by John Challis
It fairly soon emerged that the more experienced among us had a better idea of what worked and what wouldn’t, although Kate’s tendency to switch hats between producer and leading actress didn’t help. It became clear quite soon that the company had split roughly into three groups: the ‘Big Four’ – those of us who had been on the telly, the ‘Tracksuit Rehearsers’ – young things yet to make their mark and the ‘Lower Tier’, which mainly consisted of musicians.The Tracksuiters spent their time exercising, warming up, warming down and doing a lot a moody running about.
One of our ‘Big Four’ decided to relegate himself to this disparate group and be ‘just another member of the ensemble’ but the whole device smelled bogus since he was the best known of us all. To show willing, he did throw a lot of ideas into the pot, although most sank to the bottom.
Richard Heffer, on the other hand, besides being a charmer and a good actor, was also an academic from Cambridge and an avid ‘text’ man, which meant he was constantly correcting other people’s misreadings and misinterpretations. With the unconscious condescension of the over-educated, he provoked much resentment from the younger actors, though admiration, too from the more aspiring ones.
Sabina and I were inevitably tarred with sitcom schtick, so we weren’t taken seriously at all and provoked even more resentment when we suggested improvements.
In practice, what this demonstrated was the clear need for someone to sit outside the action, looking on, and see it as a whole – in other words, a director. The result of BATCO’s free-for-all was a mishmash of very good scenes and some that didn’t work at all. Even Ed Berman, my boss from a few years before in the British American Repertory Company (or BARC), who was a notorious liberal and democratic operator, would not have allowed this artistic anarchy to reign.
One member of the company who seemed aloof from the action – indeed, it seemed, outside the whole production – was Peter Adamson.
I remembered him, of course, as Len Fairclough, from the short stint I’d had on Corrie, when I’d found him always entertaining, if mostly drunk, with a dash of bitterness about life. Now, eighteen years on, he was still mostly drunk, still bitter and a lot less entertaining.
He couldn’t seem to decide if the whole BATCO concept was beneath him or above him and he managed to contribute nothing to the tortuous joint directing process. He’d opted to play Sir Tunbelly Clumsy as entertaining, mostly drunk and rather bitter.
I had the role of Worthy, a sinister, Machiavellian ladies’ man, forever plotting to prise the women away from their proposed husbands under the guise of matchmaking.
Worthy’s collaborator in this was the equally conniving Berinthia (a ‘young’ widow), played by Kate O’Mara in heroically vampish style.
Our self-appointed Tracksuiter, Roy Marsden (formerly Chief Inspector Dalgleish)played Lord Foppington, a rich, dandified, silly arse.
Somehow the show lurched into some kind of recognizable form, and we set out on the road a little nervously.
The company’s shambolic tendency was reflected in our first performance in our first venue. We arrived in Oxford to find that we were, apparently, completely unexpected. There were no posters to be seen anywhere around the town, which was hardly surprising as they were all still in a bundle in the manager’s office.
We dashed out with them and spent the next few hours persuading any shops or households who would listen to put them in their windows, in their cars, on their front doors, trees in their garden or, in one case, wrapped around their dog when they walked them through the Parks.
Once we sorted out the publicity, without much help from Peter Adamson, our egalitarian non-hierarchic company had to help with the ‘get-in’ – heaving the set, the costume hampers and props out of the transporter, explaining the lighting set-up to the local sparks, getting the right costumes to the right place and making sure the scenery was where it ought to be. It reminded me of my days in rep with the Penguin Players in Bexhill, a quarter of a century before.
On our first night in Oxford, our efforts were rewarded with an audience of three men and (possibly) a dog – perhaps the dog that had worn the poster. As the week went on things improved but I realized it was always going to be hard to sell a show whose egalitarian principles didn’t permit promoting the ‘stars’ of the show.
I know I won’t be universally popular for saying so but I’ve always felt that political attitudes and thespians don’t mix, however enthusiastically they are embraced. Look at dear old Glenda, from the grandiloquence of Queen Elizabeth I in Court, to the back benches of the Commons, once she became responsible for writing her own speeches!
From Oxford we headed west towards the mighty dinosaur’s back of the Malvern Hills and the theatre in Great Malvern, which clings to the lower slopes on the eastern side. It’s a distinctive town, founded on profits from the gentle industries of education and spa water. It seems to have a particular architecture all of its own, early Victorian multicoloured stone, held together by extravagant snail pointing. This rather genteel atmosphere has made it, like Harrogate, a gathering place for theatre enthusiasts of a certain age and income. They were always going to love a Restoration comedy.
Sabina and I shared a house with Richard Heffer. Early in our short run there, the ‘Big Four’ of us – Roy Marsden, Richard, Sabina and I – had arranged to pull on our walking togs and bound up to the top of the nearest Malvern peak when, just as we were about to set off, I was called away to do a voice-over in London.
Before I left, I watched them set off up the hill, Sabina between them, all linked arm in arm – two naughty boys whisking my wife away with a jovial cry – ‘Don’t you worry... we’ll look after her!’ – offered and taken in good spirit.
Roy, the self-downgraded ‘Tracksuiter’ had several times expressed his admiration for Sabina and with his well-oiled charisma had taken to referring to her as ‘Wonder Woman’, which soon morphed into ‘Wanda’.
He would catch me and take my arm, with a thoughtful lowering of one eye-lid. ‘What about your wife, eh?’ He would shake his head. ‘Give, give, give, all the time.’
Cynically, I replied to myself. ‘So you can take, take, take, eh?’,while the bogus tracksuiter plunged on, piling on the charm.
I was complimented on my ‘skills’ in comedy and character invention. ‘I wonder if I could borrow a bit of advice from you,’ he went on smoothly. ‘I need a bit of help with my comedic problems. The trouble is, you see, I’ve only ever done drama.’
I was flattered. I didn’t see then that this was a device for gaining my trust, allaying – when it came to it – my suspicions, while he referred to his own wife with gentle irony, as ‘The Gauleiter’.
I watched the three of them for another moment or two as they walked away, laughing and ragging one another. I wondered why I felt a little uneasy as I walked down the hill to catch the London train. The town possessed a wonderful Victorian station with colourful, wrought iron decorations and an old-fashioned tea-room into which at any minute one expected Trevor Howard to burst, breathing heavily in anticipation of his tryst with a dewy-eyed Celia Johnson. I thought of her cuckolded husband, sitting at home in a moquette armchair, puffing on his big-bowled pipe, while he listened to the wireless and I half expected a steam train to thunder through the station, whistling vigorously as it thrust into the tunnel at the end of the platform.
When I got back from London, Sabina and the other two seemed to have bonded even closer. Roy and Richard had worked together in the 1982 series Airline and knew each other well. They indulged in a certain amount of unspoken communication, in which Sabina was keen to join. Richard was a natural, incorrigible flirt; Sabina, like me, was an habitual flirt, while Roy could trowel on the charm, like a profligate Irish bricky with a pallet of mortar.
To some extent, of course, the flirting reflected the action of the play and we were all, on the face of it, getting on well in a joshy, theatrical sort of way. Sabina was Amanda – a little as she’d
played Lydia Languish in The Rivals, an ingénue among the crafty schemers trying to seduce her away from her husband, Loveless, played by handsome Richard Heffer.
With the two chaps and Sabina getting so close, I felt a little left out. I looked more closely at Kate. But no, I didn’t really mean it – she and I were far too experienced to slip into a relationship of convenience and besides, I reminded myself, I was married to Sabina.
By the time we reached Billingham, a ’60s horror of a town dedicated to the production of chemicals and adjacent to some of the most beautiful parts of North Yorkshire, the show had settled into an acceptable, if fitful rhythm. I’d taken on an additional small cameo character part of a mad old shoemaker and I relished the return to what I did best – prancing about a stage, wearing colourful clothes and being a chameleon.
It was during this third leg of the tour that I was first aware of an identifiable change in atmosphere among us ‘Big Four’. Sabina was distracted, evidently pre-occupied with something that didn’t concern me. So, as it happened, was Kate, who was sharing a house with us this time. I deduced that the young man in the company she’d been seeing wasn’t performing satisfactorily (at least, off stage) and she’d been prompted to turn her sights on Richard Heffer, who, to her angry frustration, was showing no reciprocal interest. Kate was very upfront about this kind of thing in a way I found endearing. She saw no point in disguising her evergreen urges. ‘I’m just not getting old,’ she declared frankly. ‘I mean, I’m sure I’m going to still be having my periods when I’m ninety.’
Sabina, on the other hand, held her cards much closer. She was impervious to my gentle inquiries. ‘I’m fine,’ she fluted airily. ‘I’m fine, absolutely fine. Why do you keep asking?’
By the time we reached Newcastle and the wonderful Theatre Royal, relations between us were clearly strained. The ‘Big Four’ of us carried on doing everything together. Roy took us down to show us an extraordinary arts co-operative that he had financed and helped his brother set up. It was in an old warehouse in a dilapidated part of the city where countless artists, artisans and craftsmen all beavered away merrily like the elves in Santa’s toy factory. Even with my own cynical suspicion of socialist utopias, I couldn’t help being impressed that Roy had used the money his success as an actor had brought to give others a chance to realize their own creative potential. It was, in any event, consistent with his efforts to show he was on equal terms with the other members of the company, regardless of his greater role.
At the end of our week in Newcastle, relations between Sabina and me had deteriorated badly. Our habitual double-act repartee had been replaced by irritable bickering, sighs and moody shrugs.
If I strayed into contentious areas, comments that would normally have raised a laugh and a wicked comeback were met with expressions of angry derision. When she started putting me down in front of the others, I had to get to the bottom of it. She was adamant that nothing was wrong with her, and went on the attack.
‘You’re so crass and bloody naive,’ she hissed at me.
I didn’t deny it, but she’d known that long before we were married.
The company’s visit to Hadrian’s Wall and Houseteads Roman Fort would normally have been a great treat for me, fascinated as I am by historic piles of stone (I’m even living in one now), but the enjoyment of it was marred by my growing feeling that someone else must be behind the changes in Sabina’s attitude.
At one point, when I’d been poring over some piece of Roman history, I saw what looked to me like a secret conversation going on between her and Richard Heffer.
Could it be, I thought as an absurd dread gripped my innards, that she had finally succumbed to his relentless flirting?
But there was no other sign of it that afternoon, and I decided that I must be imagining things and that the cause of Sabina’s discontent lay elsewhere.
From Newcastle we travelled across England to the Grand Theatre in Blackpool. During the week in which we stayed in the blowsy old seaside resort, I had to commute almost every day to Bristol, where we were shooting scenes for the Only Fools Christmas special, Dates, when Del Boymeets Raquel for the first time, through a dating agency.
As usual, the BBC expected everyone to be available at a moment’s notice as soon as they wanted to shoot. As there always seemed to be delays in fixing dates, most of us had gone on and taken on other jobs.
As a result of the inevitable conflicts of work, the BBC had to had to ferry Roger Lloyd Pack, Ken Macdonald and me back and forth from all corners of the kingdom so that we could fulfil our obligations.
Although I was delighted to be working with the chaps again in what was one of the best of the Only Fools ‘specials’, I couldn’t stop myself worrying about what was going on back in Blackpool.
Sitting in the back of the car as it swished through the rain on the M6, I tried to convince myself that I was just being paranoid, that Sabina couldn’t possibly be conducting an affair with another member of the company, right under my nose, with everyone else looking on – could she? After all, they were all my friends.
But my concerns about this were thrust into the background on one extraordinary evening during our Blackpool run.
Kate, who was by now seething with frustration over Richard
Heffer’s complete non-response to her obvious interest, blew her top when he arrived on stage with the tops of his boots folded up, instead of down, as they normally were.
She was completely overtaken by her anger and disappointment, while she was trying to seduce him in the scene they were playing.
She stormed off stage to her dressing room, lit up with rage and took out her fury on one of her costumes by ripping it to pieces. Sabina, who’d followed her in, pointed out that she was supposed to be wearing the dress in the second half.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ she howled so everyone backstage could hear. ‘Has anyone got a needle and thread?’
The repair took the whole of the interval and was done just in time for Kate, calmer now but still bristling, to come on and do the next scene with, as it happened, me, as Worthy.
As we passed under the stage to prepare for our entrance, she turned to me. ‘You do agree with me, don’t you, darling, for being angry? I mean, all he could say was that there’s nothing in the script to say his boot tops should be up or down!’
‘Frankly, old thing,’ I said, ‘he’s got a point.’
Kate’s eyes blazed. ‘Oh, why don’t you all just fuck off!’ she yelled as we were about to come on.
She played the scene brilliantly and there was a little secret smile on her face as we exited stage left. I couldn’t help marvelling at her talent and her courage.
Straight after this potentially disastrous, though ultimately great performance, we were offered a transfer of the show to the Mermaid Theatre in the City of London for a six-week run either side of Christmas after the end of our tour.
We had a company meeting and all agreed, in tune with BATCO’s egalitarian ethos, that we would all work for the Equity minimum rate to make the move possible, and if the show managed to make a profit, it would be split equally among us at the end of the run.
It was great news, although we were well aware that the Mermaid, being where it is, is a notoriously difficult theatre to fill and we had very little time to publicize our presence.
Kate O’Mara and Roy Marsden were the two best- known names in the show and reaching a compromise with the company’s integrity, it was agreed that their names should be writ large on a very arresting poster which Richard Heffer designed.
I hadn’t played at the Mermaid since 1969, when I’d been in Bernard Miles’ company doing Joan of Arc and The Bandwagon. I had fond memories of the theatre and of the venerable Sir Bernard, and it was good to be back. Our production of The Relapse was in good shape by then, despite the difficulties in directing by committee and we opened well enough at the Mermaid. The run settled down and we all relaxed comfortably into roles which we had we
ll-honed by then.
But two weeks into the run, we experienced a bit of a jolt when we discovered that our leading man, Roy Marsden, had come to a private arrangement with the management to receive more money than the rest of us were getting.
Roy’s credibility as a principled and egalitarian Tracksuit Rehearser was seriously compromised and his behaviour had left everyone with a sour taste in the mouth. When Sabina and I talked about it, she appeared more discomfited about what Roy had done, rather than angry, like the rest of us.
I was sharing a dressing room with Richard and Roy, where the normal jokey banter carried on but now there was a sharp undercurrent of tension and unspoken thoughts.
Chapter 5
Restoration Drama
Christmas 1988 came and went – a brief interlude in the run of our show at the Mermaid. Sabina and I did our duties in the round of present giving to Margo, Bill and Susie and my father, as grumpy as ever in Epsom. There was no overt rift between Sabina and me, but the sense of apartness I’d first felt while we’d been touring The Relapse did not diminish and the inexplicable chill between us lasted over Christmas into the New Year.
This wasn’t improved when, arriving a little early for an entrance in the play one evening, I saw a swift withdrawal of hands between Sabina and Roy.
I was almost sure that this was the conclusive piece of evidence of what I had been suspecting for some time but, being English and not wanting to cause a scene, I pretended to treat it as a joke.
‘Unhand my wife, sir,’ I hissed, quoting from the play.
But I suddenly felt marooned, marginalized, external to secret things that were going on. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ I went on, a little less jokily.
‘Oh come on,’ Roy chuckled. ‘We’re all good friends, aren’t we?’
‘Darling,’ Sabina cooed, taking my wrist. ‘You’re being a little paranoid, don’t you think?’
