Going mad in Newbury

Marvellous mad night in Newbury. Can you have a marvellously mad night in Newbury? I managed it!

I was at the Water Mill Theatre last night hosting a bizarre evening in which the wonderously reconstituted first-ever film by the British Director John Schlesinger was being shown for the first time in its full form since 1948.

Schlesinger was an undergraduate at Oxford when he made ‘Black Legend’. It is set around the gibbet on the top of the down above the valley in which I often spend weekends.

But better than the film itself – black and white and silent – was the presence in the packed theatre of no fewer than five surviving members of the cast. Amongst them the film’s narrator, and occasional star the great actor Robert Hardy.

So the evening opens with me talking with Hardy about how they made the thing and what life was like in our ever-green valley 63 years ago. At 86 Hardy looks 68 and moves around the stage as if he never left it..He’d still be in Harry Potter were it not that the wretched insurance company is convinced he’d drop dead on the set. He wouldn’t, although Richard Harris effectively did on an earlier Potter shoot with him.

He is stacked with stories, all of them insightful, most of them very funny. Not the least was acting Churchill in French in Paris. Indeed he played Churchill, in English, no fewer than seven times. And wonderful actor though Timothy Spall is, one wonders whether Hardy wouldn’t have been a better bet for Churchill  in ‘The King’s Speech’. But Hardy’s other claim to fame is to be the leading authority on the longbow. He helped restore no fewer than 154 of them off the Mary Rose, and has a vast coffee table book on the weapon coming out next month. To this day he clambers around Oxfordshire, opening his chest to ‘draw’ the vast thing back, and let rip an arrow into the blue beyond…he does confess that the beyond is getting shorter as he gets older.

Some of the villagers who played parts in the film were present. Good looking lasses of fifteen in 1948 were there in the theatre, now nudging eighty. Charlie, a terrific looking student of twenty-one now in his mid eighties, thoroughly recognisable, if a little deaf.

What a strange film too..very dark indeed..set in 1698 a story of love, deceit, a double murder, and the first and only couple ever to be hanged on our gibbet….great swooshes, of Vaughan Williams, and Arnold Bax to move it all along, and the mellifluous unchanging tones of Mr Hardy himself narrating.

An evening one could sum up a close to bonkers! The re-constitution of the film down to one local man’s obsession. The theatre Chairman’s had an almost equal determination for some reason to get me and Hardy to talk about it..he approached me at least two years ago. And then the improbable bringing together of film, cast, and extras close to where it was all set, to watch their produce well over half a century on.

One thing’s clear – Schlesinger  – who went on to make ‘A Kind of Loving’,’ Billy Liar’, ‘Darling’, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Yanks’, and so much more – was quite some film maker.