But for the audience, well… the back room of the King’s Head pub theatre had a rakish charm. And if you were keen on finding something theatrically new compared with the machine-made West End fare, you could be in for…
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They are busy people, journalists… always in a hurry. Only a few are specialists… so, remember to just give them the basics – they won’t be insulted; grateful. (It also means they don’t have to stay for the whole performance.)…
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Joan and Dan had taken on a helluva challenge – to run the first combined dinner and theatre venue in a foreign (though English-speaking) capital city – with minimal resources. The deal with the brewery was (so they told me)…
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Where from…? I didn’t know he’d been away. Ohh… yes he’d been lurking around in a basement in Soho, then - typically - accepted an offer he couldn’t refuse back home in Dublin, only to be arrested in mid-speech and…
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Sometime in the second half of 1971 I was asked if I would consider meeting this (to me) unknown couple with a view to directing in their – what exactly was it? Oh… it was a theatre in a public…
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The King’s Head pub theatre Islington has given its last performance and people who weren’t there are telling us how it started and… EVERYTHING about it. But that’s the rub – they weren’t there and don’t know what really happened…
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You have been reading Episode One of what would have been the greatest sitcom ever. We’ve been inundated with questions asking… Why? What happened? Why wasn’t there more? Was someone ill? Was it too political? Did some high-up intervene, and…
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This must be one of David Nobbs’ most bizarre inventions. There’s our wife, Pauline Yates – acting as a boxing referee, I think. And I see that Geoffrey Palmer is in this boxing scene. (I was his patient in Butterflies.)…
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Odd… to play the same scene twice with the same actor – for different writers. Leonard Rossiter caught me, suddenly, regretting my woeful career. First as a gas inspector, then as a housing controller. Leonard and I also shared a…
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I very nearly made an entire career playing small-time criminals… after starting life in the heavy stuff, Shakespeare at the Old Vic (two years of it) and thinking this might point to the road ahead for ever... I got a…
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Not many actors have my huge advantage of being professionally nondescript – which is why I was able to appear in TWO episodes of The Professionals. Admittedly, with a beard and wiped-out pre-title, but an achievement all the same. Happened…
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The difference between French farce and English farce is that in English farce the naughty behaviour is implied – and milked for all it’s worth… but then turns out to be a misunderstanding: which keeps up the hypocritical, self-serving fiction…
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The celebs were never there together but, Jeremy Kingston, one-time critic of Punch, in a flash of inspiration, wrote Making Dickie Happy, supposing they had all met, in a sparkling comedy of manners about love, sex, ambition, literature and class. …
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Shock and horror. This was one of the ground-breaking, society-changing, pieces of writing for which the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was became notorious. The establishment of the time couldn’t stomach it. Suggested by Ned Sherrin and written by…
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Tucked in among my books, I found a publisher's copy of Twelve Hundred Hostages. There was some blurb… In execution, the play might just about stand up as a time-warped addition to the Tales From the Arabian Nights. It echoes…
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There was more correspondence with agents in New York, the UK and France about rights and percentages. Until, finally, Nicholas got his version of our translation-from-the-French and began a meticulously detailed revising of his own script – the French version…
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Perhaps inevitably, we entered a period you might call the battle for recognition and rights. In all my time in theatre I've only ever been ratted on, or swindled, over rights to a text. Viable plays seem to provoke the…
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There is an entry, in the category of counts – of whom there are many – in a schedule of the Hungarian aristocracy as follows: “Wenckheim: Article 73 of 1790/91. Austrian baron: 1776; Austrian count: 1802. The Wenckheims’ hereditary seat…
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Nicholas Wenckheim was tall, slim handsomely lean-faced, beautifully dressed – probably in his fifties. He spoke remarkably good English and displayed the most exquisite manners. Even when – later – I detected anger, even fury, he controlled it in a…
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So we wrote to Nicholas Wenckheim as follows: Would he go with this approach? The answer seemed to be ‘yes’. Other jurisdictions do bad things, too, he seems to concede. Also, some astonishing figures came out of this correspondence. Not…
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