the student newspaper of which I was theatre critic and eventually arts editor. And last night he was sitting right behind me at the Trafalgar Studios to review the opening of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig — another play that happens to have personal resonances for both of us.

Actually, I can’t speak for Ian and I will have to wait for his review to find out how he took it, but one thing you can’t hide about both of us is that we’re both of a stouter disposition: “big boned” as the plus-sized woman who finds herself falling in love with a “normal” sized man in the play offers up as one of the many euphemisms that she’s always hearing for being overweight. But if she’s a poster girl for the larger woman - comfortable with herself and really quite lovely - she’s also a little defensive and insecure about society’s responses to her, and whether or not a man she meets over lunch is able to reciprocate her affections. He can and does - he tells her that he adores her - but he’s still strangely reluctant to introduce her to his friends or take her out in public.

It took me a long time to be comfortable with my own size - but my first partner used to tut whenever I indulged in chocolate (a favourite vice!) and when I once suggested going to a sauna together, replied, “We couldn’t - people would laugh at you”. Fortunately he has been left long behind - and no, they haven’t laughed when I’ve been to saunas since; in fact, I’ve happily discovered that there are places where the larger man is in high demand! And seeing Robert Webb’s under-developed straight man body, with his scrawny arms and mostly hairless chest, I realised that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder: in the play, his friends are surprised that he’s taken up with a fat woman - but maybe we should be surprised that she can’t do better! Webb’s comedy partner, David Mitchell - sitting one along from my own partner last night - is a lot beefier. But then maybe, too, I’m indulging a prejudice of my own. LaBute’s play makes you think about society’s attitude to difference - one character spews out a litany of hatred for “fags, retards, cripples, fat people, old people” - and maybe, I thought, he could add scrawny thin people, too.