Len Hawkins
‘A great man – but terribly scared of heights’
Hesmondhalgh’s. After playing Hayley in Coronation Street 1,436 times, what an actress she has become, able to touch deep chords. Laura Fraser is another favourite. I’ve been nagging Stephen Frears for years to cast her in an adaptation of the story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, simply so I can see her in a mock-up of the headless-man polaroid. Frears, incidentally, was a participant in Memories of Lindsay Anderson, a documentary broadcast late at night and with a budget so small, there weren’t even clips. What struck me, though, was that Anderson, the director of This Sporting Life, If and David Storey plays, while professing to be anti-establishment and nonconformist, was the son of a major-general, born in India. His mother was born in South Africa. He himself was born in Bangalore, a child of the Empire. He was educated at Cheltenham and Wadham. Where the hell did the chippy sense of alienation come from? As I prefer my own company, to me 66 The Oldie July 2021
the much-loved series Friends was particularly off-putting – all that exaggerated silly banter and sentimentality; the air of American selfcongratulation. Yet I laughed to see how catastrophically the six characters have aged, dragged back in the reunion episode – grey, fat and waxy-faced, or else emaciated and scooped by the surgeon’s knife. Why aren’t they screaming?
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE THE TURK RETURNS TO GLYNDEBOURNE Fifty summers have passed since Glyndebourne first staged Rossini’s Il turco in Italia. And here I was again on a Bank Holiday Sunday, treading those same flowering lawns, with the same warm sun beating down from an azure sky – and a brand-new production of Il turco in prospect.
This small gem of an opera, a distant relation by text of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, was revived in Rome in 1950 by the great Italian film director Gerardo Guerrieri. It had been a long wait – 136 years to be precise. But here at last was a director shrewd enough to realise that this seemingly banal tale of an amorous Turk and guileful Italians was a spoof on contemporary opera libretti. Beneath the surface, Rossini’s subversive young librettist Felice Romani had added a chilling disquisition on the perils of marital disloyalty. The whole thing is set in motion, what’s more, by a protoPirandellian poet in search of a story. The 1970 production, conceived and designed by a team who had left Glyndebourne three years earlier, was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Mariame Clément’s new production is both an inspiration and a joy. The only mishap in 2021 was the loss to quarantine regulations of the firstchoice conductor, an eventuality that left the show in the hands of a smug-look party who didn’t seem much interested in bringing together pit and stage with the kind of split-second timing Rossini’s music both invites and requires. With her background in literature and fine art, Clément is well placed to tackle Il turco. And she scored double. First, by directing the opera itself with unfailing attention to every jot and tittle of Romani’s and Rossini’s published script. Then by providing a valuable additional layer to the opera’s satire on pulp fiction by placing the poet centre stage as he attempts to create his novel with the characters milling mutinously about him. His laptop scribblings were visible on a video screen on the wall behind. Writer Lucy Wadham has clearly relished drafting these mental battles royal, with their diagrams, sudden imprecations, creative-writing course memoranda and occasional Jilly Cooper-style rushes into actual writing. Funniest of all were the sudden cancellations and crossings out that I imagine many contemporary writers deploy to avoid offending the Twittersphere, especially when a flighty wife and a not entirely subservient husband feature in the dramatis personae. The video narrative will have provided an excellent crib for those guests who’d failed to do their homework before pitching up with their champagne and smoked salmon by Glyndebourne’s famous ha-ha. It also explained why the cast changed clothes minutes into the show, swapping period costumes (‘Not sexy,’ decides the poet) for 1950s Italian
