House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries

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One phone call today, a woman inquiring if I’ve made arrangements for my funeral yet. At least it isn’t a recorded voice.

9781800811928 - House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries by Bennett

We are en route down the A65 for the funeral of a close friend, Michael Hindle, my solicitor. Almost at Skipton we are in a traffic jam. There has been a fatal accident, with an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly lines up and observes the scene.The scene in question was a pleasure to write. It brought home to me that HMQ (as she was billed in the programme) was a person like no other, a woman who has been everywhere, met everyone and to whom nothing comes as a surprise. At one point Blunt mentions Venice:

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He notes being sent a new bio­graphy of Graham Greene, but he wouldn’t read it because he was never a fan. “I’ve been put off by the Catholicism showing through and his frequent ‘rare’ interviews. A ­darling of the Sunday papers in the l960s, he was always said to be retiring while in fact being avid for publicity.” He only met Greene once, when he came to see his play The Old Country, and Alec Guinness introduced them. He remembered that, “Greene’s was the limpest hand I’d ever shaken. Nor did he say a word about the play, for or against.” With Rupert now working from home my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch. Rishi Sunak told Starmer: “Rather than comment on piecemeal bits of information, I’m sure [Starmer] will agree with me the right way for these things to be looked at is the Covid inquiry. Thanks to arthritis I’m now much less mobile than I was. Gone are the days when I could jump on my bike to pop down to the shops, so static semi-isolation is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine. Himself no slouch when it came to work, George Steiner once asked a Soviet dissident how he got through so much. “House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.” Alas, so far as work is concerned, I haven’t yet noticed much difference. The York Theatre Royal’s tour of The Habit of Art, the play about Auden and Britten that did well last year and was due to be revived for a festival in New York, has had to be cancelled. I write to the cast apologising and saying that one person who would not be washing his hands every five minutes is WH Auden.March. HMQ pictured in the paper at an investiture wearing gloves, presumably as a precaution against Coronavirus. But not just gloves; these are almost gauntlets. I hope they're not the thin end of a precautionary wedge lest Her Majesty end up swathed in protective get-up such as is worn at the average crime scene. It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican sermon, which always went well. Less successful, earlier in the show, was a monologue – stand-up it would be called today – on the subject of corporal and capital punishment, both in those days still going strong. Young enough then to believe that theatre and indeed satire could do some good, I was proud of this piece, though it garnered few laughs and was referred to by the rest of the cast as ‘the boring old man sketch’. The character I played was vehement in his defence of corporal and capital punishment while strongly rebutting any suggestion that the thought of either gave him pleasure. ‘On the contrary,’ I intoned. ‘They produce no erec … no REACTION at all.’ They didn’t produce much of a reaction from the audience either, and on the night the queen was present none at all. To be fair, the management had urged me to tone down the offending sketch, particularly the erection/reaction gag but (rather self-righteously) I refused. There wasn’t much laughter that night in the rest of the show, which normally went by in gales of hilarity, but with the audience only concerned with what the Royal Party was thinking, much of it passed in awkward silence. Venice is the only city I’ve been in, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’ January 2022. Sent a brochure for Venice, as we regularly are, in which the Orient Express figures prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car. It was an international train, headed, I think, for Istanbul, but overnight transformed in certain sections into something much more domestic. I went First, thinking, rightly, that this meant luxury, but venturing further down the train one found humbler passengers spilling out into the corridor along with their belongings in bulging cardboard boxes, hens and on one occasion a goat. When one eventually arrived in Venice, where I’d never been, in the late afternoon it did seem like an achievement: one came out of the station to find the canals not sequestered away in some tourist area but there on the steps of the station itself, Venice the only place that lived up to its publicity. On the vaporetto one passed the fire station, the gleaming boats ready arrayed, and that seemed wondrous too, that here even the fire engines were in boat form.

House Arrest - British Theatre Guide Book review: House Arrest - British Theatre Guide

June. When in 2019 I had a flutter with my heart and a momentary loss of speech, it must have been around the time of the stand-off between Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court because the young doctor in A&E at UCH testing my mental capacity asked me what the word was for closing down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one. Some time in the afternoon Rupert shouts down that Joe Biden has passed the line and been declared the winner in the presidential election and that the scourge of Trump has been lifted. Though Trump does not agree. Lynn Wagenknecht [owner of the Odeon restaurant in New York] texts from New York saying there is dancing in the street and holds up the phone to let us hear the rejoicing. It should put a smile on people’s faces here but there are few people about. Such relief. Today’s barber is my partner, who manages to make me look like a blond Hitler

I don’t think Her Majesty ever came to any other of my plays, though not, I’m sure, due to my youthful bêtise. Still, when I next wrote about the queen it might also have caused offence. This was A Question of Attribution, put on at the National Theatre in 1988 and the first time the queen had been represented on the stage. This needs to be said. Prunella Scales’s seamless portrayal of Her Majesty not only preceded, it also surpassed any that came after. Physically much the same as HMQ, Pru had no claim or aspirations to glamour, she even had a touch of the suburban. The sad thing is that only the National Theatre audiences saw and were stunned by this performance. Though John Schlesinger later filmed the play (where HMQ was supported by her corgis) the magic didn’t quite transfer. But Pru was the first and the best. In the central scene of the play the queen has a long conversation with the keeper of the royal pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. He is a longtime Soviet agent and one of the questions implicit in the scene is whether the queen knows this. September. I must be one of the very few of the late queen’s subjects to have said – or almost said – the word ‘erection’ in her presence. It was in 1961 in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe. Many prospective readers are likely to have enjoyed previous volumes of Bennett diaries and once again this one, though slight, will not disappoint. A few years later I met Lord Charteris, who was the queen’s secretary at the time. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I never saw the play but I gather the issue was whether the queen knew and whether Blunt knew that the queen knew. The truth is they both knew. But that, of course, has not to be said.’

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Pupils in English schools were told to wear face masks despite limited evidence of the policy’s efficacy after Johnson was told by Whitty that it was probably “not worth an argument” with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, on the issue. The bulk of this witty and thoughtful tome invites us to enter the mind of a now largely immobile mental butterfly.We have agreed that the cast and crew in the Talking Heads remount should do so for a token fee, with any profits to be given to the NHS. I’m somewhat staggered to find that this amounts to a million pounds, possibly more. It’s no skin off my nose, as I never expected the programmes to be repeated, but the financial sacrifice for some of the cast and crew will not just be notional. Astonishing though it is, this gesture passes without notice. March, Yorkshire. We vary our evening stroll, which in my case is more of a trudge, by going up the village to the church to sit in the churchyard. The birds are noisy, rooks and crows mostly, though unlike London no seagulls. And here come the bellringers for their Monday night practice, and quite frail they look too. The key is lost, so the ringers are very happy to chat and gossip while it’s located. Someone with Ukrainian relatives is taking in a family and there has been a dance and coffee morning in aid. Now the church is found to be open so no key is required, the ringers go up the tower as we walk home, and as we are putting the key in our own door the bells start.