Interview: Michael Coveney on THE FINAL CURTAIN: 'Describing Any of These Great Actors in an Obituary is Like Pinning Butterflies to Walls'

Death is not the end - at least, if there is a journalist on hand to tell the world of your deeds. Michael Coveney is best known for his work as a theatre critic at the Daily Mail, Financial Times, The Guardian and Observer alongside which he wrote a series of obituaries covering many of the most famous actors of the last century.

These have been compiled into a new book The Final Curtain with a foreword by ex-Donmar Warehouse artistic director Sam Mendes. The book covers many famed luminaries of British theatre from Laurence Olivier and Alan Rickman to Una Stubbs, Dennis Waterman and Ken Dodds. Before the book was released, BroadwayWorld spoke to Michael Coveney about the need to say what is important, the challenges of depicting the essence of an actor and what he might like in his own obituary.

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Any obituary of a well-known and much-loved actor has a danger of becoming more a eulogy than the kind of objective critique more commonly associated with a theatre critic. How do you balance these two aspects?

A eulogy is quite different from an obituary, which must present as whole and complete a picture as possible. I do not write obituaries about actors or writers about whom I have nothing to say, nor would I write one about someone I disliked. 

It’s the biographical detail and appreciation of the work that matters. And appreciation is not at all the same as a glowing review. But a good obituary, like a favourable review – the two are completely different – must in the first place be enjoyable to read.

Written originally for a print newspaper but consumed in the internet era, some of these accounts of actors whose careers lasted decades can come across as poignant but brief. How did you prioritise and decide what to include and what to leave out?

No obituary is too brief; the usual length is between 1200 and 1500 words. That’s enough to say what is important. Anything much longer is in danger of becoming a list of shows, like an entry in Who’s Who. For the collection in a book, it was necessary in almost every one of the fifty obituaries to expand or reduce to preserve some kind of shape appropriate to the design. 

My instinct was to add something germane, perhaps anecdotal, to the story, or to cut by removing anything that wasn’t. As in all journalism, nothing is ever spoilt with cutting, only improved. All other changes were made not with hindsight or “second thoughts” but to facilitate rhythm or meaning.

There’s a clear personal connection to and appreciation of many of the subjects and their stage work. If you could pick just one to see at the height of their powers, who would it be? What show would you like to see them in?

Describing any of these great actors in an obituary is like pinning butterflies to walls. But I’d love to revisit Ralph Richardson’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National in 1975 when the noise he made at the end, on a frozen mountain top, was, said John Gielgud “as if a bird had flown out of his heart”; or perhaps Helen McCrory in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National in 2016, brilliantly embodying the illogicality of passion, her features ablaze, said Michael Billington, “like a city in illumination.” 

In the sense that it can make one think and see someone (or something) in a different light, do you think obituaries and theatre reviews can be seen as works of art in and of themselves? 

I think “work of art” applied to either an obituary or a review is as ludicrous as the tendency nowadays for some critics to call everyone who steps on a stage “an artist.” Tom Stoppard says somewhere that he prefers reading Edmund Wilson, the great American critic, on Sophocles, to reading Sophocles himself. In a similar vein, David Hare said that he prefers reading Mike Atherton on cricket to watching him play it. 

So good descriptive and critical writing can enhance a work of art, certainly, and the critical writing of Kenneth Tynan, Michael Billington or John Lahr certainly does that. For myself, I’m happy to feel that I might have channelled the talents of Diana Rigg, or Barbara Jefford, or Ken Dodd, into a worthwhile addendum.

In Dropped Names, Frank Langella put his list of obituaries “in order of disappearance”, as have you with some of the bigger names given their own “fanfare” section. Did you always have that presentation in mind or did you ever consider a different order?

I thought at one point of trying to categorise actors into tragic, comic, vaudevillian, farcical, and so on. But it’s impossible. All great acting contains so many elements to render such classification as ludicrous. Donald Sinden said that comedy is much harder to play than tragedy, and it’s possible that farce is the hardest genre of all. 

I did decide early on I wanted a fanfare to start with – for Olivier, Ashcroft, Richardson and Gielgud, the foundation and inspiration for our great companies and classic traditions. And then, as you say, I followed Frank Langella’s advice, though I didn’t know that I was! Glenda Jackson just made the cut at the last minute. 

Finally, as morbid as it is, have you written your own obituary, either in your head or on paper? When you do pass on (hopefully many years from now!), who would you like to write it? 

I can’t possibly imagine what anyone would say about me beyond saying how lucky I had been in seeing what I have seen, and in doing what I have done. And like anyone who enters the later stages of life, I am convinced that I have had the best of times in the best of all possible worlds – that is, in theatre, newspapers and publishing, all three endeavours not exactly under threat but up in the air and braced (I hope) for seismic changes ahead.

The Final Curtain is published by Unicorn Publishing Group and is out on 15 September.

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