The movie, Diva, is reportedly about “a prima donna in Paris who gets involved in smuggling”. As is increasingly the case in the world of Whitney, you couldn’t make it up.. I knew when I was a small child that I wanted to act My school in Taunton was very arts-orientated. It used to have what they called Eisteddfods, which were really verse-speaking competitions
I knew when I was a small child that I wanted to act My school in Taunton was very arts-orientated.
It used to have what they called Eisteddfods, which were really verse-speaking competitions.
Eileen Hartly Hodder was my elocution teacher – I owe her a lot. Whenever I do poems in recitals I can still hear her advice, her instructions, her orders. She ran her own studio and I spent a year there after school gaining my LGSM, a performer’s diploma, which also meant that if everything failed I could teach. It was during that time that I made my début.It was 1946 and I played Aya Canora, the Spanish girl in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, for BBC Bristol with a lot of West Country actors. I remember being very impressed with everything and I wasn’t nearly as nervous as I’d be now When you’re young you feel you can do everything Youth is wonderful for that confidence You do things by instinct The more you learn, the more worrying it gets.
Only now, later in my career, do I feel more certain.The next year I went to Rada and about a month after I left I played the girl at the heart of the thriller Frenzy, the part played by Mai Zetterling in the original film written by Ingmar Bergman. I really don’t remember much about it except that I wore a plastic mac – that showed I was a prostitute – and it was May, very hot, and the sweat poured off me.From there I went to Brighton and did four plays, including a walk-on in Our Town and Viola in Twelfth Night. It was while I was doing that that I auditioned for Peter Brook’s Measure for Measure which opened the 1950 Stratford season run by Anthony Quayle. They wanted someone who wasn’t famous and after three auditions – including one in front of Quayle, Brook and the leading man, John Gielgud – I got the part I was a year out of drama school. My agent immediately sent me up to Dundee, “to get experience”.Barbara Jefford is in ‘Richard II’ and ‘Coriolanus’ for the Almeida at Gainsborough Studios, London N1 (020-7359 4404). Going to see a man about a dog is a time-honoured proverbial activity. Last Saturday, though, the Royal Court gave people a slightly rarer experience: the opportunity to go to see a man who has eaten a dog.
Going to see a man about a dog is a time-honoured proverbial activity. Last Saturday, though, the Royal Court gave people a slightly rarer experience: the opportunity to go to see a man who has eaten a dog.
The canine-consumer is Evgeny Grishkovets, a young playwright from Siberia and winner of the Russian drama award mysteriously dubbed the Anti-Booker Prize. Grishkovets performed an idiosyncratic, highly amusing and bemused monologue, How I Ate a Dog, which offered a sidelong look at the author’s three-year military service in the Russian navy. Interestingly, the event took place not in either of the Court’s theatres, but in its spanking new underground bar and restaurant, where the cuisine normally inclines less toward dog than trompettes de la mort on a bed of wilted spinach.It was an appropriate setting for two reasons. In Moscow, such work is staged in nightclubs, rather than in theatres. And it is as a direct result of the Royal Court’s recent interventions in Russian drama that nightclub-theatre started there in the first place and then took off.
To understand why, you must look at the philosophy behind the current International Playwrights season in Sloane Square, of which Grishkovets’s solo turn was a part.It’s the second such season that the Court has mounted, this time comprising work in progress from Palestine, Russia and France and two new German plays in full production, the first of which – David Gieselmann’s gruesomely funny splatter-fest Mr Kolpert – opened last week to great critical acclaim. What are on show here are not pieces cherry-picked during some chequebook-waving raid on the shopping malls of world theatre, but works discovered and developed by the Court’s formidable international department, run with flair and determination by Elyse Dodgson.As a global networker, the Court makes Richard Branson look like an anchorite nun. It extends its benign tentacles through exchange programmes, residencies and workshops abroad and through its international summer school, which offers hands-on tuition to emergent dramatists and directors from countries as diverse as Uruguay and Estonia, where there is no institution dedicated to new writing.Even Dodgson, though, is taken aback by the speed with which the Russian connection has delivered the goods. The process began only last year, when the Court’s literary manager, Graham Whybrow, went out to conduct a seminar. He “started a revolution” by describing to the amazed Russians the kind of British theatre structure in which the right to attend rehearsal and to have first choice of director, designer and cast is written into the playwright’s contract.At the follow-up workshop, the Court dramatist Meredith Oakes innocently suggested the writers bring along some thoughts about modern Moscow. The result was a flood of 17 sketches, which, under the title Moscow Open City, have been performed in joints such as the Gramophone and Propaganda, quickly becoming a cult phenomenon with clubbers.
