Monday 4th February 2013

Last week we visited Oxford for a student performance of Angels in America. I drove an unsauced Val up. He had his great days at the Oxford Playhouse with Rowan and Imogen and Hugh (but not Larry – too late for Larry), fitting these greatnesses for frockage, unsurpassed. Never again did they know such fit or cutting on the bias. Val has reigned supreme in cut and finish for 35 years. They just can’t find anyone who can match him.

I’ve long been interested to see this play, Angels in America, being too frightened of it when it first appeared in the  early 90s. It’s about AIDS, you see, and is actually in two massive parts. The students only did one part and that was three hours. I wonder if it was over-praised originally because of its subject-matter and for not being agit-prop or self-pity. Intelligent and at times funny, but it’s just too long and the dramatic technique,naturalism with flights of poetry and vision, is eventually wearying. Valiant of the young people to do it, very ambitious, and they were superb – American accents faultless, v. convincing as 80s types they can’t ever have known in real life.

Death came early to the Poor Little Rich Gays and that has made all the difference. Those mid-80s years when the shadow fell.

Val wanted to see the Ashmolean Extension so we gained  de bon heure. Of course Poor Little Rich Gays have been busy there already as you know, building and building their own monument. It’s a howling success. The public love it. In the China Room, I saw a Wedgewood plate. ‘I’ve got one like that,’ I said to Val. My thoughts fell to legacy as they had a week or so before when strolling in the National Portrait Gallery: some Poor Little Rich Gays are there already. All in time will be.

I said to Val, ‘We must look to our legacy, like Tony Blair.’ It’s all right for him; he’s already had his portrait painted – the one Poor Little Rich Gay who has at times been stumped for the bus fare home, but he’s aligned for legacy, with portrait fully painted. Then, sweeping into an Egyptian Room at the Ashmolean, glancing at the tomb, he declared, ‘I’m the incarnation of Khufu.’

So he’s double-immortal.

Wedgewood Plate in the Ashmolean: Just Like Mine! Legacy Potential

I’ve Got One Too! My Home of Museum-Standard After All and To Be Left to the Nation