New Year’s Eve is an appropriate moment to ask what has become of
Posted in General on 06. Oct, 2010
New Year’s Eve is an appropriate moment to ask what has become of the government’s policy on alcohol abuse. Ministers are against Britons drinking too much, of course, but some years after it was first mooted there is still no sign of the comprehensive policy the nation was once promised. Moon richly deserves his first place in Q magazine’s review of the 100 Most Insane Moments in Rock We will never see the likes of Moon again.. Until his untimely death in 1978 Moon made excess a way of life and it was he who did more than anyone to make rock synonymous with danger. Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat and Elton John’s Donald Duck outfit were all very well, but it was Moon who decided to drive a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, a defining moment. Can an insane moment last a lifetime? Can it last beyond a lifetime? In the case of the late Keith Moon, the answer is an ear deafening “yes”. He had suffered for some time from cancer of the mouth, which had forced his retirement; he died at his Norfolk house, near Fakenham.Alan Strachan.
He was happier taking over at short notice – after Leonard Rossiter’s sudden death – as the manic Truscott of Joe Orton’s Loot (Lyric, 1984) or in the Almeida’s nightmarishly surreal take on Chatsky (1993), which was ideally scaled to Landen’s style at its more exuberant.Joe Orton also provided a rich television opportunity for Landen with What the Butler Saw (1987), in which he was splendidly dithering as the harassed psychiatrist, and he also had excellent roles in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976) and the more recent adaptation of Catherine Cookson’s The Wingless Bird (1997).Although he based his career in London, Landen spent much of his time in the country, mostly in the Norfolk he especially loved. He should have been ideal casting for Alan Ayckbourn’s alcoholic businessman in Taking Steps (Lyric, 1980) – the play, after all, is Ayckbourn’s on excursion into farce dedicated to Travers – but the London production was miserably ill-conceived for the proscenium stage and Landen’s performance became distinctly over-emphatic.Some later opportunities were in poor material – a flaccid farce, Wife Begins at Forty (Ambassadors, 1985), a tepid thriller, Dangerous Obsession (Apollo, 1980), and a return to Shakespeare in a patchily cast Twelfth Night (Playhouse, 1991) as Toby Belch in an over-autumnal Peter Hall production. Draping his limbs, which he seemed to make almost boneless, over furniture and files while he held forth in full spate, Landen gave a performance of blissful solipsism that was brilliantly observed and continuously funny.From Dazzle and John to D’Arcy Tuck in Ben Travers’s Plunder (National Theatre at the Old Vic and Lyttelton, 1976) was quite a jump but one that Landen made seem easy. In Michael Blakemore’s loving, strongly cast and beautifully designed production, the double act of Landen and Frank Finlay and jewel thieves and a country house spiralled into the delirium of true farce in an inspired second-act bedroom-scene of glorious physical comedy. Structured round the classic Frayn opposites of chaos and control, Landen brought a good deal of the former into the play as John, the Cambridge-educated features writer, hilariously oblivious to his invasion of others’ space and privacy before his eventual taming.
With Peggy Ashcroft and Peter O’Toole striking sparks, Landen also came up with an inventive, larky Biondello.He followed the Stratford Shrew in the same play for his first appearance at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park (of which he remained a lifelong champion) in 1964, now playing a virile, athletic Petruchio and also tackling the role in a Henry V of intriguing ambivalence. Tennent management headed by Hugh (“Binkie”) Beaumont, it was by Beaumont’s dream dramatist N.C. Hunter, who regularly throughout the 1950s provided the firm with well-crafted middlebrow plays packed with juicy roles for Beaumont’s preferred star casts.A Touch of the Sun was a study of the corrupting effects of wealth on the family of an idealistic teacher at a school for disadvantaged boys. His success in this landed him an even better part in A Touch of the Sun (Saville, 1958) Presented by the prestigious H.M. In the latter particularly, Landen had a comic energy (which his wiser directors would ration), a wonderful sense of bewildered fluster and a seemingly effortless physical adroitness cloaking weeks of painstakingly perfectionist rehearsal.