Despite it being almost twenty years since he’d written his study of the man known as The Master, Hoare was as enthusiastic as if he’d just finished delving in theatrical attics.Ĭoward spent World War I in London’s underworld of sex and drug clubs. The Melbourne Theatre Company had asked me to make a series of podcasts to accompany their current season, which included Coward’s Private Lives, so Hoare and I met, me with a recorder, he clutching a bicycle helmet, in the Brutalist cavern of the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. In addition to Coward, he also wrote a life of the aristocratic ‘bright young thing’ Stephen Tennant ( Serious Pleasures ) and a study of an infamous trial featuring the play Salome, in Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand (1997). It turned out that before turning to cetaceans he had an earlier career, in the 1990s, as a biographer. So when, in search of an expert on Noël Coward, a theatre friend recommended Hoare, I didn’t realise that she was referring to the same person. I’m an admirer of the English writer Philip Hoare and his oceanic works Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) and The Sea Inside (2013), explorations and meditations on cultural responses to the marine and his own relationship with the sea and its creatures. It’s odd when you know someone in one context and then discover him in a completely different one.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |