Not until I was re-reading Edward Petherbridge's Slim Chances and Unscheduled Appearances (2011) with the cats in the summer kitchen tonight did it occur to me that my first theatrical memoir stands a very good chance of having been Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966). I love that novel so much that I don't even want to back-hand it by saying it is the least Renault-like, especially since it might be the one where she got most out of her own way; it is the tragedy no one could bear and it is chatty and discursive and convincing, even when its fourth-century Athenian theater sounds a lot like twentieth-century British theater. I think it was actually one of Petherbridge's anecdotes from rep in the late '50's and early '60's that suddenly flashed me on Nikeratos, but he sealed it with the Mermaid Theatre:
Nowadays the Mermaid, the crowning achievement of Bernard Miles, counts for nothing; the City of London Planning Committee even stripped the building of its status as a theatre in 2008. In any case, it has been smothered for years, wrapped in a plastic-clad office development and circumnavigated by a major road that cuts it off from pedestrians and its old relationship with the Thames alike. In such obscurity it has languished as a conference centre, but in 1959 it opened glowing as a new dawn, the first theatre to be created in the City of London, as opposed to the West End, since Shakespeare's day, with a bold, iron-pillared, industrial/classical entrance. It was a perfect example of British post-war make-do-and-mend. Wrought by public subscription out of a thick stone-walled, bomb-damaged warehouse, its southerly foundations were set in the riverbed, its eastern flank lapped by the murky waters of Puddle Dock. Puddle Dock, E1 was its romantic postal address. Its interior walls were russet-colored bare old London brick, its 600 seats arranged in one steep slope up the oblong length of the warehouse shell. Tynan welcomed its broad 'Brechtian' end stage, sans proscenium, whilst deploring the 'Oops my dear' musical version of Fielding, entitled Lock Up Your Daughters, that ran twice nightly in the theatre for months before transferring to Her Majesty's Theatre.
(Not many people remember Lamprias now in Athens.)
Nowadays the Mermaid, the crowning achievement of Bernard Miles, counts for nothing; the City of London Planning Committee even stripped the building of its status as a theatre in 2008. In any case, it has been smothered for years, wrapped in a plastic-clad office development and circumnavigated by a major road that cuts it off from pedestrians and its old relationship with the Thames alike. In such obscurity it has languished as a conference centre, but in 1959 it opened glowing as a new dawn, the first theatre to be created in the City of London, as opposed to the West End, since Shakespeare's day, with a bold, iron-pillared, industrial/classical entrance. It was a perfect example of British post-war make-do-and-mend. Wrought by public subscription out of a thick stone-walled, bomb-damaged warehouse, its southerly foundations were set in the riverbed, its eastern flank lapped by the murky waters of Puddle Dock. Puddle Dock, E1 was its romantic postal address. Its interior walls were russet-colored bare old London brick, its 600 seats arranged in one steep slope up the oblong length of the warehouse shell. Tynan welcomed its broad 'Brechtian' end stage, sans proscenium, whilst deploring the 'Oops my dear' musical version of Fielding, entitled Lock Up Your Daughters, that ran twice nightly in the theatre for months before transferring to Her Majesty's Theatre.
(Not many people remember Lamprias now in Athens.)
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