Courtenay's finest

10 April 2012

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth," Philip Larkin once wrote, long before he was posthumously attacked by the slings and arrows of murkier issues than poverty.

Racism, misogyny, and overardent Thatcherism poisoned Larkin's name when his collected letters, and Andrew Motion's iconoclastic biography were published in the early Nineties, yet actor Tom Courtenay's acerbic but heartfelt one-man show does much to resurrect the anti-romantic poet in all his flawed dignity.

The lights go up on a human relic of a Britain that will never exist again - a Britain that wears its patriotic parochialism with pride, and sniffs disdainfully at the lure of modernity. Clad in a slightly too small suit, Courtenay's Larkin is surrounded by cardboard boxes after moving house - and here a crocheted shawl, an ironing board, a kettle, and a brown and tan teapot all signify that while the play is set in the early Eighties, its spirit is fermented in the Fifties.

As writer and performer of this third play about Larkin since his death, Courtenay has raided his subject's prose and poetry for lines with the punch of his infamous "They f**k you up your mum and dad".

In a voice that somehow manages simultaneously to be both sing-song and deadpan, he sends ripples of laughter across the audience with acid observations such as, "I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the next day", or adapted quotes such as "I always found sex more trouble than standing for Parliament".

With heavy-rimmed glasses that would not have looked out of place on Eric Morecambe, Courtenay portrays Larkin as every inch the comic-tragedian - who can suddenly take off from his world of antique aphorisms with breathtaking gusts of free-as-air poetry.

Larkin's extraordinary empathy with the natural world is perhaps an obvious side-effect for a man whose human relationships were always infected with a degree of alienation (he called Ted Hughes The Incredible Hulk), yet this does not diminish the icetipped beauty, say, of his soul-tingling poem about lambs born in snow.

Larkin's controversial bigotry looms larger in the second half, when tea has been insidiously replaced by whisky, raising uncomfortable questions amid the wit and lyricism. It says much about Courtenay's skill that while certain comments would, thankfully, not be tolerated today, his intricate portrayal allows Larkin to leap across politically correct boundaries to a point where we could almost love him.