Notes from a national treasure

I’ve started rehearsals for the pantomime Beauty and the Beast at Richmond Theatre: two shows a day and just 13 days to learn everything, with songs, tongue-tying shticks, ghouls, hairy beasts and all. It’s like weekly rep with falsies and fart jokes. At the first rehearsal I confess I felt a little out of place in the cast of ridiculously bright-eyed young things with shiny cheeks and Lycra shorts. The director asked us all to introduce ourselves in one sentence. ‘I’m Maureen Lipman,’ I muttered, ‘and I’m a fucking National Treasure.’

The baked potato I eat in a café near the old Battersea Town Hall, now a slightly bedraggled, palazzo-style arts centre, may have been put in the oven in 1946, when I was. It’s an unhealthy shade of taupe. It sits on my chest like an anvil as I stumble through a song called ‘Don’t Break My Potty Wotty Heart’. It’s an eight-hour day and an eight-mile drive in and out, but David, my fiancé, has cooked me steak and chips and lit the fire. I am absurdly happy.

We recently entertained Yonatan and Ina, the rabbi and rebbetzin of Kyiv, for dinner. Since Russia’s invasion they preside over an often hungry, frozen and petrified community, as well as a school for autistic children. They often have electricity for one hour a day to cook 500 meals or heat their building. Screaming missiles bombard their city all through the night. The children are in and out of the shelters in the pitch black with no heat. Soon it will be 20 degrees below freezing. ‘I came to Kyiv to bring Torah teaching to an assimilated group of Jewish Ukrainians after the collapse of communism,’ Yonatan says. ‘Now all I can give them is the means to stay alive.’