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onstage. The lovely young actors formed a circle. It was all just a bit of a laugh. I began my performance. My hair was in pig-tails, I was wearing a skirt, a bra, a blouse, for some reason no shoes or socks and bright red lipstick. The people present still believed themselves to be at a party; I though had decided that I was about to give a groundbreaking performance of “Jenny Litman,” as important to the En glish theater as Giel-gud’s Hamlet. That’s why it was vital that no one spoke, drank or did anything other than watch with astonishment my mag-nificent impersonation. Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn’t do.
“What the fuck is going on?” I slurred, enraged. “Why ain’t you listening?” I eyed the crowd with menace. Menace, lipstick and a bra. “Isn’t this dramatic enough for ya?”
The small crowd grew edgy. “Oh, Russell, he’s such a laugh, he’s mucking about.” No he wasn’t. It turned out that this hastily assembled transsexual was serious and seemed to have abandoned his parody of a tutor in favor of a kind of bent Ray Winstone. “Want something a little bit more dramatic, do you?
You fuckin’ mugs.”
Some of the fi rst years began to query whether they’d made the right choice of school; this chap was unbearable and his grasp of the character terrible. “Well, if you want fucking drama, I’ll give you fucking drama!”
I drained the glass of vodka I was holding (it was part of the character), smashed it on my head and plunged it into my chest, raking it up and down my arms. “Well, the party’s been fun but I don’t think I want to be an actor any more,” said one plucky newcomer.
“You get back here and watch this master class.” “Russell! Russell!” People are shouting. “What are you doing?” It seemed I’d misjudged the mood. “I’m an actor, you must watch me in awed 168
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silence . . . I’m . . .” “Russell, this is your brain, we’re going to shut you down now, please don’t be alarmed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” “NO . . . I . . . must . . .
finish . . . the . . .”
I’m slumped outside the pub with Elia, beautiful Elia. Girlfriend. Spanish. She loves me. She’s crying. OUCH. Someone is slapping me round the face. VOMIT. “Elia, I love you . . .”
“Why you do this Russ?” OUCH. “Can you stop hitting me . . .”
VOMIT. “Don’t worry Elia, he’ll be okay.”
This lad in my year, John Turnbull (he’s had cancer since then, I hope he’s alright), managed to get me into a taxi and back to his flat to sleep on his settee.
“Good morning world! And what’s this sensation?” Why, that would be urine, Russell, your urine. “I didn’t do anything to embarrass myself last night did I?” No, of course not, oh maybe a little. After the self-harming ego show you came back to your friend’s house, tried to fuck his flatmate then pissed all over his sofa. “Nothing out of the ordinary then?” No. You carry on son.
John gave me a pair of jeans to wear home, but he didn’t have any shoes he could lend me, so I walked barefoot through Ridley Road market in Dalston, across the rotten fruit and the chicken guts from the halal stores. “What this situation needs is heroin; any fool can see that.” I had taken it once before, when I saw two Turkish lads smoking it on the train to Elia’s house, just kids they were. “You ain’t done this before ’ave ya mate?” Th ey saw
through me, because my skin was becoming so thin. I smoked it in her bathroom. Yes. Heroin. It was warm on that bathroom floor and my brain was silent; not chattering like now in this dirty market. I couldn’t find heroin. I was shoeless. I had no money. Of course I couldn’t score.
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I got back to Elia’s, on Graham Road in Hackney, which she shared with this vegan lad John: a pale sort of fella he was, well-meaning and new age. He wasn’t a student and never looked well.
Elia was unhappy about the episode at The Enterprise. We quarreled. I smashed a glass and stuck it in my arm. It was only a tiny little cut—but it generously laughed out blood. Th e
creases in the duvet filled with beautiful red pools.
I get fixated when I’m bleeding—I can see why they went in for bloodletting in medieval times because it makes you feel a bit better. When I cut myself, the drama of it kind of calms me down.
It doesn’t usually have that effect on other people, though.
She was a lovely gentle girl, Elia. She went downstairs to call an ambulance, and then John saw all the blood and started going,
“Oh God—suicide! Suicide!” So that was how it was formally reported.
When the ambulance arrived, Elia had fainted, but I—characteristically—was over the worst. Usually by the time the ambulance or the police or whoever it is that’s going to take me away turn up I’m generally feeling pretty upbeat. I was in quite a jolly frame of mind as they took me off to Homerton Hospital.
“You should be helping old ladies,” I joshed as I boarded the ambulance.
When we got there, they interviewed me and put me on suicide watch—a list on which I believe I remain to this day. So should I ever find myself in Homerton feeling blue (and it is a part of London quite renowned for its capacity to induce melancholy), I at least know that the emergency services would be in a state of readiness if I opted to do anything rash.
I know it’s difficult to imagine how a man like me could be thrown out of drama school, what with all the talent that I’ve 171
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got in such abundance, and all the goodwill I’d earned with my earlier per for mances as a drunken, amphetamine- ridden Macbeth staggering out of Duncan’s chamber, clutching a terrifying selection of butter knives (it’s all they had in the canteen). But thrown out of Drama Centre I was.
In the final term of the final year, I were awarded the title role in Volpone by Ben Jonson. As you might imagine, the part of Volpone is pretty much the best one there is in the play Volpone.
Jonson was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and Volpone is the story of a confidence trickster—the literal translation is “the fox”—who pretends he’s dying, to trick his cohorts (who all have the names of different animals) out of money.
I’m not sure why it was that I never got it together to play that last big role. Perhaps I knew that I was soon going to be leaving Drama Centre, and the idea of actually finishing something that I’d started for the first time in my life became too much to bear. Either way, I remember panicking and thinking,
“God, I’ve got to do something about this character.” So I went to Boots and nicked some white mascara to bleach out my eyebrows and facial hair, in the hope of changing myself a little bit from the outside in.
After I had been arrested for shoplifting, I was taken straight to Kentish Town police station. When I’m arrested, the police are normally quite nice to me, because I do my best to be charming. I can see the other people in the cells at the same time doing dreary clichéd things like swearing and banging tin cups on bars. What a welcome relief I must be to the police with my bright and breezy manner and “Gorblimey Guv’nor” forelock-tugging.
I was in there for a few hours. I used my phone call to ring up the school and tell them I was going to be late for rehearsal 172
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because I’d been arrested. They were bored of me by then. When I was in the first production of our third year, Arden of Faversham, or “Black Will” as my mum calls it, since that was the part I played, all agreed that I was on my way to the RSC.
One of my brilliant gimmicks was to have a mouse living in my hair. I kept this going for quite a long time—at least a month or so. I’d gone out and got a mouse from a pet shop, and let it live on my shoulders and in my hair. Mice are incontinent. Th ey
poo and wee whenev
er they feel like it, so my hair was all full of mouse excrement and urine. I’d put it in a little Tupperware box when I went to sleep.
Tim, when my mum called to speak to me on the phone, said in his Geordie accent, “Barbara, you won’t believe this, he’s got a mouse living in his fooking hair, like.” It sounded funny. What a character I must be I thought. He was a little white mouse, called Elvis. He escaped and ran off when I was in the middle of smashing a window or opening a vein but he built a new life for himself with the mice and rats that lived in the school. Once in a while someone would say, “We saw Elvis, we saw Elvis” after a ballet lesson. People told me that he looked all scruffy and weather-beaten. I imagined that he’d got in with the rats and now had a leather jacket and was a real bully-boy.
I was brilliant in that Arden of Faversham, and lots of agencies were interested in me. “This is good. I’ll leave this drama school and be all nice and famous.” But I suppose I just couldn’t take the pressure. I was always being warned about my behavior but lionized for it at the same time. They’d always be telling me I had to pack it in, but it was also clear that this was an industry that had revered Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, and as long as you could come up with the goods, you could get away with just about anything.
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What I’ve learned—to my cost—on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behavior so long as you’re giving them what they want. They’ll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you’re doing your job well, but the minute you’re not, you’re fucked. They’ll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.
When I was thrown out of Drama Centre, Christopher called me up to his offi
ce—the same office where so many times before I’d been praised and approved of, or told off even, but told off in such a flattering way (“I wouldn’t like to work with you, Russell,” Yat told me once, “I would be afraid to work with you. You are like Peter Ustinov”).* On this occasion, Christopher was up there drinking a glass of white wine. Everyone who’s ever been to Drama Centre can do an impression of Christopher Fettes—you can do that as sure as you can cry on command. In the read- through for St. Trinian’s, a film I’ve recently done with Colin Firth, I really wanted to say, “Hey, show us your Christopher Fettes,” but I was too shy. This was the only expulsion that didn’t feel triumphant, the apotheosis of the rebel. It was gloomy, him saying in his beautifully modulated voice, “Sorry, Russell, we’re going to have to let you go.” I pleaded, “Please give me another chance.” “Sorry.”
I went downstairs into the canteen and Karl Th eobald was
there. He was to become the most important person in my life so it was serendipitous that he should be in attendance. “You alright, Russell?” he said, but he knew. “I’ve been thrown out,”
I cried. Karl’s not comfortable with physical contact with blokes; I don’t really cuddle him that much even now, ten years later. We communicate through jokes. He must’ve known I
* Peter Ustinov: Comic actor, writer and intimidating genius raconteur.
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needed to be held up then though because he put his arms round me.
The drama ended when I left the Drama Centre. From that moment it was comedy. When Karl graduated—literally a week later—we started writing sketches together. V
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Part III
“But, truly, I have wept too much! The dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter”
Arthur Rimbaud
“I started doing comedy when my girlfriend left me; after all, my life’s a fucking joke”
Karl Th
eobald
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I imagine most people live their whole lives without encountering a comic genius. I’m lucky enough to have two among my close friends. One is Karl Theobald; he’s in Green Wing as Dr. Martin Dear, in which you get to see a slither of his awesome talent. He’s sometimes funny by mistake, like Hancock. He emits comedy, while he drinks tea or looks out the window. I watched him do a sketch at school and thought “I want to work with him.” It’s difficult for me to acknowledge others, what with the only-childhood and solipsism, but I told him afterward and the gods of comedy approved and just a few years later we were performing together. Above pubs. For nothing.
“Theobald and Brand on Ice” we called our double act. It’s a mark of my respect for his talent that I didn’t get obsessed about having my name first. We had to do everything ourselves, from stringing up the curtains across the back room of the Queens Arms where I’d previously lived, to create the illusion of a stage, to making tapes of the music. The pair of us constantly tramping through the Soho rain to give out flyers, and deliver endless cassettes to all the big, indifferent comedy management companies.
We were both signing on and getting housing benefit. I lived in Finsbury Park, and my life at that time centered on, every 179
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day: turning on the TV to watch Richard and Judy, eating Weetabix, reading the odd chapter of Camus, Kierkegaard or Chomsky for beginners, acquiring references, watching films, being ambitious.
A lot of the administrative and financial burden of mine and Karl’s low-bud get artistic endeavors inevitably fell on our two girlfriends at the time. I was still going out with Elia, who I’d met at Drama Centre. She was Spanish and took me to meet her family in El Escorial in Madrid. It used to kill me, that sort of stuff—going to stay with people’s families, pretending to be nice. She left me in the end, because I was a right little twerp and slept with one of her friends.
Before Finsbury Park we lived at my nan’s house in Dagenham. It was an impecunious period and I had to make my own entertainment, mostly through psychological cruelty; I was trying to make Elia smoke a joint or drink some booze or sum-mink, and she was going, “No Russell, I don’t want to, please don’t make me, Russ.” It was quite lighthearted, not proper torture.
“Nan,” I said. “If Elia don’t drink this wine, I’m going to turn the telly off so you won’t be able to watch Corrie.” My nan, instead of saying, “What? Don’t be ridiculous that’s not a proper rule,” looked at Elia and with a sympathetic smile said, “Just drink it darlin.” Like my ridiculous game had been sanctioned by FIFA. I loved her so much for that. She used to give me her pension book so I could sign for her money and spend it on drugs—“Bring me back a bit though eh, Russ?”
I used to love winding her up more than anything—she was such a laugh. I’d pretend to turn on her telly, pause and somberly announce, “Nan, I think the telly’s broken.” “Don’t say that Russell, my program’s gonna start.” I’d say, “It’s definitely broken, Nan, you’ll have to adapt to life without it, don’t make a scene,”
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then turn it on and she’d be all happy. She accepted me unques-tioningly, my nan. I was always skinning up in the front room; eventually she yielded to curiosity, “Russell—is that drugs?” “No, it’s not drugs, Nan—it’s marijuana, and it opens your mind, you square.” “Well, you wanna be careful with that Russell, ’cos I’ve seen it on Kilroy: it leads to worse things.”*
“Oh Nan,” I muttered, “you’re so parochial.” But it turns out my dear ol’ nan was right. My nan’s “Kilroy drugs ladder” led inexorably from marijuana to amphetamines, to LSD to ecstasy to cocaine and then crack to—cue fanfare—heroin: the drug addict’s jackpot. I should have listened to her. My drug addiction was a cliché that could’ve been avoided by listening to Robert Kilroy- Silk.
Stoned, and in the mood to wind her up, I once naughtily crept from the kitchen, the smell of which will remain forever with me—chips, chops, chocolate—to the living room and was about to burst in and tell her there was a fire or a ghost or a murderer, when I spied her through the open
door, sat in her chair, the TV off, just staring. I realized that she spent a lot of time alone, that she existed when I wasn’t with her, that her body was tired. She looked ready to die.
The last time I saw my nan she said two things to me. One that she’d said every time I’d seen her from the time I’d had the facility for language, the other she said only once. “You got any money?” as an offer, not a request, and “Look after your dad Russell.” She’d never said that before. That’s all she said from where she lay in Lillechurch Road, her bed having become her
* Kilroy was a sub–Jerry Springer daytime audience participation talk show where Kilroy would simplify complex social issues for the consumption of stoned or bored viewers.
Once he did a show on bullying, during which he got a person who’d been bullied to aggressively confront a non-related, nonspecific bully without acknowledging the tragic past of the poor bully, who’d suffered all sorts of nasty sex abuse. It was mental telly.
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deathbed without anyone having been informed. I owe her.
Sometimes I wish she’d lived to see me succeed and get famous but it would’ve made no difference, to her I was famous already.
I phoned my dad the next day and asked him, “Is Nan alright?” He goes “No, she died.” “Oh right, OK then.” Th e phone
went dead—he later said that he was in the car, and drove into a tunnel. I was in a call box in Elephant and Castle. I went to a pub and cried and drank loads, I wrote a poem for my nan that I read at her funeral. I scribbled it out longhand in ballpoint pen on a series of little scraps of paper, while tears fell on it. It’s the only poem I’ve ever written that is about someone else. Not meant to prove how deep and clever I am, it’s just a simple thing that I meant.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 15
