Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 18: 1984 – The End

The Theatre Chronicles – Part 18: 1984 – The End

“LOVE IS WAR

      FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGH”

          George Orwell “1984”

1984 was over. Long gone now. Orwell had his moment in my life when my brother, Andrew, and I put together a lunchtime show in the mid-’90s called “Shooting the Elephant”, after an Orwell short story, for Gill Freud’s Southwold Summer Theatre, with our nephew, Alastair, accompanying us at the piano.

The slogans above were those of “The Party”, to which Winston added:

“TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE”

• and then:

           “GOD IS POWER”

Thus the hapless Winston capitulated: “he accepted everything”, after his trial by torture with O’Brien, effectively “Big Brother” himself.

And here we are, in 2021, at the mercy of so much beyond our control; so much by which we are, in so many ways, controlled. The pandemic, of which we had no conception in 1984, beyond those on whom AIDS so invidiously preyed, has only heightened our sense of helplessness with which we view those – Big Pharma, Big Agro-Chem, Big Tech and all our present AI-proto-transhuman, algorithmic gods, let alone the all too human ones – who hold the power over our future in their well-protected hands. We can only hope they have our and our children’s interests, let alone the planet’s, somewhere at heart, assuming that there is one in there. The impact of Climate Change may make it all academic anyway. And Donald Trump, for whom Orwell might have created “1984”, has not gone away.

Tim appears in BBC’s East Enders

My 1984 had its battles and its wars – the Miners vs. Thatcher’s Battle of Orgreave representative of the one, Columbia HTV’s “Jenny’s War” of the other, either side of the protean divide. It had what could have been the ghost of a woman who might have been my mother, in a glimpse into times to come, looking for me in the wings in the Redgrave Theatre production of “Annie”. It had its other ghosts in Edward Thomas’s “The Other”, which never became The Actual, like so many other others. It had its Joe Orton’s “The Ruffian on the Stair” and my “The Woolly” which will forever be lost in the “House High Hay”. It had its Young National Trust Theatre “The Model Mill” which showed me the pitfalls of management and business, however enlightened it might aspire to be. Yet only five years later, I began the journey into AKT Productions Ltd. that, for all its joys and adventures, proved fraught with similar traps.

1984 had signalled the beginning of the end of being young and easy in the mercy of my means, as the growing responsibilities of fatherhood and the doubts as to whether I was good enough as an actor made me question the chains of the professional path ahead. When I lost my way unexpectedly in the new show of the new year in 1985, the page-riffling prompter urged me to “go back a little” but to where? How far back? To 1984 – or earlier?

I went forward and found myself high up Down Under, thanks to BP and, quite possibly its commercial casting director, “Paul, who loves you, darling”, as relayed by my loyal and lovely agent, Jan, of Evans & Reiss. I went from high brow to Löwenbräu, most definitely thanks to “Paul, who obviously loves you, darling” – although the highbrow element was more thanks to the lift the late Ian Richardson gave to an adaptation of Noel Coward’s “Star Quality” for the BBC, than my lesser role, I must admit. And, in 1988, a brief taste of high street fame came with an appearance in some early episodes of “East Enders” after which I was violently accosted more than once for defending, in my role as his solicitor, the dastardly Wilmot-Brown, so joyously played by William Boyde. Given some of the mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, the narrow shaves with catastrophe, the selfish pig-headedness, the maddening last-minute changes of direction, with a talent for the gaffe to rival the late Prince Philip, I often think it should have been me banged up behind bars, not Wilmot-Brown.

But, come the 1990’s, two and two had, arguably, started to make five, with two steps forward, one step back, at every three steps. I made and lost friends in a way I hated. Too many colleagues, partners and, yes, pals, in this entrepreneurial adventure I had begun on leaving England and arriving in France, were left on the roadside as I fumbled and stumbled towards what I could only hope would be worth playing what my old friend John Swanwick called “the management game”. Once, after a despairing phone call to him, I drove to Rugby at dawn to see him for breakfast at his kind and instant invitation. He was my client but, much more than that, a source of wisdom and friendship, as other clients too became on the long journey to trying to make it work, this thing called Business.

I had tried to find a way to make another way of living in France, at home with my family, as a practical, financial possibility, rather than always having to leave to earn a living. But how to forge a new path? How not to have to live from hand to mouth, not knowing how to pay the bills when currencies crashed, when commercials dried up and two banks, one in England, one in France, threatened to pull the plug and, with it, the roof – somewhat rickety in the first place – from over our vulnerable little heads?

Each attempt became an “other”, whether teaching English through Drama at Evreux University, for which they accepted my crafted prospectus but found no takers; an idea for a subscription-funded cider orchard to expand our stunningly successful first vintages from the gnarled old trees on our little hill in our little village in the Pays d’Auge – until the mayor took the steam out of it all when he took a chunk from it on which to build his legacy, the new mairie, and we could do nothing to stop him. And teaching jobs and work for estate agents, etc., etc. – all of which foundered for every possible imaginable reason, one after the other. To stay in France was to look into the abyss, while in England, a salary dangled…

So what became, via Michel Fustier in France and MaST International in Maidenhead, The Business of Andy, Kit and Tim, or “AKT Productions Ltd”, for all the thinnest of ice and closest of shaves along the way, proved its worth. It was the road less travelled, for the most unbusinesslikes of me at least, but it did indeed make all the difference. Involving us in every aspect of theatre – writing, production, direction and performance – let alone making it work commercially, it was an amazing ride in which I travelled far and wide, stretched myself to my limits. Most fascinating and privileged of all, perhaps, we entered worlds – some of the most remote, protected and otherwise impenetrable imaginable, at home and abroad – it would have been impossible to have known any other way. 

Sitting in a car at 9 o’clock in the evening in the heart of Glasgow’s smartest business quarter with a retired detective inspector who said: now watch. Then she and I watched the frighteningly young or prematurely aged prostitutes emerge warily like stray cats to feed their desperate drug habits and risk their lives, let alone their health, by being picked up by prowling cars or adding to the autumnal shed of condoms in the dark, narrow alleyways off the street. It was there, only hours before, where pin-striped men and women had picked their busy way from rather different corporate meetings, trying not to slip on this banana-skin underbelly of their world of which I had noticed not a thing. Talking to some of them the next day at the drop-in centre, those prepared to talk that is, I learned more about the realities of this perilous way of life for which I had been commissioned to put a discussion programme together for policy makers within government as an example of some of the on-going tensions within government policy for which there was no easy “right course”.

Or entering through successively more fiercesome barriers into a world in which things of such secrecy occurred that I am sworn for the rest of my life not to divulge what little I learned of them, and understood even less. But it may not surprise you that the people and their behaviours were no different from so many other far more accessible worlds. If anything, they were more vulnerably human in the mistakes they made which, for so many reasons, they found difficult to share and, as a consequence, learn from.

Or trying to persuade the Chief Executive of a very large US utility company across his very large boardroom table that it was in his and his company’s best interests to look at what happened in a fatal accident on their patch, how and why, so they could face up to the realities that were challenging their very existence. But it was too high a bar for him and some of his top team, despite a pull from below to do just that following a powerful and productive initial dramatised intervention on our part. The company no longer exists.

It was thrilling and challenging in equal measure but there was a price to be paid. Despite the pension, a mortgage free house and relative consequent prosperity, enabling us to help our burgeoning and often strapped-for-cash loved ones keep their heads above water, it is a price I am still paying for. 

Partnership and home are, arguably, the most precious parts of our precarious, all too lonely existence in this fleeting life. When these go out of kilter with the selfish pursuit of personal fulfilment, in whatever sphere, of whatever kind, then these dimensions of an otherwise untethered life can become acutely vulnerable. 

Some of us can, prefer to even, live alone and not be lonely, bereft, at the mercy of things. I know that. I also know the exultation of walking free, alive in every tingling sense, along old roads and new, seeing no faces, seeing new faces, meeting strangers who can, if not change, then enrich your life. This you have to do alone to feel the full intensity of the experience. Danger, too, or the perceived risk to life, often enhances this. 

To walk alone at as dawn breaks through the lower slopes of Mount Kenya with only rustling in the undergrowth, the calls and growls, fresh spoor at your feet, wondering what might lie over the next ridge, behind the next bush, then, oh boy, you feel alive. Or sitting unguarded at a café table in Sana’a at dusk with a man who tells you he can spot the signs of danger well before they turn into a life-threatening situation – which both you and he know could happen any time here – requires trust, and a kind of faith, dangerous in itself, that all will be well.

An actor friend of mine, brought up in ‘Derry during The Troubles of the ’70s and ’80s in Northern Ireland, walked with me through the Medina in Sfax, just days before the “Arab Spring” broke out in Tunisia in November, 2010. We had survived an interesting taxi ride from the heavily guarded camp where we had been conducting a week’s intensive “major hazard” training in our usual way, navigated a path through traffic that obeyed no known laws and there we were, just before the souk closed for the night, plunged into a mediaeval world.

“Growing up in a place” he writes, “where the sound of a car pulling up behind you is a potentially life-threatening situation has given me a sixth sense for self-preservation” – what he calls his “danger radar”. He continues: “All I see are shady lanes, too many people too close together and every second stall seems to be a knife-sharpener spinning sparks into the gathering dusk… Already I’ve witnessed two full-on fist fights and numerous quarrels”. And yet I saw only Ali Baba and Aladdin’s Cave and the romance of The One Thousand and One Nights.

John-Paul puts down the fact that “we don’t die, we don’t get robbed, or hurt” to a kind of “naïvety” on my part which he generously offers can be “healthy”… 

Perhaps not everyone would agree but, in my defence, I would suggest that I, too, have a “radar” of sorts, to do with a belief that a smile and a handshake can disarm and even charm those very few who might have ill intent. When trying to sleep between a very large, Zairean diamond-smuggler and a bony “Gentleman Roader” from Zanzibar, all feet to the fire outside “The People’s Bakery” off the endless Arusho Highway back up to Kenya through Tanzania, a young man with no “z’s” to his name apart from an early taste for “zoider”, as they say down Zomerzet way, felt strangely protected rather than potentially threatened by the somewhat out-of-the-ordinary circumstances he found himself in aged 21 or so. Easier for a man to say, perhaps, than a woman on her own, although I know some who would disagree. 

Fear can protect. That’s what it is designed to do. Yet it can also get horribly in the way of some the most interesting and rewarding challenges in life, whether it’s climbing a mountain – and if, like me and Ranulph Fiennes, you have a fear of heights (although I’ve never tested myself against the North Face of the Eiger, nor been shot at in the SAS), you’ll know what I’m talking about – or taking on a new job involving learning new skills and doing things, having to do them, when the risk of failure seems terrifyingly high. If you allow fear to block your path or, worse, turn to panic, it is, in my experience,  often that which can attract the untoward, in both man and beast. If one is lucky, and I have no doubt I have had more than my fair share of good luck over the last 69 years, a belief in the goodness, latent or otherwise, of the vast part of humankind is in itself a shield from harm. Until, one day, somewhere, somehow, of course, it isn’t. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say. I also know there are times and places when only a fool would venture in, given a choice which, alas, is not always the case

So what did I learn from 1984? What have I learned since? 

That love can, on occasion, be war, but war isn’t love and, unlike love, is not sustainable. That there is indeed a kind of strength in ignorance, or naïvety if you prefer, although it catches up with you, and knowledge pays in the end. That slavery is never freedom and that it will kill you – unless you can escape it. But that two and two can make five – or one and two can make four, and four and five can make eight more – and who knows how many more to come? 

As for “God is Power”, alias “Big Brother”? He’s not the one who’s watched my back all my life to date, unlike my two big brothers who have, bless them both. But the one who watches us from the front? Whether we’re aware of it, or not? Alas, we’ve seen too much of him, or he of us, and not enough of real, human, look-you-in-the-eye companionship. Call it friendship. Or love even. In the moment or life-long. 

And sometimes this thing called love, of which there are many kinds, is all that holds us from the maw of the abyss.