The shapes we take don't fit the games you play

[sovay]

"Peter had succeeded in getting his pipe to draw, and, with both hands in his trouser-pockets, was observing the actors in the drama with an air of pleased detachment."
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon (1937)



"Well, now you have me. It's that thing called charm. Without it, there is a not particularly personable, slightly skinny gent in an old loose tweed jacket and trousers with a patch on the seat and tortoise-rimmed glasses, pulling on a blunt pipe. With it, there is Leslie Howard."
—Ruth Rankin, "Leslie Howard – Perennial Charmer" (1936)



I still can't believe Busman's Honeymoon was filmed in the UK in 1940 when Leslie Howard was still alive and didn't star him. Every now and then I consider subjecting myself to it because I imagine Robert Newton was an ideal Frank Crutchley and then I remember everything else I have ever read or heard about it and I just re-read the novel.

Comments

[sovay]

Indeed.

I really like the idea of Desert Island Detectives.

Petherbridge is a lovely actor. And smart!

"As I began to work on Newman Noggs, perhaps I realized he too was a waif, a middle-aged one, who had lost his status as a gentleman and all hope of redemption. The sensations at the heart of his designedly anonymous life, I instinctively attempted to imagine in the long solitary hours he spent on his office stool and in his garret, the lonely limping errands across London, delivering letters or parcels for Ralph, with the little detours through familiar swing doors into public houses for a shot of anaesthetic. As soon as he meets Nicholas, of course, he finds a secret focus, if only out of gratitude to Nicholas's father, the man who once did him 'a kindness when there was no hope of return.' But the necessary ground is the lost cause that Noggs himself and everyone else assumes he has become, out of which the glimmers of righteous anger appear and the covert, growing determination, in whatever small ways possible, to do the right thing by Nicholas."

I'm sure it would drive me up the wall if I were trying to review his performances, but I enjoy reading someone who can do their own criticism:

"I had reasons, literally very close to home, for wanting to play Bennett's contrasting ultra-ordinary Arthur Dodsworth [in Office Suite], confined in his 'castle', which was about to be stormed by Patricia Routledge's Miss Prothero. Dodsworth is a widower, the newly retired erstwhile head of Credit and Settlement in a Yorkshire firm, a mild-mannered, modest, lower middle-class pensioner 'branching out' into pottery classes. Happily, here is a perfect and unexpected link, such as is manna from heaven to the writer of a discursive memoir! Not only had I been learning King Lear's lines, I had been defining him and the Fool in clay at my pottery classes. I could show you three versions. All Arthur Dodsworth has to show for his classes is an ashtray. [. . .]

"Kemp, mobile to mobile, was saying, 'Can I do anything to help? Can I fix you a dialect coach?' 'No,' I replied, 'This is the assumed voice, the actor's voice that I am speaking to you in now; as Arthur Dodsworth I will be speaking my native Yorkshire vernacular – a music as familiar to me as "songs my mother taught me".'

"But, there was a curious hitch. As I sat in the Chichester rehearsal room in Arthur Dodsworth's fireside chair, conscious that I was, at seventy, a little too old for the part, and about to turn seventy-one, I had the curious sensation that I was closer to my seventeenth birthday and my boyhood home, number 71 Pembroke Street, than my 71st birthday. You may laugh, but this was by no means a helpful thing for my Dodsworth. Patricia was the thing itself, had created her part for television nearly thirty years before and seemed to have matured into it, as authentic in the role now as a vintage wine in one of those venerable bottles. Rehearsing Bennett with her for the first few days was like rehearsing the Ten Commandments with Moses. I was in constant danger of being caught out dancing round the golden calf of waywardness. I felt I understood Arthur Dodsworth; I knew him, knew the lines already (almost) and the man completely, but I couldn't feel like the sedentary, bowls-once-a-week Arthur at all to begin with, though I could sound precisely like him. Even our mutual penchant for pottery classes didn't help.

"Strange, even ludicrous as it may seem, the classes I felt more affinity with and, indeed, which threatened to manifest themselves at any moment, were the first movement classes I'd attended at Bradford's Theatre School; I felt at risk of lifting like an autumn leaf off my fireside chair or turning my hand in an elegant eighteenth-century manner or lapsing into some posture learnt in my Friday morning ballet classes of over fifty years ago. [. . .] The fact is that the legacy of my early training is physical as well as vocal – perhaps predominantly physical – and I had never seen myself as settled into that dreaded category, 'the character actor'. Arthur Dodsworth was not, as they say, a very physical person and I realize now that most of the 'character' parts I have played required something of the deft clown. Even the romantic hero Wimsey (you see we have got back to him) referred to himself as a comedian, a light comedian. There's Newman Noggs, the victim of circumstance, who, chameleon-like, must adapt or conceal himself and his feelings to survive, continually 'in his cups' for anaesthetic, but still capable of girding up what is left of his loins when the Right must be fought for. Or there's the old Restoration lecher and lawyer, Coupler, in The Relapse, who, raddled though he may be, is still the duplicitous, mercurial fixer he has always been, with an eye and a groping hand for the gallant young bucks. I was warring against a whole careerful of light-on-their-feet operators, including Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière's Alceste."

(He is finally able to become "complacent" enough for Arthur when he realizes the character's non-adaptive qualities are the key to the entire play and is justifiably proud of himself.)