A.A. Milne Part 4 (Sarah Simple)

 

As with A.A. Milne's first novel (of sorts), Lovers in London, the mere fact of this play, Sarah Simple, being available again is welcome news.

 It's not included in the various collections which still crop up in secondhand bookshops, and I'd been searching for a copy for quite some time. Before the publication of Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne I had only come across a single mention of it, in a history of theatre published in the 1930s. 

It is not, however, a neglected masterpiece - something which it has in common with that novel. If you're already familiar with Milne's work for the theatre there will be little here to surprise you: a wife, presumed to have divorced her husband, suddenly reappears as he is on the verge of marrying a somewhat more stolid partner. Once, long ago, I embarked on a dissertation on Milne's plays but my tutor was not keen, joshing about his struggles to remember which missing spouse featured in which play. (In the end I switched to Tennessee Williams and still slightly regret it).

In praise of Rock & Roll Graffiti (1999) again

  

If, like me, you've been tantalised by the many clips on youtube of a TV show entitled Rock & Roll Graffiti, the good news is that most of that show, hitherto available only as an expensive DVD box set, can now be obtained on two reasonably priced 3 disc sets.

I'm based in the UK and ordered them from America for around £14 each around ten years ago though you will need to round that up to £20 or thereabouts now. These are the covers to look out for: 

Unvarnished Soul: Sonny Til

 

 Today marks the centenary of the pioneering doo wop/R&B singer Sonny Til, lead singer of the Orioles.

They are perhaps best known for Crying in the Chapel (1953) but here's the story of how the group came to record It's Too Soon to Know, now widely regarded as the first doo wop record, in 1948.

Deborah Chessler, the young songwriter behind it, had been trying to make sense of her feelings after a disastrous early marriage. It's Too Soon to Know wasn't her first song, though earlier pieces also had a direct and conversational tone in their titles and lyrics (Jerry Leiber was an admirer), and It's Too Soon to Know coaxed out a correspondingly fresh and emotional style of singing from Til and the group.

The number which kickstarted the whole doo wop shebang - or shboom? - came about when a supportive male friend who was helping with Chessler's divorce suddenly declared his own love for her. Normally it's parents who counsel caution in these matters but  her mother was all for it; it was Deborah who told her mother: "How can he love me? It's too soon to know."

The sharpest blades: C.S. Calverley and A.A. Milne

 The poet who features in A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds, soon to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London, may have been Milne's own creation - but he did pinch the name.

 If J.M. Barrie was Milne's main inspiration for playwriting the Victorian author C.S. Calverley was the man whose light verse he had sought, from his earliest days, to emulate. That's "light verse" as distinct from poetry proper: for Milne that meant the serious application of his craft to the lightest of trifles, and he had little time for the less punctilious efforts of others in the field.

A.A. Milne's The Truth About Blayds to be revived

 

A.A. Milne's 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is about to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London.

 This is good news as Milne's plays for adults are rarely produced these days. William Gaunt is playing the Blayds of the title, an elderly, much-revered, poet; having played King Lear as well as sitcom patriarchs he ought to have the necessary gravitas.  

Milne had a run of hit plays in Britain and America between the wars but Blayds, more serious in tone than most, did not receive the level of acclaim he thought it deserved, and it rankled: he dwelt upon its reception in his 1939 autobiography It's Too Late Now, his disappointment still keen almost twenty years after the event. 

"Like an HM Bateman cartoon. Only with budgies."

 

Today marks 61 years since comedian Freddie Davies's debut on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks - and eleven since the publication of his autobiography Funny Bones, which tells the story of that life-changing experience.

 

Freddie's big break came at the end of a week which had begun with the comic at his lowest ebb, struggling through an audience participation show in Dunoon, in Scotland. An article in The Stage had claimed he was leading his own troupe, but in fact it was just Freddie and a pianist called Tom, dying twice daily (except Sunday) in an open air theatre near where the ferries docked: "It was called 'Fun With Freddie', and if a few lost souls – kids, dripping wet dogs and some well known local drunks – did happen along to see what all the noise was about, they would be confronted at the end of the show by council operatives from the bin department taking up a collection in tins."