Semi-Detached (35 page)

‘Yes,
but you wrote me a letter.’

‘Did I?
I’m impressed.’ (All these letters are making me feel like some sort of
Victorian lady novelist.)

‘So was
I. You confessed. Juliet had a thing about you.’

I was
happy to let Charlotte believe that. What sort of cowardice was this, thirty
years after the event? I could have said, ‘No, no, I strung her along. I toyed
with her affections. I encouraged her, went to bed with her all through the
tour and then refused to talk to her on the bus.’ But I didn’t. I was still
ashamed. Mortification can flare up long after the details are ashes. I wanted
a settled, long-term, intimate relationship and I wanted to shag anything I
fancied too.

And I
wanted to go to America. So, Footlights, the Mummers, a new girlfriend — that
should have been enough, but I joined the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare
Company too. ‘Educational elite, fine speaking, travel abroad, hands across the
sea, special relationship.’ Like Richard Hillary, popping over to Heidelberg to
row against the Germans just before the Second World War, the combined amateur
theatrical talents of Oxford and Cambridge would vault the Atlantic every year
to recite the bard in Boston.

Rehearsals
for
Romeo and Juliet
took place upstairs in a big pub off the Euston Road,
just like for proper actors. This was during the summer of my first long
vacation. (The same summer I toured with the Footlights, went to Edinburgh and
played the Roundhouse. We took a break to do some minor academic work in
Cambridge and appear in a few other plays before heading for the States in the
Christmas vacation — ‘No, no, I won’t be with you for Christmas either, Mummy,
I’m afraid.’)

I had
been cast as Prince Escalus and ‘old Capulet’. Not ‘Capulet’ himself. He was
the one with a lot of furious speeches about his daughter marrying a Montague.
‘Old
Capulet’ crosses the stage during the party scene (the one Romeo crashes)
and has a single line. But I was also the Prince, a significant influence on
Veronese affairs in the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet.

We were
under the languidly watchful eye of a real professional director, Eric
Thompson, famous as the father of Emma Thompson, except that Emma Thompson was
yet to come to Cambridge and become a film star, so, as far as we were
concerned, famous as the father of
The Magic Roundabout.

On the
first day, after buying up a couple of large Victorian hat-stands he had
spotted in the corner of the pub, Eric stood in front of the entire cast and
stroked his luxurious Mexican moustache. ‘I have decided,’ he said,
emphatically, ‘that our main purpose in this production must be to tell the
story.’

We sat
with half smiles and the fixed attention of sheepdogs. Privately and
separately, we thought, ‘Doesn’t everybody know the story of Romeo and Juliet?’
Eric wanted to focus all his attention on the lovers and their passion, and a
lot less on fair Verona where we laid our scene, and of whereof I was the noble
Prince.

Essentially
my very important part was to run on stage and command the unruly young persons
to stop fighting. Two days after rehearsing my first scene I sat with my
half-smile and my tongue lolling out, ready for my next rehearsal while Eric
fingered his Zapata again. ‘I think we’ll cut this scene,’ he announced after a
pause. I gagged, half raised a hand and then went home.

At the
end of the first week’s rehearsal we had reached the end of the play and were
to rehearse the tumultuous final scene and my last great speech summing up the
whole sorry mess with appropriate authoritative pomp. Again Eric twirled his
moustache. Again he looked off into the half-distance. ‘I think we’ll cut the
final scene and end the play here,’ he said. At the point where you might
expect the Prince to come rushing on stage and do a big speech on the ‘woe and
Rom-ee-o’, there would instead be a sudden and conclusive blackout.

So at
the very beginning of the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company’s production
I descended a set of elegant steps, ‘like an animated mustard pot’, in a
comically large yellow hat. Having delivered my speech, I rushed back offstage,
tore off my Velcroed codpiece and my bright yellow tights, held up by
improvised elastic braces, feverishly covered my face with purple lines,
smothered my head with a manky wig, and rushed back to the wings from where,
panting heavily, I re-entered, gurning and gibbering as an unexpectedly sweaty
old man. As I reached the other side it was all over. I spent the rest of the
play and the majority of my trip around America slumped in a dressing room
waiting to take part in the ‘noises off’ and the curtain call. ‘Crescendo and …
blackout.’ Cue furious applause.

Well,
cue muted applause. They quite liked the production in places like Clarion,
Pennsylvania, where the set, big enough to fill the Oxford Playhouse, became a
doll’s house on the prairie of a university hall stage, but Philadelphia was a
tougher call. They were used to giving pre-Broadway shows a shake-down. (‘I’d
rather be in Philadelphia’ is written on W C. Fields’ gravestone.) The critics
there, in Cambridge and in Oxford or virtually anywhere they had seen
Shakespeare staged before, didn’t much care for our simplistic, story-telling
approach. Heck, I was only on in the first five minutes anyway Besides, we were
off on a complete tour of the eastern seaboard of the United States of America
in an old bus, driven by a wise-cracking black driver, through snowstorms,
along ‘turnpikes’ and ‘freeways’, past fire hydrants, Howard Johnsons, mall
strips, truck stops and all the romantic paraphernalia of a fantasy United States
spun from a childhood spent watching old black-and-white films on a
Sunday-afternoon sofa.

We went
to New York. Later that week, we also managed by some absurdity of scheduling
to call in at Raleigh, North Carolina, where it still appeared to be late summer.
Christmas was spent homeless in Washington. But usually we stayed in university
dormitories, or ‘student rooms’ in expensive New York hotels, or were put up as
‘house-guests’ by well-meaning friends of the theatre, miles out in the
suburbs. Lazing in bed in the morning, we could hear the muffled shouts of
husbands and wives arguing somewhere in their breakfast rooms, perfectly aware
that they were probably arguing about us. I barely remembered to call home and
wish Epping a happy Christmas.

Our ‘allowance’
was three dollars a day — one dollar per meal. But there was no dollar if food
was ‘provided’. After our flabby first night in Philadelphia, a reception was
organized by the Friends of the Shubert Theater. We were herded into our bus
and driven across the city to an elegant eighteenth-century mansion in an
elegant eighteenth-century street. Beyond the veil of snowflakes, we could see
an open door and a sumptuous interior. At the top of the steps several
distinguished orthopaedic surgeons and tax lawyers were waiting in dinner
jackets. Wiffin, our manager, stood up at the front of the bus.

‘There
is food provided here,’ he announced, ‘so this will be counted as your evening
meal.’

‘No
dollar?’ someone wailed.

‘No
dollar.’

Twenty-seven
student ambassadors charged through the slush, ignored the outstretched hands
of philanthropic dignitaries, scampered across the parquet and fell ravenously
upon three or four plates of dinky canapés, consuming everything, including the
parsley.

We were
Oxford and Cambridge together, but rather more Oxford than Cambridge, as I
recall. Nurses, friars and apothecaries seemed to come from Cambridge; Lords,
noble Romeos and fair Capulets from Oxford. Originally, the part of Mercutio
was going to be played by a bloke from Oxford called Mel Smith.

I had
been introduced to the male Zuleika Dobson of OUDS at the Edinburgh Festival
the previous August — not, that is, to the man himself, but to his reputation.

In 1973
there was some sort of joint charity event involving both universities. The
two groups put up a couple of their sketches. ‘The thing about you Footlights
people,’ Richard Sparks told Jon Canter, ‘is that you ignore any pretension
and just concentrate on the jokes.’

‘Yes,’
Jon replied. ‘Unlike you Oxford people. You’re all pretension and no jokes.’

But I
was probably listening to Steven Pimlott, now a distinguished stage director,
reciting M. R. James stories in a darkened room off Leith Parade. Only certain
senior undergraduates had been invited from Leith Transport Hall, otherwise I
might have encountered Mr Smith then. As it was, the day afterwards I was
sitting in a gloomy pub on the south side of the hill that runs down from the
Royal Mile to the Grassmarket, when Jon Canter nudged me.

‘That’s
him, that’s that Mel Smith bloke from last night.’ Jon pointed at a pasty sort
of bloke with a protruding jaw, hunched over an unnecessarily large selection
of drinks. I was unimpressed. I had not gone to university to be impressed by
anything, least of all by someone from Oxford. And when all was said and done,
he looked rather like me.

When Mr
Smith’s tutors heard that he had been offered the opportunity to eat hamburgers
in fake wood breakfast bars on the other side of the Atlantic, they counselled
him not to go. I believe they told him that if he did go, he need not bother to
return. They were anxious, after his undergraduate career igniting explosives
on the Playhouse stage, that he should make an attempt to master a little of
his chosen subject, Psychology. He stayed and was chucked out anyway I was not
to concern myself unduly with old potato face for another five years.

Smith’s
part was taken by the dashing Geoffrey McGivern. Nobody would have considered
Geoffrey especially dashing except possibly Geoffrey But at this stage of his
life he did, and it was an advantage. Geoffrey played all the big roles at
Cambridge. He was, and still is, an excellent, flamboyant actor, constantly in
demand as ‘the other bloke’ in sketch shows.

Like
Charlotte, he had come to stay with me for Christmas 2004. It was the same time
of year as the trip, and we were driving around the outskirts of Colchester,
the same sort of place. With its Essex straightforwardness, its hoardings and
semi-industrial hinterland, it reminded me of the States.

‘There
was the very cool dude who drove the bus through the snow, and one of the girls
wanted to be sick and asked him to stop, and he said, “Can’t do that, honey,
you go right ahead and do it on the step there,” so she did. And did you go to
that small woman with the big breasts’ house?’

‘I
might have done,’ I said.

‘She
had the embroidered gold piano.’

I asked
him whether he remembered the trip to the hunting lodge in northern
Pennsylvania.

‘Oh my
God! Yes.’

What a
thing, to open these memory banks. Geoffrey was smiling and rocking forward
with delight. ‘Weren’t there girls there?’

Oh, I
see. He was hoping for
nostalgie d’érotomanie.
‘No.’

‘But we
must have gone all the way there, miles to get there, and then got back by
first light to catch the bus …’

I temporarily
lost Geoffrey to the miserable business which afflicted whoever I reminisced
with, of trying to put the events into a logical order.

During
the tour, Geoffrey’s involvement, like mine, finished early on in the drama,
though I think it is fair to say that his performance had more impact. We
shared a dressing room with an ex-Territorial Army historian with bad teeth and
a manic laugh called Richard McKenna, who had been cast as ‘the apothecary’.
Richard had over an hour to perfect his make-up before going on stage and liked
to find ways of ‘improving’ his part. As he waited, his false nose grew ever
huger. He spent his daytimes searching out stuffed birds and voodoo dolls to
hang on his costume. He started tottering on stage on miniature stilts. Geoffrey
and the others helped him. One night, when Romeo hammered on a flat and
shouted, ‘Apothecary, apothecary!’, six separate ghostly wise old men, clad in
flowing robes, appeared from every dark corner of the stage, clutching
lanterns, and chorused together, ‘Who calls so loud?’

It was
Christmas 1973. The Philadelphia Sound was just becoming fashionable, and we
were in Philadelphia. Geoffrey and I were head-hunted in a disco by two
charming women in their mid-twenties. They had greatly admired Geoffrey’s swagger
and declamatory voice in the play, and I just happened to be with him. ‘Ooooh,
ooh, oooh! Oooooh! Take me in your arms and rock me, baby.’ Eventually we went
back to their place. My friend escorted me to her bed on the third floor of the
dinky little terraced house, leaving Geoffrey and Dee to take the room below.

We were
woken at six in the morning. A man’s voice was shouting in the street outside. ‘I
know you are in there with someone! You whore! You’re in there with some guy.
How could you do this to me, you bitch? I’m going to kill you both.’

If you
had swung the front of the terrace open (like my sister’s doll’s house) you
could have watched two men, one above the other, leaping out of bed.

‘Oh my
God. It’s Frank!’ said my girl.

Frank. Her
Frank? Or Dee’s Frank? It was a significant distinction. I was wrestling with
my fashionably skimpy hipster flares, which had pulled themselves inside out in
excitement a few hours before. There was a furious hammering on the door. (‘Who
calls so loud?’) One American fantasy was merging into another.