Isn’t it weird that they managed to dim the lights of all Broadway’s theatre marquees for a minute last Tuesday to honour the passing of Harold Pinter, as reported here - yet the West End could only finally muster a partial response four days later, when ATG did so at the Duke of York’s on Saturday evening, prior to the final performance of the revival there of No Man’s Land, and also at its other theatres as well?
Where was SOLT in the midst of this? Why did it not arrange a co-ordinated response of all of its member theatres, and rather sooner than ATG’s belated response? Of course it didn’t help that Pinter died on Christmas Eve, but even if various theatre offices may have been shut between then and Boxing Day, this is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the theatre year, and its trade body should have been on the case to arrange a timely honour, rather than one thrown out as an afterthought by one theatre group only.
It’s also regrettable that no one got around to re-naming a West End theatre after him while he was still alive to appreciate the honour. There was a story - referenced by the Independent’s Paul Taylor in his review of a show called Pinter’s People at the Haymarket in February 2007 - that there had been talk of renaming the Comedy Theatre after him, and Tom Stoppard had apparently quipped to Pinter, “”Have you thought of changing your name to Harold Comedy?”
But even if the West End has so far failed to properly acknowledge his importance, it’s not everyone who gets his funeral reviewed on the front page of The Guardian. In what might, in other circumstances, be regarded as rather intrusive journalism, Pinter’s biographer Michael Billington added a coda to his book on the man by filing a full report on the private funeral, “before a small gathering of family and friends at Kensal Green cemetery in London”, in which he wrote that “the half-hour ceremony conducted around the graveside had a deeply moving, faintly Shakespearean and entirely secular quality to it”. Michael then proceeds to review the readings that Pinter had himself selected, and the performances of Michael Gambon, actor/director Matthew Burton, Penelope Wilton and Pinter’s step-granddaughter Stella Powell-Jones: “What was especially impressive was the capacity of the readers, both actors and family members, to allow the emotion to flow directly through the words”; and he quotes a private remark of Tom Stoppard’s after everyone had filed past the grave, “You could cut the grief with a knife”.
In brighter West End news, Douglas Hodge has reportedly returned to La Cage Aux Folles, which I managed to inadvertently catch a full understudy call of last Monday night when I saw it again, as I reported here. But things apparently got worse in the company before they got better: according to a posting on the discussion board of Whatsonstage.com, by the next day, December 30, all three Albins were now off, so the matinee was cancelled and that night Graham Norton - currently rehearsing to take over the role of Albin officially from January 19 - stepped in!
And Saturday evening also saw the return of another previously indisposed star: David Tennant went back into the RSC production of Hamlet, from which he had suddenly withdrawn the night before last month’s press night which led the national critics to have to review his understudy, Edward Bennett, instead, as I reported here at the time. The RSC kept the wraps on this one, only issuing the press release about his return at 7.15pm that night. The audience, too, were apparently taken by surprise: according to a report in The Independent today, one said, “”None of us were expecting it, so when the announcement was made just before the curtain went up, we all cheered. It was a very welcome surprise. Needless to say, we gave him a standing ovation at the end.”
But let’s not rejoice too soon: the RSC announcement was understandably cautious, indicating that “We will be assessing David’s return to each Hamlet performance next week on a day by day basis so patrons are being invited to check our website www.rsc.org.uk from 12 noon each day for an update for that evening’s performance”.
Also on Saturday, the announcement was also finally made as to who Tennant’s replacement as Dr Who will be - Matt Smith. So perhaps, if Tennant has to step away again, Matt can take over! Like Tennant, he too has a strong theatrical pedigree - we saw him just last year at the Duke of York’s in That Face, and before that he was in the West End in Swimming with Sharks opposite Christian Slater. He’s also one of the many luminaries of the young actors who have come to prominence through The History Boys — just as Another Country was responsible for the early stage roles of the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth in the early 80s, so The History Boys has given early stage roles to everyone from original cast members Dominic Cooper, James Corden and Russell Tovey to replacements like Ben Barnes and Smith.
As critic and blogger Andrew Haydon remarked, it's not just policemen that are getting younger, it's inhabitants of police boxes too...
Excellent point Mark,
It does seem that the very least SOLT could do is honour a playwright whose regular and regularly profitable presence in the West End did much to allay critics' complaints about "dumbing down".
It would be especially interesting to know what Nica Burns - not only the president of SOLT but also proprietor of several West End theatres - thinks was acheived by this half-hearted salute.
Maybe she was too busy counting the cash from new-fangled "restoration fund" rip-offs to be bothered to observe the old-fashioned and honourable tradition of dimming the lights to pay respect to the passing of one of theatre's true greats.
It's shameful that Broadway beat us to it.