The Gospel according to Diana Rigg
As Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, I made a thing about getting some T S Eliot read every year in Lent.
His poem Ash Wednesday was an obvious choice but, one year, in 2009, I thought we might go for his 1922 modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. Who to read it, then? I asked Diana Rigg (who's sadly just died, aged 82) and she replied immediately, ‘Yes, please. But I'll have to have a good look at it first. I really don't know the poem very well.'
Such was her commitment that she took herself off for several tutorials with an Oxford professor of English. We met up at the Jamaica Inn in St Michael's Alley. To say Diana impressed me would be a floundering understatement. I had naturally expected that she would stand in the pulpit and read the poem.
‘Oh no,' she reproved me. ‘I can't read it. I must get it off by heart!'
That is, she proposed to learn all 434 lines of it – and in a little over four weeks, while already doing a thousand and one other things. And how should it be spoken? So many of its readers affect a drowsy, serious tone, by which they hope to convey some of the poem's expressionistic mysticism – and with the emphases all in the wrong places.
Take the opening and this, in a sanctimonious drone, is how it so often proceeds: ‘April is the CRUELLEST month, breeding lilacs out of the dead LAND…'
Diana said she would not begin like that, with the misplaced stresses. So
I waited, puzzled as to what she would deliver.
On the day, I was walking towards St Michael's in good time for the service when I caught sight of Diana in a coffee bar across the road, swotting up her lines. I rescued her and settled her in the vestry.
The parish clerk asked, ‘Will you want the sound system?'
The resonance of her articulation – along with the look she gave him – showed at once that she would need no such artificial aids.
And so she ascended the pulpit. ‘APRIL is the cruellest month, BREEDING lilacs out of the DEAD land…'
From the first line there was that stamp of indubitability. Eliot – a hopeless reader of his own poetry – would have loved it. Eliot, after Dickens, had thought of calling the poem, He Do the Police in Different Voices. Diana herself did all the voices from Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, and the drowned Phoenician sailor to ‘Hurry up please, it's time…'
The whole congregation was enraptured.
Afterwards, Diana was anxious to be off to the West End where her daughter was making her debut in a new play. It's the very devil to get a taxi around 7pm in the City. The parish clerk flagged down a cab with two passengers inside, opened the door and asked, ‘Would you chaps mind sharing your cab with Diana Rigg?'
Of course the passengers were delighted to help.