Age cannot wither them
Grey hair and dodgy hips no block to these stars of stage and screen
Johnston Monologues
The Peacock
Feb 18–March 12 ★★★★☆
Jennifer Johnston (The Captains And The Kings, How Many Miles To Babylon?) has turned 92, and it’s great to see the Abbey producing three of her monologues on the Peacock stage soon: Mustn’t Forget High Noon, Christine and Twinkletoes (Feb 18–March 12).
Written in the 1980s, the interlinked stories are about the personal tragedies of victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Dedicated ‘to all the men, women and children who have been victims of violence and intolerance for so long in this country’, they express the voices of the victims who suffered irrevocable damage from the use of abstract ideals to justify violence and to depersonalise ‘legitimate targets’. They form a neat coda to the current wave of memorabilia about 1922 and issues that have still not been finalised.
At 92, Johnston, right, still has a few years on Anthony Hopkins and Rosaleen Linehan. Last year Hopkins won his second Oscar at the age of 84 for The Father, and Linehan, also 84, put on her 90-minute show Backwards Up A Rainbow, a mixture of biography, song and saucy humour.
Then there’s mercurial American producer/director/writer George Abbott (1887-1995), who was still writing and planning stage work when he was 106. Talking about big showbiz get-togethers where he got sustained loud applause, he once remarked, ‘I’d like to think they’re applauding for my distinguished career in theatre, but I know it’s because I’m so godammed old’.
He was the go-to man for rewrites of difficult shows and he introduced dance as an integral part of the plot to musical theatre with the ballet sequence Slaughter On Tenth Avenue in the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes in 1936, which was later the last show he directed, aged 95. At 106 he was doing a rewrite of Damn Yankees. Asked by the writer Mark Steyn how the work was going, he paused and said, ‘It’s better than what most 106 year olds are doing’.
British actor John Gielgud, born 1904, ran Abbott a close second. He did his last stage work at 84, but got regular roles in television and films up to a few weeks before his death in 2000, aged 96.
It probably helped that he appeared to have little interest in anything outside theatre, although he joined a campaign against the cruelty to geese and ducks in the production of foie gras.
Typically, in late 1939, when everyone was apprehensive about Hitler’s intentions, Gielgud arrived back where he was staying, carrying a bundle of newspapers. Seeing the papers, people asked if war had been declared. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said, ‘but Gladys Cooper has got the most terrible reviews.’