1990

Festival Theatre
Adelaide, August 13, 1990.

Everybody knows that Peter Ustinov is a remarkable fellow but the list of his accomplishments is boggling. Linguist, playwright, novelist, director, actor, ambassador for UNICEF, his swag of honours include two Academy Awards, several Emmys, a Grammy, British Film Awards,
numerous Critics Awards, as well as a CBE, the Franklin Medal, a chair in the French Academy, and, in June this year, a knighthood.

In his show, An Evening With Peter Ustinov, the man himself sees it all quite differently. Instead of a catalogue of achievements, his life is an endless source of anecdotes, impressions, epiphanies and comic encounter with the human species. For more than two and half hours Ustinov talks about himself, or rather, creates a bemused persona whose experiences bear approximate connection to the life of Peter Ustinov.

Starting from before the beginning, he recounts his parents’ arrival in London from Leningrad and how his mother thought every town on the train line was called Bovril. He recalls his auspicious birth and subsequent life as a car, as well as formative school experiences and his reluctance to go into a famous London store because he believed it was owned by King Herod.

Each of these unreliable memoirs is delivered with Ustinov’s superb phrasing, declensions of mordant understatement that transform random recollections into theatrical miniatures. The Headmaster at Westminster School is described as having a cathedral mouth and in the process Ustinov manages to completely rearrange his face muscles and produce a death-rattle voice for the benefit of a dorm full of boys caught concealing a picture of a film star. Betty Grable, Ustinov explains, and in three quick gestures creates an uncanny impression of the legendary pin-up with a beach ball.

Some of it familiar from his television performances, the show is a procession of vignettes – of army life with punch-drunk and toothless NCO’s and, as the history progresses to Ustinov’s acting career, off the record apochrypha about legends of the English stage: Alec Guinness as Hitler in a shopping centre, Ralph Richardson performing Shakespeare-“He not only recited all the lines but half the footnotes as well”, Charles Laughton in his swimming pool and Laurence Olivier on a jittery horse in Spartacus.

Ustinov has a gift for catching exactly the radiant nuances of the American accent whether Mervyn Le Roy ,the director of Quo Vadis, a motorcycle cop from Yonkers or the aphasic cadences of Ronald Reagan. But even more brilliantly he mimics the sounds that pass for language, as Queen Mary wiffles regally to Ustinov’s mother at Covent Garden, or for the sound of music, when his German musicologist earnestly performs all the orchestration and voices for a baroque opera.

An Evening With Peter Ustinov is much more than the sum of scrumptious particulars though. What makes him such a singular performer is his genius with an audience. Unassuming charm and impeccable wit are undoubtedly personal attributes but Peter Ustinov has turned them into a public art form.

Murray Bramwell

”Wit plus Charm” – that’s Ustinov”, The Australian, August 15, 1990, p.10.