Philip Larkin instinctively recoiled from contact with the rest of the human race, and was singularly unfitted for the modern poetic profession of visiting lectureships, reading tours and residencies. "I couldn't bear that," he grumbled: "I don't want to go around pretending to be me." He would surely pale with horror at the prospect of someone else pretending to be him, even if that someone were as fine and sympathetic an interpreter as Tom Courtenay.
"I'm a gloomy old sod, aren't I?" declares Courtenay in this self-penned solo performance compiled from the poet's writings. An evening in the uninterrupted presence of the Eeyore of English letters presents a stern theatrical challenge, but one to which Courtenay rises dyspeptically.
Larkin's all-consuming fear of death was surely connected to the stockpile of skeletons waiting to come tumbling from his closet. Since his death the mild, unmarried, jazz-loving librarian has been demonised as a porn-hoarding, Thatcher-admiring misogynist whose pseudonymous tales of hi-jinx in a girl's school dormitory are now available in the public realm.
But the backlash to the Philip Larkin backlash seems to be underway at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where Ben Brown's meticulous emotional study Larkin With Women was presented earlier this year; followed by this touching personal tribute, which steers clear of prurience and concentrates on the poetry. Courtenay cuts a querulous, stammering figure in his Library Association necktie and ill-fitting suit, tottering around the stage as if endeavouring to establish his sea-legs.
He stops short of emulating the poet's baldness, though Larkin's claim to have "as much expression as a lump of sugar" was not strictly true, as his countenance bore the perfect, domed eloquence of a freshly laid egg. Ian Brown directs an unobtrusive production, to which Tim Hateley's box-room set adds a bit of visual impact, though the sole element of transformation comes when Courtenay slips into a beige cardigan after the interval.
But the, Larkin once declared that one of the most liberating moments in his life came with the realisation that one could walk out of the theatre. So it was a credit to Courtenay's performance that we were still around to see it.
· Until December 21. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
