KEITH DEWHURST
24 December 1931 – 11 January 2025
The English language talks of ‘the quick and the dead’. Occasionally Keith would start a sentence with ‘When I am dead…’, but I assured him he never would be, because all the words he had ever written were ‘quick’. His mind was so quick that even in his nineties I felt he was light years ahead of me. His judgement was piercing and expressed in one-liners without a dud word. ‘The theatre is in a situation where a morally good (by its own definition) opinion is all you need.’ ‘What would it be like, a world with which women were satisfied?’ ‘The real problem of decline is that people aren’t aware of it, don’t you agree?’ ‘The dog has chewed up my arthritis gloves.’ And, of course, football was always a metaphor for theatre, and vice versa: ‘The goalposts don’t move, Jimmy Murphy said to Bobby Charlton, so don’t look at them. Look at the ball, and put your foot through the middle of it. That could be Chekhov talking to an actor!’
In recent years, Keith would rather wistfully quote the line from Richard II: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ But nothing could be further from the truth in Keith’s case. At the age of 80 he had an explosion of different creativity from his youth. Between 2021 and 2024 he published five books: a warming theatrical novel The History of Polly Bowler, another novel Dancing Bear, the mind-bendingly ingenious mystery trilogy Venice Three, a book of short stories, Autumnia, and four dazzling new plays (two about feminists, one about the post-Copperfield career of Little Emily as a courtesan and diva, another about Karl Marx’s life in Ventnor). ‘I’ve only just learnt how to write!’ he told me. ‘Wasn’t lockdown marvellous? Self-isolation is what writers seek above all, but for the most part the world denies them it.’ This at the age of 92! And what he wrote in different genres was so vibrant, so in the present, more honestly focussed on Britain’s problems than many a young writer. Through it all flowed Keith’s mischievous, sometimes risqué humour. A year after he had written to me with a cutting from the Telegraph about the state of the British theatre, I noticed that on the back of it there is a large photograph of David Attenborough advertising his series Secret World of Sound and talking to a starling… Keith has doodled a big moustache on Sir David and drawn a balloon from the starling’s beak with three words in it: ‘CALL MY AGENT’!
Patrick Miles
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
