Miracles & Disappointments Surround My 75th

Last month I celebrated my 75th birthday by going from one spa to another. The first one, on the Brittany coast, specializes in Thalasso therapy, and if you can pronounce that then even Taki will not have to take a breathalyzer test. The second one, at Montecatini, just north of Florence, brings you back to an Edwardian world of elegance and calm while the potent mineral waters clean the rust out of your carburetor. The corridors at the Grand Hotel & La Pace are wide enough for two Hispano-Suizas to pass each other, and, even if you sleep alone, your linen sheets are changed twice daily. Maybe some readers will remember Marcello Mastroianni in an adaptation of a Chekhov short story, which was filmed there? Anyway, this whole paragraph is for the benefit of my friend Taki, who shares a birthday with me, only he is exactly 10 years less adult. Now he will know what to look forward to in 2011.

I did, however, go a little wild in between these two health cures, and went on a tour of the three Baltic Republics with a group of Old Age Pensioners who are culture vultures. All the ladies come from the casting agency that found the actress who played Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in the tv series. They are absolute darlings. One English bunch of geriatric students of architecture works at saving classical 18th-century buildings and, as a member, I have managed to accompany them on visits to some wonderful houses not open to the public.

One such was Chevening, which was given to the nation after the Last Stanhope died and serves as the country residence of the Foreign Secretary. Normally our society, which is appropriately named the Georgian Group, is offered a tepid cup of tea and a biscuit. At Chevening we were filled up with champagne, two wines and three courses for lunch. The new Labor Foreign Secretary had erroneously assumed that the Georgian Group was an ethnic majority from the former Soviet Union! (The Labor government has flooded the reformed House of Lords with cozy old camp followers, including some bimbos. One such exclaimed, on donning her rented robe and coronet, "Oops, now I'm a lady at both ends!" And why not. Six out of Britain's 23 dukes are descendants of the mistresses of Charles II.)

The end of the London season brought one miracle and some disappointments. I seem to have lost my patience with effeminate, dandy-ish wit, unless it is by the masters, like Wilde or Coward. I disliked Beau, which portrayed Beau Brummell, the Regency character of sartorial genius who was disgraced after being rude about the Prince of Wales. I wish all of the snide hacks who are now constantly rude about the present heir to the throne would also have to live in exile. The National's revival of Vanbrugh's The Relapse was fine, but the play now bores me. Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon was, however, a revelation of sheer exhilarating brilliance. Lepage wrote the script and directed it with technical wizardry. He has an ability to create a living relationship with his audience, and yet, as he stands alone onstage, he becomes an enduring metaphor for human isolation. I had already become a Lepage fan after his Opium and Needles, Tectonic Plates, The Geometry of Miracles and finally The Seven Streams of the River Ota. If his next play opens in Alaska, I'll be there.

The Kirov's visit with a bunch of Verdi operas was poorly rehearsed and a disappointment, except for their Don Carlos. Glyndebourne's revivals of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Janacek's The Makropulos Affair were praised, but their Fidelio was a disaster.

Since I am an incurable classical music snob, I do not normally go to musicals, but I made an exception because of Issy Van Randwyck, the star of Song of Singapore. Issy can both sing and make you laugh and is now married to Edward Hall, who, like his father, the famous Sir Peter Hall, is a brilliant theater director. I shall go to see his Julius Caesar in Stratford next month, and I will go to see Issy even if she appears in an Andrew Lloyd Webber version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Talking of little lambs, I went to hear my goddaughter, Eliza McCarthy, at a gala by the pupils of the Yehudi Menuhin School at the beautiful Wigmore Hall. The young performers were wonderful and the audience included many of the great and the good of the London music world. The new production of My Fair Lady has been highly praised, but I prefer my little Eliza to the Doolittle chick.

The British Postal Service was inundated with the mail celebrating my 75th birthday. One small, very soft package showed the sender's name as that of a very pretty New York lady. I immediately assumed that she had knitted me a woolen nightcap, which she had been privileged to know was part of my nocturnal wardrobe. But the package contained an embroidered, lace, organdy robe of Hong Kong haute couture for my one-year-old granddaughter. I didn't try to see whether it would fit me.