A couple of weeks ago I went to People by Alan Bennett at the National Theatre: dutifully full with an audience averaging seventy: nothing wrong in that of course, except that it was quite a surprise to see the  National Theatre usurping or taking over from the old West End of the fifties and sixties.

Here is William Douglas-Home of the liberal left, in a barely disguised Lloyd George Knew My Father kind of play, demoted from Home counties and building a motorway through  the family estate to North Yorkshire, to a dispute between sisters as to whether  the decaying ancient pile should go to the National Trust or a private entrepreneur as a conference centre; it was a very mediocre star vehicle for Francis de La Tour. Hardly a new joke or a new situation in whole evening : resoundingly ‘droll’.

Went this Tuesday to the centenary celebration of the Critics’ Circle at the Barbican when life achievement accolades were handed out to each choice of the various sections of the Circle, mine being the Drama Section. The honoured luminaries included Danny Boyle, for Film (surely not Trance, his latest, I hope). Peter Wright (for Dance), the late Colin Davis for Music and Max Stafford- Clarke for Theatre, who said he was surprised to be there as he wasn’t either Trevor Nunn or Howard Davies—as all awards automatically went to them!

    Janet Suzman presided and I had a conversation with her prior to her mounting the rostrum about her Antony and Cleopatra production last year at Liverpool, and at later its revival at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Both of us much preferred it at Liverpool, confined behind the proscenium and much more intimate and in contact with its audience. Kim Cattrall, I felt, as Cleopatra was so much better  at Liverpool, on her home ground and found it harder to project in the Tyrone Guthrie round auditorium. Her earlier performance was sharper. She was good on the passion, but short on projecting the wily, manipulative trickster (a surprise, you’d have thought, after Sex and the City). On that occasion of the Liverpool first night, at the party afterwards, Ken Dodd, well over eighty, held forth in non-stop stand–up form for over an hour, and did amazing imitations of my father (who was a big Liverpool favourite in his day) singing ‘I’ll take you home Kathleen’ and ‘I’m only a strolling vagabond, so good night pretty maiden, good night!’.

     Janet in her introduction to the awards amusingly recounted how a stage door keeper couldn’t pronounce the name of the legendary Michel Saint-Denis, then a director at Stratford, when calling up a taxi. My first ever theatre job was as Saint-Denis’s assistant at Stratford. Danny Boyle got a boost to his career at the Royal Court when Max Stafford-Clarke was running it, while I gave Max a part on and off-stage as  ‘stage manager’   at the Traverse in my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author performed with just five actors— which led to him, when I left, running the theatre.

      Strange how over time these critic-artist encounters reverberate. Max regaled us with his account of how after a terrible critical panning at the start of his directing career he carried Harold Hobson up and down the stairs of the Theatre Upstairs(‘his tweed jacket chafing my cheek’), this earning his first unconditional, ecstatic review from Hobson, saying the theatre had to be filled every night. Not too difficult –it was the Theatre Upstairs. But now he himself had ended up a ‘raspberry’ like Harold (rhyming slang, ie ‘raspberry ripple- cripple’)—he had a stroke in 2007. There was no sign at all of this, except for a walking  stick: Max was on scintillating form and cheerfully defined how the relationship between critics and artist should be ‘constantly  renegotiable,’ which means if you get a lousy review you don’t  straight away go and stick your head in the gas oven.

As a writer of twenty or so published books and performed plays I experienced recently a baptism of showcase noise and dense crowd immersion by visiting the London Book Fair. Julian Friedmann, my agent, gave me an entrée to online enrolment so I duly submitted to the box-filling tedium,  messing up one attempt after another just as I do with my VAT return.  On arrival at Olympia, clutching an A 4 paper pass I dodged the laminating tag machine (what point more plastic waste in the universe?) and hit the huge sea of faces and stands.  I sought my publisher’s foreign rights specialist for my book about a German pope. What an overwhelming plethora of stalls, a bazaar for soul baring and trading, where cubic footage of space proclaimed power and publisher prestige, and thousands of earnest faces over tiny tables bobbed up and down in one-to-ones in their rare encounters in the flesh.

Soon I was light-headed and dazed in the Kasbah. At last  I found she whom I sought. My appointment over I went to find a coffee. Everywhere was too crowded. An acquaintance I hadn’t seen for many years caught up with me. I remembered his name, just about—and he mine. I knew he had been a book-seller in a highly respectable second-hand  book shop.

‘What do you do now? Why are you here?'  I asked. ‘I am a sample  buyer' he said, ‘A what?’ ‘ I buy samples, and we, the people I work with, sell them through Amazon?’ I couldn’t work this out. Oh, books laid out as samples on stalls! ‘How?’ We get up to 85% discount on the sale price just to cart them away. They can’t be bothered to crate them up and take them back:  you’d  be surprised how expensive too some of the big publishers’, like Chatto, wares are.’ ‘ Oh, so you’re a buyer?’

‘ I carry cash usually and arrange  for them to be packaged and taken off at the end of the fair. We have a warehouse.’

I was staggered. Here was a highly privileged –ex-public schoolboy,  a BA or MA, dressed to fit the right book fair image, working, I daresay lucratively, as a scavenger: buying up the orts and greasy relics of the fair, and handsomely profiting from them. An eye-opener to the ways of the giant Amazon—and no profit or royalty for the humble scribe!

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds Ad infinitum."  Jonathan Swift

I found myself heading fast for the exit door at a recent screening and new release of The Eye of the Storm, escaping as quickly as possible this turgid or perhaps rancid is a better word for it, adaptation of Australia’s Patrick White novel which I will certainly never want to read. (I am a great admirer of his Voss.)

I couldn’t work out at all what the film was about at all except this aged rich floozy, played by Charlotte Rampling, looking as if she’d been left in an I’m a Celebrity Jungle Get Me Out Of Here forever— and was now in bed dying— kept meeting her two awful offspring, one a despicable Australian actor (knighted for services to the arts?—most unlikely) played by Geoffrey Rush, the other a frigid French princess by marriage played by Judy Davis. Al l the characters are stilted self-conscious puppets endowed with thuddingly obvious misery- me lines, unable to evoke a shred of pity or love in one viewer (me).

To underline the down-under connection the frequent sex scenes were loaded with platypussy platitudes, and—alas— I could never detect beneath this posturing, narcissistic slice of upper crust decay any gripping story-line. Where has the Charlotte Rampling of yesteryear gone?