A Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography

Prelude:

Memory Man, 1940

1940. The second year of World War II.

The boy was about sixteen. He had a wash of spring greens about the gills, boasting a wealth of inexperience and self-doubt. Never done this before, well, only inside his locked bedroom, entirely by himself, facing the wardrobe mirror, singing Cleaning Windows along with George Formby on the Ferguson music centre, followed by Formby’s brilliantly punctuated plonks and puddly-dum-dums on the uke. The boy had all that off to a tee, practising finger-rolls every day on his bus ticket in the back seat of the bus on his way to school. Plunk-a-dunk-a-diddly-dunk-a-diddly-diddly-dunka-dunka! Disregarding suspicious stares from passing bus conductor.

Never done it because he never had the nerve, so what was he doing now at a local talent contest in Allison Hall, the old red-brick Victorian Church Hall in Green Lanes, Haringey? Never done it before but something he would never forget, he was painfully, definitely backstage, so somehow he had managed to fiddle himself into the local talent show, probably because all the young men were in the war, only the grizzle-chinned old ’uns and the bum-fluffed young ’uns were free to appear! He was pretty good at playing the uke like George, pretty good at screwing up his eyes like George, singing in high-pitched Lancashire like George, very good at the plunk-diddly-plunk-dunk like George, so what was wrong with him being there, ukulele in hand – well, banjolele in hand (a banjolele is shaped like a banjo, a ukulele is shaped like a guitar), scrupulously tuned to ‘my dog has fleas’ (A-D-Fsharp-B), standing in the wings, waiting to go on and stop the show cold like George with When I’m Cleaning Windows?

Nothing wrong at all. Except for some reason, he didn’t remember anybody else being backstage, it all seemed totally deserted! It was still deserted when the moment arrived! The boy stepped on. Deep, dark silence! He walked to the centre and turned. Hell! He was blinded by spotlights spouting lava, couldn’t see a thing in the great cavern of darkness beyond, not even the monsters that certainly lurked there, and bought tickets. Absolutely no sign of any audience! Was he facing the wrong way? Was it all a dream?

He stood there, sixteen years old, a teenage ukulele virtuoso, about to stop the show! It was time to begin! He tried to release his breath but it was lodged in his throat. That’s when he went deaf. Oddly enough, he didn’t feel too faint. Because something was telling him again, it was time to begin!

He plunked his opening riff, Plunk diddly plunk plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk! Again! Plunk diddly plunk plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk!

He had the impression that he had begun to sing.

Now I go cleaning windows

To earn an honest bob … plunk a plunk!

And then he dried. Stone cold dead in de market! Remembered nothing! Not a word! He stood there looking at the invisible audience for some time, and he imagined they were looking at him, but they made no sound, not even a derisive raspberry to cheer him on. Nothing! Was he dreaming it? Maybe it was their dream? He turned and walked off in complete silence. He didn’t remember any more. Maybe they dreamed each other?

Part One

Praise But Not Quite Personal

1

Truth

The mysterious events which I am about to set before you (as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sleuth-monger and advocate, might so nicely have put it) began in the autumn of 2001, when I was invited by the Oxford Stage Company to play the part of veteran comedian, Eddie Waters, in Trevor Griffiths’ masterpiece Comedians.

I’d seen the play in its original run at the National Theatre at the Old Vic in September, 1975, 26 years earlier, with Jimmy Jewel cast right down to his roots as Eddie, the retired comedian, teaching local evening classes in comedy to as wild an assortment of racist, sexist, homophobic pupils as any racist, sexist, homophobic audience could hope to sigh for.

Jimmy Jewel was the funny half of Jewel and Warriss, the biggest stars on radio and in Variety after World War II. Then TV took over and revealed that Jimmy’s funny voice came from an equally life-crumpled face. His heavy Northern accent was loaded with baffled Mancunian squawks of sublime innocence – izzay? – dozzay? When the act broke up Jimmy astonished us again by going it alone as a really fine actor. Jimmy brought his own Truth to Eddie. He knew where he came from. He knew what made him tick. But the play demanded more. Eddie has an awful secret. He wants to do good. And this burning zeal to reform society is not explained until his final gut-wrenching scene with the rebel student, Price. Only then do we understand why he must perforce wage a war of wit and guile against his own pupils, his fame-hungry novices, clinically wielding his cerebral scalpel to analyse, satirize and vaporize jokes that hate women, degrade sex and feed on prejudice. Only then do we understand why he is concerned to nurture only the true joke of the thinking comedian, never the prejudiced jibe of the down-market comic.

According to Trevor Griffiths, ‘a true joke, a comedian’s joke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire; it has to change the situation’. In a word, make us look hard at ourselves and do something about it! Change today into tomorrow! True enough, but here I’m afraid I have to question whether this kind of Utopian social comment can come from material dreamed up by individual comics whose concern for their fellow man ends with a neurotic need for thirty minutes of well-milked filth. Change comes more from comedy writers who have the foresight and intellect to raise standards and generally to elevate the winds of change above the belt. We had this in the satirical theatre revues of the Fifties, the urbane Globe Revues, the chic Royal Court series, and particularly in the hilarious, rumbustious output of Peter Myers, Alec Grahame and Ronnie Cass, culminating in For Amusement Only where the closing scena, The Vagabond Student, was notorious for sending the ladies out of the theatre with mascara streaming down their cheeks. Here was social satire in its highest form; amateur dramatics would never be the same again. Here was a true joke to please Trevor, here was Truth a-plenty, albeit a special case, the Truth of Social Comment. The Truth that is reiterated in the final scene of Comedians where Eddie tells Price what he thinks of his grotesque variety act:

So much for the Truth of Social Comment. Telling it as it is. The wake-up call! But remember, only a special case, there is much more to it, and we will encounter many other kinds of Truth.

Patience, patience, we’ll find them soon enough.

We rehearsed in the Lower Hall of St Andrew’s and Upstream Church in Short Street, branching off the Cut where the Young Vic squats.

Several trendy restaurants had raised the tone of the area since I played there in Byron’s Marino Faliero. The one I found most inviting was I think Italian-Thai, maybe Singapore-Greek, definitely Oriental-Occidental and indisputably foreign. A sweet-faced Hindu- type lady beamed out of the window. She was wearing some kind of dark black, air hostess style uniform, which suggested she was some sort of maitresse d’. I looked at the inviting polyglot menu, switched to her inviting smile, smiled at the menu, smiled back at her smile and could not resist either. I walked through the door of the crowded restaurant, smiled my way up to her and said, ‘Do you have a table?’ and she smiled back and said, ‘I’m sorry, we are full up’ without moving a muscle. She was still smiling invitingly as I slunk out, watched by dozens of well-fed, smiling diners, wondering why she would bother to lure me in just so she could throw me out. I lunched thereafter in an unsmiling Pizza Express, a giant mankind-step downwards along The Cut, but a perfect spot to swot my lines.

The Lower Hall was large enough to take the six desks that made up the set, with Eddie’s desk on a dais at the upper end but with barely enough room at the lower end for a director, a stage manager, a dialogue coach (in au-then-ti-cal-laay accented Mancunian), or anyone else, including the author, who happened to drop by and didn’t mind standing.

The director, Sean Holmes, was a sturdy young giant with a boxer’s build, T-shirt, jeans and biceps that discouraged argument. Not that he argued with anyone, or punched anyone for that matter. If you had an idea he didn’t like, he didn’t actually reject it, he just didn’t tell it to the other actors and, starved of support, it quietly faded away. Like the time I found the ‘pupils’ didn’t react quickly enough to Eddie’s commands, thereby reducing his authority. I mentioned it to Sean. He didn’t disagree. But he didn’t tell the ‘pupils’. So I persisted, suggesting that perhaps Eddie, who had the style to be a spare-time football referee, could blow a whistle to command attention. He didn’t disagree. But he didn’t tell the ‘pupils’. So when I blew the whistle, nobody reacted. I gave up and went back to shouting at deaf ‘pupils’. Let them motivate.

Sean spoke only of the play. His method of directing was intensive, a relentless, repetitive, brain-hammering stream of consciousness, over and over and over, informing us what we had done after each run, as if we didn’t know. He never seemed to be satisfied or dissatisfied. He was a drill sergeant and we were being drilled. But he did suggest valuable bridging touches that opened up lines and links to action. And on the first night, his methods paid off; we performed impeccably, too brainwashed to even think about nerves. It was clear he had his own grand design for the play, he seemed to know exactly where he was going, we were encouraged to trust him. So what was puzzling me?

Here it comes! The first hint of something new, the first hint of an Enigma; the first flickerings of mystery in the air. Nothing cheerful and exciting to enliven rehearsals, like a severed head stuffed in the Lower Hall closet, just simply something not … quite … all there. That comes of using the word! Enigma! A curious word with various enigmatic meanings, not least that it is a darkish saying in which something is concealed beneath! Popular usage might go for a ‘dark side’. Although some prefer ‘riddle’ or hint at ‘legerdemain’.

Anyway, there we were, rehearsing well enough, an amiable bunch enjoying the exercise, going all the way with eye contact, playing to each other, finding the meanings of the words, establishing relationships, getting to know the mix of characters, all good stuff in the early stages of any rehearsal, in that all-devouring search for truth in performance.

There it is again! Another truth! Truth in Performance, which of course must include Truth of Character, Truth of Dialect, how about the Truth of Sub-text, and later on the Truth of Costume and the Truth of Setting? You may well protest that I digress too much on the many paths of boring old Truth when I was just about to lead you up a mysterious, exciting path to a young Enigma. To which I protest, dare we not digress when we are seeking the solution to an Enigma which may well have its roots in one of these kinds of Truth? And isn’t it as good a time as any to put the question that Pontius Pilate failed to answer two thousand years ago … ‘What is Truth?’

Truth, coming up so many times in Trevor’s play, the main bone of contention between Eddie and his iconoclastic pupil, Price, that way up front in rehearsal I had to pin it down, defy the mighty methodologist, Karl Popper, and dare to define it, then write it on the front of my script! First, a heavy dictionary definition: ‘Truth … the property implicitly attached to a proposition by belief in or assertion of it’.

Well, that’s no better than sterile solipsism, Cogito ergo sum, Descartes and Bishop Berkeley telling us that thinking makes it so. To claim a play is truthful because the writer and director believe in it leads to situations where the actor protests: ‘You forgot a thing called … the Truth! I am playing a gentle priest, how can I, in all truth, kill the penitent slave?’ and the director says: ‘Because it’s in the script!’ or ‘Because I say so!’, or, if he’s a really erudite and companionable fellow, ‘Because I believe it and because I assert it and because – shut up and kill the bastard!’

Let’s try another definition:

‘Truth … correspondence between a proposition … and the fact, situation or state of affairs that verifies it.’

Surely, that is more the truth we seek, truth set in objective observation and independent record, in a verifiably real world. We check it out, we research the facts, we chain our Beliefs and Assertions to the railings of Truth embedded in the concrete of Reality. Even that won’t give us the Big One, Absolute Truth, but it’s as good as it gets for our finite, pygmy minds.

Digression over, back once more to the Enigma and those first few flickerings of mystery. There was nothing unusual about the general air of approval, with perhaps even a hint of blind optimism in the room. After all it was (we believed) a brilliant play, and we were heading (we believed) for the West End, after a brief (we knew) provincial run with (we believed, as do we actors not all believe) an exemplary cast. Which said, was not the smug bubble of vanity it might seem, considering it included Martin Freeman, from the much vaunted TV series, The Office, and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; as well as the then barely known David Tennant, soon to be hailed in Dr Who as one of the finest occupants of the Tardis (and the front page of the Radio Times), and let us not forget George Leyton, from Doctor in the House, who was right on the ball as the toxic Simon Cowell of the talent-spotting showcase, and come to think of it, I wasn’t so bad myself!

But why was there no personal praise? At least from the director? There were of course, no critics yet, no audiences to give us the good word, a morsel of fulsome flattery to get us through the day. Nobody said ‘You were great!’, ‘Terrific!’, ‘My gosh, you were fantastic!’, ‘Excuse me while I get off my knees!’ – the humbler of the norms for personal praise. Nobody even sneaked in an oft and well deserved ‘Lousy!’ to give us at least a level. That didn’t suit me, I like to know where I’m at! Of course, we all know that if a pro tells you you’re ‘great’ that means you’re ‘good’, if he says you’re ‘good’, that means ‘don’t give up the day job’. Just pray that he never says you’re ‘interesting’. No matter, we have learned to keep our feet on the ground, grade down the encomiums, pick up on the plus signs, and play the game of theatrical-rhetorical. And if nobody says nothing, who cares if that’s a double negative?

Actually, to be fair and appear to contradict myself far too soon, somebody did say something. On the rare occasions when Trevor Griffiths came by for a masterclass in comedy we did enjoy a little personal praise. He said we were the best cast he’d seen in his play. Although he said that while we were still on the book, so he could have meant we were getting his words right, but I really think he almost meant we were the best. Either way, from that kindly, clever man, it was what we needed. I’ve always said there are two kinds of bores. Those who don’t know and talk. And those who know and don’t talk. Well Trevor knew and talked and illuminated and – maybe most important of all – encouraged. He just didn’t come round often enough. And maybe writers don’t count!

And it was early days, we had a long way to go. Working as an actor, I try to make an appraisal of present performance as a percentage of potential. I rated rehearsals of Comedians at forty percent. So I worked on steadily, fixing lines and moves and accent, not really deserving praise or giving it for that matter, and obviously over-reacting to the pressure of rehearsal. Nonetheless, that tiny frisson of puzzlement remained firmly lodged at the back of my very busy tiny mind.

The Enigma beckons … as Eddie Waters in Trevor Griffiths’, The Comedians.

2

Enigma

The puzzlement blossomed, took on a hint of frustration but stayed within the bounds of optimism when we opened the play in Exeter. The lovely little Northcott Theatre graces a university campus worthy of Capability Brown.

I have to admit it, I’m a sucker for universities. When I’m in Los Angeles, I gravitate towards Westwood, in Dublin I wander round Trinity … Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, you name it, I’ll find it, it’s like coming home. In London, on theatrical or any other business, I seem to be always somewhere within a mile of Senate House. I love those great buildings and open spaces with hundreds of students milling around, those immeasurably lucky young people with the world before them and all the intellectual ladders they need to climb to the top! It’s always been my world as much as Show Business has been my life, and when the two come together, as in Exeter, I am doubly blessed.

The Northcott opening was good. Sean’s direction, as I said, brainwashed us into a first night free of nerves. I was confident yet not without a tinge of anxiety, for I had qualms about drying on some of the long, didactic speeches, the savage stabs of imagery in counterpoint, that Trevor must have taken wicked delight in writing for whoever played Eddie. I did indeed go blank a couple of times, but, with a skill fine-tuned from a lifetime of lousy memory, turned the lapses into dramatic pauses. Then, by the kindest of miracles, or the subtlest of prompts (bless you, Martin Freeman, muttering my cues as if you were talking to yourself!) the words popped back into my head. Otherwise it was like a student sitting for an exam and wondering how those ice-veined inquisitors-cum-critics, lurking like basking sharks in the cold, dank, darkness of the auditorium, were going to mark our cards. After all, a first night is exactly like an examination with the critics, exactly like examiners, telling us if we’ve passed, got an A+ or failed, with the glorious difference that we, unlike examinees, get to do it all again! And if the critics are responsible, perceptive, and guide us well, and are not out to make their own names by lamentably well-written character assassinations, we can put it right before we get to town.

But the Enigma, waiting in the wings, was about to take its quirky bow. There were drinks on the Oxford Stage Company after the show, in the front of house bar. Sean Holmes said ‘What do you think?’; Dominic Dromgoole, the Artistic Director and now A.D. of the Shakespeare Globe, smiled and nodded wisely. But these were merely perfunctory in-group greetings, the thing to do when you’ve shared four weeks of hard graft and got the damned thing on. No, the enigmatic point was that not one member of the theatre staff, backstage crew or audience gave me a single word of personal praise. I don’t know if they praised the others, I was too busy wondering what I’d done wrong! I wasn’t on top of the lines yet, true. And yes, I knew from experience that I was usually bordering on 50% potential on a first night, and had a way to go. But I’d just been on the boards of the living theatre, God help me, and nobody seemed to notice I was there! Come to think of it, nobody seemed to notice anyone was there. And pros need to be told!

Mid-week, Vernon Duker, an old school mate of mine, now owner of the Palace Hotel, Torquay and a huge estate on the cliffs overlooking Brixham Harbour, came to see me with his colleague, Max, and a very attractive lady. Vernon and I were in the same class