To Hull and back with love (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

To Hull and back with love

3:57pm Friday 14th January 2011 in Interviews By Melanie Dakin

Words are the stuff that actors hang upon and yet it must be frustrating to recite another person’s lines and not your own. Acclaimed stage and screen legend Sir Tom Courtenay has taken matters into his own hands by writing and performing his own productions. In 1994 he won the Evening Standard Award and the Critics’ Circle Award for his one-man play Moscow Stations. He now brings his latest production, Pretending to be Me, a portrait of poet Philip Larkin, to The Radlett Centre stage.

A BAFTA and Academy Award nominated actor, Tom is renowned for a series of stellar performances that include Billy Liar and Doctor Zhivago. He wrote the script for the piece in 2002 and revised it last year for the Larkin Society, to mark the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death.

“I was asked to give a performance to help raise money for a statue of Larkin that’s being put up in Hull, his work place, and my home town,” explains Tom.

“I’ve included some new poems, but it’s mostly prose. Larkin wrote some great essays and letters.”

Although Tom touches upon some of Larkin’s well-documented obsessions, he lets the words speak for themselves.

The play broadly covers Larkin’s childhood through his university years and on to his career as a writer and librarian.

I’ve included some new poems, but it’s mostly prose. Larkin wrote some great essays and letters

Tom Courtenay

“The chronology of events doesn’t always follow. The play is a progression through a day in his life and it covers all the germane things like moving house and his mother’s death, his love of jazz, his somewhat hermit-like life style, his obsession with writing and his aversion to the poetry of Ted Hughes.”

Larkin’s relationship with his mother is well-documented.

“He visited his mother very regularly but there’s a reluctance in his letters to her. There’s a poem called Reference Back that I didn’t include in the piece before that goes: ‘Played record after record idly, Wasting my time at home, that you. Looked so much forward to’. You visit your mother and she wants to know all your news that you don’t want to tell; that has echoes for me.”

Tom’s book Dear Tom is a collection of letters written by his mother, Annie. She wrote to Tom every week after he moved from Hull to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). Tom joined the Old Vic Company and worked at the Royal National Theatre. In 1962, he won the BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He won the Evening Standard and Drama Critics’ Awards for The Dresser in 1983 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor. He was knighted in 2001.

More recently, Tom played Mr Dorrit in the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit and appeared in The Royle Family Christmas Special in 2008 as Dave’s dad, Dave Senior opposite his Billy Liar co-star Helen Fraser.

Having also played God and King Lear, perhaps it won’t be long before Tom has his own statue in Hull close to Larkin’s – but what will it say on the plinth?

“Hull City supporter,” replies Tom laconically.

Tom has not visited Larkin’s statue, he’d prefer to keep the image of the poet alive.

“He had a great fear of death: ‘the anaesthetic from which none come round’.

“My compilation has been described as ‘a meditation on mortality’, but I would add ‘with a lot of jokes’. It’s still not finished and it never will be.”

Pretending to be Me is at The Radlett Centre, Aldenham Avenue, Radlett on Sunday, January, 16 at 7.30pm. Details: 01923 859291 www.radlettcentre.co.uk