Poetic Josephine Hart

The Irish Muse of Poetry

When Kenneth Cranham performs Rudyard Kipling, he thinks of the late Josephine Hart, the writer and poetic pioneer

In February, I’ll be performing a selection of poems by Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen and Robert Lowell and I’ll read prose by JB Priestley. The show explores the poignant experience of human beings in war.

The first third of the show will be Kipling. His poems take me back to Bill Gaskill (1930-2018), the theatre director at the National Theatre and the Royal Court. I was in eight plays directed by Bill, including a part as Len in Saved by Edward Bond at the Royal Court.

The last production Bill directed was his own funeral service. For his list of chosen readings, he wrote, ‘Kenneth Cranham – Kipling’.

He didn’t say which one. So I chose Kipling’s When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted, with the lines:

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,

When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,

We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it...

I chose those words because Bill once tried to ban critics from his productions!

I also performed Mandalay, with its stirring refrain:

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flyin’-fishes play,

An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!

The poems go up to the recent past, in the shape of the American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) and his poem on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in 1968, Women, Children, Babies, Cows, Cats:

We was to burn and kill, then there’d be nothing standing women, children, cows, cats.

Looking back, I can remember doing a series of poetry performances. I shared a stage with Christopher Logue at the National Theatre, performing his poems about London. I did a selection of Samuel Beckett at the National with Peggy Ashcroft.

For a Christmas service at Westminster Abbey, I recited a text

Poetry, please: Josephine Hart (1942-2011)

about Joseph and Mary seeking sanctuary in the dark of night. I read a three-word phrase, describing their plight: ‘Far from home’. Simple words – great power. The boys’ choir really did sound like a choir of angels.

I read, too, for the late Josephine Hart (1942-2011), the author of Damage, a pioneer of poetry performances and the wife of Maurice Saatchi.

Josephine thought that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ was the first line of pure poetry she’d ever heard, as a little girl in Ireland.

As Randy Newman writes in his song Kathleen (Catholicism Made Easier), ‘I’ve always been crazy about Irish girls.’

In the February show, my daughter, Kathleen Cranham, will perform poems found by Josephine, the great huntressgatherer of poetry: Train by Helen Mackay; Perhaps by Vera Brittain; Paris, November 11, 1918 by May Wedderburn Cannan.

When I first read about Josephine, the dynamic, brilliant writer and promoter of performed poetry, I wanted to be one of her gang. Knowing she loved Elvis, as I do, I hand-decorated an Elvis cassette and sent it to her. Elvis worked his magic.

She asked me to perform Kipling at an evening at the British Library – a role previously performed by Roger Moore.

I emulated Roger’s favourite party piece, Kipling’s The Mary Gloster, a 16-minute storm of words from a dying father to his son:

Harrer an’ Trinity College! I ought to ha’ sent you to sea –

But I stood you an education, an’ what have you done for me?

The start of the reading was delayed because Margaret Thatcher was due to arrive – she was now retired and suffering from dementia but remained a Kipling fan. The hall at Downing Street during her time there was dominated by a large painting of Kipling, sitting at his writing desk in profile.

Margaret Thatcher’s favourite poem was If. I’d been given the task of performing it, including the lines:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them, ‘Hold on!’

John Major was also in the audience. His parents had been in music hall – a key element in Kipling.

Thanks to Josephine, I read in the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the Donmar Theatre in 2011. She put together a compilation of First World War poetry, writing what she called ‘introductions’ to groups of poems.

That triumphant week, she’d been battling cancer and had to be replaced by the actress Deborah Findlay. On the afternoon of the show, 2nd June 2011, it was announced that Josephine had died.

Her charming, witty, perceptive introductions were beautifully read by Deborah. Our hearts wept for Maurice. The audience and we readers were blind with tears.

One of my poems was To Any Dead Officer by Siegfried Sassoon, with the lines:

I’m blind with tears,

Staring into the dark. Cheero!

The Soldier, performed by Kenneth Cranham, is at the Marylebone Theatre, London, on 5th February