This has been an agonising time for those of us who love Julian Sands. On 13 January, he went for a one-day hike up Mount Baldy, 50 miles from Los Angeles, and hasn’t been seen since. No one who knows Julian can believe he’s dead. He’s the very epitome of the free-spirited actor. You never know where Julian will be turning up next. As soon as he lands in the UK, he always telephones to tell me about, say, playing a paedophile in the terrifying Czech film The Painted Bird or going to help Mike Figgis on his latest project in Hong Kong. If it’s Terence Davies, he’ll do it. Doesn’t mind the size of the part. That’s who he is.
Julian knows a lot about art, wine and mountaineering, but it’s his enthusiasm and generosity which makes him an outstanding reader of poetry. He developed a programme of Pinter poems which he attacked like one-act plays, redeeming them from the odium to which lethal Craig Brown parodies had consigned them. A hugely popular evening of Keats and Shelley followed. When Julian brings news of his latest adventures, he invariably spreads fresh air, hope and curiosity. His family would wish him to stay in the mountains, because he loves them. But the authorities insist that legally they must find him and bring him down.
It’s a long time since I played a round of golf. But I do remember there was something called a mulligan. That’s when you miss the ball completely and ask for it not to count. This seems to be the Tory party’s approach to the premiership of Liz Truss. They demand a mulligan. ‘That prime minister doesn’t count,’ they say, in spite of her election being entirely their fault. And anyway, isn’t it up to us to grant the mulligan, not for them to assume it? As a dramatist, I am meant to understand people. But Truss bewilders me. She issued a fierce denial that white crystalline powder had been found at Chevening while she was foreign secretary. But given that it clearly wasn’t drugs, how can anyone explain the mindless grin on her face when she strolled into Downing Street to justify her suicide mission? Kwasi Kwarteng appears quite properly shattered. But Truss, not at all. Who on earth was she? Does anyone know, least of all her?
In one way only is Truss a familiar figure. It’s always those who are ideologically keenest on shrinking the state who are happiest to live off it. As foreign secretary, Truss ran up a travel bill of almost £2 million of taxpayers’ money between January and June last year. Oh, and wherever she went a bottle of sauvignon blanc had to be waiting in the fridge. One obvious thing about public life: people who rail against the role of the state are the least qualified to run it.
I’ve been for two blissful weeks in Australia. I was there partly to appear at Adelaide Writers’ Week. It was under attack from a Zionist organisation for hosting two Palestinian writers, who, unsurprisingly, had made disobliging remarks about the occupation. They then tried to ban me and the Poet Laureate from appearing at a completely separate event in Sydney for no other reason but that we had not boycotted Adelaide. I’d never even heard of the writers in question, let alone met them. But now apparently there is a chain of contamination, which stains the bystander and offender alike. All are guilty. The right has always stolen ideas from the left, but, boy, they’ve taken to the practice of cancel culture with a zealotry which puts all others to shame. I came home to the shivering snowflakes at the Daily Mail being triggered by a football commentator having different views from their own.
This summer I walked past the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. Since 1956, the greatest names in British playwriting had shone from its red neon. Now it had a fake-cute message reading BRB WRITERS AT WORK. (BRB means Be Right Back.) It pierced my heart. Why not just mount a neon saying ‘We’ve got nothing worth putting on’? I felt the same dismay this week passing Wyndham’s, by far the most perfect playhouse in London for the spoken word. Squatting there was yet another musical, the one the profession nicknames Wokelahoma. Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path. It’s a crushing defeat to see Wyndham’s without a straight play. Is it our fault? Are dramatists not writing enough good plays which can attract 800 people a night? Will well-known actors not appear in them? Or did producers mislay their balls during lockdown?
Comments