Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 15: 1984 –“Do you mean he dwank?”
The Theatre Chronicles – Part 15: 1984 –“Do you mean he dwank?”
“Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
While 1984 was a busy year for me as an aspiring young professional actor, an embryonic director, a paid writer, and an erratically present father and husband with yet another very lovely mouth to feed, it was also a year of reckoning.
Apart from Edward Thomas’s poem “The Other” and a common sense of being destined to joust with one’s alter ego(s) until we cease, another sense of other is the strange and confusing process of trying to work out which Frostian road to take in the kaleidoscope of possibilities. Both out there and within you – what are these “others”, in work, in love, in life, all with beginnings, middles and ends, of uncertain lengths?
How do you choose? Or do they choose you? Is it all “written”, as the well-travelled American woman of a certain age told me when, aged 18, I met her outside the youth hostel in Naples, a much-thumbed, terminally unfinished copy of James Joyce’ “Ulysses” in my hand? Who led me by the other through the terraced gardens of the old palazzo to a shady spot high above the wine-dark sea lapping liquorously below; where she proceeded to seduce me while telling me that she had been shown the date of her death by a long-bearded sage in a cave in Nepal, so she was making the most of it while she could, pace-maker and all. And so she did until, to my shame, I got the giggles, which rather broke the spell.
The Careers Master at school, like most such people, hadn’t a clue, of course. How could he when he hardly knew you and had such a limited palette to play with? Given the expensive education my parents had kindly thrust upon me, I guessed a Train Driver was already out of the question, let alone the healthy outdoorsy kind of jobs to earn a crust while penning my epic contemporary cross between Homer’s Iliad and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Sure enough: Lawyer? No. Civil servant? No. Banking? Who, me? Accountant? Don’t make me laugh. Teacher? Dead Poets Society didn’t come out till ’89, but... Publishing? Ah, well, but how/where/what/when? Journalism? Hmm, could be interesting dodging bullets in a war zone somewhere scary but I wanted to be a Writer, not the more likely hack for flower shows and parish council meetings (little did I know what awaited me at the West Somerset Free Press a few years later, despite the treasures to be found there, including M. Hesp Esq.). And so on.
Unsurprisingly, we didn’t get anywhere and off I went to university without a clue as to what I might do with an English Literature degree, should I survive the course (which I nearly didn’t), and then fumbled my way through the dice-game that fate threw, mostly in my favour, thereafter.
By 1984, then, I was a working actor, a performed playwright, an unpublishable poet, a father to three, and a husband to one. In 1984 I turned 32 and should have been happy and grateful to be in gainful employment in a notoriously fickle calling. And I was, except – there was always this “other” just out of reach.
What was this “other”? It was, I suppose, the poet, the novelist, the actor, the artist, the craftsman – the things I felt I had never quite become for all the flirting round the edges. I mean the one whose slim Faber & Faber volume joins those hallowed names on the shelf; whose performance of Hamlet still resonates in the minds of those who were there; whose hand-blown glass of sublime proportions sings with the translucence of a sliding Herefordshire brook. All I wanted, in other words, was to be the interpreter of beauty and the Great Themes of Life through the differing media and materials of art, craft, music, words, and “O for a muse of fire” sheer presence on a given stage.
What a tosser! you might well think. Not without reason.
Born the youngest of three boys with a battered but nevertheless well-polished Georgian silver spoon in the mouth, the detritus of a once tenant-farming, whisky distilling Scottish family in the 18th century, made good in the cotton trade at the turn of the 19th century, made somewhat less good come the First World War, the last dribble of cotton cash giving out with the demise of two maiden aunts in the 1960’s, I had it pretty easy all things considered in my early years.
But the right names on the right pieces of paper mean very little come the crunch of working out how to make ends meet with what true wits “the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us”, as Robbie Burns said. A posh accent and an MA Cantab, or the Oxon equivalent, can get you quite a way as we know from our current Prime Minister and others of his ilk, but heaven help us if we allow ourselves to think it confers anything other than a buffed, or scuffed in the PM’s case, walnut-esque veneer on the reality beneath. And the perceptive amongst us can spot a chancer, if not a charlatan, pretty quick after the second pint.
So, clearly, the more high-falutin’ ambitions were not going to happen, then or now, and would remain firmly on the shelf marked manqué. But I tried, as most of us do, and had my moments, as many of us do. And 1984 was a wonderfully busy year, despite the reckoning underneath.
As for the wider world, it felt a long way away, most of the time, until those moments of sudden realisation that the ground we walk on, the walls and windows that keep us warm and protected from less welcome chills, the garden of good things out there – the life, in short, we are privileged to lead, if lucky enough to be alive, kicking and well – are built on sand. And the tide is coming in.
In a burst of play-as-cast company theatre in my local rep, the Redgrave Theatre, Farnham, 1984 started with the last two weeks of Lerner and Loewe’s 1965 musical “My Fair Lady”, based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” which he wrote in 1913.
This was my first taste of a great, in this case one of the greatest, classic musicals on a fairly big stage, with a brilliant Higgins played by RSC stalwart, Richard Easton, fresh from John Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” at the Old Vic Theatre, London.
Strangely, I too was to give my Higgins later in the year – but a very different Higgins in a very different story, one which brought me face to face with the Miners’ Strike in perhaps the most bizarre juxtaposition you could imagine. But that, as they say, was all to come before this singular year had dropped its leaves.
Meanwhile, I played at least three parts – it felt like more – in “My Fair Lady”, covering the social spectrum of the turn of the century from “’Arry”, one of “I’m ge’in’ married in the morning” Doolittle’s sidekicks, to a servant in the Higgins household, to Lord Boxington at the Ascot Races where still Cockney Eliza famously scandalises all and sundry with her “Move yer bloomin’ arse!”
Not having had to sing in complex harmony and dance to strict choreography at the same time before, it was a challenge. Despite my mother’s ballroom dance classes as a child, a musical ear and an ability to read music through playing the fiddle, it all helped but it wasn’t enough. My post-grad year of training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and dancing through the centuries with the Young National Trust Theatre, let alone a soft-shoe shuffle Tiger in David Wood’s “Meg and Mog Show” at the Unicorn Theatre with Maureen Lipman as Meg a couple of years before, should have helped more but this was another level altogether. It was hard work, even with the luxury of three weeks rehearsal, but in the end we got it, “by George we got it!”, as Colonel Pickering would say.
Having only a handful of lines as Lord Boxington, I decided that an aristocratic speech impediment might help things along a bit. So I removed my blooming “r’s”, replacing them with “w’s” which gave a touch more resonance to the phrase: “D’you mean he drank?” in a comment on some boozy old buffer during the races. As time went on, I childishly allowed the “d” of “d-wank” to become more associated with the “he”, as in “he’d”, than the rest of the final word. This resulted, three weeks in, with a sudden, uncontrollable fit of giggles, or corpsing as it’s known, from Higgins as the penny finally dropped.
I got my comeuppance immediately after the curtain came down. The normally indulgent Col. Pickering, played by long-standing trouper and arch-ex-RSC veteran, Michael Shannon, gave me a stern ticking-off for being unprofessional, thoroughly deserved, I have to say. Alas, it was not the only time I was accused of a lapse in professionalism in 1984, but that came right at the end in my sixth and final, Christmas show for the Redgrave company that year, of which more later.
Three jobs like buses all came at once in the early part of the year: performing MFL in the evening, rehearsing the next show as Charley in “Charley’s Aunt” during the day and writing a new play for the Young National Trust Theatre in the bits in between. It was all very exciting. I was a working thesp!
But not only was the birth of a new member of our family becoming more imminent by the day, “The Other” in me was thinking, prompted by serious, not to say difficult, conversations with the person I’d pledged to share my life with – how is this sustainable? What kind of father/husband/caring, reliable, supportive, trustworthy and productive human being did I aspire to be?
Acting in silly, late Victorian farces in cosy regional repertory theatres on Equity minimum rates, while having fun with a lovely bunch of similarly slightly lost, queer souls – was what it was all about? Some, like me, were early on in their performing lives, some were stuck in the middle, some were staring pennilessly towards the end, all of us working all day and a good part of the night, before driving home late in our dented cars to a lonely bed or, in my case, one getting fuller by the day. Was this the sum total of my hopes and ambitions as an actor, let alone as a functioning partner in a growing family?
All right, “where-the-nuts-come-from Charley’s Aunt” is a classic as farces go, even when mucked about by an overly ambitious young director who decided to turn it into a surreal pastiche of itself thereby almost wrecking the whole point of farce. This is, very simply, to play it straight as a die however silly and improbable. The faster it goes, the more incredible it gets, the more credibly you must play out the crazy logic of the thing as if it was the most terrifyingly real experience in your whole life. Only then does it become the hysterically joyful nightmare of doors, beds and mistaken identities beloved of any audience anywhere. Not an easy thing to attempt, as writer, director or actor, let alone do well. Oh, to have played in a great Georges Feydeau production, Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off”, an episode of “Fawlty Towers”, let alone “Father Ted”.
‘Twas not to be but at least three year old Josh, on seeing our director’s witty armless statue placed artfully on the set as some completely unwarranted comment on the style of the piece, said, “No arms, Daddy. But she’s got a fanny,” and waltzed off boisterously singing “Oi’m ge’in married in the morning”.
But what else was I to do? How else could I attempt to pay the bills while somehow playing to what talents, capabilities at least, I had? Was it worth hanging in there in the hope of “The Big Break” which might not, probably wouldn’t, ever come, never mind what Dyan Cannon said to me after our big, bedroom scene on the somewhat-less-than-silver screen later that year?
And if it did – what then? Join the string of divorced, forgotten, one-time stars on Sunset Boulevard? Have my moment with the gliding swans of Stratford-upon-Avon in the hope I could join the pantheon of heroes playing all the great parts? Even take off around the world on a National Theatre tour or two and still end up probably penniless, drunk and lonely in a bedsit in Farnham, playing out my days as the world of repertory theatre died beneath my ailing, gout-ridden feet?
If it didn’t, what was my “Other”, other than this somewhat dwanky playground of a theatre world, for all the primal value and virtues that entertainment brings? How could we survive as a family with integrity and some means of paying the bills that might take more into account the uncomfortable reality of the time?
It’s worth remembering that in 1984, Raymond Briggs’ apocalyptic “When the Wind Blows” had been published just two years earlier in 1982. Nuclear-armed US Cruise missiles had been coming into Greenham Common since November ’83. The Cold War was at its highest level of tension since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963. And on 23 September that year, Barry Hines’ “Threads”, depicting nuclear devastation over Britain, was shown to a shocked BBC audience of 6.9 million.
Pretty grim stuff really that significantly swelled the number of supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and prompted many a heated debate between those who believed in the principle of nuclear deterrence – by this time known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD – and those who believed the potential for accidental, let alone intentional nuclear conflict, was as high as it had ever been, the Doomsday Clock being set at three minutes to midnight.
So: a choice between being blown to smithereens at any moment, which rather made the whole thing pointless, so why not carry on regardless? Or watch the Conservative Government under Mrs Thatcher progressively dismantle not only the unions, the nationalised industries and the Welfare State but the core principle of fairness and equality in health, education and citizenship as a whole, so painstakingly fought for, inch by inch, over the previous 200 years.
Neither of the above being particularly attractive prospects and not being exactly an activist where politics was concerned, Greenham bicycles apart, I decided that the only thing was to call my bluff on being a writer. At least I could do that at home and be more on hand to share in the demands and rewards of parenthood, I thought. But it still left the problem of how to pay the bills.
I could have attempted other ways and worlds, such as Advertising which, ironically, was beginning to help keep us afloat with the occasional commercial despite the endless disappointments and the underlying humiliation of the “cattle-market” approach.
So often I would find myself in some dingy Soho backstreet, looking through the labels in the doorway to know which bell to press. Was it: Discipline and Correction by Well-starched Matron? Probably not. Nubile New Arrival in Town? No. Ah, Exotic Film Studios? Mmm, maybe not. And then finally the name of the company given to me by my agent, Jan, with a: “Here you are, darling. Instant Mash. 3 pm tomorrow, Soho. Paul again, he obviously loves you, darling. Amanda will give you details later. Bye!” And there they would all be, the same faces, time after time, all up for the same part with the same look, in the same clothes, half of which I wouldn’t be seen dead in back in the real world.
“Next!” would come the cry from a coke-addled assistant and you’d walk in to blank, bored faces in the harshly lit room, say your line a couple of times, have a brief chat and walk out again. Straight into the welcoming fug of the Blue Posts pub at the top of Berwick Street Market or the Coach and Horses, Greek Street, alongside Jeffrey Bernard & co., where you could recover a semblance of equilibrium and dignity amongst a clock going backwards and the comforting detritus of the human race.
Some casting sessions were better than others, of course. You might even get a smile or two. And then the wait. What would it be? Silence? Which meant not a sausage in Samarkhand. A “pencil”? Which meant you were in with a chance. Or: “Darling?” in those inimitable husky tones, promising heaven or hell at the toss of a coin. “You’ve got it! Epsom Racecourse on Tuesday. Early start. £200 plus repeats.” And on Tuesday, after being forced to eat cold instant mash on too many takes, with inch perfect close-ups on your look of orgasmic ecstasy, which gets harder by the 15th take, having sat around waiting for most of a damp, chilly day after a 4 am pick-up in the limo; a few weeks later – the reward. Including the magic word “repeats”, which were a life-saving royalty every time they showed it on ITV. My record was featuring in three different commercials in one ad break, which is not supposed to happen, but from which we managed to buy a sofa from Habitat, have a weekend in the Isle of Wight, drink champagne together in the bath after the children had gone to bed and, briefly, breathe a sigh of relief that we could pay the rent, buy food and clothing, and not worry about tax until the moment of panic-stricken horror that was to come.
So I owe advertising a debt for our survival in the precarious world of acting. Furthermore, it provided a beloved friend, star of the advertising world and one-time Afghan-coated, Bohemian fellow Cambridge student, with shiny, red, whale-tailed supercars. Rashly, he would lend them to me from time to time in order for me to end up in a variety of magistrate’s courts pleading ignorance of how I could possibly have been going that fast at two o’clock in the morning on a deserted motorway when I was used to driving a 33 year old Austin Devon that might hit 70 on a downhill stretch. If you were lucky.
Amazingly, I kept my license but that was more due to my acting skills and a soft-hearted presiding magistrate, bless her, than the exercise of justice. But somehow, for all the potential rewards, the “dog eat dog” world of hard-nosed commercial derring-do felt anathema to me, wanting simply, as my diary of those days says: “…a place to live and grow and reach and reap – but not stagnate in penniless frustration.” In other words, have my home-baked cake and eat it.
My supreme “Other”, as always, was to be a writer, a poet, if possible, which was both terrifying in the thought of exposing my inadequacies to the world in print, should I be lucky enough to be published in the first place, and not possible without other means of financial support, particularly with five mouths to feed, self included. As it was, the odd, all-too-welcome cheque from the Bank of Mum and Dad in which we were fortunate enough to hold a long-standing account, helped keep the yawning abyss at bay.
Heroes such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the height of his powers in 1797, seduced not just anyone who met him with his brilliant conversation and ground-breaking verse style and imagery but also Thomas Wedgwood, pioneer photographer and scion of the famous pottery family, who gave him an annual stipend of £150 per annum for life. Handy for a poet, who from 1798 onwards was in decline no little thanks to the infamous Kendal Black Drop to which opiate he became hopelessly addicted over the next 35 years, despite the God-given role it played in the dream of Kubla Khan, so rudely interrupted by the Person from Porlock. Sadly, no patron has yet emerged willing and able to do the same for me.
Or Edward Thomas, killed in the Battle of Arras in 1917 having only just discovered, thanks to Robert Frost, his extraordinary gift and unique voice as a poet. His first published work “Six Poems” emerged under the nom-de-plume Edward Eastaway, out of fear that he would be trashed by the critics. Those remarkable poems were the only ones published in his lifetime out of the 60 or so to be found in his collected works. 16 of those poems were written in just 20 days in January 1915. And he lived on the bread-line most of his life.
Financial survival apart, what about Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Thomas Hardy, or my contemporary poets of choice, Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes? If only my name had begun with “H”. But, H-less or not, I was never going to be a William Butler Yeats, let alone any of the Thomas’s. I wasn’t Irish, Welsh, even Anglo-Irish, or Anglo-Welsh, let alone Roman Catholic, Protestant or Pagan, for all my seduction by the Celtic Twilight to be found in those early Irish and Welsh poems such as “The Wooing of Etain”:
“Fair lady, will you travel
To the marvellous land of stars?
Pale as snow the body there
Under a primrose crown of hair.”
- and Dafydd ap Gwilym’s “The Woodland Mass”:
“A pleasant place I was at today,
Under mantles of the worthy green hazel
Listening at day’s beginning
To the skilful cock thrush
Singing a splendid stanza
Of fluent signs and symbols..”
– all in translation, of course, thereby losing the haunting rhythm and rhyme scheme of the originals in Irish and Welsh, and all from the so-called darker ages which were full of so much light and colour in their verse, their Books of Hours and their decorative, dazzlingly-painted architecture. I fell in love with so many of them, these surviving vestiges from oral folklore and ancient manuscripts when I discovered them back in the ’70s and, not unsurprisingly, found it hard to escape the romance of the imagery and language, even in translation.
“Voice” is at the heart of it, where poetry is concerned, and the likes of Dylan Thomas, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, even such as Heaney, Hughes and, more recently for me, R.S.Thomas, all have their dangers. Leaving aside the poets’ own recorded readings – have you heard T. S. Eliot reciting his own work? – the written words, like an Australian accent, taint you with their cadences as you immerse yourself in them in turn until you find you’ve lost it, your own voice, supposing you had one in the first place.
How not to be derivative or unintentionally parodic even, at its worst? It’s something I still struggle with until those moments when something happens – a coincidence of place, time, energy, inspiration, if you like, can create the hwl from which something true can come. Robert Graves believed passionately in the power of the “Muse”, something he ascribed to a magical state derived from the mother-mistress he called “The White Goddess”, a Cerridwen both cruel and kind in equal measure, but without whom, he swore, no true poem could emerge.
I bashed on regardless, hoping that, in between acting, writing and, with luck, more directing jobs to come, I could, in time, achieve something approaching a Work that had merit one way or another.
Having failed to persuade Stephen Barry at the Redgrave to take on my proposal for a dramatised version of Thomas’s “The Other” – I forget his reasons: money? obscurity? timing? worth? – as we retired to the Gents in time-honoured fashion after our chat at the bar, he offered me the sop of a small part as Baron von Swieten in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”, due to open on 11th September, running through to early October. Edgar Metcalfe took on the role of Salieri and Kit Thacker, who was to play an important role in my life in times to come, was Mozart.
Meanwhile, the 1984 West Indies Cricket Team completed a comprehensive “white-wash” of the England team, 5-0 in the Test Series over the Summer, with Viv Richards and Ian Botham battling it out on their respective sides instead of having fun together for Somerset County Cricket Club outside the tests. I’d once sat up in the commentary box with Henry “Blowers” Blofeld, reporting in my role as the West Somerset Free Press “Star Match” correspondent on a match between Somerset and the touring West Indies Cricket team in 1977. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young and watching Joel Garner pounding down the wicket was very heaven”, as William Wordsworth might have said. Highlights in 1984 were Gordon Greenidge’s 214 not out in the 2nd Test, old Viv cracking 5,000 Test runs and young Both becoming the first cricketer to achieve the “triple double” of 300 wickets and 3,000 runs in Tests.
It was in between the 1st and 2nd Tests that Fela Kuti performed his spell-binding 35 minute set of “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” at the Glastonbury CND Festival in between sets from The Smiths, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Joan Baez, Fairport Convention, Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg – the list goes on. Michael Eavis raised £60,000 for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with Monsignor Bruce Kent, Chairman of CND, to receive the cheque, and Paddy “Pants Down” Ashdown on hand to cheer them on. I wish I’d been there to cheer them on too.
