Actor Jeremy Irons, who famously played Charles Ryder in the 1981 Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited, recently made another visit to its setting. He was artist in residence at the Ryedale Festival in which he appeared in “A Meeting of the Minds.” He read lines from T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton set to the music of Beethoven’s final quartets. One of the performances took place in the Long Gallery at Castle Howard, which stood in for Brideshead Castle in the TV series, as well as the later theatrical film version. Irons is pictured in this story from a local newspaper, the Malton & Pickering Mercury, with his wife and the current occupants of Castle Howard. Additional performances of this and other compositions took place throughout the region, including at Ampleforth College where Evelyn Waugh stayed in 1937 on his only recorded visit to Castle Howard (Diaries, p. 420). The festival ends tomorrow.
