Across the pond

Off to Lyme Regis for a lunch at a rather posh hotel organised by the friends of the museum at which the speaker was Ann Jelicoe, best known for her play, The Knack, which hit Broadway and was later made into a film. We arrived at the Alexandra Hotel at 12 AM precisely for our £25 lunch. I did not mind shelling out £25 quid, because it was going to the Lyme Regis Museum, but of course, there was half an hour or so to kill before we sat down. I went to the bar and ordered two drinks, a white wine spritzer and a glass of Rose. I watched mesmerised as my drink was poured out. The bar tender poured the wine into a metal measure, and then transferred it to the size of wine glass I normally use,  There was enough to half fill the glass.

The bill was £10.15. The Ritz Hotel in London W1 probably charges more. But not much more.

I tell you this, so that you will know that your truth telling reporter at this event, may be influenced in what he is writing by some personal feelings. Which were exacerbated when Ann rose to give her talk, nearly two hours later.

She began by saying:

I knew that i wanted to do – go into theatre – when I was four years old……..  From that moment I never dobuted. It made life very simple.

What rot, I thought. At 4 i probably wanted to be an engine driver. At 14 I wanted to be Prime Minster. As life happened i started as a journalist and then went on to be a teacher of journalism.

But when I listened to the rest of her talk, I realised that her life had been far from simple.

She went straight from school to the Central School of Speech and Drama in the closing years of the war. The teachers were tired. Most of the men were still away at the Front. The course was far too long. But in her final year – of a three year course, which she said was far too long – was a huge success, because she starred in a play produced by a young playwritght, Christopher Fry. for the school.

That did not launch her career. Despite her outstanding talent, she could not get a job in theatre. And she became quite seriously depressed. She was rescued by her old school, who gave her a job teaching their students. Who included Vanessa Redgrave, whom everyone at today’s lunch had heard of.

Her own success came years later. When she made her name as a writer and director of plays, thanks partly to the help of George Devine at the Royal Court theatre in Chelsea, one of the key figures who revitalised British theatre in the 1960′s.

So Ann Jelicoe’s story is far from simple. For the last thirty years or so, she has been developing community theatre in Dorset, which does not hit the headlines. She is still going strong at 82. She can still bend an audience to what she has to say.

Even though she is a mistress of the art of self-deprecation. Because when you hear her in person, you realise that her life has not been simple or easy. She has stayed faithful to her own imperatives. Despite the many difficulties on the way.

In one of her plays, she invented a new planet called, ‘Hope’. The scientists have not yet found it. No matter. Utopia has still not been found.

But meanwhile there are many worse things you can do with your lives, than working to find an alternative to American consumer capitalism.