Back Story

by David Mitchell

  But honestly … ‘Guilty pleasures’? It’s prudish and judgemental and yet it’s referring to harmless things people do in their spare time. I mean, I’ve watched and enjoyed The X Factor and I know that it’s not exactly the Proms or The Wire or whatever worthy thing I’m supposed to be watching, but why should I feel the least bit guilty about having taken pleasure from it? Or, for that matter, from eating a Findus crispy pancake, watching a Brittas Empire DVD or reading Country Life in the bath?

  It has occurred to me since, as it almost certainly occurred to you, that there was probably more than one timorous child only pretending to want his face painted. But that just makes the idea of consensus all the more terrifying.

  - 11 -

  Cross-Dressing, Cards and Cocaine

  Having turned right after the Hampstead Theatre down Winchester Road, I am walking between two gleaming new blocks of flats, under one of which will be fragments of rubble from the first flat I rented in London – a time when I had no money and no paid work. I’ve been standing on stages for years, I thought in those days. If someone doesn’t pay me for a public performance soon, it’ll be as if they’re trying to starve me into stopping.

  After inexpertly miming the life cycle of a staple crop and being made to look like a clown, my next public performance (unpaid) was when I was ten years old, and it was the role of ‘Dancing Girl’ in a production of A Christmas Carol. This wasn’t the lead. I was only in one scene: Mr Fezziwig’s party. You know, when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge what he used to be like when he let his hair down (or, in most productions, before he’d let it get all grey and straggly). I didn’t have any lines. Basically I was an extra in drag. I was part of a group of eight boys, half of us disguised as women, who were doing a sort of line dance in order to make the atmosphere of Fezziwig’s Christmas party seem appropriately festive.

  It’s impossible for me to infer anything flattering from being cast in this role, and God knows I’ve tried. Clearly the school wished to involve as many boys as possible in the production; if you auditioned, they’d try and give you something to do. Their decision to put me in a wig and a dress at the back of the stage in a single scene does not suggest that my acting showed much promise. And obviously, it was embarrassing to have to cross-dress – but then, it was an all-boys’ school so I wasn’t alone and some of the boys had to play actual female characters, which involved talking and (in the most nightmarish examples) pretending to be in love as a woman – inevitably, there being very little lesbian theatre performed at my prep school, with a man – which I considered much, much worse than what I had to endure. (Obviously, if there had been lesbian theatre at my prep school, both of the lesbians would have had to be played by boys, so that wouldn’t have helped either.)

  I’ve worn drag a few times on stage since then – I pretended to be Cilla Black at a college rag week version of Blind Date, and played the dame in a couple of pantomimes in the part of my career before anyone paid me, when I was living on the very road I’m walking down now. Later, when Robert Webb and I were doing our sketch show, I appeared on television as Mrs Danvers (Daphne Du Maurier’s terrifying housekeeper), Mrs Patricia Wilberforce (our vision of a 1940s British version of Oprah) and half of a two-headed Mrs Hudson. On every occasion I enjoyed it; it’s so much easier to get laughs when you’re a bloke in a dress. Audiences just find it funny and seem well disposed to whatever line you deliver.

  I don’t really understand why that is, although I can certainly feel that hilariousness myself when I watch the Monty Python team pretending to be housewives – particularly, I think, the Batley Townswomen’s Guild re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor (essentially they just run at each other in a muddy field wielding handbags). There is something about male impersonation of female mannerisms, however inexpert, that makes people giggly – possibly because it consists of the right combination of silliness and taboo-breaking. Fluidity of gender is not something we’re culturally confident about, however much we try to be outwardly accepting.

  This is one of the reasons transsexuals get such a hard time. They’re doing something which, for some, offends against principles which are deeply, if only instinctively, held. A minority of the offended, the angrier, stupider minority, then lash out. But, even for those of us who aren’t remotely offended by what transsexuals do with their bodies or their lives, there’s the problem that, when a large man decides to live and dress as a woman – and to have what surgery in that direction they can to help the process – what most of us still see is a bloke in a dress.

  And it does often seem to be quite a large man, wearing quite an old-fashioned twinset and pearls type of get-up – although they may just be the only ones we notice. And they look very much like the Batley Townswomen’s Guild. So it’s funny. But we’re not supposed to find it funny – so it’s even funnier. The person who’s made that choice is deadly serious and very sensitive about it – which makes it funnier still. To the comedy-appreciating parts of the brain, it’s as if someone has solemnly announced their intention, in order to be more completely themselves, to live a life of constantly slipping on banana skins. And then we see them doing it. All seriously.

  Unfortunately, that immediate entertaining effect of a man in a dress didn’t really happen for me when I was ten – partly because I didn’t have any lines but mainly because, if you put a pre-pubescent boy in a dress and a wig, he looks exactly like a pre-pubescent girl. The very effect that large hairy blokes who feel they’re women trapped in men’s bodies are so desperate to achieve, I couldn’t at that age avoid. The photographs of the production were humiliating, as my true gender was completely undetectable – and this was at an age when I identified quite strongly with being a boy and the thought of blurring that line was intensely threatening. I was proud to be penis-bearing and considered girls to be basically silly and unnecessary. It was disconcerting to discover that I was a few months without a haircut away from being indistinguishable from one.

  On stage, I did my dancing steps as rehearsed while the action of the play continued around me. I had little or no idea what went on in any of the other scenes – it was only later that I found out the plot of A Christmas Carol. I was only on for two minutes and I spent the rest of the time playing cards with the other dancing boys.

  That was why I fell in love with the stage: it gave me the opportunity to play pontoon in the gaps. There was a huge amount of waiting around involved in this show. School would finish, after which you’d either have boarders’ tea or go to McDonald’s – but then there were still hours to wait before the show, during which you’d change into your costume and get made up by one of the team of female teachers and mothers. They ran a sort of greasepaint production line to make sure that every member of the huge cast was properly painted orange with red lips (if they were pretending to be girls) or with thick black worry lines (if they were pretending to be old) and a great big scarlet dollop in the corner of their eye whoever they were pretending to be.

  The older boys would earnestly explain that, without this bizarre caking, human facial features were almost totally unnoticeable under the powerful lights of the school hall’s stage. Obviously this was nonsense. We would have looked completely normal under the lights without make-up; with it, we looked like we were absolutely covered in make-up. But I must say, in contrast to my experience as a clown, I found being made up for the play quite fun. It made me feel important and I liked the smell.

  But during the hours of waiting for everyone to get through this process, and then the hour or so while the audience arrived, and then the hours of the show itself, which I resolutely ignored apart from my two-minute appearance, there was plenty of time for playing cards. This felt like the most fun I’d ever had in my life. I’d been taught pontoon by my grandfather (the second nicest one), but to play it with other boys of my own age – to get to teach some of them the rules – was hugely exciting. It felt very grown-up and sophisticated, particularly because it invol
ved betting (albeit only with matchsticks) but also because it had its own little argot: not just the names of the cards but things like ‘twist’, ‘bust’ and ‘five card trick’.

  I was very disappointed, and slightly alienated, to discover many years later, on a stag do, that the casino version of the game not only has a different name – blackjack – but also different words and conventions for everything. You’re not supposed to say things like ‘twist’ and you get treated like a rube if you do, so it turns out that my schoolboy sense of sophistication was illusory. And of course it struck me as illogical and unfair that ‘twist’ exists as a word – an obscure way of asking for a card that you have to be in the know to be aware of – but quickly becomes obsolete when you get even deeper in the know. It would be like mariners not only having the words ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ instead of left and right but also a secret rule which stated that, when you really became a seasoned seafarer, you reverted to saying left and right. For some reason, I expected better from these people who were trying to cheat me of my money.

  Back at school, before I was aware that it was possible to spend an evening playing games of chance without the excuse of a theatrical production, I decided to sign up for every play going – which, unfortunately, was only two a year. In the following year’s Christmas production, I was given my first line – and I’ve been battling cocaine ever since.

  No, I’ve never, in fact, had cocaine. No one has ever offered me any cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me any cocaine.

  Can you believe that? What’s wrong with me? I don’t want any cocaine, by the way (in case you were offering – which, experience suggests, you weren’t) but it would have been nice to be offered once or twice. It’s like being a vegetarian to whom no one has ever offered any meat. They wouldn’t be pleased. A vegetarian doesn’t want meat but neither does he (or she – usually she, let’s be honest) want the thought that, as soon as she enters a room, everyone assumes she’s a vegetarian. No one, however merciful towards animals, wants to look so vegetarian in every way that no one has even bothered to check. That’s how I am with cocaine and it makes me worry I’m not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.

  Anyway, I was given my first line of dialogue in the next year’s production and it was: ‘Vespasian, centurion.’ Two nouns, one of them proper. I think the centurion is trying to remember who the current Roman emperor is after a year of political instability and each of his soldiers, of whom I was one, makes a suggestion. On consulting Wikipedia, I learn that, after the death of Nero in AD 68, there were four Roman emperors in quick succession – Galba, Otho, Vitellius and then Vespasian. It was this fact that the author of this comic play set in Roman times, presented by and for children, who was also a Latin teacher at the school (Mr Roberts), was seeking to do a joke on. That’s the sort of thing that gives dumbing down a good name.

  It was very enterprising of a teacher to write the school play but I didn’t feel that the line ‘Vespasian, centurion’ was exactly a zinger. I’m not saying I could have got full value out of ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!’ but with ‘Vespasian, centurion’ I didn’t think I’d been given the equipment with which to amuse. I felt in need of a bed of nails or even a hockey stick. When I said ‘Vespasian, centurion’ at the point instructed, the audience showed no sign at all of having noticed. But the good news was that saying ‘Vespasian, centurion’ didn’t eat seriously into my card-playing time, which kept the magic of theatre alive in my heart.

  The next year’s production presented a problem: I was given quite a large part. It was an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh and I was cast as Rabbit. This is the first time I can remember acting, rather than just moving and standing, and occasionally saying ‘Vespasian, centurion’ in exactly the way I was told. In our family car we had a tape, which I would ask to hear again and again, of Lionel Jeffries reading Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s a brilliant reading by a terrific actor. If you think you don’t know who Lionel Jeffries is, you’d probably recognise his face and bald pate. Among hundreds of roles, he played Dick Van Dyke’s father in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and did a rather moving turn as the patriarch of a brewing family in an episode of Inspector Morse.

  Anyway, he read Rabbit with a sort of clipped military Field Marshal Montgomery voice, and I had the idea when auditioning for the show (and I mean ‘idea’ very much in the sense that advertising creatives use it) of copying him. This immediately put me head and shoulders above anyone else who read for the part – I already had a performance. When I landed the role, I remember counting my lines – I had well over a hundred! I’d hit the big time and, in that production, I had no time for playing pontoon. Fortunately for my future financial security, I found that I enjoyed the performing even more than the cards. (I say ‘fortunately’ but then acting is hardly the most secure financial path you can tread – and I’m reliably informed that some people make a very good living playing poker, although I don’t think the same can be said for pontoon.)

  And with my first stage performance of any size came my first on-stage cock-up. The approach to theatre at New College School was an old-fashioned one. Realism, wherever possible, was demanded. I have extremely fond memories of the set: no short cuts, no simplified black box staging, none of that theatrical bullshit that, in our heart of hearts, we all know is an excuse to save effort or money. No, there were trees and burrows and bushes and paths and doorways and a bridge and a river all crammed onto the stage in the school hall, all lovingly recreated in wood and paint.

  For the scene in the snow – the first story from House at Pooh Corner in which Pooh and Piglet decide to build Eeyore a house and in the process accidentally demolish the one Eeyore has just built for himself (they mistake the structure for a pile of sticks) – the set was transformed, in a quick scene change, into a snowy landscape, complete with cotton wool snow along the railings of the bridge. I thought that was amazing.

  And the commitment to realism extended to the costumes. The animal characters weren’t alluded to with, say, a pair of ears while the rest of the costume was human in a way that reflected the character’s personality. Oh no. We were head to toe, fingertip to fingertip in fake fur. Only our faces showed. This led to my mistake.

  There is a scene in which Rabbit has to read out a plan to drive Kanga out of the wood – it’s in the form of a long list. He doesn’t like immigrants basically but, like many extremists, he’s attempted to rationalise his instinctive xenophobia into some sort of coherent philosophy. It’s a very funny list which I had sort of learned. Not as well as I’d learned my other lines because this bit, I reasoned, I’d be reading out. It is not a good idea, I now know, to sort of learn anything – to ‘become familiar’ with it. It’s worthless. Either learn it or don’t. If you’re going to read it out, just admit that and don’t in any way lull yourself into a false sense that, were the piece of paper to go missing, you’d probably be okay.

  The piece of paper did not go missing, by the way. I am very organised about props. People who mess with them get my full anal barrage (by this, I do not mean that I shit on them – I’m using anal in its modern slang sense). The piece of paper was where it should have been – folded up in the pocket of Rabbit’s waistcoat (which I wore over the top half of the fur body suit; I did not wear anything over its bottom half, but that’s okay because there is a strong convention that the anthropomorphised animals of children’s stories are non-genital).

  The only problem was that when I came to read out the list on stage, I couldn’t unfold it because of the ridiculous furry mittens I was wearing in order to complete the illusion that I was in fact a talking rabbit. I was able, with difficulty, to fish it out of my pocket, but that was all. The words were on the inside. All I could do was stare at the blank, white, folded quarter of A4 and try to remember my lines, a process not helped by simultaneously having to surf a wave of panic.

  But it could have been worse. I fluffed a
bit, I approximated, I probably went slightly red but, in the context of a prep school play, the standard of professionalism probably didn’t fall perceptibly below the mean. What interests me about it is that, afterwards, one of the directors of the show, Mr Sleigh, to whom I’d been recounting my mittens nightmare with a verve worthy of a classic anecdote about Gielgud getting caught cottaging, said that I should have taken the mittens off to unfold the list. He said it would have been funny.

  He was right, of course. But it had never occurred to me to do that. In my mind, I was pretending to be a rabbit and the rabbit wasn’t wearing gloves. I felt that to take them off, assuming people didn’t scream because they thought the giant rabbit was now skinning its own hands, would have been to shatter the illusion – as surely as if I’d gone off stage and fetched the script. It would have been cheating. I wanted to say: ‘Look, am I pretending to be a rabbit or not?’ But it stayed in my head, that idea of how you could cheat in a performance – the thought that, as the audience members were suspending their disbelief anyway (I certainly didn’t think that anyone believed I was a rabbit), they’ll suspend it a bit further if you give them a joke.

  Whether on stage, on TV or, I suppose, in a film, although I’ve had very little experience of that, it’s a tricky thing knowing how much you can ‘break the fourth wall’, acknowledge the pretence. The right decision usually depends on context and, by keeping the mittens on, I was rightly erring on the cautious side even if I lost a laugh. But this early directorial note is interesting because it lodged firmly in my mind the idea that, when you’re performing, what you’re primarily doing is telling a story and trying to entertain, not just pretending to be something that you’re not.

  The other distressing event in that show was the moment towards the end when I was supposed to hug and kiss another boy. You’re probably thinking: ‘I don’t remember that bit in Winnie-the-Pooh!’ Don’t you? That story where Rabbit professes undying love for Eeyore and starts to hump his leg? Don’t worry, that’s just in the fan fiction (or that’s what I imagine – there’s a big internet out there: get googling!).