Pretending to Be Me

Pretending to Be Me, the play about the late poet Philip Larkin, transfers well from the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds to the West End in London. It feels fresh and Tim Hatley‘s deceptively simple design – a moving day front room overflowing with boxes, steeply raked, kaleidoscopically mood-lit (care of Jason Taylor) and with funhouse-style walls that close in – is highly effective at filling the Comedy stage and framing its sole performer, the incomparable Tom Courtenay.

First impressions aside, whether or not you love or loathe this piece is largely a matter of taste. Those who appreciate monologues, poetry readings, Courtenay and Larkin are, indeed, well catered for. I count myself a fan of the first three – though, at times here, the balance between reflection and recitation seems off-kilter – and open to education on the last.

I can’t help but believe that the two-part drama may not succeed in the hands of anyone aside from Courtenay, who devised it based on Larkin’s writings and who, like the poet, for better or worse, calls Hull home. But why worry about such future casting conundrums when we’ve got the man himself in front of us now?

Like Hatley’s set, Courtenay manages beautifully to fill the stage, despite playing such a self-contained and private man as Larkin. Courtenay’s stammer, jerky gait, awkward crossing of arms, his gradual and grumpy capitulation to the effects of alcohol paint a riveting picture of a misanthropic – and, so we’re led to believe, misunderstood – artist. And in between diatribes and jibes (most at the expense of Ted Hughes), there many poetic moments when he literally takes the audiences breath away, a sustained hush falling over the auditorium.

Tom Courtenay is a sublime actor at the height of his powers, and his return to the West End stage is most welcome indeed.

– Terri Paddock

Note: The following review dates from December 2002 and this production’s original run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

“My miseries are a bit overdone by my critics,” says the poet Philip
Larkin as quoted by Tom Courtenay; and, defending the decision to maintain
his day job as librarian at Hull University, he admits he could live simply
by being a poet but it would mean “giving readings and lecturing and spending
a year at university as a poet in residence or something. I couldn’t bear
that. I don’t want to go round pretending to be me.”

On the slightly questionable basis that “lots of things he said, he didn’t
mean”, Courtenay’s compilation from Larkin’s prose and poetry seeks openly to
underdo, even undo, the poet’s miseries and, up to a point, to pretend to be
the man himself.

The conceit at the heart of Pretending to Be Me is that Larkin is obliged
to leave his top floor university flat and move into a house of his own. We
find him ready to go amongst his boxed-up worldly goods, which
spark off his monologue, a patchwork admiringly stitched together by
Courtenay from the poems, prose and letters that remain since his companion
destroyed his diaries. An old portable gramophone allows him to explain his
passion for jazz while he jigs around rather unconvincingly to snatches of
Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith and fantasises about “Bill Wordsworth’s”
frantic five; and a hardback copy of Ted Hughes’s Crow brings forth a snatch
of parody Hughes.

Since his death, Larkin’s press has been heavily weighted towards
the negative; Courtenay’s emphasis on his wit serves as some sort of corrective. It’s hard to think too harshly of a man who delights in the thought of all the American
academics who land at Heathrow, take the train northwards to seek him out,
don’t realise that you have to change trains for Hull at Doncaster and go on
to Newcastle “to bother Basil Bunting instead.” But what are we to make of
the intemperate onslaught on modernism in the arts, which Courtenay presents
as rather amusing quirkiness but which is actually ranting tabloid
philistinism?

Here we have the play’s central paradox. Sir Tom is a
national treasure who exudes an unforced bonhomie, whilst Larkin was pretty
much a trappist hermit. In giving voice words which were only ever
written down – and in the case of Larkin’s letters to his curmudgeonly compadre,
Kingsley Amis, only ever intended to be read by one person, which must have
coloured the attitudes he struck – the actor cannot avoid coming across as
a garrulous and almost clubbable bloke.

Courtenay and his director Ian
Brown wisely decide against full-blown impersonation, so instead of the
miserable moose-face and polished pate we have token signposts – the
suit, Library Association tie, an occasional stammer, a tottering gait and
fussy arm movements. And, mercifully, we’re spared the soporific drone of
the Larkin voice. The selection of writings – including revealing information about the poet’s childhood and parents, as well as
his diatribe against death – is excellent and with Courtenay’s benign
presentation makes for as engaging an evening in the theatre as you could
wish for.

– Ian Watson