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| Timothy Bateson obituary British character actor whose role in Waiting for Godot led to more than 50 years on stage, television and filmTimothy Bateson, who has died aged 83, was a character actor of boundless versatility and great warmth of personality who will always be remembered for playing Lucky in the controversial British premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre, London, in 1955. The production, directed by Peter Hall, moved on to the Criterion amid a continuing debate about what the play meant: the actors were no wiser themselves, though Bateson came to love the piece. He delivered his torrential monologue at the end of a rope with a blithe technical perfection, said the critics, and Kenneth Tynan noted that he made anguish sound comic – "a remarkable achievement".Bateson had already appeared at the Old Vic, in Stratford-on-Avon, and on tour in America with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, but Godot set him up for a busy five decades in theatre, TV and film. His last stage appearance was at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Jonathan Kent's 2007 revival of William Wycherley's The Country Wife, in which he played an amusingly grumpy ancient doorman to Toby Stephens's lascivious Horner, with David Haig as Pinchwife and Patricia Hodge as Lady Fidget.You could not imagine an actor more suited to playing in Dickens or Shakespeare, for Bateson had a naturally clownish disposition, an expressive moon face and a wonderfully crackling voice that belied a lack of training – just years of practice with the Oxford University Dramatic Society to the Old Vic and beyond. Like TS Eliot's Prufrock, he was an attendant lord, never the lord himself, but he was the perfect gravedigger for Alan Rickman's Hamlet, or indeed Justice Shallow for Simon Callow's Falstaff in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight at Chichester 10 years ago.Bateson's father was Sir Dingwall Bateson, president of the law society, and his mother, Naomi, was the daughter of Sir Walter Alcock, a famous organist at Salisbury Cathedral and great friend of the composer Edward Elgar. He grew up in the village of Preston, Rutland, and was educated at Lockers Park prep school in Hemel Hempstead and Uppingham School, Rutland, where he won a scholarship to read history at Wadham College, Oxford.He went straight from Oxford into Alberto Cavalcanti's unfairly overlooked 1947 film of Nicholas Nickleby, scripted by John Dighton, with a galaxy of British stars such as Sybil Thorndike, Cedric Hardwicke, Stanley Holloway and Bernard Miles. His cameo as Lord Verisopht prepared the ground for later BBC television Dickens appearances in Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield, in which he scuttled around as the eccentric, knife-bearing Mr Dick. He made his stage debut with the Old Vic in 1948 in Twelfth Night, and at Stratford over the next two years played small roles in productions by Tyrone Guthrie, Michael Benthall and Peter Brook. The latter's Measure for Measure, with John Gielgud and Barbara Jefford, restored the play to the modern repertoire, and he also appeared in Gielgud's 1950 King Lear.With the Oliviers in New York he made up the numbers in the Antony, Caesar and Cleopatra plays by Shakespeare and Shaw, returning for a season to the St James's in London. The parts improved at the Old Vic in 1953, where he was ideally cast as both Osric in Richard Burton's Hamlet and Trinculo in The Tempest. He was the ostler in Olivier's great Richard III movie in 1955 and over the subsequent two decades was a regular member of the BBC Radio repertory company while making a mark in films as diverse as Jack Arnold's The Mouse That Roared (1959) with Peter Sellers and Jean Seberg, Bryan Forbes's The Wrong Box (1966) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – he was a funny little, very nasal, legal clerk – and Peter Collinson's The Italian Job (1969) with Michael Caine and Noël Coward.More recently he popped up in Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing (2002) with Timothy Spall, Charles Dance's Ladies in Lavender (2004) with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005) and as the voice of Kreacher in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).Bateson's stage career was no less eclectic, ranging in the West End from the American musical The Fantasticks at the Apollo in 1961 to the courtroom drama Difference of Opinion at the Garrick in 1963 and the classic comedy The Clandestine Marriage with the peerless Alastair Sim in his last stage performance (Bateson took over Sim's role at the matinees) at the Savoy in 1975.Jonathan Miller cast him as Firs in The Cherry Orchard at the Sheffield Crucible two years ago, with Joanna Lumley as Ranevskaya, just before he played in The Country Wife, and his other notable stage work included appearances in Yukio Ninagawa's beautiful production of Tango at the End of Winter, again with Rickman, at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1991, and as yet another butler in Franco Zeffirelli's version of Pirandello's Absolutely (Perhaps) with Joan Plowright at the Wyndham's in 2003.Both he and his wife, the former actor Sheila Shand Gibbs, whom he met while nursing half a pint in a drinking club and married in 1953, were committed Christians, which precluded, as far as he was concerned, making adverts for alcohol or cigarettes. He lived an almost model family life in Barnes and Surbiton, having peaked as a sportsman when coxing the Wadham crew in Eights Week just after the second world war.He is survived by Sheila, their three children, Elizabeth, Andrew and Caroline, and by an elder sister, Ann. • Timothy Dingwall Bateson, actor, born 3 April 1926; died 15 September 2009Radio dramaSamuel BeckettPeter Hall CompanyLaurence OlivierWilliam ShakespeareCharles DickensTS EliotUniversity of OxfordBBCRadioMichael CaineNoel CowardHarry PotterWest EndMichael Coveneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Popular Author’s Audiobook Tries a New Format: Vinyl David Sedaris’s publisher was drawn to the quirky idea of offering his “Live for Your Listening Pleasure” in a limited album format. feeds.nytimes.com |
Intercontinental Drift This Mexican novel attempts to encompass the last 50 years of — well, everything. feeds.nytimes.com |
What are your new year's reading resolutions? 2010 is finally upon us. The moment is ripe for new leaves – and the best sort, of course, come between the covers of books. So state your intentions now: what are you planning to read this year?Of all the half-hearted resolutions I cobble together on a yearly basis for the benefit of my mental, physical and financial wellbeing, the only ones I manage to adhere to with any degree of success are those concerning my reading habits. My Reading Resolutions are important to me for the simple reason that if I'm not reading something in which my full interest is engaged, the feeling of disaffection tends to encroach upon all other areas of my life, rendering me a shadow of my former self, left to wander listlessly from room to room, sighing heavily and gazing wanly out of windows. Well, metaphorically, at least.Of course, first and foremost, reading should be a pleasurable activity. Therefore, the whole point of my Reading Resolutions is to make me a better reader (thereby increasing my reading pleasure and the pleasure I get out of life, and so on). To this end, if it turns out I have misjudged a resolution and it is in fact having a detrimental effect on my reading life (and all that follows), I don't hesitate in breaking it. For example, one of my RRs for 2009 was to finish every book I started. This was a resolution I was forced to stick to at the time due to a project I was working on, and meant long and painful slogs through The Tin Drum, East of Eden and The Glass Bead Game (apologies in advance if these are your favourite books: they just weren't for me). Now, at the end of 2009, I'm happily breaking this resolution and reverting back to my old reading habit of giving up on books I'm not enjoying, on the grounds that life's too short to spend reading something you don't like.But enough of 2009, for it is over and past. Here, for the record, are my Reading Resolutions for 2010. The future's bright ...1. For various reasons I spent 2009 exclusively reading novels and novellas. This year I intend to redress the balance by reading at least one work of non-fiction and one collection of short stories a month. Lined up for January I have John Cheever's Journals and James Joyce's Dubliners. 2. In general, I spend more time re-reading old favourites rather than starting anything "new" (new to me, that is. I really should read more contemporary fiction (see RR3)). In 2008 I gave myself the RR of not re-reading two books in a row. This fell apart somewhat in 2009, but I plan to resurrect it for 2010 as it proved very useful in making me read outside of my comfort zone and investigate new authors and fiction. I still maintain that all books are better on repeated readings, and continue to treat an initial read of a book as a "dry run" - but at least now the range of books I can reread is always increasing. 3. Read more contemporary fiction. See above. 4. The first few chapters of a new book are usually the most rewarding for me. I suppose this is because one doesn't usually start a new book on the hoof, but tend to be sitting down in comfortable surroundings, dictionary at hand, mentally prepared to enter a new world. However, once a book is underway, it's pretty much anything goes as to when and where the reading continues: chapters can be snatched while waiting for a bus, or drowsed over before bed; my reading can speed up and get sloppy as I rush over paragraphs, bleep over words I don't understand and sometimes even have to go back over entire pages when I realize I haven't taken anything in. Enough! This year I intend to look up every word I don't understand and, most importantly, read more slowly. The former is pretty easy to sort; the latter might prove trickier – so if anyone has any advice on how to slow down, please tell me: it's a bad habit I definitely want to break.5. Finally, here are some writers who aren't yet on my radar but who I feel ought to be – and whom I therefore intend to investigate this year: Somerset Maugham, John Cheever (see RR1), Joseph Heller (anything that isn't Catch-22), John Updike (anything that isn't the Rabbit books), Anthony Burgess (anything that isn't A Clockwork Orange), Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson. Title recommendations most welcome.  Right. That's my lot for 2010. Fancy sharing yours?Wayne Gooderhamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates sails bafflingly close to Nabokov's Lolita, and predictably comes off second best, writes Elizabeth DayWith more than 50 novels to her name and three Pulitzer nominations, Joyce Carol Oates is one of the leading American novelists of her generation. Her writing is admired for its acute social observation, restraint and dark ambiguity, and has won her comparisons to Balzac and Dickens.So her new novel, A Fair Maiden, comes as something of a disappointment. Instead of her usual tight plotting and suspenseful prose, Oates seems to have lost her way. It reads as though she has attempted a modern-day reworking of Nabokov's Lolita but not pulled this off, so the end result feels worn and unoriginal; as if we have read the same book before but done rather better.The central character is Katya Spivak, 16, who has landed a holiday job as a nanny for a well-off family in the posh seaside resort of Bayhead Harbor. Here she meets the debonair 68-year-old Marcus Kidder, an author of children's books and a man whose surname and profession are presumably designed to jog readers to grasp the plot's undertones of latent paedophilia.Katya's superficial coating of street-smartness masks an unhappy upbringing in New Jersey at the hands of an abusive single mother. Her father is missing and her only prior experience of affection has been a messy entanglement with her violent cousin. Bayhead Harbor offers the prospect of an enticing new world, far away from the "soft, formless, graceless things, soiled and sagging sofas, worn vinyl chairs" of her hometown.Teetering on the brink of adulthood, Katya, like Lolita, is both innocent and knowing. Flattered by the attention shown to her by "Mr Kidder" and enamoured by his glamorous lifestyle, Katya is gradually drawn into a sexual world that she does not understand. Her unwillingness to confront her own ignorance has predictably sinister consequences.Although there is the occasional lyrical phrase – "Shadows through a lattice window moved restlessly against a wall, appearing, disappearing" – much of the writing appears to be wilfully ponderous until the plot suddenly speeds up towards the end. Everything interesting happens in the last 40 pages. At times you feel that Oates is attempting a post-feminist take on a Perrault fairytale of curious virgins and murdering noblemen, but delivered with such a lack of emotion that you feel strangely detached from the action.There are a couple of unnerving literary tics – Oates has a tendency to repeat expressions of which she is especially fond ("sick-sinking" is used once too often for comfort) and she frequently breaks out into breathless italics to convey Katya's tortuous thought processes. On page 95 it is: "Mr Kidder is my friend, Mr Kidder would never hurt me." By page 142 Katya is feeling differently: "Dirty old man, what right d'you have…what right, damn you, hate you." And so on.All of this is rather a shame because Oates is a far better writer than this book allows her to be. Her strength is in her subtlety: the glimpses of lives lived that enrich her characters with complicated back-stories more powerful for never fully being explained. With Katya, Oates reels us in with telling narrative fragments that hint at the darkness lurking beneath.And yet, although Katya is an intriguing heroine, she is fatally constrained by the unnecessary literary conceit that surrounds her. Instead of trying to make her into a 21st-century Lolita, Oates should have allowed her heroine to become her own woman.FictionVladimir NabokovElizabeth Dayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |