Timothy West
Timothy West
Timothy Lancaster West, CBEis an English film, stage and television actor...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth20 October 1934
avoid cross invaded meant
I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink.
along club either fringe licence london openly secretly theatre until war
There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.
life people performed plays saw suddenly time
Suddenly we saw that you could do plays about real life, and people had been doing them for some time, but they weren't always getting to the audiences. They were performed in little, tiny, theatres.
began brought hold lord member ordered private royal staff stop towards
Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.
act dinner everybody house jacket life loads owned people plays popular privileged seen third war wished wore
There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you'd owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.
bit people sort
When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.
bad
Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.
class use reluctant
I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.
class playwright elizabethan
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
hunting steps hunts
You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.
money fighting complaining
Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don't like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.
good-night goodnight somewhere-else
The newly decorated theatres produced things like car parks and restaurants, so you could have a good night out, quite cheaply without all that bother of having to go somewhere else.
people groups lord
Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.
character trying playwright
A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.