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Bill will read Dracula!
Loading ...Bill Nighy to appear on John Betjeman Gala
Bill Nighy is expected to perform at the John Betjeman Gala, together with a long list of other stars of film and the theatre. The Gala will be held in the Prince of Wales theatre in London.
The cast includes Nick Cave, Jonathan Cecil, Ronnie Corbett, Kenneth Cranham, Sinead Cussack, Joanna David, Edward Fox, Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant, Anne Hart, Jools Holland, Kit and The Widow, Joanna Lumley, Miriam Margolyes, Diana Quick, Prunella Scales, Rachel Stirling, Suggs, Timothy West, British Sea Power, and St Pauls Cathedral Choir.
The evening promises to blend variety, music and dance, with tunes coming from British Sea Power, Suggs, Jools Holland and St Paul’s Church Choir. There will also be a video link to Australia, where Dame Edna Everage will join the proceedings.
Proceeds from the evening, which is sponsored by Shell, will go to mental health charity SANE. The charity aims to raise awareness and respect for people with mental illness and their families, research the cause of serious mental illness and provide information and emotional support for those suffering from mental health problems.
Read more about the gala here.
More about John Betjeman here.
Poems by John Betjeman
Update:
Some pictures of Bill Nighy related to this performance
A review of the Gala by ThisisLondon
Bill Nighy, running Grant a close second in the sartorial elegance stakes, bagged a peach of a piece, A Subaltern’s Love Song, featuring the seductive Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, “furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun”.
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Will you be going Ingrid? :)
Glad to see Bill doing more things for charity. I love that so much. Thanks!
Uhm no, but I regret that immensely at the moment, but it’s sold out now. I secretely hope the BBC is filming it for a later broadcast. There is a lot of John Betjeman stuff on tv lately in relation to his 100 year centenary. So we might be lucky.
And there’s a great article by Judith Priestman in “The Oxfordian” about Betjeman’s unhappy relationship with his tutor, C.S. Lewis (”Chronicles of Narnia,” but also a professor of Old English, philology, etc.). Priestman is a librarian at the Bodleian and has curated the exhibit on there now about J.B. This article samples from many of his letters, C.S. Lewis’ letters, and some of J.B.’s poems about Oxford (where he flunked out, then failed to get a decent rec. letter from Lewis because Lewis thought him “an idle prig,” and Betjeman thought Lewis a macho old whiskey drinker given to singing in Norse after he’d knocked back a few. If this were an intellectual smackdown between the werewolves and the vampires, a la Underworld, J.B. was definitely one of the cool, Goth vamps. (J.B. was also bisexual, and once, to get Lewis’s goat, Betjeman tried to argue that Oscar Wilde’s boy-toy, Bosie, was a better poet than Shakespeare.)
Anyway, you can read the Priestman article online and it gives a great flavor of this British poet laureate so loved by Bill and others.