‘Thank you very much for the Aintree Iron …’

 

Roger McGough, CBE, Liverpool’s poet laureate, is actually a resident of Barnes and has been down in the London area for close on 30 years, thank you very much. He used to live in Notting Hill Gate and was driving back through Barnes one night when he thought it might be a better place to bring up his two youngest children. ‘It’s as much country as I can cope with. I love sitting in my study looking out at the trees and rain!’

 

He’d been dabbling with writing since his late teens, powerfully emotive adult verse enabling him to find a space for his grief at his father’s death and a way of stepping back to make sense of the world. Although now renowned as a poet, he failed English at school, went on to study French and Geography at university and then became a teacher.

 

He likes poetry that tells a story, that uses drama, and when he read Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, and some of Baudelaire, poetry really began to interest him. Published in the university paper, he began doing readings around Liverpool at The Everyman among others, hanging out with the likes of Brian Epstein and Mike McGear (Paul McCartney’s brother), and then broadened into doing sketches in the same vein as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Working as a teacher, he was using his own poems to instil in his students a love of rhythm and words.

 

One lucky day, a guy from Thames TV was at the show, spotted him and his mates sending themselves up and selected them for an audition. They became The Scaffold and got to number one with Lily the Pink, a ridiculously silly song, the likes of which sadly don’t get written any more. That was it for the day job.

 

Despite the fact that it was fame that led Roger to doing what he loves most – making money from his vocation as a brilliant and observational poet – he finds the whole Make Me a Celebrity TV culture really irritating. That and the fact that we live in such a blame culture. But don’t get him wrong, he’s not a grumpy old man, although he confesses that his hobby of playing bowls on the Green behind the Sun Inn in Barnes might make him appear so!

 

No, he’d rather make people laugh than cry, and his two ventures at the Rose will certainly do that. He is performing in his one-man show, Said and Done, which features work from his hilarious autobiography, about the days of the Mersey Sound and beyond.

 

In a separate venture, he has adapted Tartuffe, Molière’s verse comedy which pokes fun at religious hypocrites. In brief, the story revolves around Tartuffe, apparently a beacon of piety and nicely ensconced in the home of wealthy merchant, Orgon. But the family smell a rat and amid the frills and frivolity of 17th Century society, they hatch a cunning plan to outwit the wily deceiver before he brings their house crashing down.

 

Banned by Louis XIV, under pressure from the religious bodies of the day, Molière’s Tartuffe has been adapted by Roger with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse for their European Capital Culture year and arrives at The Rose on 4 June. Roger has kept in the time of the day but has wittily updated it to reflect the current religious fanaticism and fundamentalism that seems to be colouring this century.

 

Ticket info: Tartuffe, 4-14 June, suitable for over 12s. See www.rosetheatre.org for booking info or go in person and save a booking fee. Box office open every day 10am-6pm and there’s a great café too!