WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE died 400 years ago last Saturday: you may have read the reviews.

Though these columns may not be supposed – what’s the word – highbrow, it seemed proper for an A-level English man (B grade, 1965) to essay a little re-enactment.

Readers of a less antic disposition may be assured that we’ll be back in the pub before curtain fall.

Chiefly we studied Hamlet, or Omelette as the head of English liked to call it. We thought it quite funny, the first time.

Hamlet – or, strictly, his crafty Uncle Claudius – was the subject of Robert Cohen’s one-man, one-night performance at the shoe-box sublime Georgian Theatre in Richmond last Wednesday.

The audience numbered 20-odd, of whom six or so were themselves probably English teachers, several more A-level archivists and some of the others the ladies who normally sell ice creams out the front.

Clearly there are those around Richmond who still believe Hamlet to be Downholme, or possibly Marske-in-Swaledale.

The show’s called Something Rotten – as in “Something rotten in the state of Denmark” – and those who suppose it a bit over their heads should know that it would make a sensationally lurid story in the Copenhagen slip edition of the Sun.

Claudius in short, kills his brother the king, succeeds him, swiftly weds and beds his sister-in-law – probably been bedding her for ages, truth to tell – and then has his nephew Hamlet seen off, too. Prince Hamlet, come to that, also bears a marked resemblance to his uncle.

Claudius talks of the first 100 days, which makes him sound like Harold Wilson, and of Respect, which makes him sound like the Football Association. Neither project was terribly convincing.

Cohen appears for the defence, thereby digging Claudius’s own grave. There’s an awful lot of skull diggery in Hamlet.

The play’s the thing, and the conscience of the king is inexorably ensnared.

To perform it, Cohen had driven from his home in Brighton the previous day – “fairly pain free as seven-and-a-half hour car journeys go” – set up stage and planned to return two days later.

It’s one of three one-handers – as theatricals like to call them – which he’s written and currently performs, the others the “true story of a McCarthyist supergrass” and the wholly untrue story, called High Vis, of a traffic warden under siege.

He’s also written something about internecine warfare in a stuffed animal museum in Cromer.

On a website he talks of the frustrations of trying to get his stuff noticed – “The powerlessness is well nigh Beckettian in its bleakness and intensity” – and of the slight advantage of one-man operation.

“It’s a way of claiming and retaining at least a little bit of power. They can’t cast someone else in your show.”

Madness with method in’t, as is observed in Hamlet? “It’s just that special feeling when you’re up there performing,” he says in the empty bar afterwards. “Money can’t buy that.”

The proper critic isn’t greatly impressed – “If you didn’t know the story in the first place you’d be pretty knackered,” she says, though probably not in print.

We, conversely, very much enjoy it – clever, oft-funny, adeptly and energetically performed.

It next shows up at the Brighton Fringe in June. Four centuries on and Shakespeare lives, thank goodness.

SATURDAY was also St George’s Day and the Feast of the Passover, celebration of the latter perhaps precluded by an 8am bacon butty from Greggs at Newcastle bus station.

In order to raise a glass to the playwright, we head ten hours later to the Shakespeare in Durham, though the pub sign appears more greatly to resemble a poster for jammy dodgers.

On a cold night, Durham seems almost uniformly under-dressed – though not, of course, undressed – the atmosphere not overly enhanced by some remarkably discordant buskers.

If music be the food of love, no wonder the divorce rate’s spiralling.

The pub’s well filled, much of the conversation of bed and bawd, though we did enjoy a little chat about football in Newton Aycliffe.

On the wall is a picture of Shakespeare and, next to it – appropriately, because it’s Hamlet’s summary of the whole sorry situation – the quote “That it should come to this".

The most appropriate rejoinder may be “Quite”.

Ford popular

BERYL MAUGHAN was just an excited girl of 15, outside the Globe Theatre in Stockton with her mum, that star-struck night back in 1959.

Most were thronged outside the stage door in the hope of a glimpse of Adam Faith, one of pop music’s new heartthrobs. Beryl hoped for an autograph from Emile Ford, with whom Faith shared the bill.

The Northern Echo:
Beryl Hankin and Emile Ford

“The show had been absolutely amazing but suddenly I came over all funny,” she recalls. “The next thing I remember is coming round in the dressing room with my mum and Emile standing by me, smiling but still concerned.

“He took a St Christopher medal from a chain round his neck, gave me it and told me to take care.”

It was the start of a friendship that was to last 57 years but ended with the singer’s death, aged 78 and almost blind, earlier this month.

That none of the papers seem so far to have recorded his passing may partly be because so many celebrities have died of late.

His death also stirred memories for Beryl – long Beryl Hankin – of a column back in the 1970s after the singer had paid one of his periodic visits to her shop in Darlington. “You said I was doe-eyed,” she says. “It was very sweet.

“I thought Emile was great already, but after that night in Stockton, I was hooked for life.”

BORN in St Lucia, educated in electronic engineering at Paddington Tech, Emile Ford and his backing group The Checkmates most famously sang What Do Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For, which stayed at the top of the charts for six weeks and became the swinging sixties’ first number one. New Musical Express readers voted him best new act of 1960.

Slow Boat to China and White Christmas were also top ten hits while Ford is further credited, says his website, with pioneering the sound system which became known as karaoke.

Beryl, now 72 and still running Guru Boutique after 45 years, heard of his death last week. “I got a call from another friend of Emile’s but for a few days there was nothing on the internet and I was just desperately hoping it could be wrong. Then I heard from another friend who confirmed it.”

He’d take her to shows, get her in if she hadn’t enough money for a ticket – “I’d carry his suit or something” – even appeared on television with his number one fan. For a short time in the 1960s, Beryl also ran his fan club.

By then his star was fading. Ford lived for a while in Sweden but returned to London where he spent much of his time as a recording engineer, not a singer.

So who was making eyes at whom? “No one,” says Beryl. “He was very handsome, a wonderful singer who never seemed to get the acclaim he truly deserved . Emile seemed just to radiate happiness, a thoroughly nice man who was always so kind and decent. In later life he got on just as well with my husband. My teenage crush had turned into a lifelong friendship.”