A Chit Chat special this week, dedicated to Tim Walker, Sunday Telegraph ‘theatre critic’ (please note the inverted commas) and fellow diarist, under the title of Mandrake for that stable’s daily edition.
Walker, as well as being the critic who famously got in a muddle and thought Olivier had blacked up to play the part of Iago, is clearly a gentleman of many parts, a Renaissance man, a jack of all trades. Perhaps, we might suggest, he is over-stretching himself.
For, on reading his Mandrake column last week, Tabard spotted a rather familiar looking story in which the delightful Olivier Award-winning actress Margaret Tyzack bemoaned the variety of roles on offer to actresses of a certain age.
It was, in fact, familiar because it had already appeared on the front page of The Stage, with the very same and just as delightful Tyzack saying almost exactly the same thing.
We stress the word ‘almost’ because on closer inspection, Walker couldn’t possibly have lifted the story from this venerable newspaper, because where Tyzack called the roles on offer “a load of cliched bollocks” in The Stage’s copy, in Walker’s story this had metamorphosed into “a load of cliched old bollocks”.
Clearly, the more logical explanation is that Walker and Tyzack had the precise, exact same conversation, with the addition of one single, extra word.
Continue reading this week’s column »
Content is copyright © 2012 The Stage Media Company Limited unless otherwise stated.
All RSS feeds are published for personal, non-commercial use. (What’s RSS?)
