I’ve started rehearsals for the pantomime Beauty and the Beast at Richmond Theatre: two shows a day and just 13 days to learn everything, with songs, tongue-tying shticks, ghouls, hairy beasts and all. It’s like weekly rep with falsies and fart jokes. At the first rehearsal I confess I felt a little out of place in the cast of ridiculously bright-eyed young things with shiny cheeks and Lycra shorts. The director asked us all to introduce ourselves in one sentence. ‘I’m Maureen Lipman,’ I muttered, ‘and I’m a fucking National Treasure.’
The baked potato I eat in a café near the old Battersea Town Hall, now a slightly bedraggled, palazzo-style arts centre, may have been put in the oven in 1946, when I was. It’s an unhealthy shade of taupe. It sits on my chest like an anvil as I stumble through a song called ‘Don’t Break My Potty Wotty Heart’. It’s an eight-hour day and an eight-mile drive in and out, but David, my fiancé, has cooked me steak and chips and lit the fire. I am absurdly happy.
We recently entertained Yonatan and Ina, the rabbi and rebbetzin of Kyiv, for dinner. Since Russia’s invasion they preside over an often hungry, frozen and petrified community, as well as a school for autistic children. They often have electricity for one hour a day to cook 500 meals or heat their building. Screaming missiles bombard their city all through the night. The children are in and out of the shelters in the pitch black with no heat. Soon it will be 20 degrees below freezing. ‘I came to Kyiv to bring Torah teaching to an assimilated group of Jewish Ukrainians after the collapse of communism,’ Yonatan says. ‘Now all I can give them is the means to stay alive.’
As I was travelling to Belsize Park, packed in a Tube like a Smartie, I wondered what had happened to the great comic actress Marcia Warren. Crossing Haverstock Hill, I saw her coming out of Nisa. ‘Marcia!’ I yelled, almost knocking her off balance. ‘I was just thinking about you! What’s happened?’ ‘Oh Maureen,’ she cooed. ‘How lovely to see you. Of course I see you on TV all the time.’ ‘But why are you using a walking frame?’ I asked. She filled me in – broken hip, bad replacement, a lot of pain. ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’ she added. I didn’t, but said I would invite her over, asked for her number and enquired whether she was still able to work. ‘Oh no, I’ve retired more or less.’ We slowly climbed the hill towards her flat in South End Green and I took out my phone for her details. She leaned over and carefully spelled out her name: ‘It’s Marion, er… B for Belgium, E for… and my number is —.’ I paused. ‘Is… Marion your real name then?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, dubiously. ‘So Marcia Warren is your stage name?’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ I looked at her keenly. ‘You are Marcia Warren, aren’t you?’ Her face fell six inches. ‘Oh dear!’ she wailed. ‘Does that mean we can’t have coffee?’ ‘We can,’ I assured her, ‘but… look!’ I googled her a picture of her doppelgänger. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she beamed. Turning to go, I was halted by her words: ‘Two of the happiest years of my life were spent in Israel.’ ‘Are you Jewish?’ She shook her head: ‘No, but my great-grandfather was called Lipman and came from Lithuania.’ ‘Mine too.’ I rang the real Marcia, strong of leg and hale and heartily employed, and we are both dining out on it. Marion and I are getting coffee in the new year.
The other week I was at a fundraiser for Shooting Star, a desperately necessary charity supporting three hospices for terminally ill children. When the assisted dying bill staggered through parliament, it occurred to me that there’s no adequate answer today to the same question faced by my heroine, Dame Cicely Saunders, when she founded the first hospice in 1967: why doesn’t the government divert money into palliative hospice care instead of rewarding NHS middle management?
The green room at rehearsals is a ‘steam’ of dancers eating sticky takeaways. No wonder the Strictly non-pros tend to get overemotional; dancers are workhorses with photographic memories and concave stomachs. Actors harbour flab and constantly assume others think they are miscast. After just a few days of rehearsals, I am cultivating a meltdown and a cold sore. I ask Hope, the tiny, dynamic Little Voice playing Beauty, what her last job was, and she tells me it was touring in Grease. ‘Wow! How exciting!’ I say. She looks unconvinced. ‘Well, yes, but I really want to do something else.’ Here it comes, I thought, another would-be Hedda Gabler. ‘I’d like to be a tattooist.’ I really didn’t see that one coming. I guess we are all just trying to make our mark in life.
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