patsywp, Author at Patsy Trench Author

People who declined knight- and damehoods

Published on October 19, 2024October 19, 2024 by patsywp

The British honours system isn’t something I usually give much thought to but in the course of my researches into theatre history I’ve come across some oddities that have made me ponder.

Theatre was regarded as a low form of entertainment until Henry Irving became the first actor to be knighted in 1895, after which it presumably became respectable overnight and Sirs and Dames cropped up all over the place.

What has struck me however is why certain people received honours and others didn’t. The acknowledged greatest actress of all time Sarah Siddons presumably was too early to be Damed. But the first theatre Dame was actually not as I had imagined Ellen Terry but someone called Genevieve Ward.

Who?

She was a nineteenth century American-born opera singer turned actress, who worked with Irving and took over his theatre (the Lyceum) at one point and made a name for herself in a play called Forget Me Not. But I confess I had never heard of her before I began investigating her, which I did largely because of her Damehood, and frankly there isn’t a lot of information out there.

I then began looking at the people who didn’t become Sirs or Dames, such as Lilian Baylis, who founded both the ENO and the Royal Ballet as well as running the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells. What does a woman have to do to be given a Damehood? Not to mention Elsie Fogerty, who founded the Central School of Speech and Drama virtually single-handedly.

Then there were the people who turned down knighthoods such as Bernard Shaw – no surprise there – and the actor/playwright/director Harley Granville Barker.

That in turn made me think about all those other people who turned down honours of one sort or another, so I started looking into it. (Googling it, to be precise – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_declined_a_British_honour.) I came up with some surprises, both of people who turned them down and the people who didn’t. Here is a very brief edited list of people who rejected Knighthoods or Damehoods:

Alan Bennett, Davie Bowie, Danny Boyle, David Hockney, Albert Finney, Harold Pinter, J B Priestley, Peter O’Toole, Paul Schofield, Doris Lessing, Glenda Jackson, Bridget Riley.

There are no particular surprises there; all these people were well-known for their left leanings or anti-establishment views. More surprising are these:

Bernie Ecclestone, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E M Forster, Michael Frayn, Michael Faraday, Graham Greene, Stephen Hawking, John Galsworthy, Humphrey Lyttleton, J Arthur Rank, Robert Morley.

I say surprising because I wouldn’t necessarily associate those people with the anti-establishment. Some of them were quite posh, or wrote about posh subjects – Rudyard Kipling is perhaps the most surprising of all.

And the person who turned down the most honours? The artist L S Lowry.

But what of the people who did surprisingly accept knighthoods? I’d include among them the playwright David Hare, the actor Mark Rylance and the actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave (she declined the first offer and accepted the second) – actually that’s all that come to mind immediately but I’m sure there are more.

As for people who for some reason weren’t honoured and should have been (some of them are still alive and may yet be):

Charles Dickens (he may have been too early)
John Maynard Keynes – the economist, part-founder and first chairman of the Arts Council.
George Devine – founder of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in the 1950s.
Rufus Norris – current Artistic Director of the National Theatre; presumably will be honoured when he comes to the end of his tenure in 2025.
Sonia Friedman – theatre producer
Nica Burns – theatre producer
Benedict Cumberbatch – a matter of time I think
Es Devlin – theatre designer

That’s my list, off the top of my head. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Our Country’s Good (revisited)

Published on September 15, 2024September 15, 2024 by patsywp

The Lyric Hammersmith has revived this wonderful play by Timberlake Wertenbaker. It’s the third time I’ve seen it. The first was at the Royal Court in 1988 (marvellous) then at the National Theatre in 2015 (not quite so marvellous: for a play about the while colonisation of a black country it was bizarre in my view to cast a black actor as Governor Philip) – I reviewed it here – and now at the Lyric.

When I heard the playwright was revisiting the play in the light of changing circumstances – or rather changing perceptions of the same circumstances – I was afraid she might be adding some anachronistic post-colonial-guilty touches to the play, but of course I was wrong. This production has a true Aboriginal woman (Naarah) playing the Narrator – quite a coup – but otherwise the changes are subtle.

Based on Thomas Keneally’s book The Playmaker, itself based on a true story, it tells the tale of First Fleet convicts in the new and as yet unbuilt colony of New South Wales attempting to mount a performance of The Recruiting Officer.[1] The play is the brainchild of the King’s representative Governor Philip in the hope that the ‘redeeming’ nature of theatre will provide the convicts with distraction and hope. He hands the reins to Lt Ralph Clarke, an upright, uptight young man who yearns for his wife left back home until his head is turned by one of the lady convicts.

For anyone unfamiliar with the play the cast doubling might be a tad confusing, especially since all the actors do to indicate the change is don a red coat (marine) or a torn shirt (convict). In an all-round strong cast the stand-out performance, for me, is Finbar Lynch, doubling as the quietly menacing Major Robbie Ross (red coat) and the reluctant hangman convict Ketch Fletcher (no red coat).

It is a play about redemption through theatre, but it is never sentimental or heavy-handed. Convicts sent to New South Wales were all petty felons, transported for – in the case of my three times great grandmother – stealing a petticoat, or my three times great grandfather who was given 14 years for handling forged banknotes: the sort of crimes that nowadays would earn a person a suspended sentence. What is so marvellous about this play is the way in which Ms Wertenbaker manages to weave the story of the early days of colonial Australia so deftly into the action; how the colony nearly starved, which is why stealing food was punishable by hanging; the humanity and sanity of the (possibly atheist) Governor Philip and his cohort David Collins. (I did take issue with the portrayal of Watkin Tench, who I always had down as an effete, witty, humane man rather than the flog ‘em and hang ‘em fellow he is here; and he would not been seen dead in a pair of grubby shorts.)

The setting (Gary McCann) is a sloping scrub with trees which in Act Two have been chopped down and the stage strewn with rubbish. A nice touch. The lighting (Paul Keoghan) is bold – often the entire rig is lowered almost to head level – and hugely evocative; the final moment when the stage is bathed in red light took me right back to the land of my ancestors. The director is Rachel O’Riordan.

It is a truly lovely play: funny, moving, intelligent, thoughtful, thought-provoking. I’d love to see a sequel. What happened to these poor creatures? Maybe their descendants are now living in million dollar apartments overlooking Sydney Harbour. It’s more than possible.

[1] For my review of the National Theatre production I looked for reports of the production in the journals of Ralph Clarke and Davy Collins and found only a passing mention.

The History of Acting (update)

Published on August 3, 2024August 3, 2024 by patsywp

We are now just over half way through the year and I have kept to my pledge to post a chapter a month, in instalments, of my personal take on five hundred years of British theatre.

It has not been easy. It entails a vast amount of research into the actors, the theatres and the people who ran them and the backgrounds and the fashions of theatre throughout five centuries and whittling it all down into manageably consumerable chunks. So if I only have a few pages to devote to, say, Thomas Betterton or Sarah Siddons or David Garrick, how can I possibly do justice to them?

The answer is I can’t and I don’t even claim to. What I am trying to do, as I’ve explained here, is to give readers a glimpse into what I have called the essence of their lives, their talents, their personalities and the reasons for their success.

There have been many times when I’ve been tempted to give up. I am getting very little feedback on my chapters and I have the growing suspicion that nobody is reading them.

What? After all my hard work?

What is a writer expected to do if nobody is reading her work?

In my case, I shall carry on as normal. I am enjoying the research. I am learning new stuff all the time and I am writing about it with total freedom, without fear of criticism or correction. Isn’t that what a first draft is for?

I am discovering some aspects of the acting business that are common to all my subjects, namely:

All actors are incomplete people

Who only feel totally at home when they are pretending to be someone else on stage. The difference between the on- and offstage behaviour of my subjects is marked. Many if not most of them – Sarah Siddons included, especially even – used the stage as a way of escaping the tribulations and mundanity of real life. Acting to them was not just a job

It was a compulsion

Which is why they worked so unbelievably hard, often in gruelling circumstances, when pregnant or days after giving birth or when physically debilitated. The most successful actors had something else in common:

They were quite unlike anything seen before

which obviously depended on who had gone before; so, for instance, David Garrick’s well-reported ‘naturalism’, which set him apart from his predecessors, blew like a gust of fresh air into a world used to the hyperbole of James Quin and his contemporaries. Edmund Kean’s casual yet flashy ‘lightning-strike’ acting might not have captured the public’s imagination had it not been in such contrast to the formal, scholarly pedantry of John Philip Kemble. As the critic William Hazlitt said, ‘We wish we had never seen Mr Kean. He has destroyed the Kemble religion; and it is the religion in which we were brought up.’[1]

All this might not have been so important had it not been for the fact that

There were no theatre directors

Right up until the early twentieth century. Before that it was the responsibility of the manager of the theatre, usually an actor himself such as Betterton, Garrick or Kemble, to choose the plays and to stage them, usually with very little rehearsal time. The ‘stars’ were mostly left to do their own thing, especially if he was also the manager, which was often the case.

Actors were required to hold a dozen parts in their heads at any one time

and be asked at very short notice to appear as any one of them. Plays did not necessarily run for set periods; a smash hit could quickly replace something from an old repertoire and vice versa. If a play did not ‘take’ immediately it would be withdrawn immediately, according to another vital element of the theatre adventures: the audience.

Audiences were frighteningly demonstrative

We complain nowadays about mobile phones and the fact that if an audience doesn’t get to its communal feet at the end of a performance the show is deemed a flop.

Compared with eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences we today are remarkably reticent. Not only did people scramble over one another at the risk of their own and other people’s lives in order to gain access to a ‘hot’ show or the latest super-actor, they thought nothing of chatting among themselves throughout a performance, waving at friends or, on many occasions, rioting. The idea of sitting quietly and listening was not something audiences did.

At the same time if they approved of something they let it be known. They thought nothing of applauding at the end of a speech or of demanding encores in the middle of a performance, with which actors invariably complied. Up until and beyond David Garrick’s attempts to remove them they assumed the right to wander onto the stage at will, getting in the actors’ way and causing general mayhem; not to mention the freedom to meander backstage in and out of actors’ – and more to the point actresses’ – dressing rooms and watching them undress.

Then there was the business of being allowed to enter a theatre halfway through a play at half price, which meant playwrights were expected to include a précis of a Netflix-style what-happened-before at the beginning of the last act.

When John Kemble, manager of Covent Garden Theatre, tried to hike ticket prices following the rebuilding of the theatre after a fire, they rioted for two whole months until he was forced to back down. They even, more astonishingly still, got him to reinstate the flesh-and-blood figure of Banquo in the banquet scene in Macbeth, who hitherto had been visible only to Macbeth.

Audiences had power.

So what hasn’t changed?

The fundamentals of the theatre world have never truly changed. Actors have always come from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them quite unexpected. Some, such as the Kembles, the Keans, the Terrys and the Redgraves, are acting families. Others such as Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, William Macready and who knows how many others have no known connection to the theatre in their backgrounds. Still others came from very humble beginnings: Nell Gwynn began her career selling oranges at the Drury Lane theatre. Peg Woffington – Garrick’s favourite, in every way – was ‘discovered’ selling food on the streets of Dublin.

Theatre management

This has certainly changed. In the old days anyone foolish enough to buy themselves shares in a theatrical enterprise was more than likely to end up in a debtors’ prison. Many of them – such as Christopher Rich – were frankly crooks. Others such as Richard Sheridan were charismatic yet incompetent. Theatres survived by luck more than good management.

More importantly still:

State subsidy

Introduced through the Arts Council after World War Two, public subsidy has allowed theatres to experiment with new ideas without having to be constantly concerned only with the box office. It also helps to keep ticket prices down so anyone can afford them.

Lastly, as we know –

Theatre survives no matter what

Plague, pandemics, fires, government crackdowns, strikes, wars, censorship – none of it has ever done more than temporarily halt the determined march of the theatre and its people, nor will it in the future despite the competition from other media. The need of live audiences for live entertainment, and vice versa, is and always will be paramount.

[1] The Examiner, December 8 1816, cited in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt

Confusing London landmarks

Published on June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by patsywp

The thought occurred to me as I was looking into the history of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane – whose entrance has never been in Drury Lane – why is it so many of London’s place names make no sense? Is it to confuse tourists? Or is it some ancient form of wish-fulfilment, as in: here is Belsize, let’s build a park here one day, meantime we’ll call it Belsize Park anyway. ?

Drury Lane Theatre, photo taken a few years ago (part of my research for The History of Acting in Twelve Chapters)

So I made a list and did a lot of Googling to try and find the answers:

Where is the farm in Chalk Farm?
Where’s the Wood at St John’s?
Likewise the parks in Belsize and Wembley? (There are probably others in places I’m not so familiar with)
And the Green at Willesden
Why is it called the Theatre Royal Drury Lane when the entrance is in Catherine Street?
Where is the Gospel Oak?
Is Old Street actually older than any other street?
What was the White City?
Why is Southgate in the north and Norwood in the south?
What was Shepherd’s Bush?
Why do trains from Liverpool Street not go to Liverpool?
Where’s the water in Bayswater?
Ditto in Stamford Brook and the ‘borns’ – Holborn, Marylebone etc.*

Answers: (according mostly to Wikipedia)

The origin of Chalk Farm is disputed. It does not mean the land is chalk as London is built on clay. Most likely it is a distortion of the old name of the manor house of Caldecote, or Chalcotts.
There was once a Forest of Middlesex at St John’s Wood but it became built on as the land was broken up.
Once again there was a park at Belsize belonging to the manor house, though it seems it disappeared around 1746. Wembley Park is and has been known as an ‘entertainment park’; there was once a fairground and exhibition centre there but it’s better known now as the home of Wembley Football Stadium and Wembley Arena.
Who knows? But presumably like the other disappeared parks and farms there was once a green at Willesden.
The theatre – there have been four of them on the same site – originally fronted on to Brydges Street, which is now Catherine Street. It does back onto Drury Lane, if that counts.
There was a Gospel Oak on the corner of what is now Mansfield and Southampton Roads near Hampstead Heath, where folk used to gather to listen to gospel readings. John Wesley is reputed to have preached there. The oak disappeared in the early 1800s.
Quite possibly yes. Its Old English name was Ealdestrate and then Oldestrete. It’s on the route of an ancient track linking Silchester (to the west near Reading) and Colchester.
It was originally known as the Great White City, a reference to the marble cladding on the outside of the exhibition centres, which were demolished at the beginning of World War I.
Well, most places are south of somewhere (except Antarctica) and north of somewhere (except the Arctic).
Shepherd’s Bush Green used to be common land where shepherds could rest and graze their sheep while on their way to Smithfield Market. Presumably the green – which still exists – had bushes on it.
The station – and the street – are nothing to do with the city of Liverpool but take their name from Prime Minister Robert Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool in 1829.
The name Bayswater comes apparently from “Bayards Watering Place”, which means a watering place for horses, possibly connected to the Bayard family.
Probably obvious really, but there once were ‘bourns’ there, or brooks, which is much the same thing. Holbourne was an alternative name for the Fleet River apparently, which now runs under the ground, as we all know. Likewise there was once a ford at Deptford.

* Thanks to Londonist for alerting me to these water-based names.

If you have any quirky names to add to my list or if you’d like to correct any of them please let me know. As I said my source was mostly Wikipedia, which is never wrong about anything.

Prudence is free

Published on April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 by patsywp

Until Sunday 7 April

Available at Amazon in ebook form HERE

Why I am resurrecting Prudence

I should point out at the start that Prudence did not die at the end of my novel. I left her living happily, if scrappily (and platonically), with her friend Dougie, who was instrumental in turning Prudence’s first memoir into a readable book.

Of all the fictional characters I have created Prue was always my favourite, partly because she is the least like me. Growing up with no rules, the daughter of parents who paid her very little attention, she was left to discover the world as she went along. Lacking any kind of pre-knowledge or preconceptions about behavioural norms or even what was considered right or wrong she learned by trial and error, and there was a lot of error.

To Prudence life offered opportunity, not barriers. Brought up in Victorian England she was ignorant of what was considered the woman’s place in society. She went skinny-dipping in Regent’s Park until she was admonished by a park keeper. She became a self-styled suffragette, claiming she invented the phrase ‘Action not Words!’ way before the Pankhursts came on the scene. She befriended – and for a while fell in love with – the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, and by sheer cheek became her dresser. She wheedled her way into the Bloomsbury set and was proposed to by John Maynard Keynes. Her attempts to storm parliament in the cause of female suffrage was again a first, though it did not end in the prison sentence she was hoping for.[1]

She was a one-off. Bossy, self-opinionated, confident, anarchic, fun-loving, outrageous, outspoken and afraid of nothing. Everything I am not.

She was still in her early fifties at the end of the first book. I sense she has enough exciting and surprising life left in her for a sequel. Watch this space.

[1] None of this has any basis in fact by the way, in case you were wondering.

It’s not easy being the first

Published on February 28, 2024February 28, 2024 by patsywp

. . . you find someone else with a slightly higher profile got there before you.

It’s not that I thought nobody had ever written a book about the history of acting before, though until I was browsing yesterday in the National Theatre bookshop I hadn’t actually come across one.

Needless to say I don’t expect to compete with Peter Ackroyd, one of the most distinguished – and prolific – writers of history and in particular of London alive today. I’m reading his book now, which may be a mistake as it may (or just may not) cover the same ground I’m tentatively treading on.

All I can say in my defence is that I used to be an actor and Peter Ackroyd – to my knowledge – never was.

PS If you want to follow the book as I write it do please subscribe to me FREE on Substack.

A history of acting in twelve chapters

Published on February 13, 2024February 13, 2024 by patsywp

A personal and unscientific meander through
five hundred years of British theatre

It’s quite an undertaking, but I have pledged to post a chapter of this book a month, in biteable chunks, on Substack.

The subtitle of the book is a clue to its nature. Those who know me and my writing know I am not an academic and I don’t have an academic mind. What I do have is a long life spent in various aspects of the theatre – acting, writing, teaching, excavating – and a fascination with the world of theatre and how it has reincarnated itself over the centuries.

The book is intended very much as a personal exploration into how theatre began in this country, beginning before Shakespeare and moving gradually to the present day. Who were the actors? How did they get to be actors and why did they want to do it in the first place? Their backgrounds, their characteristics, what they think it takes to be an actor, and on and on as the mood takes me.

As I am effectively publishing the first draft of my book it will need editing and maybe even correcting here and there, which is why I am definitely looking for feedback not just about the content or the accuracy of it, but the tone. I like to think my books are above all readable. I’ve spent too many hours poring over incomprehensible texts in the course of my own studies to ever want to be bracketed with those academics who write in lengthy sentences with no punctuation using the kind of language only they could possibly cognize.

The real challenge in such a book is not so much the writer’s knowledge or her ability to research, it’s to turn months or years or a lifetime’s preoccupation into a page-turner. Let me know how I’m doing!

February 2024

The Humbling of Meredith Martin

Published on January 9, 2024January 9, 2024 by patsywp

OUT ON FRIDAY 12 JANUARY. SPECIALLY DISCOUNTED PRICE OF .99c or .99p.
CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER.

The Humbling of Meredith Martin is book five in my Modern Women Breaking the Mould series. It tells the story of an ambitious actress struggling to achieve the stardom she believes she deserves by any means possible. If that entails gate-crashing auditions or upstaging her fellow performers, so be it.

‘It was how the theatre worked, was Meredith’s view. A girl had to take chances, grab opportunities as and when she could, using guerrilla tactics where necessary. Meekness in the theatre did not inherit anything.’

Available as an ebook from Amazon
and in print from Waterstones, Foyles, Barnes & Noble & Booktopia

An elderly novelist battles with technology

Published on December 14, 2023December 14, 2023 by patsywp2 Comments

Writers need publicity*

Some writers are naturally good at it – a surprising amount of writers appear to have a PR or marketing background. Others, like yours truly, not only find the whole business tedious and baffling they’ve been brought up never to blow their own trumpets, as the saying goes. It isn’t easy for a lady novelist of a certain age to market her products with anything approaching authenticity.

Marketing involves getting to grips with technology

Whether it’s figuring out social media or creating an author website and blogging on it, or setting up a newsletter and finding people to subscribe to it; all of which, clever me, I have done. I have even, for my sins

Designed my own book covers

Received wisdom says authors should not design their own book covers unless of course they have a good knowledge of graphic design. I’ve repeated this mantra over and over myself and despite what I’m about to say it still holds true.

In my case it was made clear my covers – which I really liked incidentally – were not selling my novels. However lacking the wherewithal to have all of them redesigned by a professional, and with the help of Canva and the encouragement of the wonderful Katie Sadler I set about redesigning them myself. Here they are:

I also have a new book out soon

On 12 January 2024 to be precise. It’s called The Humbling of Meredith Martin and it’s book five in my Modern Women Breaking the Mould series.

Meredith has appeared in two previous books – The Makings of Violet Frogg and Mrs Morphett’s Macaroons – alongside her colleague, friend and rival Gaye Worth. (Aka Merry and Gaye.) This book features Meredith centre stage and tells how an actress with aspirations struggles to become the leading lady she believes she was put on earth to become. It’s set in Edwardian London and like my other books it’s a light-hearted read with a touch of romance and is available to pre-order HERE.

And I have joined Substack

Substack is what you might call an online newsletter platform which anyone can join for free and post away to their heart’s content about anything and everything in the hope that someone will actually read what they have to say. I’m still learning the Substack ropes but my eventual idea is to post chapters or part-chapters of my new book – tentative title Theatrical Women – on Substack at regular intervals.

If you’d like to subscribe (for free) click HERE.

Not bad for someone in their eighth decade, eh?

*With the possible exception of J K Rowling, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens

Vanya: the one-man Chekov

Published on October 5, 2023October 5, 2023 by patsywp

‘Uncle Vanya’ is a play very dear to my heart. Many decades ago I played Sonya in rep at Harrogate Playhouse. I had only just started out as a professional actress, with no training other than getting out there and doing it, and while I have no idea if I was any good or not I identified with Sonya totally and utterly: the plain, naive girl who falls in unrequited love with a man who looks on her as no more than a friend, and a child to boot.

More recently I booked to see the play in the West End but was thwarted when Covid shut down the theatres the day before I was due to see it in March 2020. Fortunately that production, with Toby Jones as Uncle Vanya, was subsequently filmed, so I was able to watch it over and over until I knew every word, every movement by heart. It was a wonderful production and featured Aimee Lou Wood as a heartbreaking Sonya.

The play also features very strongly in my current novel-in-progress. My central character is an actress who thinks she is the bees’ knees until she is put very firmly in her place by a Russian disciple of the great Stanislavsky. When asked to act the part of Sonya in a demonstration of the famous System she is bullied into a realisation that acting is more than just walking onto a stage and projecting your lines to the furthest row of the gallery. Through the medium of honest, homespun Sonya the sophisticated, haughty Meredith learns something not just about herself but about the whole business of acting itself.

So when I heard that Andrew Scott was to play every part in a one-man production of the play my first thought was, Why?

The answer is partly because Andrew Scott, in an albeit restricted run, is able to sell out a West End theatre where the cheapest available ticket is £120.

One hundred and twenty pounds.

But then I read the reviews, first in What’s On Stage and elsewhere, in which the reviewers dispelled all my doubts. I knew I had to see the thing. But at £120??

Fortuitously this production is mounted by the same company, ATG, as my missed Uncle Vanya, for which I dimly remembered I was in receipt of a voucher. That reduced the cost of the ticket by around a third, which mean my seat in row K of the stalls only cost me around £80.

So what of the production?

I have loved and not loved Andrew Scott in the past. I did not love his Gary Essendine in Present Laughter at the Old Vic, but I did love his lockdown performance in Three Kings at the same theatre, filmed and transmitted live. There’s no doubting his extraordinary talent.

First of all, you really need to know the play before you see this version. Set in the present in Ireland, it is confusing, at least to begin with. Who is Michael? (Astrov) And who is Ivan? (Vanya, of course) Scott signals his switch of roles partly by use of props – he fingers his necklace as Helena and wipes his hands on a cloth as Sonya; Vanya toys with sunglasses and Vanya’s mother Maureen smokes cigarettes. Helena speaks RP and her husband Alexander has what sounds like a pompous Ulster twang. It is very subtle – so subtle in parts that it was difficult to hear the dialogue, though Scott does have the ability to whisper on stage and be audible – and at times very funny. The adaptation by the supremely talented Simon (Curious Incident, to name one) Stephens is deft and fluent and artfully edited down to just under two hours without a break.

Uncle Vanya, 2020 production (Official London Theatre)

In the end though, does it offer up anything new about the play? You have to admire the performance, that goes without saying. However it’s my view that Andrew Scott is always even at his best just a little mannered, and some of his mannerisms – hands over the face, wiping the eyes wearily – do not seem to be fixed to one particular character. Yes, it is extremely moving at times, but ultimately it struck me as above all a masterclass by an actor at the top of his game. For a definitive version of a great play, give me Toby Jones and his fellow actors any day.