KRAPP’S LAST TAPE is a one-act play for one actor by Samuel Beckett. I first saw it performed by John Hurt at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London in March, 2000. It’s genre is described as ‘minimalist monodrama’. It’s Krapp’s 69th birthday and he hauls out his old tape recorder, listens to a recording he did 30 years earlier, before making a new one.
Sir Michael Gambon performed a revival at the Duchess Theatre in October 2010.
Priscilla Presley made her pantomime debut in London last Christmas, playing the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I sent this drawing to the theatre and received it back through the mail in January.
Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’ died yesterday.The former and first (and only) female British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s passing has bought mixed reactions in the UK. Tony and Olivier nominated actress, Haydn Gwynne currently portrays her in Peter Morgan’s new play, THE AUDIENCE at the Gielgud Theatre. “I don’t know many people who would be neutral about Margaret Thatcher,” she wrote in the programme. “Everything about her was antithetical to what I believe in,but I would never play her through a filter of my own view of her…it’s not what is required. The weird thing is that, as soon as you are asked to play someone like this-and of course I watched bits of footage and read her biography and memoirs-you stop judging.”
I was going to do a sketch of Haydn anyway, along with other cast members,so it seemed appropriate to whip one up and have it signed by the Thatcher ‘stage surrogate’ on the day of Maggie’s passing. It was a surreal atmosphere around the stage door as cast and crew filtered in,with the occasional comment about ‘the event’ of the day. I missed Haydn going in, but did get to meet Peter Morgan,who signed my programme which was a bonus.
Everyone left relatively quickly after the performance and the group gathered at the exit soon dispersed once Dame Helen drove off, leaving only me, Phil, the stage door manager and one or two patrons from the gay bar opposite who had popped out for a ciggy….oh and the guy who feeds the pigeons. Haydn finally appeared around 10.45 and looked surprised..that someone was still waiting,let alone with a sketch. “I guess it must have been an interesting night?” I said. “Very interesting”, she replied. She liked the drawing-thought it was a nice touch and the poignancy of the moment felt as she signed it with a spirit-based sharpie.
In 2006 Dame Helen Mirren won 29 major awards for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the film The Queen, including the Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA Awards for Best Actress.
In April this year she once again reprised the role for the stage production of Peter Morgan’s (who also wrote The Queen) world premiere of The Audience at the Gielgud in Shaftesbury Ave.
For the last sixty one years, the Queen has met with 12 Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said… not even to their spouces. The Audience breaks that code of silence and imagines a series of pivotal meetings, charting an arc through the second Elizabethan Age. Prime Ministers come and go through the revolving door of politics, while she remains constant.
The Audience opened to critical acclaim, and is nominated for five Laurence Olivier Awards, including a Best Actress nod for Dame Helen.
She is always very accommodating with autograph requests. If she doesn’t sign in person, the stage-door manager takes material to her. My programme was signed when she was leaving after an evening performance, but I left the sketch at the theatre. When time is limited and there are gazillions of graphs to do, she has abbreviate to ‘H. Mirren” so I was please to get a full signature and the customary wavy underline. I wonder if Elizabeth R will take in the play, after all she and Philip did go to War Horse and did invite Dame Helen to dinner at the Palace in May 2007.
It’s April – not that the weather’s come to the party, as it continued to chuck down the white stuff…. but, as they say ‘there’s no business like snow business.’
Appropriately, a white carpet (or maybe originally it was red!) awaited Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko and director Joseph Kosinski for the UK premiere of the Sci Fi saga Oblivion at the BFI IMAX near London’s Waterloo station.
One of the highest paid and most sought-after actors in screen history, Tom Cruise, has played a bartender, soldier, pilot, special agent, samurai, contract killer, senator, magazine owner, lawyer, sports agent, student, vampire, race-car driver and pool player can now add one of the few remaining drone repairmen assigned to an Earth devastated by decades of war with the alien Scavs.
One forecast was guaranteed, whatever the weather, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV would not disappoint his frozen fans. Thankfully, he shortened his moniker, or it would be Summer before he finished signing. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tom doesn’t rush. He always arrives early, completes media commitments, and then spends as much time as it takes ‘signing the line’ (that’s graphers lingo for everyone).
The planet’s biggest star is also its biggest signer. An interesting fact: he’s actually left handed but signs with his right hand. He has been known to spend up to 3 hours signing siggies and posing for pics prior to screenings. That’s quality and quantity, but then he’s good with numbers. Each one of his three wives have been 11 years younger than the previous one. And they were all 33 when the marriages ended. So maybe he’s more of a numerologist than a Scientologist.
By the time he got to me which was around half an hour after he started down Sharpie street, he must have signed nigh on 100 ‘graphs. When he saw my sketch he was really pleased with it and we had a brief chat and he signed and dedicated it. Mission: Acccomplished
The Michael Grandage Company’s second of five theatrical treats at the Noel Coward Theatre is Peter and Alice written by John Logan, it’s a moving study of enchanchment and reality after a brief encounter between the real-life models for Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, laying bare the lives of two extraordinary characters shaped by JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll. The actual fleeting meeting took place at a literary event in 1932, when Alice Liddell Hargreaves was 80 and Peter Lleweullyn Davies was 35. Logan speculates on their imagined conversations, looking at how we are all shaped by our childhoods. The children who inspired two classics meet as emotionally bruised adults in a dusty old bookstore and explore their views of past relationships with the authors and the price that they have paid when fame is foisted on the child heroine and the boy who never grew up. It is a tale of two tortured souls with Peter struggling the most with the unwanted fame. “I think I know what childhood is for. It’s to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering.”
Alice passed away peacefully and contented, Peter committed suicide, throwing himself under a train in Sloane Square. The principle characters are played by Dame Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw – transferring ‘M’ and ‘Q’ from the screen to Wonderland and Neverland from the recent Bond film Skyfall (also written by John Logan).
Both actors are terrific on stage and off stage. They are great signers, but the problem is that they leave at opposite ends of the theatre. Alice through the front looking glass (barriered) and Peter flies out the back. In order to avoid having to go back twice, signature strategy requires some prior intelligence. My spies told me that Ben usually exits first, then the mob hot foot it to the front of the theatre for Dame Judi. And that’s exactly what happened. As all good bedtime stories should finish.
Some more thoughts on drinking from the rich and famous. A second part to this.
I’m sure being inside the head of American actor, writer, director, producer and fashion designer John Malkovich would be a fascinating, if not a disturbing space to be. I would settle to be in a space beside him for as long as it took him to sign and dedicate my sketch. That space happened to be The Barbican in central London on a Saturday in mid-June 2011. Like his imagined persona, JM can offer a variety of responses to graph – both auto and photo – requests. One thing I did find out from the zombies, who were circling the foyer in numbers, Mr Malkovich walks in the front door – no sneaking in side entrances for him. His signature used to be recognisable in the early ’90’s – all letters formed in the conventional manner as per the English alphabet, spelling out his name. Now it looks more like the print out from a cardiograph machine.
John Gavin Malkovich has appeared in over 70 motion pictures, spanning a 30 year career. He’s also directed and produced a few and written a screenplay. To complete his Renaissance-man image he set up his own fashion company, ‘Mrs Mudd’ in 2002. Among other things it includes the John Malkovich Menswear Collection called ‘Uncle Kimono’ and he designs the clothing himself.
He was hopefully entering the front door of The Barbican that Saturday afternoon in mid-June to take part in a Q&A following a screening of DANGEROUS LIAISONS . He was also performing a two-day season of the unusual one-man play, THE INFERNAL COMEDY, playing the role of the notorious Austrian serial killer-Jack Unterweger. It was a solo acting part… along with a baroque orchestra and two sopranos, singing arias about murder and abandonment. Not one of your cheeriest days in theatre. So, would he be in character-method acting? Pretty hard to get a graph from a serial killer…without some fatal injury.
As it turned out, Mr M was already in the building, possibly using a side door and was wandering around the foyer, talking on his cell phone… followed by a line of autograph hunters. It resembled the Pied Piper. I decided to remain in one spot and watch the carnival, which eventually came past me.. and stopped… because the prey stopped. He saw my sketch, completed his call and asked me if I wanted it signed by him – a novel reversal to the norm. He did so with his cardiogram sig and dedicated it, as well as signing a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH film poster. Then his phone rang and he popped back on it and the procession started all over again around the Barbican foyer on that bright Saturday afternoon in mid-June.
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