Tom Wilkinson
Jan. 1st, 2024 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseI've spent the last few days sick. Not COVID, just a sore throat, cough, and a rash. I'm better, which is good. I have a mild superstition about starting the new year the way I intend to go on and hacking out a lung didn't bode well for the year.
But Tom Wilkinson died yesterday, and I'm deeply sad. I saw him as Horatio in Hamlet in 1980. The fact that I was noticing Horatio probably doesn't bode well for the leading man's Hamlet, but I found him compelling. So compelling that I tried to see him in the smaller production where he was the lead called The Maid's Tragedy. I was unsuccessful, but I did go into the clearing by The Other Place, where the play was being performed, and listen to Nick Bicat's gorgeous score for the production.
A year later, I go on my junior semester abroad in London -- it's not so abroad when you're living in Brussels -- and I wonder if I'll see Tom Wilkinson in anything. I was literally in the hotel looking for something to watch on TV and stumbled across him in a Play for Today.
The first play we saw for the RSC -- and I think the first play for the class -- was The Love Girl and the Innocent by Solzhenitsyn. I don't know whether it was a good translation; I don't read Russian. The production was excellent and Tom Wilkinson played Nemov, the ex-POW who was pulled from the lines and charged with a political crime. There's a moment, a throwaway line of Nemov's. In the production I saw he referred to trained men doing scutwork as being stuck "like axes in dough." Wilkinson didn't make a production of the line in any way, but it's stuck with me for years, the sheer futility of the Gulags and the system that made them.
We saw lots of RSC productions and many of them had Wilkinson in second leads or supporting roles. The exception was Richard III where I think they cut all his character's lines (Catesby) and The Maid's Tragedy which had a fourteen night run at the Donmar Warehouse. Thanks to cheap student tickets and a willingness to spend hours in line (the seats were first come, first serve), I was able to see it with my friend (later roommate) six times.
It still stands vividly in my mind, and we discovered that the actors hung out at the Crown and Anchor nearby after the show. We went and had our after theater drinks, never approaching them, just enjoying the atmosphere. What we hadn't counted on was that the theater was so small that the actors saw us, too. At different points in the two London runs (my roommate and I saw the second run all fourteen nights), different actors came up to us and asked about our reactions to the production. Domini Blythe was the first. She was very sweet.
During the second run, Tom Wilkinson came up to us and said, "Are you planning to be here every night?" We acknowledged that other than the one night where my roommate had lost the draw and was babysitting, both of us would be there for the run. He nodded and said, "You should have a long service medal minted." Later, just before we left to catch the tube, he gave us his phone number and told us to call him after the play had been over for a week. We did. Tom Wilkinson took the two of us out to dinner.
It was a lovely evening, never any suggestion of something other having a good conversation on a wide range subjects. I had one embarrassing moment when I didn't know what mussels were. My roommate said, "we had them in Brussels, moules." It was completely inadvertent and probably made me seem a complete prat, but I don't know if I'd ever eaten them before we moved to Belgium.
Later, our theater professor asked Wilkinson if he'd speak to the class about British theater and repertory work, which he did. He walked right over to me and my roommate and said, "I didn't know you two were with this outfit." He told a story about why he thought that subsidized theater of all types at all levels, fringe, local, regional, touring, and national was important.
At the end of it, after he'd left, my instructor said, "He may be in favor of socialism, but that man is one of nature's aristocrats."
I was lucky enough to see him in other productions: Ghosts [Ibsen] with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Alving, An Enemy of the People [Ibsen adapted by Arthur Miller] which nearly had me out of my seat the tensions ran so high, Tom and Viv [Michael Hastings] at the Royal Court...
He was a genuinely nice man who happened to be a genuinely good actor. I never felt a false note from him in any role that I saw him in.
May flights of angels sing Tom Wilkinson to his rest.
But Tom Wilkinson died yesterday, and I'm deeply sad. I saw him as Horatio in Hamlet in 1980. The fact that I was noticing Horatio probably doesn't bode well for the leading man's Hamlet, but I found him compelling. So compelling that I tried to see him in the smaller production where he was the lead called The Maid's Tragedy. I was unsuccessful, but I did go into the clearing by The Other Place, where the play was being performed, and listen to Nick Bicat's gorgeous score for the production.
A year later, I go on my junior semester abroad in London -- it's not so abroad when you're living in Brussels -- and I wonder if I'll see Tom Wilkinson in anything. I was literally in the hotel looking for something to watch on TV and stumbled across him in a Play for Today.
The first play we saw for the RSC -- and I think the first play for the class -- was The Love Girl and the Innocent by Solzhenitsyn. I don't know whether it was a good translation; I don't read Russian. The production was excellent and Tom Wilkinson played Nemov, the ex-POW who was pulled from the lines and charged with a political crime. There's a moment, a throwaway line of Nemov's. In the production I saw he referred to trained men doing scutwork as being stuck "like axes in dough." Wilkinson didn't make a production of the line in any way, but it's stuck with me for years, the sheer futility of the Gulags and the system that made them.
We saw lots of RSC productions and many of them had Wilkinson in second leads or supporting roles. The exception was Richard III where I think they cut all his character's lines (Catesby) and The Maid's Tragedy which had a fourteen night run at the Donmar Warehouse. Thanks to cheap student tickets and a willingness to spend hours in line (the seats were first come, first serve), I was able to see it with my friend (later roommate) six times.
It still stands vividly in my mind, and we discovered that the actors hung out at the Crown and Anchor nearby after the show. We went and had our after theater drinks, never approaching them, just enjoying the atmosphere. What we hadn't counted on was that the theater was so small that the actors saw us, too. At different points in the two London runs (my roommate and I saw the second run all fourteen nights), different actors came up to us and asked about our reactions to the production. Domini Blythe was the first. She was very sweet.
During the second run, Tom Wilkinson came up to us and said, "Are you planning to be here every night?" We acknowledged that other than the one night where my roommate had lost the draw and was babysitting, both of us would be there for the run. He nodded and said, "You should have a long service medal minted." Later, just before we left to catch the tube, he gave us his phone number and told us to call him after the play had been over for a week. We did. Tom Wilkinson took the two of us out to dinner.
It was a lovely evening, never any suggestion of something other having a good conversation on a wide range subjects. I had one embarrassing moment when I didn't know what mussels were. My roommate said, "we had them in Brussels, moules." It was completely inadvertent and probably made me seem a complete prat, but I don't know if I'd ever eaten them before we moved to Belgium.
Later, our theater professor asked Wilkinson if he'd speak to the class about British theater and repertory work, which he did. He walked right over to me and my roommate and said, "I didn't know you two were with this outfit." He told a story about why he thought that subsidized theater of all types at all levels, fringe, local, regional, touring, and national was important.
At the end of it, after he'd left, my instructor said, "He may be in favor of socialism, but that man is one of nature's aristocrats."
I was lucky enough to see him in other productions: Ghosts [Ibsen] with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Alving, An Enemy of the People [Ibsen adapted by Arthur Miller] which nearly had me out of my seat the tensions ran so high, Tom and Viv [Michael Hastings] at the Royal Court...
He was a genuinely nice man who happened to be a genuinely good actor. I never felt a false note from him in any role that I saw him in.
May flights of angels sing Tom Wilkinson to his rest.
