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Badge of honour Sir David Suchet, 75, famous for playing the detective Hercule
Poirot, at Windsor Castle yesterday after being invested as a Knight BachelorSTEVE PARSONS/PAOde to Helen McCrory cuts to the heart of the matter
Spoken word Dominic Maxwell
A Poet for Every
Day of the Year
Lyttleton, National Theatre
HHHHIHow would Damian Lewis, making
his first stage appearance since the
death of his wife Helen McCrory last
April, begin an occasion dedicated to
her memory? With a no-nonsense
nod to the mixture of happiness and
sadness of being at an occasional
poetry reading event that she had
taken part in previously herself?
With a poem in her honour,
performed to a well-scrubbed
crowd (including McCrory’s friend
Helena Bonham Carter) who had
turned out to see him and Sir
Simon Russell Beale, Fay
Ripley, Danny Sapani
and Lesley Sharp
reading from the latest
anthology of 366 poems
edited by the evening’s
organiser and host, Allie Esiri?
In the end, no. Lewis found a
way to address the elephant in the
room that was both unexpectedand oddly fitting to such a
charming, varied and resonant
evening. He told a story about
John Dennis, the 18th-century
critic and dramatist who, it
turned out, had
inadvertently invented the
expression “steal my
thunder”. “One person
whose thunder absolutely
would not be stolen was
Helen McCrory,” Lewis
added, in the building where
his late wife had successesin Medea and The Deep Blue Sea.
“You could try, but it wouldn’t work.”
That done, he started off the
evening of 30 poems with Robert
Burns’s Address to a Haggis, his
Scottish vowels enabled, he said, by a
“little tutorial” from his father-in-law
the previous night “after a couple of
gins”. Not everything that followed
had such a memorable accent to
propel it, but almost everything here
was pithy and impassioned.
Russell Beale gave his all, yet kept
his usual sense of ease, to WH
Auden’s O Tell Me The Truth About
Love. Sharp was as good imitating
Dorothy Parker’s cynical drawl forOne Perfect Rose as she was joined by
Ripley for a twin delivery of
Tennyson’s The Charge of The Light
Brigade. Although there were a few
more greatest hits of poetry like that,
more recent and less-known pieces
made as much of an impression.
Sapani’s reading of Two Guns in the
Sky for Daniel Harris made one want
to hear more from its author,
Raymond Antrobus.
There was a moving finale when
footage of McCrory performing at the
event, in 2017, was shown as the final
poem. It was a tremendous reminder
that poetry cuts to the heart of things
as much as it dances round their edge.Damian Lewis paid fitting
tribute to his late wife