An extraordinary email from theatre critic Mr Lloyd Evans arrived in my inbox last week. He’d written a play, it said, a two-hander, and one of the characters was based on me. He’d based the character on me after we’d met at a Spectator Christmas lunch five years ago. The play was opening at the King’s Head in Islington on Tuesday. If, after seeing his dramatic representation of me, I was minded to sue, it went on, perhaps we could come to an arrangement that benefited plaintiff and defendant at the expense of the lawyers. Meanwhile, would I like a ticket?
I don’t know Lloyd well. At The Spectator, the more sociable contributors turn up twice a year for the Christmas lunch and summer party where we are power-hosed down with champagne for a couple of hours then turned out into the street. So we all only see each another briefly and when drunk.
I remembered the Christmas lunch Lloyd was referring to, though. It was my first. It took place on a restored Thames sailing barge moored in St Katherine’s Dock. I think it must have been a full moon. The noise level grew steadily from pleasant chatter to a sustained crescendo of confused roaring, punctuated by the sound of breaking glass. In the pub afterwards I saw the unlikeliest couples snogging as if their lives depended on it. Because he had a beard, I got it into my head that Lloyd was the sports correspondent Simon Barnes, and it was only much later, after several out-of-focus, bi-annual conversations about football, that I discovered he was the poetry editor, as he was then.
I’d last seen Lloyd just three weeks ago, but only very briefly, at The Spectator’s 180th birthday party.
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