Maureen Lipman: My best friends are old – but only in body

There have been a lot of news stories about old people this week; a lot of programmes about old people, and our care of them – including Tony Robinson’s documentary about his mother. It’s reminded me how often I’ve wanted to take a camera to record conversations with remarkable women. Sadly, it’s not what TV executives regard as sexy, although sex comes into such conversations often. Elsbeth met her husband to be when, at seven years old, she threw a snowball at him. He was 14 and she knew immediately that she would marry him. Another, much younger, friend (but still over the three-score-and-10 phase), Eve, joined me on holiday in Zakynthos and was, maddeningly, the only one of a group of dressed-up dames to bag the best-looking man in the bar. Eve dances with an over-60s group, acts, does yoga, pilates, poetry workshops and, best of all, tells me stories. You can’t imagine how nice it is for me to just sit there and be entertained.

Lesley Joseph’s 94-year-old mum, Vicky, goes line dancing every week and Julia McKenzie’s, Kay (93), looks like her sister. Good health and indomitable brain cells are the common denominators, of course. Without these, we all face uncertain futures. As my remarkable mother used to say, one mother can care for 10 children but 12 children can’t care for one mother.

There are many reasons to go the theatre, several of which occurred to me after a full house last Saturday night and the kind of reception usually reserved for rugby squads bringing home the world cup. It had been a Glorious performance to a brilliant audience.

The audience dictates how the show proceeds. Sometimes, at the outset, there are stragglers who hang back from laughing but after a while they all come together, and then the sensation is like riding a superb horse over a familiar course, holding her back at certain jumps and urging her forward at others, always with the other riders and the spectators in mind (why I chose that particular simile is a mystery: the only time I’ve ever been on a horse was in 1966, outside my parents’ terraced house in Hull, when a horse-mad school friend brought her chestnut round and I got up one side and fell down the other.)

Quite often, and invariably in the front row, there will be a stone-faced man, with crossed arms and a thunderous brow, surrounded by shrieking, hooting, body-popping punters. It must be dreadful being him.

There are, sadly, other reasons not to go to theatre. People have got into the habit of one anniversary splurge a year. It’s that no-man’s land after Christmas, let’s say, when you’re stuck with the odd relative still here, so a block of six tickets is booked for The Lion King and off you all go to a matinee and to a pizza parlour. It costs a lot, you know, but it’s done now and the kids and the in-laws will all remember the elephant walking down the aisles, and you can tick off theatre-going for another year.

“Did you enjoy it, darling?” I once asked my mother, after an arm-and-a-leg of an expedition, involving SAS-style organisation. “Mmmm, yes, it was … good,” she said, with qualification implicit in the very removal of her rain hood. “I mean it was a musical – you know … far-fetched.”

Someone wrote me a letter at the Duchess Theatre this week, saying what pleasure Florence Foster Jenkins’ hilarious optimism had given them after coming to see the play. They were theatre-goers from the early years of their marriage and came to London for a cultural splash every year. This year, she wrote, with the train and the tickets and the administration fee on the tickets, plus the programme, drinks and meal, it had cost them £500. My blood pressure rose and a vein started throbbing in my temple. Thank God they enjoyed the show, was all I could think.

What exactly is the administration cost of booking a theatre seat? They just pick up a phone and consult a seating plan, don’t they? Can someone enlighten me? I mean box-office staff were always knowledgeable and helpful, and one or two, back in the 1960s, were the ears and eyes of the whole outfit. Now their skill is relegated to face-to-face booking in theatres which have almost no walk-past trade; all telephone bookings are transferred to ticket agencies or online ticketing.

There, the would-be purchaser endures the wretched “if you want to waste 20 minutes to get through to a Dalek, press two” ordeal, and more often than not, will be told there are no seats available for the show they want.

And here’s the rub. The major agencies allocate a few seats to each subsidiary agency, so when they tell you “there are no seats available for Glorious or the Blue Man Group, but we do have seats for Phantom of the Opera or Stomp”, they are, at best, distorting the truth. I’ve had friends tell me they couldn’t get into our show when the house was only three-quarters full.

Some of the ticket agencies are owned by the theatre owners themselves, which in itself is worth investigating, perhaps (said she, looking nervously over one shoulder). Meanwhile, the buildings are archaic, the seats maim you, the toilets are vintage and few (a throwback to Edwardian times, when women didn’t have bladders). As for the backstage areas – well, there are very few open days in London theatres, you’ll notice.

At least Cameron Macintosh puts as much back as a theatre owner as he puts in as a producer, and his recent renovations are monuments for future theatre-goers’ pleasure. For some of the others, it’s just bricks and mortar on the outside, whatever tosh it takes to keep it open on the inside, and slap the inflation on the programmes and ice-cream bills.

· This week Maureen watched the film version of Patrick Marber’s Closer: “Very sharp and interesting; insane casting.” She listened to Sarah Badel reading, beautifully, Edna Healey’s lovely, wry biography Part of the Pattern on Radio 4. She read The Women by Clare Boothe Luce: “Witty, radical in its day and very relevant. Sex and the City, circa 1920.”

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