Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 17: 1984 – “Let’s go back a little”
I went off to fetch the message for Daddy Warbucks, stage right, as always. It would be set on the silver salver, as it always had been, from the dress rehearsal on.
When you leave the stage, you go from bright light into near darkness where it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and as I reached for the salver on the little table on my right, I realised, with a jolt, that I was not alone. Normally, every night so far, I had been at that point. Now, there was someone standing there, right in front of me, looking past me to the stage. Someone who had never been there before – who should not have been there.
Momentarily fazed, instead of picking up the salver, I looked at what I saw was an elderly woman, in slightly shabby clothes, a coat, half done up – it was December and cold outside – and a woolly hat over the grey hair of her head. A bit like my Mum.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?” I whispered. We were right next to the stage.
“My son,” she said. “I’m looking for my son.” I worried that her voice would carry through into the auditorium.
“You shouldn’t be here. We’re in the middle of a show,” I whispered.
“I need to find my son,” she said, again too loudly.
At that moment, I heard a bellow from the stage.
“Drake!” and again, louder, “Drake!!”
I’d missed my cue. I grabbed the salver and, leaving the strange woman behind, half ran back on stage.
“Mr Warbucks, sir. A message for you.”
“About time!” improvised a wrathful Daddy W. With a glare, he took the message and on we went.
The one great sin, apart from forgetting your lines, corpsing, coming on pissed and a myriad other bloopers that can happen in a show, is missing your cue ie not being on stage when you should be. From time to time it can happen. Actors have been known to be playing cards or various games – Scrabble was a favourite in our dressing-room – or in the loo or listening to the cricket. In one show I remember, an actor with not many lines to say was actually listening to John Arlott’s Gloucestershire burr mid-Test match overseas with his head-phones under his wig and missed his cue on stage. But it can be a sacking offence and you risk not working at that theatre again.
The first thing I did, when the curtain came down on that evening’s show in the five week run of “Annie” over Christmas, was go to David’s dressing-room and abjectly apologise. I explained what had happened. He was not impressed. He was, after all, the star of the show, along with the little red-haired horrors that alternated as Annie. He was right to be thoroughly pissed off. Nevertheless, the show must go on, which it did, and my funny walk as the butler, Drake, continued to get a laugh every time I came on stage – well, Max Wall has a lot to answer for, including John Cleese.
But what had happened in the wings, in the middle of the show, had never happened to me before. Or since for that matter.
Who was that woman? I wondered. I asked everyone if they’d seen her but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. She was there. I saw her, I told them. All I got were puzzlement, shrugs and a few funny looks, as if suggesting that I must have been “on” something or had made it up to cover my gaffe.
And her son. Was it one of the cast? But no-one seemed to know anything about a disturbed, possibly demented elderly woman, who might be looking for them.
A mystery then. Or – had I imagined her in some brief psychotic episode? Was I worried about my Mum for some reason? Or – surely not. Some kind of ghost?
She was nowhere to be seen after the show and neither I nor anyone else ever saw her again.
A bottle of the best vintage port somewhat assuaged Daddy W.’s ire and you can be sure I never missed my cue again. When it comes to forgetting lines though, that was to come. In the form of what is called a catastrophic “dry”.
It was the next show after “Annie”. It was time I played a villain, Stephen said, as we shook off the last drops in the Gents. The villain in question was called Michael Starkwedder – or was he…?
The play of the book, “The Unexpected Guest”, by none other than Dame Agatha Christie, opens with my character coming through the french windows in a swirl of Welsh mist. So you know he’s the villain before anybody says a word. Or is he…?
The first scene is a nightmare. 16 pages with just me and a woman first seen standing upstage (at the back of the stage) who I don’t see when I come into the room because my attention is focused on a man, seemingly asleep in a wheelchair in the centre of the stage, set in classic ’50s drawing-room style.
Except he’s not asleep. He’s dead. Not the best part, really, for an actor. It’s usually played by a stage hand or someone who looks more or less the right age for a big-game hunter who was mauled by a lion a few years back, unlike most stage hands, hence the wheelchair.
Within a handful of lines, the woman, Laura, has produced a gun from where it was concealed in her frock and confessed to the murder of the man in the wheelchair. Why? Because “he drank,” (pronounced “drenk” in that fashionable ’50s, upper-middle-class way), “he was cruel” and she’d “hated him for years.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, murder is murder and she wants to give herself up.
But I have other ideas. After all, Laura is “a very attractive woman”, and I, Starkwedder, am curious to “know what it’s all about”. So we spend the next 12 pages or so, covering the background and manoeuvring round the furniture – and that was the problem.
With Agatha Christie, not only do you have to weave an intricate way through a convoluted plot, you also have to plot a path round the furniture in a way that stitches the whole thing together, the one dependent on the other. That’s how you learn it in rehearsal, how you know where you are. So on the opening night you’ve had 8 whole days’ rehearsal to get it all fixed with satellite navigational precision (not that they had that in 1985) – words (and there were a lot of them), moves, gestures, etc. Hence if, by any chance, you drop a stitch e.g. miss one of those moves, or get them in the wrong order, the whole thing goes out of kilter.
There they were, the good burghers of Farnham town, dressed in their finery, stretching back, row after row, looking forward to an evening’s entertainment of a thoroughly untaxing kind – for them, that is. And all was going so swimmingly until five pages in. That was when I dropped the stitch.
Talking all the while, I’d gone over to the desk, tick. I’d opened the top and looked inside, tick. I’d pulled out the drawer, tick. I’d taken out the revolver – not tick. I’d not taken out the revolver. Why not? I should have taken it out to emphasise the line coming up. But I hadn’t. Why not?? Where am I?! Oh God. And it had all been going so frightfully well.
Rule Number One: never, ever, allow yourself to think it’s all hunky-dory on the opening night so you can, metaphorically, just sit back and enjoy it. Especially after only 8 days rehearsal, as was the way with rep in the day. I know that now and I learnt it then.
You know that dream where you don’t know who or where you are, a bit like The Prisoner, if you remember that. Or Pinter. That’s where I was. In No Man’s Land.
Lost, bewildered, I felt a growing sense of panic rising in me in the certain knowledge that I had no idea of what came next. Mind you, that was nothing to the look of pure terror in poor Pauline Benyon’s eyes – she was Laura – as she realised that I had “gone”.
We were revolving round the sofa as I rashly but understandably extemporised on what I could remember of the plot, in a way that might have been funny if it had been a bedroom farce but it wasn’t. It was Agatha effing Christie.
After about half an hour – well, that’s what 30 seconds feels like in that kind of situation – I gave up and uttered the fateful word that fortunately one rarely hears but has been known to fall from the lips of one or two very much better known actors than me.
“Line”, I said, in a firm, in-character-ish tone – Starkwedder is a bluff, moustachioed, ex-pat kind of chap, who throws his hat into armchairs in strange houses and believes he has a way with women and the world that is irresistible.
There was a distant rustling of pages somewhere off-stage right like the opening sally of the mighty wind of doom.
“Line!” I said again, more strongly this time, beginning to hope that this was all a terrible version of the actor’s nightmare and that I might wake up in a moment in my bed at home.
Then came a quavering voice from off-stage right.
“Let’s go back a little.”
Stunned, I thought – what do you mean: “let’s go back a little”? Back where? How far? I can’t. I can’t!
In desperation, I tried one very last time, this time with the life-blood draining out of my catatonic body, deep into the Surrey earth below, through the soles of my highly polished brogues.
“Line?”
By now, I could hear murmuring from the audience as they now not only realised just what had happened but were deciding whether to walk out in disgust or mockingly enjoy this abject display going on in front of them in the full glare of the theatre lights.
“You’ve hated your husband for a long time,” came the line, eventually. And then the penny dropped. Of course! “Let’s go back a little” was a line. My line. The one before: “You’ve hated your husband…”. Suddenly I knew where I was and we picked it up and on we went.
It took more than a bottle of port to rebuild even a smidgin of trust between Pauline and I, let alone the good fun we’d had putting it all together in rehearsal. And we had four weeks of the thing to run. Every night as we approached the same spot I felt the cold sweat trickling down my back and my heart rate rising but we got through it. I did work there again, many times. My Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for one, with a highlight as Doc Harding in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” in which I did, indeed, fly.
Corpsing, on the other hand, is a sin which can rightly be called agonisingly, appallingly delicious. On stage, there is an unwritten rule that if you get the uncontrollable giggles it should be something shared with the audience rather than a private joke between those on stage. Easier said than done, as they say.
My most literal experience of corpsing was in a play called “Bury the Dead”, an expressionist, anti-war work by American playwright Irwin Shaw, written and first performed in 1936. It was chosen by one of our tutors at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, who decided, perhaps unwisely, that it would be a good end-of-year show for the students, of whom I was one.
I played a doctor who, at one point, had to inspect a line of the fallen who had become the living-dead, for no doubt good expressionist, anti-war reasons, and were, all 15 of them, standing up, facing up-stage, in other words with their backs to the audience. I, on the other hand, was above them, facing down-stage, with the entire focus of the audience in the handsome 18th century, Bristol Old Vic Theatre, on my face.
My job was to inspect them, one by one, commenting aloud on their terrible wounds as I passed along the line from left to right. What the audience couldn’t see but I could, from inches away, was the fact that each “corpse” had cooked up a mix of the most ridiculous expressions, obscene, suggestive gestures and, in one case, an open fly with something like an uncooked chipolata poking through.
I made it to the third one, I think, before, despite my best efforts, which only made it worse of course, my façade of forensic, medical gravity started to crack. By the fifth or sixth, my words were emerging in gasps and all attempts at maintaining my all-purpose American accent had collapsed.
I got to the seventh, with still the other half to go, and there, glistening in the red and green glow from the atmospheric back lighting, was the uncooked chipolata. Well, I’m only human. Despite the fact he later told me it was his wiggling finger, rather than a semi-tumescent schlong, it was the final straw. I threw in the towel.
On stage, the only thing you can do, apart from run straight off stage, is turn up-stage. Which is what I did, hoping my shaking shoulders were expressing grief and anger at the horrors of war, rather than paroxysms of laughter, mixed with a kind of outrage at these unfair and unprofessional tricks being played on the one person the audience could actually see full-on – me. Not unlike the time, on the last night of David Wood’s The Meg and Mog Show, also at Farnham on this occasion, when I had to retrieve a tiger’s tooth from between the hairy buttocks of the person who normally handed it to me off-stage left. Bad enough, you might think, but it was the sucking noise as I retrieved it that finished me off. Or… but no. I would hate to spoil the illusion of the theatre-goers amongst you that professionalism reigns supreme the other side of the proscenium arch.
What is it about dead bodies, though? Another show at the Bristol Old Vic while still a student was called “Love’s Sacrifice”, a 17th century play by John Ford in the genre of what is known as “Revenge Tragedy”, which tells you all you need to know, really. Sure enough, by the end of the play, there was a pile of bodies on the stage who had come to a variety of sticky ends.
Unfortunately, I came to my sticky end not first but second, with a third end of stickiness on top of me to complete the pile. All went well – ohh, aghhh, unhhh, we went in turn, dropping, as requested by the director, in a neat, run-through stack, sufficiently up-stage for those few still left alive to walk around us.
All went well – except that the person on the bottom of the pile, in a miraculously undead moment, suddenly sneezed. Well, that was it. I can’t remember who started first but when you’re on top of each other like that, the slightest movement travels up and down through all of you in a single rippling vibration.
It wasn’t long before we were all three shaking and trembling like “jello on springs”, as Jack Lemon described Marilyn Monrow’s ripplingly upholstered posterior when he and Tony Curtis were tripping over each other’s high heels behind her on the station platform in “Some Like It Hot”.
As soon as one of us regained control, another would go again and off we’d all go, shaking and trembling as we desperately tried to suppress the Mt. Etna on the point of eruption that was each one of us, let alone all three. Please God, we prayed, let the lights fade to black, the curtain come down, the ground open up, anything, just please let it end. The agony and the ecstasy, wrapped up in one chained and bolted Harry Houdini parcel, with no immediate means of escape.
But it did end, as it always does; the lights go down, the curtain falls, and you move on to the next appallingly delicious moment that springs out at you when you least expect it, like the phone-call that turns out one night to be for you…
Alcohol, unfortunately, is one of those latent risks that usually plays a more expected part and tends to be a habitual problem rather than someone having a freak extra pint in the pub before the show.
It can become something you rely on to get you on stage, starting with the first night and then night after night. On tour it can be even worse. You’re away from home. You may or may not get on with the company, one of whom you’re sharing a room with. You may be having troubles at home that you don’t know how to deal with. The list goes on and on. There’s always a reason for another drink, before, after, and sometimes even during the show. Before you know it, you can’t live without it, even though somewhere you know it’s damaging your ability to do everything that’s needed, both professionally and in other aspects of life.
The worst is when you see someone with all the talent in the world, a great actor – once. But then to see them stagger about the stage, slur the words, if they can remember them at all or, almost worst of all, not know what they might do next; it’s ruinous. It ruins them, their reputation and their health; and those who have to share the stage with them to lose all trust, and worse, respect for this person who has become no more than a liability to themselves and others, let alone to the play itself.
All it takes for things to boil over, or become apparent not just to your fellow actors but the audience as well, is the trip, the fall, the stumble, the dry, when things grind to an embarrassing halt or have to be variously covered up by those around you. Then, quite often, action needs to be taken, a moment of reckoning for you and the company.
I was once running an endless, months’ long gig that stretched all of us to our absolute limits but one of us more than the rest. I knew nothing of this until one evening, after yet another long hard day, things boiled over in the bar of our hotel. A glass was smashed. Someone was threatened. And then it all came out. I won’t go into the details for obvious reasons but that person never worked for us again. It was too risky. It may well be we could have tried but – why should we? In the kind of pressure we operated under, there are some things you just don’t want to have to think about, let alone deal with. So you don’t.
It could have been me, quite easily, in any of the alcohol-related scenarios described above. Except for the incident with the glass. I spent far too long away from home for years and years, even more so after I stopped being a “jobbing actor” and became more of an impresario, in the sense of creating shows, putting companies together and running programmes with my colleagues in AKT.
I was always fond of a drop, as they say, and I still am, if not quite in the “hell-raising” Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed class. But my one golden rule is: never have a drink before the gig. Wait till the job’s done. And despite, on rare occasions, stretching the night before too close to its limit (I can still hear the cuckoos at dawn before filming “The Forgotten Story”) that rule has served me pretty well, even if I know how to enjoy the bit when the job’s done.
Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was another year or so along way. As was Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, at The Horseshoe Theatre, Basingstoke, brilliantly directed by Kit Thacker. And many other productions, both in local reps, on tour around the UK and one-offs elsewhere – including the Devil in Igor Stravinsky’s fiendish“The Soldier’s Tale” in Malta in 1987, with Richard Baker and John Amis. More theatre, more tv, more commercials and even a few corporate film jobs which were just getting going around then, and the odd script too. All with the usual ups and downs, when, out of the blue, we were asked to vacate our lovely old house just above Alton at The Golden Pot. Eight years we’d had it, for a song in terms of rent, etc. and two children born in the bedroom upstairs, Amy in 1984, and Sam in 1986. Then, with the letter asking us to leave, on the morning of Sam’s 3rd birthday, in 1989, the reckoning came home to roost.
From the start I had recognised that there were actors out there who, as soon as they stepped on stage, or hit the screen, had something that leapt out at you almost immediately. Judy Dench, Mark Rylance, Virginia Redgrave, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ian McKellan, Maggie Smith – and those are just some of the British ones. The list over the ages and continents is, of course, endless. And that list can be extended to include actors of whom the general public, by and large, will never have heard, but so many of whom I saw, worked with, and employed at various times over the last 40 years.
I suppose you could say that there is a difference between a great actor and a good actor. It’s easy to tell a bad actor and you can tell it very quickly. What makes an actor good, but not great, is more subtle.
I think a good actor is one you don’t notice is acting, one so completely subsumed and at one with their role that they are exactly who they need to be. The bad actor very simply tries too hard. The good comprise the doctor, the pilot, the publican, the king and the queen, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and the midwife, of course – these are the characters who make up the vast bulk of those we see on tv every day of the week, and those in theatre whose names we never really know but, without them, the whole pack of cards would collapse.
I was privileged to know a lot of these good actors. A wonderfully diverse bunch of human beings possessed of a talent, a skill, a make-it-look-easy expertise, learned through doing and more doing – without whom we would be lost.
I hope they know who they are but some may still not realise quite how they marked me and others in a given performance or brought a whole show alive in a way that, very possibly, only that person could.
The problem was I wasn’t really one of them, as an actor. Neither great nor quite good enough. Tried just a little too hard, perhaps? Didn’t quite trust myself enough – not always, but too often for comfort, resulting in more stress than joy.
I had my moments – “Cuckoo’s Nest” was one – when something happened. I could let go and be free within the usual constraints of working with other actors and a worked show. Every night I felt I grew, searched into the nooks and crannies of my character, made something new and different happen that my fellow players recognised and were themselves lifted by. It was thrilling. But was the odd “moment” enough?
Improvising, thinking on my feet, engaging children, adults, in a story where I could play to my wider knowledge of the world we were in, now that was something I could do and loved. The kind of work we did in the Young National Trust Theatre, for example, or thinking on my feet in character in the off-script elements of my work with AKT – that’s when I felt most at home whereas some actors found it deeply uncomfortable without the solid, immutable script behind them. So there were some things I could do and do well, I believed - but was it enough?
I felt, on balance, probably not. So when Gill said, as we were trying work out where we could go, what we could do next, now with a family of six, four children and us, and a dog, and no financial capital, or savings, whatsoever: “You speak French. Houses are cheap out there. Why don’t we go and have a look?” “Yes,” I said. “Why not?” knowing that this was the first step away. Away from a kind of close-knit, theatre hub where I could be on call, could go and see, build the critical relationships with all the people out there who might give me work.
Not that we were going to the back of beyond. Normandy was a relative hop. Easy reach of the ferries at Ouisterham and Le Havre so when I got the call from my loyal and lovely agent, Jan: “Darling? Can you be in Soho tomorrow. 10.30. Paul again. He does love you, darling.” – I could do it, even if it meant a long night crossing and the early morning trip up from Portsmouth.
And then, through the hand of friendship and fate, in 1989 began the adventure with Michel Fustier, founder and creator of Théâtre et Congrès in Lyon, that led to many opposites from what had gone before. Business, money, taking people on, fighting for one’s corner, sticking it out – if not in quite the way Stephen and I used to do in the Redgrave Theatre Gents – but it all still had theatre at the heart of it, even if in a rather different form to what had gone before.
So in many ways, 1984 marked a personal tipping-point in a career as an actor that I wasn’t fully aware of at the time. It was a time of realisation of both strengths and weaknesses. It became a step on the way to something else that used all the experience of that year, and those before and those after, to create a springboard into the unknown – of my own business.
In a way, this is a tale of so many people whose name will never be known beyond being buried in the cast list of a long-forgotten programme in a back number of the Radio Times, or scrolled out illegibly fast in a repeat from the mists of days gone by. But each one of us, both back then and those emerging right now, fresh-faced and hopeful from their training, has had our time in theatre not only play a crucial role in whatever we did next but left our mark on many of the thousands of people we engaged in whatever we did at the time. For some, it may even have been a life-changing event – in a good way, I hope.
But the life of an actor is hard enough without wondering whether you’re good enough to cut the mustard, both by the standards of others and those you set for yourself. I was 32 by the end of 1984, 37 when we left England to live in France and then, in both France and England, begin a new professional adventure to take me through to the end of my full-time, working days in 2017.
I had no idea whether it would work, this new “business” adventure. How could I? It was all a huge and often highly stressful risk, both to myself and the well-being and survival of my family and one I sometimes regretted.
I continued to come back for commercials and small parts in tv, all essential to our survival in France, but any idea of, say, a season at the RSC or the National was long gone. If I’d been younger, single, and, arguably, a good deal more talented when I started, it might have been a different story. But I wasn’t. And of the work I did in those pre-AKT days, with very few exceptions of the “instant mash” variety (and even that brought in the bacon that made the difference between staring into the abyss and relative comfort), I loved practically every minute, for all the sweat, blood and tears involved.
But they – the blood, sweat and tears – were nothing to that experienced by the miners and their families. By the police too, and people in the wrong place at the wrong time such as the taxi driver, killed by a lump of concrete thrown from a bridge by two miners, as he drove to a pit with a “scab” in the back on 30 November 1984.
Harold “Supermac” Macmillan, he of “you’ve never had it so good” fame when Conservative Prime Minister in the late ’50s and early ’60s, watched with dismay as Mrs Thatcher ditched the old “One Nation” Tory values in favour of every man and woman for themselves. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, aged 90, on 14 November 1984, he began: “It breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country today… the wicked hatred that has been brought in by different types of people.” And it is clear that he must have included both opposing camps in the conflict over the closure of the mines, Scargill for the miners and Thatcher on the Government side.
Apart from my strange juxtaposition with the charging police at the Proteus Camp near Ollerton in Nottinghamshire while filming Columbia HTV’s “Jenny’s War” over five weeks as winter of 1984 approached, I and my family sailed on virtually oblivious in our preoccupations with babies and work. Greenham Women’s bicycles apart, we were just too busy and too removed from the world out there to engage with the serious business of politics and the consciousness of warning signals sent by Orwell and others as to where we might be heading.
Our venerable 1951 Austin A40 Devon, Violet, on the other hand, was like a trusty old nag. She always knew where she was heading, if at an endless, steady plod and, preferably, on winding, lonely lanes rather than the motorway. She headed us to Borth, near Aberystwyth, and back that year for a spot of family summer sand-castling. But after a further trip to Bristol and then down to old haunts and special friends in West Somerset, her old bedevilment of a blown head-gasket struck yet again and required special measures to try and cure the problem. Two gaskets had been suggested by the Austin Counties Club specialist, Neil Parsons, so off came the head and on they went, thanks mostly to our resident mechanic and general DIY supremo, Gill. But all went well enough to seek out yet another ancient Austin to join the stable containing Violet and a little, black, “Baby Austin” A30 of 1954, called – what else? – Blackberry.
This time it was what is known as a “woody” – in this instance, a wooden framed estate body hand-built on a 1956 pick-up Austin A40 Devon chassis. “Arthur”, brother to Violet, cost us the princely sum of £200 and I enjoyed a terrifying, brakeless ride at the wheel back to Alton from Shakespeare Country where he had been resting like a sleeping Falstaff, fatly snoring for a number of years.
Sadly, it was to be another case of “other”. Arthur sat quietly snoozing with us for another three years, waiting for that moment to be commissioned as our family vehicle of choice, until the fateful letter came for us to leave. So Arthur had to go and be replaced by the remarkable 1973 Citroen Ami Super Break that took us to France, wheel-barrow on the roof, for our biggest adventure yet.
