When Vanessa Redgrave and Simon Russell Beale are the readers in what was the final programme at this year’s poetry festival, you can expect a huge turn-out.
And so, after half-empty houses for some of the offerings staged here this season, it was heart-warming to find huge queues stretching four deep down Henley Street, all anxious to hear a great actress reading great poetry. Some people were anxious to tell you that they remembered Ms Redgrave half a century ago at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre as the finest Rosalind of her generation in As You Like It.
The evening was a triumph. Redgrave was cool and well-prepared and had obviously done her homework while Simon Russell Beale went to the heart of everything he read, with that seasoned expertise which he brought to his rendering of Hamlet a decade ago (still the most memorable I have seen to date).
Roger Pringle, who directed the festival himself for 35 years, devised a fascinating programme which inter-linked poetry and poets with the 60-year history of what has generally been regarded as the finest festival of its kind in the country. He focused on the different directors from Christopher Hassall, who was there at the beginning, to Paul Edmondson, the current incumbent, who has taken the festival out into the streets of Stratford in a desire to give it all a community outreach feel.
The choice of poets was perfect, from lost souls such as the eccentric and boozy George Barker, seen by some as an equal to W.B.Yeats, to the equally eccentric Elizabeth Jennings, a poet who speaks like no other about joy and passion and (common to us all) the fragile yearning for fulfilled desire, to Ted Hughes, Laurie Lee, John Betjeman (gloriously droll as ever) Seamus Heaney and many more.
Moments which mesmerised this huge audience (the overflow sat in another room watching the proceedings on a huge screen) included Redgrave’s rendering of W.H.Auden’s Musee Des Beaux Arts, with the final image of Icarus falling helplessly out of a painted sky while Bruegel’s toy ship sails on across the canvas with total unconcern.
Redgrave has a heart-stopping way of reading, approaching a poem almost tentatively, as though the poem is new to her.
It can move you to tears and seemed to lift out the heart of the poetry carefully and succinctly, while Russell Beale scored one resounding triumph after another, particularly with Charles Causley’s deeply moving Timothy Winters ( a bitter picture of an abused childhood) and Edwin Morgan’s marvellous Advice To An Actor.
Finally it had to end, and some of us left wishing it had all been twice as long.
