Corin Redgrave - and death by Wikipedia…
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010Very sad news about the death of Corin Redgrave, as some have said a much under-rated actor - and a man whose reputation crept for a long period under a double-shadow, that of his formidably successful father and that of his own often contentious hard-left political activism.
I feel blessed to have encountered some of his finest performances in the latter stages of his career. I doubt I will ever forget his near-definitive account of the fossilised classics master Crocker-Harris in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version at Derby Playhouse in 2002. About that performance I wrote: “This bespectacled pedagogue shuffles about with stiff, stooped precision, as though each movement were meticulously timetabled. Even without the assistance of close-up camerawork, the most telling details reach us: the withered, withering voice that cannot produce warmth beyond the most impersonal cheeriness; eyes that are incapable of meeting another’s gaze; lips that can only purse themselves in disdain… all the hurt walled up behind this old-womanish facade is suddenly released in a damburst of sobbing despair, Redgrave clawing at his face in a manner that is quite unbearable to watch.”
Other magnificent performances included his exquisite incarnation of Kenneth Tynan, as brought to us from the critic’s diaries by Colin Chambers and Richard Nelson, Redgrave again capturing the inward agonies of an erudite figure - “Twitching his lips into a thin half-smile, letting his gaze sink to the floor under unseen pressures of sadness, Redgrave shows you that, even though the critic’s body disintegrated, his mind remained razor-sharp and more than capable of lacerating its once-proud owner. A haunting evening.”
He was sublime too as Hirst in Old Man’s Land at the National Theatre, and as Oscar Wilde in De Profundis. He had his off-days; Macbeth at BAC, directed by Tom Morris, was nothing to write home about, and the reviews were mixed, mainly against, his militaristic, ramrod-straight Lear at the RSC - about which you can hear various critics disagreeing in a Theatrevoice discussion.
I had the good fortune to speak with him twice in recent years - once just ahead of the Theatre Museum (now V&A Theatre Collections) exhibition of choice bequests from the Redgrave Archive - which I wrote about here. And more recently, just over a year ago, when he bravely ventured to tread the boards once again in a new project, Trumbo - an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s letters, at the Jermyn Street Theatre. You can read about that here.
Sadly, although I found him considerate and gentle-mannered in conversation, Redgrave at that point - still in recovery from a major heart-attack, was rather too hesitant of speech for a full-length Theatrevoice interview to be advisable. So, inevitably on days like this, one regrets the opportunities let slip to record an actor of his renown and experience for posterity.
Generally, there’s a faint shock at realising the reviews and articles you thought were safely preserved online have floated away without trace.
A Daily Telegraph review I wrote of Blunt Speaking, Redgrave’s 2002 play about Anthony Blunt at Chichester, is now nowhere apparent on the paper’s main site. This, alarmingly, has been retitled Bluntly Speaking, on Redgrave’s Wikipedia entry.
More alarmingly still, it would appear that in the rush to throw out quick news items to mark his passing, almost all the major media outlets online have reprinted the Wikipedia error that Redgrave received an Olivier Award for his performance as Boss Whalen in Tennessee William’s Not About Nightingales at the National in 1998. I was absolutely convinced this wasn’t the case - but the mass replication of this “fact” had me phoning the National Theatre press-office to confirm that, yes - “He definitely didn’t win an Olivier for Not About Nightingales”. Is it the case now that we’re so awards-minded that it’s inconceivable that an actor of Redgrave’s class wouldn’t have earned an Olivier? Or is that the internet now requires such haste in information-processing that a group-think emerges, which swiftly shapes unsubstantiated assertion into accepted universal truth? Doesn’t an actor at the end of his career, and life, deserve better? We all make mistakes but whatever the underlying reason here - ignorance, economics, carelessness - this was not only a sad day for the acting profession, it was a sad day for journalism.
