Robert Gorelangton

Thursday

24 Jan 2019
Robert Gorelangton

Queen bitch

In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp (her third husband), and her career was spiralling above the plughole. She only got the lead part in All About Eve when Claudette Colbert — who was all signed up — ruptured a disc while doing a rape scene on another film. The story goes that with Colbert shrieking in traction, the producer Darryl Zanuck, who hadn’t spoken to Davis since using the words ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, was obliged to offer her the part. It didn’t take much. No sane actress could resist Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fabulous script with its sophisticated wit and refreshing cynicism. Davis literally kissed the script and leapt at the part of the Broadway diva Margo Channing.

Queen bitch

Thursday

31 Aug 2017
Robert Gorelangton

Moor and more

In 1824 an ambitious teenage actor fled to England from his native New York where he had been beaten up once too often. He built a career here, being billed as ‘a Most Extraordinary Novelty, a Man of Colour’. What audiences encountered, however, was not the expected comedy of a simpleton mangling the Bard. They got instead an actor of thrilling charisma and deep natural ability. Ira Aldridge soon became the first black actor to play Othello, taking over the part from the brandy-sodden genius Edmund Kean, who died mid-run due to what one obituary called his ‘vortex of dissipation’. Thanks to a slew of highly prejudiced reviews in London, Ira became a classic example of a tour de force who was forced to tour. He expanded his repertoire with Shylock, Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Macbeth, and the wonderful Oroonoko — a dramatisation of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel about an enslaved African prince.

Moor and more

Thursday

16 Mar 2017
Robert Gorelangton

Tail-end Terry

It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he wrote. But he had, I think, another secret up his sleeve that is still little known. He was a tailgunner in the RAF. Indeed the service was his family and a thread of blue serge runs through his career. He died in 1977, aged 66. After Harrow and Oxford, the war rudely interrupted his dazzling entrée as a dashing young Thirties playwright. After basic training, Rattigan was assigned as a wireless operator and airgunner to a squadron of Sunderlands, hunting enemy submarines in the Atlantic. One moment he was banking nice fat royalties from West End hits such as French Without Tears. Next thing he knew, he was patrolling the Atlantic on 13-hour missions, prey to long-range enemy aircraft looking for an easy target.

Tail-end Terry

Thursday

3 Sep 2015
Robert Gorelangton

All white on the night

Shakespeare’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ will have no ethnic minority actors in the cast when the shows (two Henry VI plays and Richard III) open at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, later this month. A sprinkling of so-called BME (black and minority ethnic) actors in Shakespeare has been the norm for ages now. So the decision by the director to go with an all-white cast has caused much hurt and concern from the actor’s union Equity, the Guardian, and from various groups promoting racial diversity in the arts. From all the fuss, you’d think the plays are being directed by a hooded white supremacist. In fact they are being done by Trevor Nunn, former boss of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and not a chap you could accuse of political incorrectness.

All white on the night

Thursday

9 Jul 2015
Robert Gorelangton

North Cornwall

In a documentary filmed at the end of his life, Sir John Betjeman, who lived in the village of Trebetherick on the Camel estuary in north Cornwall, famously regretted not having had more sex. That problem doesn’t seem apply to today’s party crowd in the area. Nearby Rock and Polzeath are thronging with bingeing public-school teenagers, traffic jams of gleaming 4x4s, and new-build houses with plasma screens, wet rooms and all that hedge-funders require. David Cameron has body-boarded at Polzeath on recent holidays, his security detail bobbing like seals around him. For children of the 1960s, memories of frugal holidays in north Cornwall include pasties, fathers in baggy shorts, and limbs turning blue with cold. Betjeman may have evoked the ‘sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea’ in his poems celebrating the era of Morris Minors and unspoilt beaches.

North Cornwall

Thursday

4 Dec 2014
Robert Gorelangton

The birth of a barrel of cider

The fabulous October weather is now just a memory but it made for a golden, old-fashioned apple day down in Somerset. The plan was to pick and convert a mound of sugar-rich Redstreaks — about 400 kilos — into a rather special vintage. We would pour the apple juice into an oak hogshead, freshly emptied of its whisky, to make a cider tinged with a 20-year-old malt. How good does that sound? The idea of the get-together was the idea of designer Bill Amberg and publisher Damian Jaques, who is a cider boffin. Various friends and their families convened by an old barn with a nearby orchard. We tipped piles of apples on to a mat. The children rinsed the fruit in buckets and chucked them into a tall macerating contraption.

The birth of a barrel of cider

Thursday

13 Nov 2014
Robert Gorelangton

A brown-noser’s history of the Old Vic and National Theatre

The moment Waterloo Bridge was planned across the Thames, a new theatre to serve the transpontine coach trade was inevitable. The Old Vic opened in 1818. Originally called the Royal Coburg, it could seat a whopping 3,800. Kean was the first great actor to perform there. In 1831 he played Richard III, King Lear and Othello in one week. After giving his Moor, he came on, still blacked up and doubtless drunk, and let the heckling swine have it: ‘I have never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I see before me.’ Theatre back then sounds such fun. The amazing thing about the Old Vic is that it never burned down like all other theatres of its vintage; instead, its story is one of constant financial disaster.

A brown-noser’s history of the Old Vic and National Theatre

Thursday

25 Sep 2014
Robert Gorelangton

I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman

At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from the mouth of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the play in which Rudman once directed Dustin Hoffman to great acclaim. The author is also Felicity Kendal’s other half, making him a figure of envy for much of male Middle England. A tall ‘Texan Jew’ who went to Oxford, Rudman has quite a CV. He started at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where with the approval of the theatre’s chairman Nicholas Fairbairn he put on drugs and porno plays. An award-winning stint at the Hampstead Theatre followed, then a spell at the National Theatre. He later ran the Chichester Festival Theatre before going to the Sheffield Crucible.

I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman

Thursday

10 Jul 2014
Robert Gorelangton

Indiscretions from two veteran producers

Stars, playwrights and even set designers are constantly being lionised in the papers. But why not producers? They, after all, are the ones who choose the plays, the stars, and then make it all happen. Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliott are two veteran cigar chompers who’ve been in the business for 45 years. They’ve made and lost a packet, over and over again. They never seem to learn. Like all producers, they love their wives almost as much as they love a hit. Over lunch in the West End, I discussed the knack of being and staying a producer. Great exponents such as Cameron Mackintosh and Bill Kenwright have always had loyal teams. But Elliott and Weldon are in a way the true odd couple. They shared an office on the Aldwych (Ivor Novello’s old suite of rooms) for 37 years.

Indiscretions from two veteran producers

Thursday

20 Mar 2014
Robert Gorelangton

Julian Mitchell on Another Country: ‘I based it on my fury and anger and I wrote it fast and it flowed’

Today’s top public schools are plush country clubs with superb facilities, lovely food, first-class teaching, no fagging, no beating and, one imagines, minimal sexual interference from the staff. Most even have things called girls. While excellent at turning out world-class actors, the public schools these days are far too nice and unbrutal to be of any use as dramatic material for a play. Julian Mitchell’s play Another Country (1981) belongs to another era. It is a tale of sadistic, crumpet-munching prefects lording it over traumatised fags; homosexuality is rife and there’s brutal jockeying for position among the prefects — all good training for the cabinet jobs these teenagers one day expect to enjoy. It is set in the privileged school system of the 1930s that was briefly a crèche for budding Marxists and traitors.

Julian Mitchell on Another Country: ‘I based it on my fury and anger and I wrote it fast and it flowed’

Thursday

30 Jan 2014
Robert Gorelangton

The ‘detestable, bombastic, egocentric’ detective — Hercule Poirot lives on

With all the enormous fuss over Sherlock on the telly, David Suchet’s recent retirement from Poirot should not be forgotten. What an incredible innings! The actor finally hung up his patent-leather shoes after a quarter-century of playing the sleuth in 70 stories. The case is not closed for fans, however. Agatha Christie’s Belgian brainbox — to whom a speck of dirt on a cuff is more agonising than a bullet wound — has already returned. He is on stage in the form of Robert Powell, famous for once playing Jesus of Nazareth. The play is Black Coffee, Christie’s first play and the only one with Hercule Poirot in it. Poirot, a Belgian refugee from the first world war, made his début in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

The ‘detestable, bombastic, egocentric’ detective — Hercule Poirot lives on

Thursday

7 Nov 2013
Robert Gorelangton

‘You can’t handle the truth!’ — the greatest courtroom dramas of all time

Our legal system is pure theatre and always has been. Many barristers stand accused of being failed actors and vice versa. Judges love the dressing-up box and a chance to give their gavel a good bang. With murmuring galleries, shocking verdicts, swooning witnesses, cries of ‘all rise’ and ‘take him down’, the flummery and drama of the courtroom has always supplied a rich genre for film, theatre and telly. Now there’s a chance to see one of the more serious courtroom classics in the West End. Twelve Angry Men — originally written for the screen and directed by Sidney Lumet — is about a grumpy New York jury deciding on the fate of an ethnic kid accused of stabbing his father. If guilty, it’s the electric chair. There’s racism in the air as 12 men sweat it out in a heatwave, keen to get their verdict returned and to go home.

‘You can’t handle the truth!’ — the greatest courtroom dramas of all time

Thursday

10 Oct 2013
Robert Gorelangton

Ta-ra, Dame Edna — Barry Humphries bids goodbye to his chattier half

Dame Edna is hanging up her tiara. From now on the ‘failed comedian’, as Edna calls her alter ego Barry Humphries, will have to make do without her. Her current tour includes a run at the London Palladium but after she’s graced the provinces, it’s adios, possums. Her last ever live show is currently bringing (I paraphrase her website) a spooky old resilience to people’s lives through laughter, prayer and a life-enhancing enzyme called Vitamin E —  that’s E for Edna. The truth is, Barry can’t face touring any more. He is 79 and sick to the back teeth of trendy hotels with their moody lighting and minimalist nonsense. The last straw came when he was unable to turn off the bedside phone’s flashing message light and was obliged to drape his pants over the blinking thing.

Ta-ra, Dame Edna — Barry Humphries bids goodbye to his chattier half

Thursday

12 Sep 2013
Robert Gorelangton

Gregory Doran interview: ‘I wanted some big hitters,’ says the RSC’s new supremo

Gregory Doran has famously long glossy locks and is widely known to be a nice guy and an incurable Shakespeare nut. He has now taken over the reins at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he’s been associated for 26 years, working on both sides of the footlights, first as an actor and then a director. If you think he’s in the wrong job, blame Eileen Atkins. He first went to Stratford as a schoolboy to see her in As You Like It. ‘I went dancing out of the theatre and as we went back up the M6 in my mum’s beige Mini, apparently I turned to her and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up”.’ In fact, Doran, 55, has been putting on shows ever since the placenta hit the pedal bin, to use Maureen Lipman’s happy phrase.

Gregory Doran interview: ‘I wanted some big hitters,’ says the RSC’s new supremo

Thursday

22 Aug 2013
Robert Gorelangton

Tell me a story! Anne Fine, Amanda Mitichison, Terence Blacker and Keith Crossley-Holland on the joy - and importance - of reading aloud

A dark afternoon in December, aged about ten, I was in a class waiting for double geography. Mr Blake breezed in, told us to put our books away and, as a treat, he read us a story. It was ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, the famous ghost story by M.R. James. Heads resting on our arms, we listened to this chilling tale of a scholar who takes a winter holiday at an English seaside town, finds a whistle buried in the sand engraved with the inscription of the story’s title, and makes the mistake of blowing it. An evil thing is summoned — a flapping, sheet-like, blind thing with a ‘horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen’. Once heard, never forgotten. That story was by a mile the most memorable single event in my umpteen years of education.

Tell me a story! Anne Fine, Amanda Mitichison, Terence Blacker and Keith Crossley-Holland on the joy - and importance - of reading aloud

Thursday

14 Mar 2013
Robert Gorelangton

Book of Mormon – religion hits the West End

Hitchhiking through Salt Lake City as a student in 1976, I asked a local man, who was out shopping, directions to the nearest Salvation Army hostel. Rightly assuming I was down on my uppers, the man gave me his huge bag of groceries and walked off with a ‘bless you’. Say what you like about them, Mormons in my book are lovely. In several days spent in the most boring city on earth, I never met a nasty one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now the subject of the much-hyped The Book of Mormon, which is finally about to open in the West End after a year of total triumph on Broadway. Its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are the men behind South Park, the scatological, cynical, badly drawn but addictively funny TV cartoon series that has been polluting young viewers’ minds since the Nineties.

Book of Mormon – religion hits the West End

Thursday

31 Jan 2013
Robert Gorelangton

Unacceptable faces

A play called Rutherford & Son gripped audiences in London 101 years ago. Set on Tyneside, it was the David Hare-style leftie hit of its season. It depicted the unacceptable face of capitalism, a face that belonged to John Rutherford, who rules the family glassworks by fear, hated by his workers and his children alike. It’s still a fresh, brutal-up-north story of a monstrous control freak devoted to work and money and nothing else. The show has a terrific twist at the end and it was an instant hit in London, went to New York and was widely translated. But it became a big news story when the unknown author, K.G. Sowerby, was revealed to be a woman. Women did not write plays back then. It stuck in the craw when the critics found out, some of them slimily recanting their positive views of the play.

Unacceptable faces

Wednesday

12 Dec 2012
Robert Gorelangton

Going for a song | 12 December 2012

I once asked Donald Sutherland what it was like filming the famous naked love scene with Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. He said, ‘It was just so horrible.’ I was telling this anecdote over a bacon sandwich to the freckled actor Eddie Redmayne, who, if he is hit by a bus tomorrow, will be remembered for the very rude sex scene he did in the telly adaptation of the novel Birdsong. He had to make love to the radiant French actress Clémence Poésy. What can that have been like? ‘The only thing I can say is: imagine if you had to do it. Her nipples had tape on while your bits are stuffed into a sock and there are 20 strangers watching you both. Then someone shouts “Action!” It’s horrendous! There’s a famous sex scene in the book we had to recreate and we had to find a way in which it wasn’t going to be utterly awkward for both of us; it involved taping a cherry-flavour Haribo to her inner thigh and I would kiss that and no further.

Going for a song | 12 December 2012

Saturday

16 Jun 2012
Robert Gorelangton

The master’s lost voice

There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile. The play is the result of his life out in the tropics well away from the Angry Young Men in their winklepickers who were ruling the roost back in Britain. What a life it was! After a hard day’s snorkelling, Noël would sit outside his house, sipping a cocktail served by a white-coated native, the sun setting over the Caribbean, no cheap airline tourists to pollute his coral-fringed paradise. On the page Coward’s lost play exudes heat, sexual intrigue and the chink of ice in long drinks.

The master’s lost voice

Saturday

17 Mar 2012
Robert Gorelangton

Fairground attraction

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Professor Vanessa Toulmin about bringing the 27,000 Volt Girl and five-foot earwigs back into the public eye Vanessa Toulmin is that rare thing — an academic professor who grew up on a fair. From the age of ten she fried onions for the hotdogs, spun candyfloss, and took money for rides on the gallopers. She can remember, as a little girl, George the Gentle Giant (seven foot four) lurching home drunk with his chum Wee McGregor (two foot four) peeing on his shins. Her early life was like a Fellini circus film. As a teenager, Vanessa actually ran away from the fair to get some A-levels. Today  she has a chair at the University of Sheffield and is director of the invaluable National Fairground Archive.

Fairground attraction

Saturday

25 Feb 2012
Robert Gorelangton

A break from posh

The actor Ed Stoppard is kicking off the year in some nice period costumes. One of our brightest young actors, he’s back at 165 Eaton Place in the new BBC Upstairs Downstairs (reviewed on page 60) playing the diplomat Sir Hallam Holland. It’s got gas masks, the Munich Crisis, cocktails, a dead pet monkey, the odd conchie servant and, not least from Ed’s point of view, some great clothes. ‘In this series I get to wear jodhpurs and hacking jacket, naval uniform, black tie, white tie and a dressing-gown that would make Hugh Hefner green with envy. It will look sumptuous — more so than the last series. So there will be more bang for your buck,’ says Stoppard, who is hardly ever off-screen in a show whose great blessing is that, unlike Downton Abbey, it doesn’t have adverts every three minutes.

A break from posh

Saturday

10 Dec 2011
Robert Gorelangton

Consumed by Dickens

If you don’t like Simon Callow, you probably don’t like the theatre either. He is as theatrical as a box of wigs. Who else would bark ‘come!’ when someone knocks on his dressing-room door? There he is with a glass of wine, a boom of good cheer, having peeled off his side whiskers after his lushly enjoyable one-man show based on two rediscovered Dickens stories, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops. But that tour is now over and Callow (probably still best known for his part in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral — the funeral was his) is going straight into another Dickens, his new version of A Christmas Carol. The actor-writer who has cornered the market in Dickens works likes Dickens. He has a book coming out next year, his 13th.

Consumed by Dickens

Saturday

22 Oct 2011
Robert Gorelangton

Playing Churchill

Where would gentleman actors be without Churchill? No prime minister has given as much work to the profession as Winston (though Blair comes a close second), patron saint of jowly thespians of a certain age. Churchill now features in a new stage play called Three Days in May, about the British war cabinet in May 1940. The great man is played by Warren Clarke, whose fleshy fizzog is well known to fans of the 12 series of the BBC’s Dalziel and Pascoe — he plays Detective Superintendent Dalziel. A splendidly robust actor, he has roughly the same baby-fed-on-whisky looks as Churchill. In this he doesn’t wear rompers, instead you get the Churchill outdoors look — spotty bowtie, homburg and cigar. ‘He was balder than I am,’ Clarke says over coffee and a shared bag of Galaxy Minstrels after a matinee performance in Milton Keynes.

Saturday

11 Jun 2011
Robert Gorelangton

Priestley values

The J.B. Priestley flame is kept alive today by his son Tom, who resides in the same Notting Hill flat he has lived in for more than 50 years. His father — novelist, dramatist, scribe, broadcaster, socialist (who died in 1984) — was glad that Tom, now 79, hadn’t chosen the same life. ‘The only time he came here to the flat he said, “Don’t be a writer. Dreadful business.”’Tom is a retired film editor who manages the literary estate. He is the offspring of J.B.’s second marriage to Jane Bannerman, the divorced wife of the humorist writer Bevan Wyndham Lewis. There was one more Mrs Priestley after her — Jacquetta Hawkes, the distinguished but flinty archaeologist. Tom grew up in homes in the Isle of Wight and London — where his father kept two adjacent ‘sets’ in Albany — with his four sisters.

Priestley values

Saturday

23 Apr 2011
Robert Gorelangton

Wilton’s Music Hall - The good old days

John Major is half way through a book about the rise and fall of the music hall. His father, Tom, was a song-and-dance man who formed a double act with his wife, Kitty. John’s brother Terry was a trapeze artist, and the former prime minister must have come close to going into the family trade. Parliament’s gain was, in John Major-speak, showbiz’s not inconsiderable loss. Oh, yes.  Tom Major was a name in his day, although the fag-end of the music hall he knew is deader now than even the madrigal. The generation of halls that emerged in 1850 were very rapidly gone. Only one survives, in the East End of London, off Cable Street in Stepney.  John Wilton originally bought a terrace of five Georgian houses and a pub so that he could use the land at the back to build his music hall.

Wilton’s Music Hall - The good old days

Saturday

9 Apr 2011
Robert Gorelangton

The face of space

Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshowFifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth. Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation Street. Yuri was mobbed, the girls infatuated with the beaming Soviet pin-up Macmillan called ‘a delightful fellow’.

The face of space

Saturday

19 Feb 2011
Robert Gorelangton

‘I play to middle England’

Raymond Gubbay is a hard man to avoid. Especially at Christmas. Last year Raymond Gubbay Ltd presented roughly 600 concerts, of which 180 were part of his annual Christmas Festival and he lived up to his festive catchphrase: ‘You want carols? We’ve got carols.’Gubbay’s packaging of live classical music has been amazingly successful. He came up with the idea of Vivaldi by candlelight played by men in wigs. His regular Johann Strauss galas are a big hit, as is Strictly Gershwin, and his own-brand laser-lit Classical Spectaculars. The genial man with the Midas touch is famous, too, for his operas at the Albert Hall, where Madam Butterfly is about to return. It comes complete with a 60,000-litre pond, which turns the place into a giant Japanese garden centre.

‘I play to middle England’

Saturday

8 May 2010
Robert Gorelangton

Two men in a boat

Robert Gore-Langton on a stage adaptation of the Erskine Childers classic Riddle of the Sands The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. It was an instant bestseller and has never been out of print since. It’s the story of two young Englishmen who, while sailing off the German coast, unearth a fiendish plot to invade Britain. The book is often cited as the first ‘factional’ spy story, one that launched a genre. With its mass of authentic, verifiable detail it set the trend for Fleming, le Carré and the rest. The book includes maps, charts and tide timetables. It’s part patriotic thriller, part advanced sailing course; the explanations of the theory and practice of inshore sailing are perhaps its chief glory, fascinating even to those of us who don’t know a mizzen from a marlinspike.

Two men in a boat

Saturday

3 Apr 2010
Robert Gorelangton

What’s a war book without a dead Nazi?

Objections are raised to a cracking new children’s book on account of a dead German soldier and pictures of frostbite. But the young adore grisly bits, says Robert Gore-LangtonThere’s a cracking new children’s book out, Mission Telemark, by the award-winning writer Amanda Mitchison. It is set in the second world war and it’s based on the story of the Norwegian sabotage raid on Hitler’s ‘heavy water’ atomic plant in Telemark. You might remember the film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas as a most unconvincing Norwegian. Both the film and the book were based on the famous 1942 mission — a tale of great courage, skis and atoms. In the children’s novel the saboteurs are young teenagers and the foursome are sent to Scotland to be brutally trained in special ops by a peppery British colonel.

What’s a war book without a dead Nazi?
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