DIARY
The publicity is the hard bit. Even though Edna: The Spectacle is by far the most elaborate offering I have ever pre- sented in the West End, it's almost a breeze pushing the Austral icon into her follow- spot and letting her free-associate for an evening. Telling the public to come requires a great deal more effort, ingenuity and patience. You have to do a lot of radio, which I love, but the telly interviews can be dangerous, because you always have to win. There is absolutely no alternative possible. But if you do too much television, people think they can see you any time they like by pressing a button; so it is necessary simulta- neously to amuse them and lure them out of their armchairs and suburbs with the promise of even greater rewards and merri- ment at the Haymarket.
The newspaper interviews are the hard- est, because however beguiling or brainy the interviewer, you can never really be cer- tain he's on side. When you meet him he's Courteous, even slightly nervous, as he sets up his tape recorder. Sometimes this little black machine could lull you into the delu- sion that your replies are of interest to your interlocutor, but this is not always the case. He has done his homework: read the cut- tings, even scanned some of your books, though he may never have seen you on stage. He doesn't need to. He has already decided who you are, so what you do isn't important. I'm normally good at picking those journos with a fixed agenda into which I must at all costs be squeezed, but a few slip through the net. They often have grandiose bylines like The Piers Prendergast Interview. One lad recently decided long before our meeting that I was a 'sex addict' who hated his mother. He had, no doubt, pictured the juicy headline, and his editor may even have blessed it. When he snuck in the question I realised with a sinking heart that here was an immutable thesis which polite demurral and even bewildered Protest would only confirm. I, whose approaches to desirable women had always been self-defeatingly circumspect, sat glum- ly there with my interrogator as he ham- mered me into this lecherous mould, and being very tired, heard myself muttering a few 'well, I suppose so's' and 'well, when you put it like that's'. The result in print Wasn't all that bad, though it managed to be simultaneously trivial and pretentious, and syndicated copies have since been faxed to me by female friends from all over the World, embellished with large exclamation marks.
he pre-West End tour is over, thank goodness. Guildford was fun and I checked BARRY HUMPHRIES out Thorp's famous bookshop, which used to have a branch in Dover Street and another on the Holborn Viaduct. Alas, it was a sad relic which made a decent Oxfam shop look like Maggs. I found Louis Gold- ing's poems The Sorrow of War but not much else. The Theatre Royal in Plymouth has gamboge seats, giving the artistes on stage a (literally) jaundiced view of the audience. Empty seats, mercifully few, grin out of the darkness like rows of yellow teeth. Poor Plymouth had the double mis- fortune of being bombed by the Germans and rebuilt by the British, so that it is most- ly awful, the worst building being the school of art and design, wouldn't you know. In the museum there is a beautiful seascape by the too neglected Julius Olsson RA, with his characteristic crust of opales- cent moonshine on the waters of Plymouth Sound. There is a golden rule of show business which I always forget: never arrange tickets for people. It's almost always a nightmare and something goes wrong. When a person you haven't seen for years rings you up and after a few softening-up pleasantries says, `How do we go about getting tickets for your new show?' you should reply, 'I'm afraid we only accept experienced theatre- goers. Have you seen a live show before? Mousetrap? Phantom? Try the box office, I only work backstage', but you rarely do. Always a craven people-pleaser, you tell them you'll see what you can do. Now, everyone thinks actors and comics walk around with pockets stuffed with freebies and no one, except Cameron Mackintosh, Duncan Weldon, Michael Codron and I, knows that, except for press nights, every ticket has to be paid for by someone to keep the lights shining in Shaftesbury Avenue. Thus I not seldom find myself on stage, heavily bedizened, peering into the stalls at the costly little group in row G. I have an eagle eye for an empty seat, and invariably one of my party doesn't show up, or comes late, or comes in error to the matinee and gives the lady at the box office a hard time. Ten years ago, the day before my final performance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, I received an urgent call from the piss-elegant wife of the Aus- tralian ambassador to, let's say, Ruritania. `His Excellency and I' — for some reason she always described this nincompoop as His Excellency — 'are only in London this weekend and we long to see your last show.' I explained that it was booked out, but she wheedled. Naturally, I caved in and scrounged a couple of cancellations from the box office. When I called her with the good news she asked if the seats were on the aisle. I explained they were centre stalls but she sounded crestfallen. Couldn't I please try once more for two on the aisle? It was terribly important and she'd explain later. Well, after about an hour of trying to get through and much shifting of the seat- ing plan, I wangled her aisle seats, but I couldn't help asking why. Did His Excel- lency have a bad leg? Had there been a ski- ing accident? `Oh no,' she said brightly, `it's just that we need to be on the aisle because we're going to Cats that night.' `Cats?' I exclaimed, incredulous. 'But I have just spent two hours arranging for you to come and see me!' Oh yes, we are, dar- ling,' she purred. 'It's just that we were very lucky to get the tickets to Cats, which ends at 10.30, and I'm told you go on till 10.45, so if our driver steps on it we can just make the gladdies at the end of your show. Especially if we're on the aisle. It would be so rude to push past all those people.' Would you believe it? Give me a break!
Previous page
