Brian Viner: As affectionate laughter rippled through the audience, we could relax

Thursday, 15 April 2010

The world premiere of Tales of the Country – which, as I think I might have mentioned before, is a play based on the book inspired by my columns about moving out of London to rural Herefordshire – took place at the Severn Theatre in Shrewsbury last Thursday.

To get there in good time, Jane, the children and I took the 17.08 Arriva Trains Wales service from Leominster – which might not be how Agatha Christie arrived at the world premiere of The Mousetrap (just to pluck a random example of another stage adaptation of a book), but I bet she didn’t enjoy her evening half as much as we enjoyed ours.

Admittedly, Shrewsbury is not the West End, and Arriva Trains Wales is definitely not to be confused with a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom; but then Tales of the Country isn’t The Mousetrap. Mind you, I’m certain we’ve had more mice running amok in our house than Dame Agatha ever had in hers.

We were joined on the 17.08 by a gang of friends, and to make an occasion of it, took several bottles of champagne. Our mate Patrick had undertaken to provide nibbles, and took his duties very seriously, half-emptying the Marks & Spencer food hall in Hereford.

So, as there were too many of us to sit round the few tables that Arriva Trains Wales provide, I had to walk up and down the aisle, like a five-star trolley service, dispensing drinks, prawns, cocktail sausages and those hefty pieces of M&S sushi – only one of which rolled off my plastic tray and into the lap of a woman from Bridgend.

A party on a train brings out the best in people, as long as you’re inclusive about it. The woman from Bridgend had a sausage, and a man from Penarth – who happened to be sitting at a table with me, my friend Stewart the local chicken farmer, and Stewart’s wife Susie – had some crisps and champagne. I told him all about the play, and he told me all about the book he’s writing, a biography of John Venn, the 19th-century inventor of the Venn diagram.

For a while it was like a Radio 4 arts programme at our table, at least until Stewart told us his latest politically incorrect joke, about a bald man who goes into a pub with a parrot on his shoulder.

The journey was such good fun that some of us were actually quite disappointed when we arrived at Shrewsbury, but also a little bit excited, while some were more excited than disappointed, and others were wholly excited – the sort of situation that would have driven John Venn to his drawing-board.

Anyway, we walked to the theatre from the station in glorious late-afternoon sunshine, and had dinner in the Theatre Severn’s excellent restaurant, before it was finally time for curtains up.

I’d read the script and been to a couple of auditions, and Jane and I had met the final cast, but we hadn’t been to any rehearsals, and really didn’t have a clue what to expect. In truth, we were apprehensive. At least my book is my own account of our life in the country, whereas the script is the interpretation of Nick Warburton – to be sure a hugely experienced playwright, but I had wondered whether the self-deprecating tone of the book might, on stage, look like that of a man with plenty to be self-deprecating about.

However, as affectionate laughter rippled across the audience we began to relax; after just a few minutes it was clear that Nick and everyone at Pentabus had done a fantastic job, and the cast are superb. The company’s visionary artistic director, Orla, received almost 600 CVs when she advertised the auditions, which makes me shudder for young people – including my own daughter, Eleanor – wondering whether to pursue an acting career. The profession has never been more competitive. But choosing a company of five from 600 hopefuls at least means that you end up with some class acts.

Even class acts, though, need classy audiences. Since last Thursday the play has moved into village halls, where I’m told it has been wonderfully received. They seem to love a scene about poultry-fancying, in particular. But this is the country. How will the chickens go down at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington? That’s my new concern. Metropolitan readers can find out, let me insouciantly add, between May 11 and May 16.

A few years ago in these pages I related an anecdote about a young curate and a fierce dog. It was a funny tale told to me by an elderly clergyman friend who assured me that he had been that very curate, and yet by an unfortunate coincidence the same story had appeared in the Independent’s property section just the day before, presented by an estate agent as having happened to him.

I didn’t know this until a few days later, when I opened an envelope to find my column and the property feature clipped together, with an arrow pointing at my picture by-line alongside the single word, “twazzock”. This had been sent anonymously, so was vaguely unpleasant in the way that anonymous post always is, yet it also made me laugh. And at least it had arrived in the post, whisking me back to the 1980s when I first joined a local newspaper, and old-fashioned letters – or in extremis, telephone calls – were the only means of communication between writer and reader.

That all changed with the invention of the email. Folk who might not have got round to writing a letter, had only to tap their computer keyboards a few times to let a journalist know what they thought of his or her words. Sometimes this electronic feedback is aggressive, in which case the best course of action is not to reply, and certainly not to enter into sustained dialogue. Nobody wants a poison pen-friend. And yet it’s often hard to resist. Not long ago, I received an email angrily calling me “incredibly self-possessed”. I wrote back, politely saying “don’t you mean self-obsessed?” No, my critic thundered, I mean self-possessed. “But,” I replied, “it’s a good thing to be self-possessed, it means being in full control of your faculties. I’m sure you mean I’m self-obsessed.” “Don’t tell me what I mean,” came the reply, and so our correspondence continued, with me offering advice on the correct invective.

And now we also have the blogosphere, making it even easier than the email for readers to register contempt or, indeed, support. Either way, the journalist’s work has never before been subjected to such an instant and public assessment which, good or bad, can be a hugely positive force, although there are also some remarkably intemperate people out there. Colleagues such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown know this better than I do; the abuse she gets is shocking. I write about more mundane matters, and am less pilloried. But not long ago I had to ask The Independent’s IT people to remove a comment referring to me as a four-letter C-word that wasn’t ‘clot’, after I’d owned up to being … a Volvo driver.

All this was meant as a prelude to writing about the play by Pentabus Theatre Company based on my book Tales of the Country, now in rehearsal prior to its world premiere in Shrewsbury next month. I approach the subject tentatively, because last time I wrote about it, a blogger accused me of delivering the longest book plug he’d ever read. Still, if it’s any consolation to him, Nick Warburton, who has adapted the book for the stage, liked the twazzock story so much that he has my character being called a twazzock repeatedly. In Shrewsbury, I’ll be the one watching through his fingers. Which is also how I’ll read the online comments following this column. I just hope there are some. All columnists would rather be abused than ignored.

Anyway, while I’m shamelessly if not twazzockly plugging my own books, I might as well mention the next one, about the British on holiday. I have two friends who run travel companies, and some of their stories make me realise that a journalist is mere grapeshot-fodder compared with the cannon fire these guys occasionally get from people dissatisfied with their holidays. Which is fair enough, if the complaints are justified. After all, a holiday is a rather more significant investment than a newspaper. But one elderly Englishwoman returned from a very upmarket African safari incandescent that she had found a frog on her verandah, and demanded a portion of her money back.

My other friend runs cycling holidays in Europe, and employs a dozen reps. Last summer, one of his reps found the stress of the job too much, so stripped off in the middle of an Italian piazza and set fire to his clothes. The hazards of writing for a living suddenly seem rather tame.

Brian Viner: ‘It’s a weird experience watching actresses audition to be your wife’

Thursday, 21 January 2010

There are probably experiences weirder than sitting in a rehearsal room just off Tottenham Court Road watching actresses read for the part of your wife while the high-spirited singing of what sounds like a group of munchkins carries through from the room next door, but it was hard to think what they might be.
I had dropped in to the Drill Hall in Chenies Street at the invitation of Orla O’Loughlin, of the Pentabus Theatre Company. Orla is directing Tales of the Country, the new play based on my book of the same name, which in turn was based on the column of the same name (the forerunner of “Home and Away”), about our move out of the metropolis eight years ago in search of the elusive rural idyll. The play is due to open in Shrewsbury in April, then tours for seven weeks, mainly in the Welsh Marches. The tour ends up in London, with a run at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington. And after that, who knows? The Palladium? La Scala? A Peter Jackson film trilogy?
I’ve had no creative input into the project apart from having written the book, which has been adapted – brilliantly – by Nick Warburton. Nick is a hugely experienced writer for stage, screen and radio whose credits include episodes of EastEnders. That proves what a versatile fellow he is: murder, rape, abortion, adultery, armed robbery, incest, and now cowpats.
Anyway, back to the Drill Hall. In the casting process, Orla and her associate director, Kate, have had to whittle 600 CVs down to around 50, and on Tuesday they were looking for someone to play Jane, my wife, and one actor to play 16 assorted characters, including all three of our children. I’d never been to an audition before, and never leafed through actors’ CVs either. They make absorbing reading. Most of them specify ‘voice character’ and ‘voice quality’ – which got me wondering how I’d define my own voice.
One of the actresses who read for Jane had “assured” vocal character and “clear” vocal quality, but that seemed a little dull next to the woman who claimed “earthy” and “velvety”. I know Jane would like to be earthily and velvetily represented on stage. In the event, of course, I had nothing to do with the casting decisions, but just sat there relishing the weirdness of the situation, which got weirder when the munch- kins started up next door (although Orla told me they’d had an aria to contend with the day before). For a non-theatrical, it was fascinating to see how these things work, not least because several of the actresses auditioning for Jane had just come out of panto, and were still ever so slightly in thigh-slapping mode.
There followed a succession of eager young men trying out for the multiple-character part. Orla got each of them to read the scene in which my daughter Eleanor begs me for a puppy, and it was interesting to see how differently they did it: one of them made her like Violet Elizabeth Bott, one made her like Lolita, and one made her borderline autistic. The same actors also had to play a scene in which a policeman stops a motorist for speeding.
From the CV of one of them I noticed that his range of accents included: “Birmingham, Black Country, Bristol, Cockney, Geordie, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Yorkshire, American (West Coast), American (New York) and American (Deep South)” and impressively there were traces of most of these contained in the highly idiosyncratic accent of his Herefordshire copper. Still, at least he seemed like a reasonably benign copper. Another interpreted the character more like a Stasi officer with toothache – and you’d be very unlucky to come across one of those on the A44.
But I really don’t mean to belittle their efforts, which on the whole were excellent, and heaven knows it must be a hard and often unrewarding business to go through these auditions. Eleanor, who is now 16, is currently thinking of pursuing an acting career, and yesterday’s experience makes me wonder whether to discourage her. Either that or I’ll send her down to the Drill Hall. She knows better than anyone how she asked for that puppy.
Meanwhile, the search goes on for a Brian. They thought they had one, but he’s landed more lucrative telly work instead. So back in London next week they’re seeing 25 Brians. I might give that session a miss.

Brian Viner: ‘What’s it going to be like in a theatre, seeing actors grappling with being me?’
Thursday, 10 December 2009

Last week Jane and I were invited to a read-through of the play based on my book Tales of the Country. Jane especially went with trepidation. She doesn’t mind me opening our lives to public scrutiny in a weekly newspaper column, or even in a couple of books, but a play’s a slightly different matter. At least until now it’s been my own interpretation of our family life, not a playwright’s, and we don’t sit there while people read about us, listening to their reactions. What’s it going to be like in a theatre, with actors pretending to be me and her and even the children, metropolitan émigrés grappling with life in rural Herefordshire?
If the first read-through is anything to go by, it will be unnerving and exciting at the same time. The excellent Pentabus Theatre company is based in an old school building just north of Ludlow, which is where we went for the reading. We sat round a big table with half a dozen actors, the director Orla, and the playwright Nick. On the table was a cafetière full of good coffee and a plate of chocolate brownies. It was a bit early in the day for double vodkas, although I dare say we could all have done with one; Nick, Orla and the actors were no less aware than we were of the weirdness of the situation. They all introduced themselves. “I play Brian,” said a nice young man, rather better-looking than me. “And I play Jane,” said a pretty dark-haired woman.
Ever since Pentabus first approached me for permission to adapt the book, Jane and I have joked about who might play us, if not on stage, then in the Sunday-night television version which is more or less, possibly with emphasis on the less, bound to follow. I think Pierce Brosnan and Pauline Quirke, she thinks Catherine Zeta-Jones and Timothy Spall. Anyway, we were both more than satisfied with our alter egos at the read-through, although Orla made it clear that she hadn’t yet cast the play, so these might not be the eventual stage actors.
Around the table, though, they did a fine job. As had Nick in adapting the thing. He is a hugely experienced writer for stage and screen, with numerous Radio 4 plays and episodes of Holby City and EastEnders in his locker, so I never doubted his expertise, but I still wasn’t sure how he would fashion my literary meanderings into a tightly-crafted play. He has done so brilliantly, and very funnily, albeit that much of the comedy is at my expense.
In the book I told the story of my clergyman friend, who was once summoned to the home of a very grand lady, but reached the garden gate to find a large snarling dog barring his path. He was about to turn tail when an upstairs window opened in the house, and the grand lady called out: “Don’t worry, vicar, he won’t hurt you, you just have to kick his balls.” My friend stood rooted to the spot. “Go on,” she called imperiously, “kick his balls. He likes it. They’re at the back!” Hesitantly, my friend shaped up to do as he had been bidden. “What on earth are you doing,” she shouted. “I said kick his balls. His footballs. They’re at the back of the lawn.”
By a stroke of cosmic misfortune, this story appeared in my column in The Independent, which had been written a week in advance, the very day after precisely the same anecdote appeared on the property pages, presented as the personal experience of a Stratford estate agent. And in the book I described how, a few days later, I was sent both cuttings through the post by some ill-wisher, with an arrow pointing at my byline picture and the single old Herefordshire word “Twazzock!” As far as I can recall, the word “twazzock” appears only once in the book, but in the play Nick uses it liberally, to convey my status in the eyes of the locals. Only gradually do I stop being a twazzock.
Still, if I can manage to sit on my pride, the play should be quite an adventure. It starts in Shrewsbury next April, then tours for six weeks around the Welsh Marches before winding up at the Pleasance Theatre in London for a few nights. After that, who knows? I suppose it might depend on Timothy Spall’s commitments. Or Pauline Quirke’s.

Brian Viner: ‘Tolstoy and I deal with similar themes – love marriage, death, moles…’
Independent

Orla O’Loughlin, artistic director of the Ludlow-based Pentabus theatre company, e-mailed me on Tuesday to say that they have now engaged someone to adapt my book Tales of the Country, about my family’s first year in north Herefordshire after leaving north London, for the stage. His name is Nick Warburton, and he has an illustrious track record in writing for the theatre, as well as for radio and television. He is certainly a man of impressive versatility, with a stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s complex novel Resurrection on his CV, as well as episodes of EastEnders.
Orla has suggested a meeting later this month between her, Nick and me, and I can’t wait to find out what his visions are for the stage version of Tales of the Country, which doesn’t on the surface have much in common with the works of Tolstoy, although I like to think that Count Leo and I dealt with similar sweeping themes: love and marriage, age and death, the irrationality of human behaviour, the place of the individual in history, whether urinating on a molehill will stop the mole coming back, what to do with an ailing chicken, that sort of thing. Jane, meanwhile, is wondering whether Nick’s pedigree as an EastEnders writer might influence the way he dramatises our trials and tribulations in Herefordshire. “Bleedin’ moles! Bleedin’ place is full of ‘em! Ain’t they got nowhere better to go?” Or, “‘Ere, I ‘eard you got a chicken giving you problems? I know this geezer who can get rid of her for yer, no questions asked.”
I suppose the pub is the only way in which Docklow, where sheep outnumber people by about 100 to one, can be compared to Albert Square in the fictional London Borough of Walford. Not that the King’s Head much resembles the Queen Vic, although a change of ownership is a seismic event here, as it is there. The King’s Head changed hands last month – for the fourth time since we moved here seven years ago – and is now run by Paula and Tony, an amiable couple who had been living in rural France for a decade or so. I confess that the Gallic connection caused Jane and I some excitement when we heard. We wondered whether confit de canard or crêpes suzette might perchance find their way onto the King’s Head menu, especially when we heard that Paula, a Lancastrian, had been to cookery school. But it turns out that she learnt to cook not in Nice, Nancy or Narbonne, but Nelson, making her a hotpot and jam roly-poly specialist, which on reflection is precisely what the King’s Head needs.
After all, out here in sheep country, continental influences are quite often regarded with suspicion. At the bar of the King’s Head a couple of nights ago a local farmer, Tim, told me in disbelief that he’d just had a vet round, sent by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to check on the welfare of his animals, and that said vet came from quite a lot closer to Benidorm than Bromyard. “What do the Spanish know about animal welfare?” Tim asked me, rhetorically. “Their national sport is bloody bullfighting.” Not a man known for hiding anything under a bushel, Tim added that he’d raised precisely that paradox with the vet, who’d responded rather chippily – and on slightly shaky ground, it has to be said – that our national sport is fox hunting.
So much for European union. Indeed, I am often reminded on such occasions of the final some years ago of the pan-continental TV quiz show Going for Gold, hosted by the great Henry Kelly. The two finalists were a woman from Ireland and a man from Norway, and after they had finished with level scores, they stood side by side facing a tiebreaker question, with the winner to be the person who first blurted out the correct answer. “Name an American state beginning with the letter V,” said Kelly. “Visconsin,” said the Norwegian, quickly, and lost.
In other words, the semblance of European unity will always be undermined by linguistic and cultural differences, as was discovered by the Spanish vet inspecting Tim’s livestock. Still, Tim is a hard-working fellow committed to the principles of responsible farming and I’m sure that even after their snippy exchange, the vet gave his animals the thumbs up, or whatever the Spanish equivalent of thumbs up might be. I just hope it’s not a two-fingered V-sign.

Brian Viner: ‘The play will tour village halls – and perhaps even be staged on Broadway ‘
The Indepependant
Home And Away
Thursday, 5 March 2009

One of the perils of writing about your life in a national newspaper is that people rush to judgement about you. And not only that, they know how to find you. This column in a previous incarnation was titled Tales of the Country, and in 2003, about a year after I started writing it, I got a letter from a fellow who lives three miles away, which, in this neck of the woods, counts as practically a next-door neighbour.

“It is a pity you do not restrict your contributions to The Independent to your sporting interviews,” he thundered, “as your Tales of the Country are exceedingly trite and patronising.” He went on in a similar vein for a few more sentences, vigorously lambasting me on all sorts of counts, and then he wrote, “Hey ho, on a positive note I cannot believe the number of times you appear to have emptied your septic tank. Something is wrong. We have emptied ours twice in 22 years.” The key to the whole exercise, he advised me, “is the nitrification tile or perforated plastic pipe which takes the septic tank’s effluent. It must be of sufficient length (150ft-plus) and surrounded by coarse/medium gravel. Yours sincerely…”

As I wrote at the time, this marked a new stage in the evolution of the poison-pen letter, someone not sending me his own effluent in the post but considered technical advice on what to do with mine. I was almost touched.
Anyway, I hope that Mr Effluent will be duly outraged to learn that those Tales of the Country columns, which inspired a moderately successful book of the same name, are now to be adapted for the stage. A theatre company called Pentabus, based in Ludlow, approached me a couple of months ago to ask whether they could make a play of the book, and the plans are for it to tour village halls around this time next year, and perhaps even for it to be staged on Broadway. Sorry, I meant in Broadway. I’m told that the United Reformed Church Hall on the High Street is a smashing little venue.

In our house, however, we are already getting ideas above our station. Jane wonders whether we might be able to interest Andrew Lloyd Webber in a Saturday teatime BBC1 reality show, in which women will audition for the chance of a lifetime to play her at Pudleston Village Hall. They could call it Wife of Brian. Failing that, she hopes Pentabus are aware that Julie Christie lives not far away over the Welsh border, and might be tempted to tread the boards again, albeit the boards of Clun Memorial Hall rather than the Royal Court. As for who should play me, Daniel Craig might fancy a break from the rigours of James Bond movies, although Jane thinks that Richard Griffiths could better capture my essence. Whatever, I do hope that there will be a role, or at least a mention, for Mr Effluent.

It’s all very exciting, but also rather alarming. It’s one thing chronicling my life in print, whereby one can only picture people reading about my family and me, but sitting in a darkened auditorium among a paying audience as actors recreate the pratfalls with which our first year in the country was replete, is a different matter entirely. And what about those theatre critics, whose pens spill even more acid than Mr Effluent’s? So far I’ve had to withstand only the barbs of literary critics, a slightly less savage breed, although they can be hard enough.

My latest book, a memoir about growing up in front of the telly in the 1970s, has been widely and on the whole generously reviewed. Unfortunately, I have never quite learnt to do what Laurence Olivier advised young actors: that if you laugh off the bouquets, you can more easily shrug off the brickbats. Consequently, I was thrilled with a marvellous review of my book in The Mail on Sunday, but aghast when it was slated in the Daily Express. It was also reviewed in this newspaper, I should add, by a former colleague of mine called William Cook who suggested that I have built my career on “cheerful bonhomie” and wrote that another colleague once described me as “a journalistic Val Doonican”. I dropped William a note saying that I didn’t know whether to laugh or croon.
Either way, I might be laughing, or crooning, on the other side of my face on Tales of the Country’s opening night.