Last long lunch for Mayle, bon vivant author of Provence trilogy
Francophile whose novels were responsible for an invasion of British expats dies, aged 78
FOR Peter Mayle, one of the great joys of life in the South of France was the long lunch, preferably accompanied by several bottles of wine.
The bestselling author of A Year In Provence died on Thursday, aged 78, and had made plans for the most fitting of send-offs. In one of his last interviews, Mayle was asked about dying. “I loathe funerals, and would prefer not to have one. Instead, I’d like to put aside enough in my will for a lavish lunch for a few friends,” he said.
“I’ve often thought the best time to die would be after a long lunch – just before the bill arrives.”
Mayle died following a short illness at a hospital near his home in the village of Vaugines.
The bon vivant once remarked: “I write to be able to go to restaurants. My books are pretexts to eat well. The rest is nothing but literature, n’est-ce pas?” Mayle moved to France in the Eighties after a career in advertising, and chronicled the experience in A Year In Provence. The initial print run was 3,000. It went on to sell six million copies in 40 languages.
His descriptions of the food, the wine, the gorgeous stone farmhouse and the lavender-scented countryside – not to mention the charming Provençal locals – inspired thousands of Britons to up sticks.
The book was made into a television series starring John Thaw, whose portrayal of him Mayle found to be “too grumpy”. Mayle also collaborated with Sir Ridley Scott, a neighbour, on the Russell Crowe film A Good Year, about a banker who inherits a French vineyard. Paying tribute yesterday, Sir Ridley said: “I think Peter picked up on the humour in the relationship between the British and the French. There was always that humorous, competitive spirit that Peter captured brilliantly.” Mayle was awarded the Legion d’honneur in 2002, and took French citizenship shortly before the EU referendum. He considered Brexit “a disaster”, saying in 2016: “I am sad for the future of my English friends.” He had no plans to return to Britain. “Why be vaguely happy in England when you can be very happy in Provence?” he asked.
At the height of his fame, Mayle bought a second home in Long Island, New York, in order to avoid the hordes
‘I think Peter picked up on the humour in the relationship between the British and the French’
of tourists who descended upon Menerbes to see his farmhouse and its famous stone round table. He often found tourists wandering around his home and once found some Italians in his swimming pool. Later, he moved to an 18th-century farmhouse in the village of Lourmarin, selling it in 2011 for €6million (£5.3million) and moving to Vaugines with his third wife, Jennie.
Elisabeth Bourgeois, a chef who runs Le Mas Tourteron, near Gordes, said Mayle was a regular customer and “charming gentleman”.
“He did a huge amount for the region. His books were very mild, with a wry take on locals but nothing mean. He brought a huge amount of Americans and Britons to the area,” she said.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Ailie Collins, his assistant of 25 years, said his death was a shock.
“When I sat down for Christmas with him, I didn’t think he would no longer be here today. He’s had a variety of unfortunate health issues over the past two years.”
She said very close family would be holding a “celebration of his life” in private in due course.
“He was very much loved in Lourmarin. Jennie has been inundated with calls and flowers. People are just beginning to learn and are very shocked.”
JOHN BARTON, who has died aged 89, was a former don at King’s College, Cambridge, who, in 1960, became the cofounder, with Peter (later Sir Peter) Hall, of the Royal Shakespeare Company; over the next 50 years he had a huge impact on the way Shakespeare is performed, and directed some of the company’s most memorable productions.
Bearded, cardiganned, intense and demanding, Barton was a man around whom stories tended to accumulate. As a young director, he reportedly chewed razor blades during rehearsals, mesmerising his actors as he slowly turned the blades over and over in his mouth until they drew blood. Once, he was so absorbed that he fell backwards off the stage into the orchestra-pit, whereupon he dusted himself down as if nothing had happened and resumed.
In Directions by Indirections (1985), his account of Barton’s RSC work, Michael Greenwald recalled: “He has been known to step into paint buckets on otherwise empty stages; while giving cast notes, he has managed to insert his chair leg into a coffee cup; it is not uncommon to see him driving around Stratford with his car door wide open; he invariably has a half-dozen cigarettes lit at one time during rehearsal because he has forgotten where he has laid each one.”
But if Barton looked every inch the absent- minded professor, there was nothing shambolic about his work.
Barton remained at the heart of the RSC for almost half a century, becoming a loyal if sometimes challenging colleague, and directing or co-directing more than 50 productions. Yet he never sought the limelight and never became a household name.
He directed with great precision, arranged strikingly realistic fight sequences and sometimes appeared on stage himself. However his most lasting impact was on the way Shakespeare is spoken.
Ideas of blank verse speaking had been dominated after the war by Gielgud and Olivier, whose stagey delivery became the norm. Aided by his wife, the Cambridge Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton, Barton fostered a more naturalistic approach – “trippingly on the tongue’’ as Shakespeare enjoins through Hamlet – based on a scholarly understanding of the theatre in Shakespeare’s day. Elizabethan actors would not have spent much time in rehearsal, but their training in rhetoric meant, as Barton put it, that they would “intuitively pick up a lot in the text that we don’t notice”.
Barton’s Shakespeare language classes became compulsory for actors and even walk-on parts, and in the early 1980s he presented a BBC television series, Playing Shakespeare, which became a classic.
Not that he regarded the texts as sacrosanct. Indeed he made a name for himself for taking flawed (and not so flawed) masterpieces and “shaking the texts about”. In 1963 he transformed the unfamiliar Henry VI trilogy, along with the better-known Richard III, into three plays which kept a tight focus on the intricacies of the 15th century power game and contained 1,400 lines of Barton’s own “Elizabethan” verse. Produced jointly with Hall, The
Wars of the Roses was hailed as “the greatest theatrical feat of the century’’, and even seasoned critics were unable to spot the joins. Barton recalled being approached by the Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson, who wanted to know what was him and what was Shakespeare. Barton told him he would have to guess: “And he said, ‘I want to find a golden moment in the early Bard, but I don’t want it to be one of yours!’ ”
The trilogy was also notable for the cool and unromantic way the actors spoke the verse, a style that became a hallmark of RSC productions over many Stratford seasons. Much was written about the RSC’S post-brechtian sense of realism.
As well as The Wars of the Roses,
Barton was responsible for another RSC hit, The Hollow Crown,a celebratory entertainment about the kings and queens of England consisting of an anthology of poetry, chronicle, speeches and letters. With a cast of three RSC actors and himself as both director and performer, the readings were presented in 1961 in the West End and have remained part of the theatrical canon.
Barton directed a series of memorable productions of such plays as Twelfth Night, Much Ado, Troilus and Cressida, The Way Of The World, Richard II and Peer Gynt. In 1980 he
put together and staged The Greeks, a magnificent nine-hour 10-play marathon about the Trojan War, adapted from Euripides and Homer.
There was, as Hall once observed of Barton, an “arrogance in his shyness” which manifested itself most memorably in an almighty row with Hall over the production of Tantalus, another mammoth 10-play cycle about the Trojan War which, unlike The Greeks, was all Barton’s own work.
Before the cycle was premiered in 2001, Barton had been labouring on the text for some 20 years – much longer than the war itself. The only trouble was no one could be found to back such a massive theatrical venture until Hall managed to negotiate a joint production between the RSC and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in America.
At the start of rehearsals, however, Hall and his co-directors decided Barton’s cycle needed tightening up. Barton refused to budge so Hall removed one of the original plays and edited the rest, reducing the cycle from 16 hours to 10. By the time Tantalus was premiered (it has gone down in history as the most expensive regional theatre production in America ever) to wildly enthusiastic reviews, Barton had returned to England in high dudgeon, refusing to be acknowledged as its author and describing the revised cycle as a “pirated” and “unauthorised” version of his original text.
The stand-off with Hall seems to have been resolved by 2010 when they appeared on stage together at Stratford to look back at their partnership and talk about Shakespeare.
John Bernard Adie Barton was born on November 26 1928 in London, the son of Sir Harold Barton, a distinguished accountant and governor of the London School of Economics. He was educated at Eton where he first staged Shakespeare, awarding himself the plum role of Harry Hotspur in Henry IV.
He went up to King’s College, Cambridge, to read English and soon became involved in student theatre, joining the university’s Marlowe Society and the Amateur Dramatic Club, of which he became president. A Varsity profile in 1951 noted: “He prefers his own company and it is perhaps a weakness that he lives too much in a world of his own ideas”. At Cambridge he met the young Peter Hall and also Ian Mckellen, who recalled him as “the image of eccentricity”, with unkempt hair and beard and “long green cardigan flopping almost to his knees”, but a diligent taskmaster.
By the time he graduated, Barton had played 25 roles and had become, in the words of his fellow thespian Tony Church, “the big whizzkid director” and “the most positive force” on the Cambridge theatre scene. Peter Hall later observed that the dominance of Cambridge graduates in the British theatre (Nunn, Eyre, Wood, Hall, Miller, Hytner, Mendes) had a good deal to do with the rigorous standards set by Barton. During his time at Cambridge Barton also did a 12-part series for BBC radio on the medieval Mysteries and directed Henry V for the Elizabethan Theatre Company at the Westminster Theatre in 1953.
After graduation, Barton was invited to become a fellow and lay dean at King’s. His graduate research was on Beowulf, but what he really wanted to do was act and direct.
Barton had been responsible for giving Hall his first solo production – Loves Labour’s Lost – as a student. Hall would repay the favour in 1960 when he invited Barton to join him at the fledgling RSC.
As associate director of the company from 1964, Barton directed 25 plays out of the 35 in the Shakespeare canon, demonstrating a particular talent for the comedies (also his wife’s forte). His Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and Cressida are thought by some to remain unsurpassed in the company’s history. He also ventured into Restoration drama and proved a notably effective director of Ibsen.
Critics tended to emphasise Barton’s scholarly credentials to an extent that some felt was overplayed. Ian Mckellen, who appeared in his RSC productions of King John and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (both of them ruthlessly edited by Barton), once said: “I wish people would stop calling him academic; he’s actually a great vulgar showman.”
In the role of the RSC’S advisory director, Barton continued to give public workshops into his eighties.
In 1969 he married the Americanborn academic Ann Righter (née Roesen), who took his surname and, as Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, was possibly the only person whose knowledge of Shakespeare surpassed his. She died in 2013.