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The 1975 film In Celebration with Alan Bates |
Storey for our times
DAVID Storey, the Booker Prize-winning novelist and playwright, who celebrates his 74th birthday next month, was in open confessional mood when I talked to him this week about Hollywood star Orlando Bloom starring in a surprise West End revival of his formidable play In Celebration.
He had never heard of Orlando, one of the stars of Lord of the Rings and Johnny Depp’s Caribbean pirate epics.
Storey, whose working-class novels and plays of the 1960s and 1970s made him something of a socialist hero, has lost his enthusiasm for the theatre.
He no longer goes to see plays, doesn’t watch drama on television or listen to it on radio. So he was overwhelmed by the drive he discovered on meeting Orlando and the cast of In Celebration, together with its young director, Anna Mackmin.
“Did it all come as a surprise? Yes, that’s the long answer,” Storey wryly told me at his home in Willes Road, Kentish Town. “I think I must have been the last to hear about the revival. But it is now in the grip of people I’ve never worked with before. And they are full of enthusiasm and inspire a lot of confidence.
Storey has now met the cast of the play, which is all about three unhappy sons of Yorkshire who return home for their parents’ wedding anniversary, which made its debut at the Royal Court in 1969 and later became a film starring Alan Bates, directed by Lindsay Anderson.
The play was last revived in Chichester four years ago. Storey did become involved in the rehearsals of what he then considered his swansong in the theatre. But this time round he has decided to stand back and watch.
“I realise I am getting too old for young directors to cope with,” he explained. “They have an enthusiasm for the theatre which has rather faded in me. I am still rather shocked by not knowing any of the people involved in this new production, and thinking, Christ, I really am getting old.”
So what did he make of Orlando? “He was very charming and very personable,” said Storey, who wrote In Celebration in just three days when he lived in Lyndhurst Gardens, Hampstead.
“No side has developed which stars get eventually when they have been hammered home with success. He seemed very natural, easy going and an accessible fellow.”
So he will be going to the first night when In Celebration opens next Thursday.
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