PRETENDING TO BE ME: Tom Courtney on Larkin
Leeds
PRETENDING TO BE ME
by Tom Courtenay from the writings of Philip Larkin based on an idea by Michael Godley
West Yorkshire Playhouse Courtyard Theatre To 21 December 2002
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Audio described 11, 14 December 12 December 2.30pm
BSL signed 12 December
Captioned 18 December
Postshow discussion 11 December
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS 0113 213 7700: www.wyp.org.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 28 November
At the Comedy Theatre to 26 April 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm
TICKETS: 020 7369 1731
A remarkable performance of an unremarkable man and remarkable poet.
He looks and sounds like Tom Courtenay. The eyes-wide expression that looks you in the face, the sympathy-evoking vocal cadences. This is a person not pretending to be any other than the actor he is, soaking up your attention. So why does it work so well when the character is a poet whose whole persona was not to have a persona? Who worked in a university library, but did not believe in contact with students. Who was glad that university, from 1955, was Hull: a place on the way to nowhere, so visitors would not call.
Philip Larkin, you feel, went unnoticed by choice. He would not do the poetry-reading circuit, going around 'pretending to be me'. And had as his bete noire the younger, hunkier, vibrant reader of his own poems, Ted Hughes looking, in his leather jacket, 'like a Christmas present from Easter Island'.
So quiet was Larkin that, just as it took people 20 years to realise he'd started writing, it would take them 20 years to realise he'd stopped. Inspiration left due to an enforced shift – in 1974, year of his last collection High Windows - from a rented top-floor flat to his own house. He's just arrived when we meet him, popping up from behind the removal crates like another bit of debris from his own life.
As he refreshes himself through the day – tea in act one, whisky post-interval - Courtenay's Larkin offers a seamless interweave of prose memories and their verse reflections. It helps that Larkin's verse language is so quiet (the trad. jazz-loving poet came to rhyming, scanning verse through dance-music lyrics), unlike Hughes' image-laden lines, which he parodies along the way.
Courtenay touches lightly upon the post-mortem discoveries of Larkin's right-wing views (more moral perception than ideology) and sexual fantasies: students are becoming 'juicier or more uncouth' according to sex. And this side's handled comically, with Larkin's disappointment over his newly-acquired TV, which doesn't display the filth people complained about. Less news, more nudes would be his code, you feel.
But it's hard to object to any views filtered through Courtenay's sardonic, boyish appeal. And the good poems are great; well worth the life in Hull.
Philip Larkin: Tom Courtenay
Director: Ian Brown
Designer: Tim Hatley
Lighting: Neil Austin
Sound: Mic Pool
2002-12-07 16:49:26