by Stephen Fry
Everywhere about the city, on every wall, window, lamp-post or doorway, were posters for plays, comedies and idiosyncratic entertainments that combined everything from circus, music hall, surrealist balloon manipulation and ballet to street percussion, Maoist limbo-dancing, gender-bending operetta and chainsaw juggling. Members of the casts of these shows would dress up and run down the streets showering the good-naturedly reluctant passers-by with leaflets and complimentary tickets. On the opening day a parade of floats moved slowly east along Princes Street. There was somewhere in the city, or so we were told, a proper and official Festival being held: professional theatre companies and international orchestras performed plays and concerts for grown-ups in smart concert halls and theatres, but we saw or knew nothing of these, we were the Fringe, a vast fungus-like organism that spread its filaments throughout the fabric of Edinburgh, into the dossiest accommodations, weirdest sheds, huts, warehouses and wharves, and into every church hall and functional space large enough to house a punk magician and a few chairs.
Half-way along the Royal Mile, which runs down from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace, stood the Fringe Office, where festival-goers queued up for tickets. There were two shows I knew that I simply had to see. One was the Footlights Revue which due to The Tempest I had missed in Cambridge, and the other was a one-man comedy performance which was being put on at the Wireworks, a converted factory just behind the Fringe Office. I had been told so many times that this performer, an Oxford graduate called Rowan Atkinson, was not to be missed that I felt justified in lining up to plank down some cash on tickets for me and the Oedipus cast.
There was bad news when I got to the front of the queue.
'Ooh, that one's sold out, my darling.'
'Oh, really?'
''Fraid so ... what else do you - hang on.'
She picked up the phone and as she listened to the other end a smile lit up her face and she flashed me a happy look. She was a very pretty young Scot and wonderfully cheerful given her hard, non-computerized workload. I can still picture her face exactly.
'Well, well. That was the Rowan Atkinson people just now to say that due to popular demand they are doing an extra late-night performance on Saturday night. Can you make it?'
I bought five tickets and one for the Cambridge Footlights and stumbled happily away.
We presented our Oedipus every evening for two weeks at the Adam House in Chambers Street. The production design was 'inspired' by science fiction films and the principals and chorus had to wear strange costumes constructed from cut-up sheets of coloured lighting gel which were a devil to get on in time given my tight gap between performances. Peter Rumney had chosen W. B. Yeats's translation of the Sophocles original, and I spoke the language well, in a mellifluously rhetorical kind of way, but was unable to ascend the heights of tragedy and despair that the play demanded. In fact I didn't even reach the foothills. Oedipus Rex's journey from commanding greatness to whimpering ruin called, in Edinburgh terms, for a Royal Mile that swooped from the elegant squares of the New Town into the sinister slums of the old. I gave them a flat Cambridge street with some pleasant window shopping but about as much pity and terror as a banana milkshake. Nor did our production do well in the turbulent competition for Fringe audiences. The Scotsman reviewer described me as the figurehead of the ship, which sounded good until she went on to explain that she meant I was imposing and wooden. Oh well. None of this worried me: I was having the time of my life. In the Mummers' afternoon show, Artaud at Rodez, amongst other characters I played the great French actor Jean-Louis Barrault. It was directed by the dynamic and intense Pip Broughton, who had cast Jonathan Tafler (son of the film actor Sidney) in the lead role of Artaud. He was superb and dominated the stage and the production despite having to spend most of it in a straitjacket.
On my fifth evening, as soon as Oedipus came down I decellophaned myself and hurried away to join an impatient full-house queue that was shuffling its way into the theatre where the Cambridge Footlights were giving their revue, Nightcap.
'Apparently it's crap this year,' I heard from someone behind me as I sat down.
'Yeah, Nightcrap,' tittered his companion.
It was not crap. It was astonishingly good, and the sceptical pair behind me were the first to their feet whistling and stamping approval when the curtain call came.
There were two first-years in the show, my friend Emma Thompson and a tall young man with big blue eyes, triangular red flush marks on his cheeks and an apologetic presence that was at once appallingly funny and quite inexplicably magnetic. His name, according to a programme that included helpful photographs of the cast, was Hugh Laurie. Another tall man with lighter but equally blue eyes, curly hair and a charmingly 1940s manner was the current President of the Footlights, Robert Bathurst. Martin Bergman, the previous year's President, was in the show too, performing a clever kind of moon-faced epicene MC role. Also in the cast was an astoundingly nimble, twinkly and clownishly gifted comic actor called Simon McBurney, whom I knew because he was, as it happened, Emma's boyfriend. This was to my shocked mind as perfect a comedy show as I had ever seen. It had never occurred to me that the Footlights would be this good. So good indeed that I instantly abandoned any dream I might have had of next year dipping my own toe in the waters of sketch comedy. I knew that I could not for a second hold my own with these people. Cool as I wasn't, I had nonetheless absorbed the predominant cool person's view that the Footlights Club was peopled with self-obsessed, semi-professional show-bizzy show-offs. What was so extraordinary about Nightcap was how technically perfect in delivery, writing, timing, style and confidence it was, while managing to project a wholly likeable awareness of the absurdity of the whole business of student comedy. It was grown-up and polished yet at the same time bashful and friendly; it was sophisticated and intelligent but never pretentious or pleased with itself; it had authority, finish and quality without any hint of self-regard, vanity or slickness. It was, in short, just what I believed comedy of this kind ought to be. For all that I had by now been in at least fifteen plays, some of which had been comic in some form or other, I did not believe that I would ever have the confidence to knock on the door of a Footlights Club that boasted such assured talents.
Heigh ho. At least I might be able to sneer at this Rowan Atkinson fellow. After all, what had Oxford ever done for comedy? Well, Terry Jones and Michael Palin obviously, but apart from them, what had Oxford ever done for comedy? Dudley Moore. Well, yes, apart from Palin, Jones and Moore what had ...? Alan Bennett. All right. Granted. But apart from Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Dudley Moore and Alan Benn ... Evelyn Waugh? Oscar Wilde? Oh all right then, damn you, maybe Oxford weren't such duds after all. Still I went to the Wireworks not expecting that a one-man show could compete with the skill and style of Nightcap. I staggered out two hours later almost unable to walk. My sides and lungs had taken a hell of a beating. They had never been put to such paroxysmal use in their lives. You have probably seen Rowan Atkinson. If you are lucky you might have seen him on stage. If you are very, very lucky, then you might have had the experience of seeing him on stage before you had ever seen him anywhere else. That is the kind of joy that can never be reconstructed, to encounter an astounding talent for the first time with no preconceptions and no especial expectations. I had never watched Rowan Atkinson on television and I really knew nothing about him other than that his show was a hot ticket. It was called a 'one-man show' but actually there were two other performers: Richard Curtis, the writer of most of the material, who took the role of a kind of straight man, and Howard Goodall, who played music from an electric piano and sang a witty song of his own.
I had noticed from the programme that the staging was the work of Christopher Richardson, whom I had known when I was a schoolboy and he a master at Uppingham School.+ I had a brief word with him afterwards, and he told me that the show had previewed at Uppingham.
'The theatre has become quite a regular stop on the way between university and E
dinburgh,' he said. 'You must bring some of your Cambridge people.'
'Oh I don't, I'm not ... we wouldn't ...'
The drama I was doing at Cambridge suddenly seemed ordinary, worthy and desperately unexciting. I dismissed such unnecessarily negative thoughts from my mind. What was there to complain of?
Cherubs, Coming Out, Continent
The accelerando that had begun in the second term continued on my return. More drama, less academic study.
I now had the option of living out of college in digs or staying in and sharing with a fellow second-year. Kim and I chose to share, and we were rewarded with a stunning set of rooms in Walnut Tree Court. The ceiling had dark Elizabethan beams, and the walls were panelled in wood. Some of the panels were cut to reveal recessed cupboards and, in one place, an area of medieval painted plaster. There were bookshelves, a good gyp-room, window-seats, leaded panes of warped glass of great antiquity and far from contemptible furniture. With our books, records, glassware and china, my bust of Shakespeare, Kim's bust of Wagner, Jaques chess set and Bang and Olufsen record player we were as well set up as any students in the university.
The three terms of that second year have blended and blurred in my mind. I do know that it was then that I was asked to join the Cherubs, hurrah! The initiation ceremony required the draining down of heroically repulsive and impossibly combined flagons of spirit, wine and beer. One also had to recite the meaning of the Cherubs' emerald, navy and salmon necktie: 'Green for Queens' College, blue for the empyrean and pink for the cherub's botty.' Another duty was to declare what one would do to advance the cause of the Cherubs and Cherubism. I cannot remember what I said, something arrogant about wearing the tie on television at every opportunity when I was a famous actor, I think. Another initiate, Michael Foale, announced that he would be the first Cherub to join all the other cherubs in heaven. When pushed for an explanation he said that he intended to be the first Cherub in space. It was a preposterous claim to make. Space travellers were either American astronauts or Soviet cosmonauts. At some later, slightly less incoherently drunken Cherubs party I discovered that he had been perfectly serious. He had dual UK/US nationality, his mother being American. He was already fluent in Russian, which he had taught himself, reasoning that the future of space exploration would depend on full cooperation and collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was into his third year of a doctorate in astrophysics and a member of the RAF's Air Training Corps, able to fly just about anything that had wings or rotors. I had never encountered such focus and determination in anyone. Seven years later he was accepted by NASA as an astronaut. He flew his first Space Shuttle mission five years after that and retired having spent over a year of his life away from earth. Until 2008 he held the American record for time spent in space - 374 days, 11 hours and 19 minutes - which is still, needless to say, a British record. I would like to say that his resolve, dedication and commitment were a life-changing example to me. Instead I thought he was potty and blush to think how I humoured him.
The Cherubs. I know we look like wankers, but really we weren't. Honestly.
Mike Foale invited me to attend the launch of his mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999, but I couldn't go. He invited me again to his final launch in 2003, for which he was appointed Commander of the International Space Station. Again I had to plead other commitments. What was I thinking of? Surely I could have postponed whatever it was I was doing and travelled to the launch site to watch a remarkable man doing one of the most remarkable things any human can do? I regret missing the chance deeply. I hope today's Cherubs at Queens' have incorporated a toast into their rituals which recognizes the most illustrious and intrepid of their heavenly host ever to don the green, blue and pink.
I soon made sure that Kim was initiated into the Cherubs too, and perhaps as a kind of thank you, or more likely because he was such a generous soul anyway, Kim offered to have a dinner jacket made for me at a grand tailoring shop on the corner of Silver and Trumpington Streets. Ede and Ravenscroft, besides being fine fashioners of a gentleman's dress suiting, were also makers of elaborate and distinguished academic, legal, ecclesiastic and ceremonial costume of all kinds from graduate gowns to royal robes. The double-breasted dinner jacket of heavy wool they made for me was a thing of rare beauty. The facings of the lapels were of black silk as were the stripes down the side of the trouser legs. Kim felt I should have a proper shirt with separate collar to go with it as well as a good silk black bow-tie. And how could any of this be worn without proper shoes? Kim was generous with his money, but he never used it to show off. Not once did he make me feel that I was a lucky recipient of his largesse, or put me in the position of being embarrassed or overwhelmed by it. The kindness was as much in the manner of his generosity as in the quantity of it, although the latter did keep our rooms in enviable luxury. Kim's mother often sent large hampers from Harrods, cases of wine and quantities of cashmere socks for her beloved only child. His father worked in the advertising business, something to do with the sites on which posters were put up, and it was clearly a concern that flourished. My own family's relatively modest prosperity did not, like Kim's, run to truffles, pate and vintage port, but my mother was able to exhibit more often than was comfortable for a sceptic like me a most uncanny ability to know exactly when and by how much my funds were depleted. A bill from Heffer's, the Cambridge bookshop, might arrive in my pigeonhole and loom over me and deprive me of sleep that night, and the following morning there would be a letter from Mother with a cheque and little note saying that she hoped that this might come in useful. The sum seemed nearly always to cover the bill and leave a happy amount over for wine and cakes.
My sister Jo came to stay. She adored Kim and made friends with everyone, most of whom thought she was an undergraduate, although she was only fifteen. It was in a letter to her when she was back home that I wrote something that my father saw, something that made it clear that I was gay. He got a message through to the porter's lodge at Queens' asking me to ring. When I called he told me that he had seen my letter to Jo, that he was sorry to have done so, but that as far as the gay thing was concerned he couldn't be happier ...
'Oh, and your mother would love to speak to you.'
'Darling!'
'Oh, Mama. Are you upset?'
'Don't be silly. I think I've always known ...'
It was the most marvellous relief to come out in this way.
Papa.
Mama.
My scholarly duty of saying Latin grace in hall for a week came round. I began to write occasional articles and television reviews for a student newspaper called Broadsheet, and more and more parts in more and more plays came my way. I played a disc jockey in Poliakoff's City Sugar, a poet in Bond's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and a Classics don in a new play by undergraduate Harry Eyre. I played kings and dukes and old counsellors in Shakespeare and killers and husbands and businessmen and blackmailers in plays old, new, neglected and revived. If Kipling's suggestion that to fill every minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run is truly, as he asserted, the mark of a man, then I seemed to have become one of the most virile students in Cambridge.
In the Christmas vacation that fell between the Michaelmas and Lent terms, I accompanied the European Theatre Group on a tour of the continent, bestowing the blessing of Macbeth upon a bewildered population of Dutch, German, Swiss and French theatre-goers, mostly reluctant schoolchildren. The production was directed by Pip Broughton, who had been responsible for Artaud at Rodez, and she had cast Jonathan Tafler as the murderous thane. Illness prevented him at the last minute, however, which was a great blow to Pip, for she and Jonathan were an enchantingly devoted couple. I played King Duncan - a marvellous role for such a tour because he dies very soon in the play, and I could spend my time scoping out whichever town we were quartered in and be back in time for the curtain-call pregnant with information on the best bars and cheapest restaurants. The ETG had been founded by Derek
Jacobi, Trevor Nunn and others in 1957, the year of my birth, and had earned a lamentable reputation for its frequent lapses from high seriousness and decorum. There was a rumour that the town of Grenoble had gone so far as to ban all Cambridge drama troupes from ever appearing in their town again after a notoriously drunken exhibition at a mayoral reception some time in the mid-seventies: well, drunken exhibitionism, if the story is to be believed. Our company was not as bad as that, but we did misbehave on stage. There is something about the sight of row upon row of serious Swiss schoolchildren with copies of Shakespeare on their laps studiously following the text line by line that brings out the devil in a British actor. A Word of the Day would be announced before curtain-up and prizes awarded to whichever actor could most often jemmy that word into their role. 'There's no weasel to find the mind's construction in the weasel,' I remember saying one night in Heidelberg. 'He was a weasel in whom I placed an absolute weasel.' And so on.
