David Jason: My Life (12 page)

But one thing which I definitely had in my favour was determination. I kept on writing. And finally, after countless applications and countless refusals, and at the expense of what would now be a rather fine collection of first-class stamps, I hooked one: an audition for a place with Margate Repertory Theatre, who were looking for actors to add to their general company.

I could have hooted with relief and delight, and, indeed, did, several times. At last someone had opened the door. And now it was up to me.

The auditions were held somewhere off the bottom of Devonshire Street, in central London. The requirement for each actor, as explained in the letter from Margate, was to offer a rendition of a piece from Shakespeare, a piece from a modern play and then a piece of your own choosing. At the appointed hour, I climbed some dingy stairs to a dusty little anteroom, where a person took my details and invited me to sit and wait. I duly did so, in the process noticing two things: first that my heart now appeared to be playing some kind of drum solo behind my ribcage; and second, that my fists were bunched so tightly that my nails were digging into my palms. Welcome to the world of auditions.

In due course a door opened and the preceding actor passed
through on his way out, giving me a fleeting moment in which to read the expression on his face. Horror? Delight? Mortification? Relief? It was hard to say. Then, after a few more clenched moments – and not only my fists – I was called through.

It was a big, high-ceilinged room with a wooden floor, entirely unfurnished, as I recall, but for a table at one end of it, behind which was seated the Margate Rep audition panel – two women and a man. I introduced myself, as best I could, although my tongue now seemed to have taken on the thickness of a can of Spam.

‘So, what are you going to do for us …’ The man paused and looked down on a sheet of paper which I suspected had hundreds of names on it. ‘… Mr White?’

‘I’m going to do
Richard III
,’ I said, stiffly. ‘The opening speech.’

‘Very good,’ said one of the faces at the table. ‘In your own time.’

In the context of the expectant silence that then fell, the project I had announced suddenly seemed more than a little daunting. Indeed, the full difficulty of acting, and its basic absurdity, descended on me all at once. Basically, I was going to have to transform myself, at the click of a finger, from a jobbing electrician who has decided to give the theatre a go, into a vengeful, unscrupulous, blood-crazed monarch with a hunched back. Moreover, I was going to have to do this while on the edge of a personal nervous breakdown and in front of three complete strangers in an otherwise empty room.

I drew a deep breath, stooped slightly, to convey the all-important hunched back (‘That’ll impress them,’ I thought), and kicked off.

‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.’

OK so far, but I was still far from relaxed. Moreover, as I continued, I began to hear a rapid tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room.

‘
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
…’ tap-tap-tap.

The noise was light, but persistent, a bit like rain on a window, and more than a little distracting.

‘
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried
…’ tap-tap-tap.

By now I could see a look of consternation on the faces of the three people at the table, who could hear the tapping too.

‘
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths
…’ tap-tap-tap.

And that look from the table, in combination with the still increasing volume of the taps, caused me to dry, mid-line, and come to a halt.

Tap-tap-tap.

The noise continued in the otherwise quiet room. And I was slowly drawn to the gaze of my interviewers, all three of whom seemed to be directing their puzzled eyes at the floor below me. I looked down and was surprised to discover that the tapping was coming from the ends of my own legs. In my clenched state, the muscles in my calves had tightened, I had gone forward onto the balls of both feet and my heels were trembling rhythmically on the floor.

End of audition. ‘Thank you very much, Mr White. We’ll let you know.’

Now I had to recover my legs and make an exit. It was dead man walking – one of the longest walks I’ll ever make.

Out in the street, full of embarrassment and self-loathing, I felt about as foolish as I have ever felt. If I couldn’t even pull myself together to audition, how would I ever get anywhere?

Even when I overcame the shaky legs, I wasn’t immune to other humiliations. I got an audition for another repertory company – I think it could well have been in Basingstoke – and successfully kept my legs under control throughout, only to be told, ‘I’m sorry – you won’t match up to our leading lady.’

Match up? What – in terms of acting ability? No. What they meant was, their leading lady was five foot ten. Being four inches
south of there, I would never match up to her in height. What they were saying, ever so politely, was, ‘You’re too short, mate.’

It wouldn’t have been an issue in the movies, of course. Many of the world’s leading film stars are shorties, mentioning no Tom Cruises. Mentioning no Alan Ladds, either. Ladd was one of my earliest cinema heroes. He was reputedly only five foot seven – but that didn’t stop him forming a convincing screen relationship with Veronica Lake. But in film, you could stand on a box, dig a pit, shrink a doorway, lower a door handle, manipulate the perspective. In the theatre – no such luck. If the male actor only comes up to the female actor’s waist, you’ve got yourself a problem. I was made to realise very early that, however this acting life of mine panned out, romantic leads were probably going to be hard to come by.

In the end, I owed my first big break, as I’ve said, not to those endless letters, but to my brother. (I could have saved a fortune in postage if I’d known.) Now moving smoothly in the world of theatre, Arthur had forged a particularly good friendship with an actor and director called Simon Oates. Simon was one of those irritating men who are tall, handsome and extremely popular with women. Indeed, girls seemed to fling themselves at him on sight. It will tell you something about the style and panache of the man that he auditioned for the film role of James Bond in
Dr No
, came through a number of screen tests and got down to the final three for the part before they ended up giving it to someone called Sean Connery. I wonder what became of
him
. Really it might just as well have been Simon smoothly driving Aston Martins away from exploding warehouses as anyone else. That was pretty much how he was in real life.

Anyway, in the early spring of 1965, my brother brought Simon and his girlfriend along to see me in an amateur production of
The Teahouse of the August Moon
, with the St Bride’s Players, based in Fleet Street. This was the John Patrick play, based on a novel by Vern Sneider, about a clash of culture
between Pacific Islanders and occupying American officers after the Second World War. (I’m pretty sure I was playing Captain Fisby. At any rate, I’m fairly confident I wasn’t playing Lotus Blossom, the geisha.) I don’t know how thrilling a prospect this must have been for Simon, but he came anyway. And afterwards we went to the pub and Simon was good enough to tell me that he thought I had come across well – and also good enough to give me the impression that he wasn’t just saying this because he was there as a mate of my brother and felt he ought to be encouraging.

Eventually Simon asked me what I was going to do next, and whether I had any plans. Now, as it happened, I was in a position to tell him that I did. My scattershot mail-outs to the small ads in the back of the
Stage
had just opened a highly promising avenue.

‘Well, actually, Simon, yes,’ I said, adopting all the nonchalance I could muster. ‘I’ve got the chance to be a pirate in Southend.’

I still have that letter, dated 10 March 1965 and typed on the headed notepaper of Leon Markson Limited. The ad had asked for actors who could take part in a ship-based theatrical extravaganza at the seaside. Mr Markson, the producer of said extravaganza, had replied to my application as follows:

Dear Mr White
,

Thank you for your letter.

Would you be kind enough to let me know if you are able to use diving boards at 5 and 7 metres?

Also would you let me know the lowest salary you would accept for a 15-week season?

As you will know, the fight scene on the ship may call for some of the cast to fall over the side and while we have experienced divers for this purpose, accidents can happen.

Yours sincerely,

Leon Markson

By the way, just to complete the indignity, the letter was addressed to ‘Daniel White’. Close, I suppose.

Anyway, I would, indeed, have been able to reassure Mr Markson regarding my ability to dive off boards at five and seven metres. That kind of stuff was like falling off a log to me – except higher up, of course. As for the dangers involved, well, sometimes you take your life in your hands just walking up the street. I was all set to write back to Mr Markson with a full declaration of my competence and bid him have the eyepatch ready and waiting. After all, whatever else you want to say about this project, it was an offer of work in the absence of any other. To that extent, then, my ship had come in – with the twist that I would be expected to fall off it every night for fifteen weeks for the lowest salary that I would accept. And in the full awareness that ‘accidents can happen’.

When I had explained all this to Simon, he did his best to nod soberly – but then gave up and fell about laughing instead. When he’d finished laughing, he told me he thought I should probably be aiming a bit higher. (And, no, he didn’t mean the ten-metre board.)

‘I’ve a proposal for you,’ he said. He was going to be directing a play at Bromley Rep, in south London, beginning at the end of April. ‘I may have a very small part for you,’ he said.

I was already nodding like mad when he added that there was one potential drawback. ‘It might mean blacking up,’ he said.

Even then, in 1965, this was an uncomfortable notion. But I didn’t care. If I was prepared to risk death on the ocean waves in order to get into the theatre, I was certainly prepared to endure a fortnight in politically incorrect make-up. Fault me if you will, but I just wanted a break.

‘I’d like that very much,’ I said.

You will understand how buoyed up I was by this offer over the ensuing days – and, equally, how deflated and anxious I
became as two weeks went past without any further mention of it. I was beginning to think I might have been better off going away to sea with the pirates. But then, on a Thursday when I was upstairs getting ready to go out to the pub, the phone rang, and it was Simon.

‘Are you still serious about wanting to be an actor?’

My heart sped up here, and my breath started to come – as in my youth – in short pants.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Then you come to the New Theatre, Bromley, next Tuesday morning, 10 a.m., and you start rehearsals. You happy?’

God, yes, I was.

‘It’s a Noël Coward play and you’ll play the small part of a butler. Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. See you Tuesday.’

By now I could barely breathe at all, in any kind of pants, short or otherwise. This was it, at long last: a professional role.

That Tuesday, the first day of the rest of my life as an actor, dawned optimistically bright and clear. Or was it ominously cloudy? You know what? I can’t remember. But what I do recall is that I set off from Finchley in the Mini Van sometime around dawn, so as to remove all possibility of being late. As a result, I got there at least an hour too soon. I found somewhere to park, and then walked around outside the theatre until five to ten.

The New Theatre wasn’t among the capital city’s most gilded or most storeyed venues. In fact, it was a converted swimming pool. But it felt like a temple as far as I was concerned. I went in through the front door and a woman in the box office pointed me in the direction of the swing doors through to the auditorium. And I’ll never forget the magic of that – walking down the aisle between the velvet seating towards the stage on my first day as a professional actor. I could hardly breathe with the thrill of it.

I was introduced around the cast. Everyone seemed to me to be rather grand, but that was probably my insecurity. They were so elevated in my estimation because they were professional actors and I was the lowest of the low.

Scripts were handed out: Noël Coward’s
South Sea Bubble
. My part: Sanjamo the butler.

Let’s say it wasn’t a big role. In fact it was completely tiddly. The play was mostly people sitting around talking in a terribly thirties, terribly upper-crust manner. And every so often, I got to come on and serve the drinks. Still, Simon had decided that the piece was a touch stuffy in places, and he wanted to liven it up a bit. So every time I appeared, he gave me bits of business to do and built up this butler’s character until he was far more important than he was written to be.

In particular, there was a moment near the end of the play when there was a set of bongo drums lying vacantly on the stage. Simon had me come on quietly to do some clearing away in the background of a scene. While other actors were in conversation at the front of the stage, I was to look longingly at these drums, clearly wanting to play them but knowing that it isn’t really the place of a servant. But then I had to yield to temptation and pretend to play them – only to end up accidentally hitting the things, causing the other actors, in conversation at the front of the stage, to jump and spin round.

Again, one winces to reflect on this: a blacked-up actor, yearning to play the bongos. What can I say? Such were the times. Let me at least speak in defence of the routine’s purity as comedy, though. It was a Laurel and Hardy thing at root: you know someone is going to do something; what you don’t know is when. The comedy lies in how you draw out that time and fill it – edging gradually closer, almost committing, backing off, starting again, and hoping to pull the audience in and out with you.