I was consumed by waves of melancholy driving down the Cut last night. I spent so many years of my life on that short little road near Waterloo.
And now the pandemic.
Just off the Cut is ETT, the company I founded, which for so many years was my home, my office, my palace with its very own rehearsal room. Oh luxury. Then the Young Vic, the Old Vic (where my productions of Henry IV and King Lear both played), the NT Studio where I spent six fascinating, challenging, bewildering months in the 1980s learning pretty much everything that matters really. The Jerwood Space where I rehearsed so many plays, including All Our Children, my favourite. There used to be an old church on Short Street (was it called Upstream?) with a great big room which smelt of incense and urine. The Windmill, that pub where I used to drink beneath all those framed pictures of famous, and not so famous, actors and actresses. So many conversations. So many plans. So many wasted hours.
And taking actors out to lunch at Tas. The Chinese noodle bar for laughter. The old Acropolis where Peter Gill held court over moussaka before it closed down and got turned into an expensive fish restaurant (Live Bait, Peter Hall’s favourite) and is now a burger chain. Diana Quick striding along so elegantly. Vanessa Redgrave and a friend, I don’t know who. Paterson Joseph and Joe O’Connor sharing a dressing room at the Old Vic. The Calder Bookshop where I used to listen to John Calder talking about (his friend) Sam Beckett and I greedily bought copies of Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. The Baltic (where I had my 50th birthday and drank too many shots of cherry vodka and my friend made that lovely speech) and the tapas bar on the corner of Short Street where so many plans were hatched. La Barca on the Marsh with Tim and Sam West, and Ultz’s old studio in that building by the station in the corner which has now been pulled down. And back by the Young Vic: The Anchor and Hope. Or is it the Hope and Anchor? I had lunch with Simon Beale there once and we sank deep into our anecdotage, rambling on about Cambridge, and more times lost, another space of friendship, art and dreams.
Fragments of my life, all torn. All gone.
And now all shut. All closed down. Shuttered up as the virus passes by.
“The night is long that never finds the day.” Shakespeare
“You can’t step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus