Film in the family

Plus: my paean to female friendship and Ian McKellen on marvellous form.

The Critic (2023) directed by Anand Tucker and starring Alfed Enoch and Ian McKellen. Photo by BFA / Sean Gleason / Kino Lorber

While it’s awful to brag on your own account, I think it is permissible to boast just a little about those you love – or, at least, this is what I’m telling myself as I write this Diary in the suddenly rather quiet hours following the European premiere of The Critic, starring Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. The film (it opens on 13 September), years in the making, is based on a novel my husband, Tony, published ten years ago, Curtain Call.

The book is set in London’s Theatreland in the 1930s. Its most indelible character is a vaguely monstrous theatre critic called Jimmy Erskine – and it’s Erskine whom McKellen plays, to mesmerising effect. Will he win awards for his performance? For the sake of everyone associated with The Critic, I hope that he will. But in my eyes, Tony has already picked up his Oscar. One day, you’re sitting at your desk, dreaming. The next (OK, not quite the next), your name is up there in neon at the Curzon Mayfair.

The upper circle

Doing the rounds to publicise the film, McKellen has talked of the fall he took last June while on stage as Falstaff in Player Kings, and the effect this has had on his confidence. But on the big night, he was on marvellous form, staying late at the after party, charming everyone he met. He has all the stories.

Jimmy Erskine was inspired by the famously waspish James Agate, the drama critic of the Sunday Times from 1923 until his death in 1947. Like Jimmy, Agate had a number of male secretaries, the longest serving (and, perhaps, longest suffering) of whom was Alan “Jock” Dent. Having become a critic himself, Dent would go on to give a young actor from Bolton his first professional notice. That young actor’s name was Ian McKellen.

A gathering of pen-pals

All round, it has been quite the week. Three days after the premiere, The Virago Book of Friendship was published, an anthology born of a long-standing desire on my part to edit one (all I can tell you is that I grew up on mix tapes). The book is a feminist project, its attention focused exclusively on friendships between women, real and fictional: Jane Eyre and Helen Burns; Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield; Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt; Bridget Jones and Jude and Shazzer.

But I’m pretty sure, too, that it’s also the first anthology of its kind to include extracts from cartoons and graphic novels as well as from novels, poems, diaries and letters. Among them is The Four Marys, a strip from Bunty, a comic I once loved passionately. The eponymous quartet of its title share a dorm at an establishment called St Elmo’s, and when I was living abroad with my mum as a child, my dad would roll it up and post it to me weekly, the better that I wouldn’t miss my regular fix of such exotica (NB: not erotica) as lacrosse sticks and prefects. Like so many British girls, I went to boarding school only in my fantasies.

Then three come at once

I have a Protestant streak as wide as the nave of Durham Cathedral. Good fortune makes me nervous. Expecting punishment at any moment, I remind myself constantly to be grateful – though to be honest, this is hardly difficult. It gets harder and harder to make a living from writing, and I’m one of the lucky ones. The other day, a well-known journal told me it would be paying me only an “honorarium” for a piece I’d written, a term I’m guessing must be the Latin for a book token and a free coffee at Pret (I don’t know: again, I didn’t go to that kind of school). So I’m determined to enjoy this lovely, fleeting moment.

Friends having emailed to say that ads for The Critic are on the sides of London buses, I rush out of the house, eager to photograph one for posterity. Could anything be more glamorous? I love this city as only a northern immigrant to it can, and regard the ads on red buses as the glorious apogee of culture and commerce combined (“If you can’t buy a ticket, steal one!”). But alas, no luck. An hour later, I return home with nothing more to show for my time than a little light perspiration – picture me running in my Birkenstocks after a number 56 I missed while staring at my phone – and a Twix, which I eat slowly while reading a somewhat concerning pension statement.

[See also: WH Auden’s visions of England]