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Blue Skies & Dishing Critics

These past few glorious days of blue skies, sunshine and an icy wind moderating to merely chilly have almost made up for the miseries of an unusually brutal four-month winter, and more mud on Hampstead Heath than I can recall in three decades.

The rarity and sudden surprise of such days makes us appreciate them all the more, and I spent yesterday happily dashing about Birmingham, knocking around London Bridge and finally strolling through the St Paul’s Cathedral precinct and up what is still called, but is no longer, really, Fleet Street, to see Out of Joint’s Dr Johnson play, A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, in the very house in Gough Square where the great man composed his dictionary.

In Birmingham, I was able to take a look at the amazing new nine-floor Library that is going up in Centenary Square right next to the Rep, which has now closed for two years in order to accommodate the changes, and acquire a new third auditorium of 300 seats.

The Rep reopens in 2013 – the year of its centenary – and with a new artistic director: Rachel Kavanaugh, who has done such a good job these last five years after succeeding Jonathan Church, is leaving to have her second baby in two years before resuming the freelance life.

The city centre is going to be quite something, as you cross Victoria Square past the Museum, the Town Hall and the Adrian Boult Hall en route to the Rep, the Symphony Hall and the ICC, and now the £186 million (all signed and sealed with the city) Library of Birmingham, the second largest in the world, I’m told.

No wonder the trains up and down from Euston are jam packed. I don’t know whether it’s down to the times I travel, or the rising fuel prices for car-owners, but I’ve noticed every single train I’ve been on lately – and on the Tube – has been chokka.

And at stations like London Bridge, you can hardly move for commuters at almost any time of day. You really do feel as though we’re approaching some sort of saturation point. I’d hardly regained my breath on emerging into the afternoon sunshine when I noticed for the first time the extraordinary skyscraper going up a few yards along St Thomas’s Street, quite near the Menier Chocolate Factory.

This is the London Bridge Quarter, an office block that is going to look like the Eiffel Tower, only twice as tall, and covered in sloping glass, like a gigantic pepper cruet. Just looking at it makes you dizzy, and I’m afraid the clear blue sky gave me a sudden panic twinge about the Twin Towers in New York on that fateful Tuesday morning – tenth anniversary coming up soon.
 
So I was certainly looking forward to A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, though the only cuppa proffered by the good doctor’s blind housekeeper went straight to Paul Taylor of the Independent – who gallantly passed it on to a grateful Ann Pennington, former partner of the show’s director, Max Stafford-Clark, who sat tea-less at the back of the room with his wife, playwright Stella Feehily.

All critics are, to a greater or lesser extent, experts on Dr Johnson. Paul Taylor was quoting liberally as he walked in the joint, and Libby Purves of The Times revealed that, as an impecunious Johnsonian graduate, she had spent many happy hours in this house, keeping warm.

One critic who hadn’t made the cut, Henry Hitchings of the Evening Standard, was represented in the bookshop by his handy tome on the history of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which I purchased and am thoroughly enjoying perusing. 

A critic, said Dr Johnson, is a species of dung beetle, a fellow who makes himself fat upon other men’s droppings. Lord, how we laughed, especially the critics, fat and not so fat alike.

“Yet you must allow that they can sting a little, Sir, ” replies Boswell.

Johnson is unfazed: “Why Sir, a fly may sting a horse, but at the day’s end the fly is but an insect, while the horse remains a noble animal still.” Johnson was a great critic, but he was nothing if not a noble animal, too.

As Christopher Ricks once said: “He is our greatest man of letters, our most acute and ample (sic) critic, our first whole-headed editor of Shakespeare, our greatest dictionary-maker, our gravest poet, our wisest, wittiest talker and our most humane moralist.” I’ll drink to that, tea or anything else. And the actor Ian Redford almost – impossible task – conveys as much in his performance.