“This I have to see!” It was the first reaction of my entire career.
The Citizens Theatre was situated in one of the roughest parts of Glasgow, the Gorbals. By the time I got there the whole area had been torn down. Now it was a vast wasteland cut in half by the railway tracks, which were built on a low aqueduct of grimy old arches that ploughed through the Gorbals towards Motherwell and the south. The sandstone tenements from the nineteenth century had been replaced by grim modern towers that stood apart from one another, surrounded by a muddy no man’s land upon which the odd corner shop still stood defiant on the vague traces of former streets. Trains from Central station clattered through this inner-city desert and at night they flew past, the lights from the carriage windows throwing exciting shadows against the grimy brickwork of the Victorian sidings. Villainous pubs twinkled out from under the arches below and figures from Lowry were briefly caught in the strobe effects of the passing trains. It was like the picture on the cover of a paperback thriller.
The theatre was on Gorbals Street. It had formerly been the Palace, one of the top music-hall venues in the country, with four giant statues presiding over a big white façade. Now it had been stripped of all its external glamour and was a sad solitary warehouse, with only a bus stop for company. But inside that unpromising hangar was a beautiful nineteenth-century auditorium, decorated like a Chinese restaurant in red, black and gold with pale pink cherubs: a mirage refuge from the bombsite outside. It was cheaper than the pictures. And warmer. So it was an unusual crowd, to say the least, that picked their way through the singing drunks who sheltered by the stage door. They were quite unlike any other audience I have ever seen.
But when the house lights went down and the curtain came up, even those punters who had chosen the Citizens over the bingo were momentarily gobsmacked. The most extraordinary visions of opulence and decadence flickered across the footlights; actors like animals performed in a style unknown to the rest of the theatrical establishment (let alone Glasgow). Faces caked in white greasepaint, clothed for a film by Visconti, they howled and squirmed half naked around amazing sets of classical ruins or beautiful drawing rooms, their declamatory style varying from the opera to the soap opera, seemingly incompatible, but, to my young entranced eyes, utterly mesmerising.
A short while after my audition I travelled up to Glasgow to stay with Joe McKenna, and we went along to the Citizens one rainy night to see a play about Diaghilev called Chinchilla. It was the first time I had seen this place about which I had built up such a fantasy. We crossed the Clyde on the Jamaica Bridge. A man lay on the pavement. His face was bloody. His hands grasped the rails as though he were being swept away.
“Gie’s a hon, pal, aver th’ege?” he slurred.
“Sorry?” I replied politely.
“Wull’ye no gie’s a hon o’er?”
“Just keep walking,” said Joe firmly.
“What was he saying? Maybe we should get help.”
“No, darling,” said Joe. “He just wants to know if you’ll help him jump into the Clyde.”
I will never forget that first image of the Gorbals. A half-built mosque; the burnt-out carcass of a car in a circle of parched grass; a menacing group of kids running around with a football. And the theatre, blurry in the drizzle, more like a Methodist church than a bacchanalian performance centre. A huge poster on its rough stone wall proclaimed: “All seats 40p.”
“This doesn’t look much like a place where the actors all have sex in the showers after the show,” I grumbled to Joe, in reference to one of the (untrue) myths surrounding the theatre.
“I’m sure you’ll change all that,” replied Joe, tartly, and we went into the theatre. An old lady tore my ticket (she would be my co-star in the next production) and I sashayed with Joe through another swing door into the rest of my life. During the interval I went to see the three directors in their little front office near the stalls bar and was offered a job as an extra in their next production that was starting in a week’s time. I couldn’t believe my luck. Joe and I celebrated all night in a club called Cinders.
The play for which I was contracted was a typical Glasgow endeavour: an adaptation of the complete works of Proust called A Waste of Time. It was written by David McDonald, one of the three men I had met at my audition, and was directed and designed by one of the others, the man with the tears in his eyes, Philip Prowse. They needed dukes, and could find none among the stagehands and cleaners who usually did the extra work. Just by luck I was there at the right time and got my large foot in the door. I was paid £17 a week, and went to live with my Uncle David and his wife Aunt Pixie in their house by Loch Lomond, half an hour outside the city. Of all my family, it was Pixie who really supported me in those days, waking me if I was late for rehearsals, leaving meals in the oven when I returned late at night, and sitting up to chat about life at the theatre over a cup of tea. The rest of my poor family still bristled uncomfortably at my new career, but not Aunt Pixie. She seemed as excited as I was, and that meant everything.
Philip Prowse was a bit like a defrocked Zen monk. He was icy calm, with an ethereal voice and very long fingers, with which he restlessly twiddled a large mole on the front of his neck, or the assistant stage manager if he was within twiddling distance. He had a crew-cut and piercing blue eyes, and was a kind of visionary. He had started his career as a designer and had only begun directing a few years earlier. His roots were in the ballet and the opera, and his staging of plays was very different from anything one saw on the English stage. The only work comparable to his was done in Europe by people like Peter Stein or Patrice Chéreau, but Europe didn’t rate in the Great Britain of the seventies. Like everything unEnglish it was simply a joke, and Philip was widely distrusted (and disliked) by the British establishment. His was a design-oriented theatre where the look of a performance was as important as the sound and feel of it. Added to this, he had a strange uncompromising view of humanity, and he tutored savage performances from his actors. He was not a believer in cosy emotional resolutions. An actor could perform a scene with heart-wrenching vulnerability, and then turn proudly to Philip. “What did you think?” he would ask hopefully.
“I wanted to be sick, my dear. I felt it was utterly bogus. But I may be wrong.” Of course he never was. (Even when he was.)
He saw all human beings as self-interested manipulators and wanted to see that on the stage. Sometimes the actors couldn’t accommodate all this, being drawn to emotionalism as bees are to honey. They were uncomfortable letting go of the accessibility of a warm performance, and were unable or unwilling to grasp Philip’s world-view. These actors came across as wooden in performance and were not invited back.
We got along straightaway, and Philip became one of my closest friends. In the years that followed I was to become his unmanageable parody. But for the time being the most valuable thing had happened: a creative contact had been made, and a foundation for my life as an actor had been laid. This is as much as you can hope for at the start of a career: to admire a director’s work, their angle, and to find some kind of parallel in yourself, so that when they talk about how they see something, whatever it is—a gesture, an attitude, the seemingly incomprehensible movement from one emotion to another—you are able without much effort to perform it.
In one of Philip’s productions an extra could walk away with the show. There were probably fifteen non-speaking roles in the Proust play: dukes, footmen, mothers and grandmothers. We were moved around the stage in a brilliant choreography, punctuating the action, and pointing the focus from one timeframe to another, so that we all had the opportunity to grab the attention of the entire piece.
A Waste of Time was an amazing production. For anyone unfamiliar with Proust, in a nutshell the books are a catalogue of memories inspired by an afternoon recital in Paris after the First World War. In the wizened old faces of duchesses and courtesans, musicians and artists, the author, by now a bedridden recluse on a rare excursion into society, is remind
ed, in nine intensely detailed volumes, of their various journeys through time. Tangled paths, long overgrown, are rediscovered and charted by Proust in a book that changed the face of literature. If you can get yourself into them, they become hypnotic, and are really moving and funny. A few films have been made from some of the different volumes. Pinter wrote a brilliant screenplay of all the books for Joseph Losey to direct. But to my knowledge ours was the only theatrical production ever attempted and it was a work of genius.
In the darkened auditorium a huge black veil billowed inside a gilt picture frame that spanned the entire proscenium. As the lights began to fade, liveried footmen carrying dripping candelabra could be vaguely discerned, moving behind it like reflections on a flat lake. Other ghostly figures began to appear: silhouettes in top hats, a group of old ladies around a table, and high up at the back, just visible, like a distant memory across a gulf of time, was a lady on a throne. As the audience fell silent and the house lights quivered out, she could be heard reciting in French. The black veil was pulled aside to reveal the frozen tableau of an afternoon salon at Madame la Duchesse de Guermante’s house in Paris. Hunched old men with walking sticks, and women in beautiful afternoon dresses, watched entranced as an actress called Rachel performed Phèdre by Racine. Proust was played by an actor, now dead, called Stephen Dartnell. He was forty years old, deathly white; he stared out into the audience.
“Vaines précautions! Cruelle destinée!” moaned the actress. “Par mon époux lui-même à Trézène amenée.”
And strangely enough they loved it, but like Cinderella at the ball, the Glaswegian audience had a curfew, and the silver slipper on the stage shattered into a stampeding shoal of Dolcis wedges at twenty past ten, just before the last bus left from outside the theatre. Unfortunately, A Waste of Time was nearly four hours long. At a certain point in the play (ten-fifteen) a character called Swann, abandoned and dying, realises that the love he had dedicated his whole life to was nothing more than a mirage (ten-seventeen). A famous moment in Proust: the end of a long obsession. Swann has come to tell his friends, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, that he is dying and leaving Paris, but they are late for a party, for which the Duchesse has made the mistake of wearing black shoes with a red dress, and they don’t want to hear. Swann puts on his hat, picks up his stick and is about to leave (ten-eighteen, but sometimes, if Andy the actor was milking it, ten-nineteen). He turns back to his friends with a last thought: “To think that I have wasted the whole of my life on a woman who was simply not my style.”
In the silence afterwards, you could hear a pin drop. Andy Wilde was an excellent Swann, but as he left the stage, half the audience ran from the building and we would often finish the performance alone. But no one cared: there was an intensity about that play that everyone felt. It’s difficult to describe a theatrical production. It exists for the moment it is on the stage, and even then, it’s different for everyone who sees it. As the curtain falls, the final tableau dissolves into the ether. A few pictures might remain to jog the memory, but photographs are performances of their own, and so the magic of theatre is its life, yet also its death. Both are contained and celebrated in the moment of applause. The curtain goes up again. The actors take their bows. It’s over. So I won’t go on.
The week before going back up to Glasgow to begin, I gatecrashed Nicky Haslam’s party for Andy Warhol at the newly refurbished Casserole, the restaurant above the Gigolo. I stole a beautiful suede jacket by Claude Montana from the shop where I had been working in Beauchamp Place, and also borrowed a garnet necklace (without asking) from the bedroom of Maria St. Just, the mother of one of my best friends. I went over to my friend Hugo Guinness’ house, where some junkie acquaintance of one of his sister’s had left a bottle of methadone on the nursery table while they all went downstairs for a drink with Mr. and Mrs. Guinness in the library. Both Hugo and I were utterly reckless; diving off the deep end. We didn’t know or care exactly what methadone was (“It’s a downer, no?” we agreed vaguely), but like the medicine bottle in Mary Poppins it stood there beckoning us, looking absolutely delicious. So with an ear to the nursery staircase, we both took an enormous swig, filled the bottle up with water and set off down the backstairs to crash the party.
The restaurant was packed. There was nowhere to sit but I was about to fall down, so I squeezed on to the edge of a banquette and had a quick nap. A few minutes later I opened my eyes to find three extraordinary faces looking at me with amusement. Lady Diana Cooper wore a hat like a medium’s lampshade with long white tassels. Next to her sat Andy Warhol under a weird peroxide wig, plonked the wrong way round on his head, and Bianca Jagger was sleek and glowing beside me with delicious smelling pomade in her hair. We introduced ourselves and I apologised with half-open eyes for the intrusion.
“What are you on?” asked Lady Diana from inside the lampshade.
“Morphine, I think,” I said.
“Oh, isn’t it marvellous?” replied the old lady in a jolly voice. “Doesn’t one just want to curl up and have a lovely scratch? I was on it throughout the war, Andy.”
“Aww, gee, that’s great,” said Andy.
And so I became friends with Bianca Jagger. She was beautiful. She’d just cut her hair short and was wearing a green Halston trouser suit. Nicky was not entirely pleased, but Andy and Bianca were entranced.
At a certain point Andy took Bianca’s lipstick and wrote on my forehead, “I love you.” A photographer took a snapshot. I thought no more about it, but the following Monday, after the first day of rehearsals in Glasgow, I was the leading story in the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster column, beneath the headline, “Spotlight on Bianca’s new leading man.” My first brush with publicity left me with a spiralling sense of panic that should have made me think twice about the life I was so busy plotting for myself. Dempster revealed that I was a confirmed bachelor (journalistic patois for “screaming queen”), and I can remember writhing around in my bed, worrying about the various reactions of my family and the company I had joined that morning. Dempster also mentioned that I was working at the famous Glasgow Citizens. The next day all hell broke loose among the Scottish press, and that evening I was asked to go and see Giles in his office. Philip and David were there too. Tears prepared themselves behind my eyes as I gloomily resigned myself to being fired.
“My dear,” said Giles. “I have had the Evening Times, the Herald, the Scotsman and The Stage on the phone. They all want to talk to you. What on earth is going on?”
I explained the situation.
“What was she wearing?” said Philip.
“A green Halston trouser suit,” I replied.
“How ghastly. I wonder if it was made in ultrasuede?”
“I don’t think that is really our problem, Philip,” said Giles. “What are we going to do about all these journalists? We’d better have a press conference.”
I went white. How was I going to get along with the rest of the company, being the extra that I was, and give a press conference? Actors are quite touchy about these things. But Giles seemed quite determined, so eventually it was organised. I had by then made friends with the actress Di Trevis. She advised me to tell the press all sorts of lies: that Bianca and I were both macrobiotic and were planning a trip to the source of the Nile, and that she, Di, was my “constant companion.” Unaware of the repercussions, I repeated what she said more or less verbatim. Over the next few weeks hysterical articles appeared in the Scottish press, and were repeated around the world. Bianca was furious, but everyone in Glasgow laughed.
A Waste of Time went on tour and I was promoted to a speaking part, and thus finally got my Equity card. Soon afterwards, while we were playing at the opera house in Amsterdam, I went blind. On the night before the official performance in front of Queen Juliana, I put my head into the water of a Jacuzzi thick with detergent and developed an acute case of conjunctivitis. The next day I could not open my eyes. The trouble was that there were no understudies. There was a crisis meeti
ng and it was decided that instead of cancelling the performance, it could be reblocked by Philip during the intervals, so that I could be led from one position to another. Luckily I was playing Charles Morel, the pianist, so mostly I was seated at the piano, but Giles was deeply unamused. Philip, on the other hand, took it all in his stride.
“My dear,” he said, “all piano tuners are blind.”
“Yes,” replied Giles tersely, “but few concert pianists are.”
Before each act Philip re-rehearsed the scenes I was in, but while we were going through the extremely complicated third act, the bell went and we never got to finish, so that when it came for my big speech I stood up and, feeling no helping hands to guide me, began a perilous journey down a small flight of steps towards the front of the stage. The whole cast (and, I like to think, Queen Juliana) held their breath as I headed like a lemming over the edge but at the last moment I miraculously stopped and delivered my speech standing on the lip of the stage with a fifteen-foot drop into the orchestra pit right in front of me.
The amazing thing was that everyone thought I was pretending. Legend has it that as I left the stage for the last time I opened my eyes and winked at an attractive stagehand. In fact, I did not. But it just shows what a plotting maniacal queen I must have become that people entertained the idea that I could dream up and pull off such a gigantic scam.
I adored Glasgow and returned often over the next fifteen years. The jobs I enjoyed best and did best happened there. There was always a drama at the Citizens. You couldn’t wait to get into the theatre at night before the show. A formidable lady named Rose Cull ran the canteen, which was like a prison staff room—shiny custard-coloured walls, a pool table and a TV. She was a stocky Irish redhead with small shrewd eyes that swivelled from one breathless queen to another, and she had a voice that could rise above the din of a shipyard, let alone the Citizens’ canteen. She’d put her big hands on her hips and call us “a bonch ae fockin’ shirt lifters” but she came to every show even if she didn’t understand a word, always sitting in the same seat, upright in her coat, her handbag on her knees, and her eyes glued to the stage, where you could hear her roar with laughter during the most serious moments. She was a lovely woman, and her canteen was a marvellous place, a melting pot of stagehands, wardrobe fairies, actors and front-of-house staff. Philip and David presided over the proceedings like the generals of a benign dictatorship, and Giles flitted around, suddenly swooping in on one. (“Darling, could I have a quick word?”) You could score anything there from drugs to a washing machine. Conversation moved seamlessly from football to Flaubert or Proust to pornography. There were no holds barred. No one was patronised, neither the fey queen nor the illiterate thug; everyone was quite fascinated by everyone else.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 13
