John Sessions RIP

John Sessions checked out my arse on sunny Goodge Street. I was very flattered. I had the sort of arse that caught the eye and the imagination in those days, and I was very pleased it was him. John Sessions was a hero of mine. 

In the late 80's and 90's Sessions' pell mell and sweaty solo shows were the closest I ever got to theatre. A man in a room on a mostly bare stage telling ludicrous stories and spinning nonsense out of awkward collisions between low and high art. Posturing, preening, doing all the voices, all the contortions, and smuggling in, under the guise of improv, real, surprising writing. He snuck it in there, right before my greedy face and I was like a pig at a trough. He performed Napoleon's campaigns, Turner painting The Fighting Temeraire and the Biblical War in Heaven - the obvious stuff of comic material - and I was dazzled. I needed to look these things up: I needed to hit the books and find out who Pinter was and why he spoke like that. Imagine hitting the library after a comedy gig now. I miss this: archness, difficulty, art aimed over my head. It's impossible to imagine - those days have been demographically streamlined out of existence and those shows would never get on telly now - they'd struggle to get in a theatre. 

You can't get them on DVD. Apparently no one wants them. 

He was always funny too. Its not enough to be just clever - and in truth Sessions was in those days always desperate to show people how clever he was. I understand it - he talked at length about his impostor syndrome, his depression, his feeling of never being good enough. I feel you, John (though I never did on Goodge Street). But he was always funny. 

I loved John Sessions. His perm. His grin. His tongue sticking out. His certain knowledge that he was rubbing people up the wrong way and he couldn't help it because that was who he was. In later years he became a character actor of gravity and detail, a classy bit of furniture dressing a set, always perfectly placed. In his private life he became a curmudgeon, embracing his oddness: a seething Brexiteer and an ardent Sherlockian. It didn't put me off him. It seemed like he had painted himself into a corner. He had become the sort of irascible old don that he was always destined to be. Having views.   

He's dead at 67 which is far too young. He should have had another twenty years in which to turn into Margaret Rutherford, the part he was born to play, alongside Napoleon, J M W Turner, Satan and Keith Richard. Another little bit of my youth has been chipped away and another one of the good people gone. And I'll not get to meet him, apart from that fleeting buttock-based moment in North London. Shame.