A REMARKABLE performance recreated aspects of the former Poet Laureate's childhood and early life as Tim Heath mined the autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells.
Betjeman's life as a child in Highgate in north London, the family business he refused to carry on, school days marred by casual brutality and insecurity and happier Oxford days were all relayed.
Betjeman's words, funny, touching and compelling, were given the very best treatment by Tim Heath both in speech and drama.
He could create the mannerisms of a bewildered small boy or an overbearing father, various schoolmasters or his small-voiced mother.
He caught the vulnerability of the man, his desire to be a poet and the knowledge of his own shortcomings, sometimes humorously treated, sometimes in a way that made you smell his fear.
It put flesh on a long vanished world, as remote and unrecognisable as the Middlesex of Betjeman's World War I childhood to anyone who knows the county today.
An extremely interesting and enjoyable evening, making this very accessible poet even easier to know.
David Edwards
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