Semi-Detached (33 page)

At one
point the junior chaplain’s mask of synthetic indulgence fell away. ‘You are
not going to worship God because you’re too busy worshipping yourself,’ he spat
and we smiled. We had angered him, and now he was lashing out ad hominem. Yes,
yes, we notched that up, or drew a little tick in the ceaseless map of doodles
that we scribbled as we talked or listened.

I
dropped Andrew, didn’t I? To begin with, in the alien environment of university
I needed to hold his hand. We went to the lunchtime greeting parties together
and sat around in each other’s rooms nursing the colossal waking hangover that
five glasses of sherry delivers by three in the afternoon. We went down to
attend a debate at the Union and watched the boys in waistcoats preen. He was
reading English. I liked the people that he met and he settled in with them. I
kept my distance from my own History set, but I found the English group congenial.
I hung around with Andrew, hoping to hang around with them. It was easy to do.
The rooms opened out on to a roof garden. On the other side was Charles Lambert’s
room. If the light was on late at night I walked across and usually I found
them talking about Bryan Ferry or Robert Palmer or David Bowie.

Thirty-three
years later, the current Master of Emmanuel told me he had just been up on that
roof garden for the first time. I was taking tea before addressing the Emmanuel
Society in 2005. Back yet again.

I
always returned to my past through unexpected entrances, as if someone was
protecting me from too much exposure, sliding into ponds of nostalgia slowly, a
limb at a time. Did I recognize a single bit of the Master’s Lodge?

I had
only been there once before. We had been ushered in to meet our Master in
little groups in the first week, to drink tea. I went with Andrew We noticed
the collection of Tang dynasty pottery horses in a glass case, implying some
level of sophistication and money too, we supposed. But Sir Gordon Brims Black
McIvor Sutherland had the dour distraction of a senior man. What did any of
the senior politics of Cambridge have to do with our lives then? I had been
brought up to be intimidated into excessive politeness by elderly figures of authority
In Cambridge I was permitted, perhaps even expected, to ignore them, so I did.

Now
Lord Wilson presented me with cake and Earl Grey tea. We talked about my son.
He wasn’t going to be at my lecture. George was working in the architecture
studio. ‘He looks quite an academic around the college,’ said the Master. That
seemed a good if slightly surprising thing for George to be. But my wife and I
nodded wordlessly.

Lord
Wilson mentioned my vice-presidency of Footlights. He was thinking of the
reason I had come. He was going to mention it again in his introduction. He’d
looked me up on the internet, not something I would ever be able to do myself.

‘Yes,’
I said, ‘but I was president of the Mummers and the ADC too and directed for
the Marlowe. The Footlights was really a rather small part of my Cambridge
life.’

What
was I doing? Setting the record straight, then? There’s no point in being a
golden boy, a great white hope, if when you come back they don’t realize that. ‘Nick
Hytner and I divided up the world really …’ I was warbling on now ‘He
directed half the productions, and I directed the other half …’ The Master
was smiling encouragingly He told me about his own appearances with Richard
Eyre. How ridiculous was I trying to be here? I was anxious to establish my
Cambridge undergraduate amateur theatrical credentials with the man who had
once been Secretary to the Cabinet.

Some
time early in my first term I walked into Andrew’s room and killed our
friendship. The exact circumstances of the quarrel have completely gone. I can
sit here now and revive the tightness. But what on earth was it about? We
hardly did anything more elaborate than walk to other colleges to look at their
bars, or take a rowing boat on the river, or go to a late film at the Cambridge
Arts Club. I can remember that I was convinced he had excluded me from his set.
Perhaps he had. I was the one behaving like a girl in a
Jackie
comic
though.

For a
year Andrew and I continued to live next door to each other, exactly where we
had been put. We shared a communal kitchen and a fridge. At some point in the
summer term, I sat again in Andrew’s room, talking about some plan, probably a
play that I was doing, and I reached across and moved some books on the heavy
coffee table that was part of the furniture in every room in that block. It
would have been the same coffee table that my son would have in that same room
in his time there. As I got up, feeling myself now somehow remote from him,
someone who had been such a close friend, I noticed that he reached out
carefully and reordered the books. He lined them up exactly as they were
supposed to be, one on top of the other, spines facing towards him, edges
carefully touching, and waited until I left. Did I see Andrew much in the
following two years? I don’t think I did. I moved on, didn’t I? I moved on from
the friends across the roof garden too.

‘Yes, I’ve
just been up on the roof garden,’ said the Master.

‘Where
is that?’ His wife, Caro, asked.

‘Up on
top of South Court.’

‘I had
no idea.’

‘No,
the head gardener has barely touched it in the thirty years since the place was
built. There are all these shrubs in beds. They are completely overgrown. He’s
going to cut them back for me.’

But I
had been elevated to the Footlights. I had been chosen by open audition for the
May Week revue. I had been on tour and visited the Edinburgh Festival. Now, at
the beginning of my second year, I was expected to appear in a smoking concert
in a lecture room in Trinity. I didn’t need Andrew.

There
were no backstage facilities. On one side there was a set of steps and a couple
of drapes behind which the performers ineffectually tried to hide themselves.
And shortly after the beginning of my second year, I hid behind them myself,
waiting to go on for the first time. You took responsibility for your own
material, and it seemed that the more old-fashioned that was, the better you
were likely to survive. I was a second-year now, still a relative junior and a
smoker-virgin compared to Clive Anderson.

Clive
had come from a clone of my own school, further around the London compass —
Stanmore in fact — along with someone called Michael Portillo. At least, I don’t
remember Portillo ever getting up in the Trinity lecture hall wearing a skirt
and horned helmet, waggling his hands around and stepping back and forth
distractedly making puns about Vikings, but that’s how I first encountered
Clive.

For my
first appearance, I wrote a pirate monologue. The entertainments at a smoker
were entirely derived from an already extinct tradition of concert parties.
Comic songs were popular. I wrote some myself: ‘The Fork Lift Truck Driving
Song’ and ‘Cow Poke’ (‘I’m an old cow poke, and I surely do miss the range now
There were no ladies there but we didn’t care. We were too busy poking the cow’).
Sketches were performed wearing rudimentary costumes. There
were
women
about, but it was quicker to wear a dress and guarantee a laugh even if the
script didn’t. Nobody performed ‘stand-up’. Stand-up comedians had gone into a
temporary cultural abeyance, in working men’s clubs up north. We wanted to be
Monty Python. So we put on a silly hat and pretended to be an improbable
Frenchman or a Viking or a pirate.

I
hobbled into the lights with one leg tied up behind the knee and a broom as a
crutch stuffed up under my armpit. I had a stuffed parrot too. The parrot sat
on a heap of white plaster. There were lines — ‘He adjusted the albatross
around his neck with his good hook’ — but I wasn’t delayed by them for very
long. Half-way through I pretended to become increasingly distracted by the
pain from my broom handle and carefully transferred to my other armpit. I then
fell heavily sideways. That got a laugh too.

But
Footlights was only one of my distractions. That autumn term I was also the
newly appointed president of the Cambridge University experimental theatre
group — ‘The Mummers’.

By the
beginning of 1973 I was already sitting at meetings with a furrowed brow,
trying to decide what ‘experimental’ theatre was. I bought books on Antonin
Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. I mugged up on Mayakovsky I prepared myself
to confront the inevitable challenge: ‘was I Brachia enough?’

It was
the 1970s. We were all eager to be alienated by our theatrical experiences.
Equally clearly, nobody understood what that meant.

The great
actor Ekkehard Schall was asked to define ‘alienation’. I was grateful that he
was prepared to do so. He was reassuringly brisk. ‘Alienation,’ he explained, ‘is
a character on stage performing a double take.’ This was more like it. I
understood double takes. I could even do them myself: look, think, look again. Mug
for a laugh.

So, it
seemed that the experimental theatre was not so very far removed from the
completely un-experimental theatre as advocated by the more conservative
members of Footlights. I decided that cinema was the natural home of the
natural and that theatre should be the home of the unnatural. Music, lights,
dance were what we needed, properly alienated of course. ‘Let’s put on a bit of
a show, then.’

Having
wrapped the two opposite poles of Cambridge theatre into one convincing whole,
and since I was now in charge, I would decide what. was ‘experimental’ anyway I
went in search of ‘epic’ plays to direct which would allow for plenty of mime,
posturing, effect and alienation, and lots of double takes, of course.

Naturally,
I had no real idea of what a director did. I had been subject to Mr Baron’s
emotional tyranny in school plays. I had watched at least two others try to
tell me what do at university but I had no idea what constituted ‘stage craft’.
I had hardly been stage-struck as a boy, though in the last few years I had
discovered matinee tickets in ‘the gods’ and I had been, on my own, to see
everything accessible in the West End — staring down from a great height on
remote explosions of glittering brilliance like Adrian Mitchell’s musical
version of William Blake or Peter. Nichols’ biographical play
Forget-Me-Not-Lane
or Alistair Sim in
The Magistrate.
I lived my early theatrical
excitements from up high. Perhaps this was another reason why I needed a lot of
arm-waggling and plenty of bangs in every student production that I directed.

There
was a photograph on the wall of the Amateur Dramatic Club theatre. It had been
long enough behind the glass to have the slightly wavy corners of a dried-out
print. The sleek and comforting visage of Peter Hall beamed out, and underneath
he had written: ‘To the ADC. Thank you for allowing me to learn from my
mistakes.’ It was timely.

Yes, as
well as the Footlights, it was from this little theatre that the titans of
British theatre had emerged. They had, in the last twenty years, revolutionized
not only productions, but more particularly, from our point of view, the very
status of the university-educated director. The notion of actors being bossed around
by uppity bearded teenage know-it-alls (instead of semi-retired actors) was
relatively recent and still enjoying its peak. What had filtered through was
not so much the methodology as the hierarchical implications. Were there any
more glittering exemplars of creative and artistic power than Jonathan Miller,
Trevor Nunn or Peter Hall? They bestrode the arts pages — colossi in cable-knit
sweaters — without even having had to write anything, or anything difficult
like that; just by ‘interpreting’, organizing people and reading ‘the text’
carefully We could do that! There were Cambridge actors, of course: McKellen,
Jacobi, Redgrave (Corin, not Vanessa or Michael). They had all burst out of
this great period of fecundity too, nurtured by the frightening Dadie Rylands
and the brainy John Barton. But you didn’t need a degree to have acting talent.
It was spawned all over the place. It was a bit of a liability to do too much
thinking as an actor, and acting was a rather crowded field. There were plenty
of acting heroes with no A levels. It was directors who cracked the whip.

Years
later, David Tomlinson explained over lunch in Boodles that senior actors of
the post-war period subscribed to Robert Morley’s dictum. The director was
someone who got your coat if you happened to have left it in your car. By the
late sixties the director was the one who arrived in the car. God knows, it
wasn’t that we wanted to direct professionally I had no coherent forward
thinking at that stage. I had been propelled entirely by circumstances to a
Disneyland in the fens. I had no sense of beginning, planning or auditioning
for a career. But just as little boys had once wanted to be engine drivers, so
little undergraduates like me rather fancied being stage-directors, and there
was Peter Hall on the wall to tell us this was all right. Off I went to make as
many mistakes as I could, so that I too might learn.

The ADC
was a strange warren. Its white gable end was decorated with a black lion.
Inside, a blank staircase led up to a corridor and beyond that to an
unprepossessing entrance and a very dark and bare auditorium. It had none of
the trappings of a theatre — no curly plaster detailing, no cherubs, no red
walls or half-shaded boudoir lights around the balconies, because there weren’t
any balconies. The seating raked straight backwards. The walls were painted a
grim battleship grey, and the stage had a stripped proscenium arch with two
black entrances cut in the fabric like pillboxes on the Atlantic Wall. It wasn’t
that modern-looking, either. The ambience owed something to the 1930s and
Edward Craig. It was an almost charmless place, tacked on to the back yard of
the Union and sharing space with fire escapes and a bicycle shed, but from now
on I was to spend a lot of my time there (certainly more than in college),
hunched around one of the low tables in the bar which, even if no one was
attending the play, filled up towards the end of the evening, as the pubs shut,
with the camp, the loud-mouthed and the ambitious.