Sc(h)ofields

In Saturday's newspaper there was an obituary of Joy Parker, an actor who died last month aged 90. I can't say I remember her, but my eye was caught by the accompanying photograph.

It showed Joy with the better-known Gwen Watford and Mia Farrow: they were in the title roles of Chekhov's Three Sisters - and I do well remember that 1973 production. It took place on the apron stage of Greenwich Theatre, with Charles Dance as the ghastly Solyony: his was not a performance I recall, any more than Joy Parker's Olga, but I haven't forgotten Mia Farrow's doll-like appearance as Irena.

It was a memorable evening also, being the first time Caroline and I went to the theatre together: there was a last-minute party of us, for whom she cooked supper afterwards - in the extremely primitive under-stairs kitchen of her flat in Regent Square.

Joy Parker's chief claim to fame might have been to have been married for 65 years to the same man, another actor: long stage marriages are rare. And her husband? None other than my absolute hero, Paul Scofield. (They had two children, Martin and Sarah.)

These birds were photographed in July at "Schofields", the garden.

"Earthquakes in London"

The joint National Theatre/Headlong production of Mike Bartlett’s 2010 South Bank success is now on tour: we drove to Malvern this evening to catch it, suckers for anything to do with climate change. Rupert Goold’s energetic direction does wonders for what is ultimately not a very profound play. But it is rich entertainment, and may I suppose end up by preaching to others than the converted. At the interval, I found myself thinking of the dysfunctional family and its hangers on in terms of Chekhov somewhat speeded up. The ending however disappoints, resolving itself into sci fi fantasy. A guess at what might be the truth, Cormac McCarthy-like, would of course be far too painful for the punters. Bumping into friends there, we somehow sought to avoid any discussion of the substance of the play.

Relayed cherry-picking

In Portugal, the informal economy was at its most visible in the stalls of cherries for sale by the roadsides. Yet we didn't see a single tree with them growing.

Within the past six days I have been to Glyndebourne and the South Bank, but travelled a mere sixty miles to get there and back. The peerless Glyndebourne Die Meistersinger came to Malvern on Sunday afternoon, and last night we had The Cherry Orchard at our local Cineworld direct from the National Theatre in its sublime production by Howard Davies.

The durability of both is that they have something timeless to tell us, and yet so much more than that: in the Wagner, we see the possibility of romantic happiness with a beautiful girl flitter across the consciousness of an eligible widower, before he concludes that a liaison would be in the long-term interests of neither. In the Chekhov, there are similar dalliances, but chiefly the conflict is between the unconstrainable romantic imagination of Mme. Ranyevskaya and her situation's grim financial reality. Andrew Upton's brilliant translation makes us very aware of the parallels with our recent banking crisis.