Long life | 27 September 2012

An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises on her leg that she had got while tumbling about with her stage lover during the second act of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. That was after just the first two preview performances, and the play is only now beginning a six-week run at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex.

I had gone there to see her with her father, my elder brother John, and was struck by how old the audience was. Although 72 myself, I felt like one of its younger members; and when I later mentioned this to Anna, she said that she sometimes felt as if it were the end of an era, and that once this generation had passed away, there wouldn’t be any theatre audiences any more.