Birmingham Post

It’ll be alright on the night... fighting fires backstage

Stephanie Williams steadied the ship during her 35 years of staging music festivals at sea. She recalls some of her amusing tales with RICHARD BRATBY

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STEPHANNIE Williams still remembers the day she organised a Viking funeral in Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s not a typical part of the job descriptio­n for the director of an arts festival – but anyone who attended the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival during her years at the helm knew to expect the unexpected.

1990’s festival had a Nordic theme, and as soon as Stephannie decided that it would end with a Viking ship going up in flames on the Avon... well, when Stephannie (known to friends as Steve) decides something’s going to happen, it usually does.

The precise (and frequently hilarious) details – a saga of drunken boat-owners, precarious­ly-timed pyrotechni­cs and the life-size rubber corpse of King Ragnor – are among the many colourful tales recounted in her new memoir, Beyond the Notes.

Friends and colleagues had been urging her to write a book for years, but it was one of her oldest and most beloved clients, the writer and broadcaste­r Richard Baker, who finally persuaded her to tell all. “Richard, who I represente­d for 30 years, kept saying to me, ‘Steve, why don’t you write a book?’”, she remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, I will, I will’. And then, a couple of months before he died, he rang me and said, ‘I think you’d better get on with it’. That’s when I got started on it, and things came flooding back.” As an agent, Stephannie represente­d performers ranging from Arthur Lowe to the Choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

As well as running the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival, she served for over a decade as director of the William Walton Trust, dealing daily with Walton’s notoriousl­y feisty (not to say eccentric) widow Susana.

For 35 years Stephannie was the driving force behind P&O’s Music Festivals at Sea. Meanwhile, her work promoting Scandinavi­an music resulted in her being awarded the Order of the Polar Star by the King of Sweden. It’s safe to say that in a career like that, you pick up a few stories, and they’re all in Beyond the Notes.

There’s the time the great harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler refused to leave the stage. “He was great, a lovely man, but you just couldn’t get him off the stage. Once he started to talk, he didn’t want to stop, and the following act was getting really, really irritated. In the end their trumpeter just went on and said ‘Off!’.”

Or there was the moment when the firebrand film director Ken Russell, a guest speaker on one of Stephannie’s Music Festivals at Sea, unleashed his volcanic temper on the ship’s crew. She managed to

Stephanie Williams with her memoirs, Beyond The Notes

calm him down, but the fun was only just starting.

“Richard Baker thought we should show some of Ken Russell’s films. So we decided on… well, which is the one where Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestle in the nude? Women in Love. P&O decided we’d have to put it on after midnight, because it might be a bit too much for the old ladies. So midnight came and there was a great long queue outside the theatre to see the film. I was sitting behind two old ladies and when it came to that scene, one turned to the other and said, ‘That’s a lovely carpet, dear’.’’

But most of her tales are classic backstage yarns of temperamen­tal artists, unexpected crises and the ingenuity, tact and profession­alism that meant that on Stephannie’s watch, the show always went on. On one cruise, her artists were due to perform in the spectacula­r opera house in Manaus, deep in the Brazilian jungle. Adverse tides in the River Amazon nearly put paid to that.

“We should have arrived in the afternoon to set everything up. But we didn’t arrive until 9.30pm that night. So it was panic stations. We had to be ready as soon as the ship docked, in our evening finery – the pianists and all my lovely singers had to be ready to dash to a waiting coach and be taken to the opera house as soon as the gangway went down. All these Brazilians were standing there to see this great ship coming in - and there we were, with

jewels dripping from us in these long evening dresses. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They thought we were mad. And when we got to the opera house, they hadn’t tuned the piano, and the mosquitoes… there were so many that you had to wear insect repellent to perform”.

But by the time you get to this stage of the book, you’ll already have guessed that the outcome was a triumph. Stephannie is one of those people with a knack for making good things happen.

Technicall­y retired, she’s still helping young artists launch their careers. She writes movingly of her late husband, the CBSO viola player Gwyn Williams – in whose memory she’s endowed a bursary for student viola players at the Royal Birmingham Conservato­ire, to be supported by the proceeds of her book. “Looking after one or two special artists is very rewarding, and when I can help young people with their careers, that’s what I want to do”. She’s involved with the record label SOMM, too, as well as a growing list of literary projects. “I still keep going” she says, with typical understate­ment.

Not the least remarkable thing about Stephannie Williams is that she makes it sound so easy – and that Beyond the Notes makes it all seem such terrific fun.

Beyond the Notes (Brewin Books, £11.95) is available from various outlets, including Waterstone­s and Amazon.

BEST known as the genial co-host of Pointless, Richard Osman, all 6ft 7in of him, cannot quite believe the attention his debut novel has been receiving. There’s been a huge buzz around The Thursday Murder Club, an engaging tale about four would-be sleuths in an old people’s retirement village who investigat­e the murder of a local property developer.

It has a touch of Miss Marple about it, with Richard’s wry observatio­ns, gentle wit and skilled characteri­sations making it a read which will cross all generation­s. It feels very British, with references to clematis cuttings, the doctor from Holby City and a vegan cafe called Anything With A Pulse.

Yet the Americans are lapping it up. He wrote the book in secret for 18 months and before he knew it, The Thursday Murder Club was acquired in one of the biggest debut novel deals of the decade and Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin had bought the worldwide film rights.

“Suddenly, the Americans were saying, ‘Oh, we love this’ and then the Germans and Spanish and Taiwanese want to buy it,” he says, incredulou­sly. “I thought, that’s interestin­g, when I’ve been banging on about Robert Dyas and Twixes. “I haven’t met Steven Spielberg – well, for a number of reasons I haven’t been able to go to America and he hasn’t been able to come here. I haven’t even met him via Zoom. I don’t know what he’s playing at.”

The idea for the novel was sparked when Richard visited a retirement village to see the mother of a friend. He thought the secluded English countrysid­e setting would be perfect for a murder.

“I spoke to residents and listened to some of the things they’d done in their careers and how much of a laugh they were having living there and I thought, I bet if there was a murder this lot would solve it – or commit it.”

He won’t be drawn on who could play the four protagonis­ts – a former spy, a nurse, a trades union official and a psychiatri­st – in the screen adaptation, but says there’s a plethora of brilliant older actors who could be cast.

“We live in a country of so many incredible older actors, so people who read it are telling me they want it to be Judi Dench or Julie Walters or Penelope Wilton or Art Malik. Everybody has their perfect casting.”

Creating different personalit­ies who are in their 70s gave Richard plenty of scope with the writing, he explains, and he agrees old people are often dismissed in society.

“We are obsessed with young people, but people in their 70s have identical brains to those in their 50s or their 30s. Our circumstan­ces change and our physicalit­y changes and we have a great deal more experience, but we’re still as mischievou­s and interested and sparky as we always were.

“I didn’t write about them as older characters, I wrote about them as engaged human beings with some of the disadvanta­ges – and advantages – that age has brought them.

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