More than actress

 

Among the clips replayed during the recent celebrations of the life of Diana Rigg, was her summary of the character she played in The Avengers. The point was, she said, that Emma Peel was just as clever as the men. The same might be said of Miss Rigg herself.

Having found my copy of No Turn Unstoned, I see that I did her a disservice in describing her earlier as a mere "anthologist". Her introductory chapter is a pithy history of drama as well as that of theatrical criticism because the latter almost immediately followed on from the former. The selections themselves are interleaved with the odd editorial comment showing her occasional sympathy with the critic as well as the criticised. 

The idea for the book came, she wrote, from the realisation that surely everyone in her profession must at some time have been given a bad review. So she tapped the thespian network for donations of the worst or funniest reviews. (She did not spare herself; the disgracefully male chauvinist notice of her Eloise is on page 64 of the paperback edition.) 

Sadly, time has caught up with most of her contemporaries who contributed. Annette Crosbie, Frances de la Tour and Judi Dench are happily still with us, though, as well as Anthony Hopkins who drew this criticism (from Clive James? - the text is ambiguous) that his 1971 Coriolanus was

dressed like a cross between a fisherman and an SS man, evoking doggedly a Welsh rugby captain at odds with his supporters' club.

Mixed with the contributions which rolled in are historical examples, clearly the result of extensive research. The classics are here (e.g. Walter Kerr on I am a Camera: "Me no Leica" and Dorothy Parker's "Go to the Martin Beck Theatre and watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut-t-t of emotion from A to B") but there are also extensive passages from other critics who became institutions.

Mrs Parker really did not like A.A. Milne. In the week after Goodbye Christopher Robin had its showing on UK terrestrial TV, it is timely to relay part of the review of Milne's Give me Yesterday quoted extensively by Diana Rigg:

... My dearest dread is the word "yesterday" in the name of a play; for I know that sometime during the evening I am going to be transported, albeit kicking and screaming, back to the scenes and costumes of a tenderer time. And I know, who show these scars to you, what the writing and the acting of these episodes of tenderer times are going to be like. I was not wrong, heaven help me, in my prevision of the Milne work. Its hero is caused, by a novel device, to fall asleep and a-dream; and thus he is given yesterday. Me, I should have given him twenty years to life.

There are other criticisms which one is forced to agree with, both of plays and of actors. However, most of the actors cited in the book have risen above their bad notices and there is one chapter on musicals etc. which demonstrates how first reviewers can get things spectacularly wrong. Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Guys and Dolls, The Sound of Music and Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be were all successes in spite of bad notices.

 

The book is a testament to Diana Rigg's love of the theatre and respect for its history, to her devotion to the Roman faith and to Yorkshire - and her wit.