The Fry Chronicles (17 page)

Another feature of the Cambridge Easter term (for so they call the third term of the academic year) is the Footlights May Week Revue.
The Footlights Club
is one of the university’s best-known institutions, having sent generations of comic writers and performers into the world over the course of its 130-year history. Its May Week show at the Arts Theatre was an annual ritual. If you were cool it was an event to disdain. ‘Apparently the Footlights are crap this year,’ you would say to your companion as you wrinkled your nose at a poster for the event. There has never been a year in which this has not been said. The same phrase would have been heard when Jonathan Miller was running the Footlights, or Peter Cook and David Frost, through Cleese, Chapman and Idle and past Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson and Griff Rhys Jones, Dave Baddiel and Rob Newman, David Mitchell and Robert Webb all the way up to the current year. If you were normal, such cynicism did not occur to you, and the May Week Revue was another fun fixture on the Cambridge calendar. I was neither cool nor normal, but simply too busy with
The Tempest
and other things to be able to attend.

I heard that someone was putting together a production of
Oedipus Rex
for Edinburgh and decided that I might as well go and audition. I boomed and strutted and gestured
and declaimed in front of the director, Peter Rumney, and left thinking that perhaps I had rather overdone it. The next day I found in my pigeonhole a note from Peter asking me to play Oedipus. I was bound for the Festival Fringe, and my excitement was almost impossible to contain. For the rest of the term I bounced and buzzed about Cambridge like a bee in a bottle.

At some point I believe I must have sat some exams. Prelims, I think they were called. I remember precisely nothing about them. Not where they took place, nor what kinds of questions we were given to answer. I suppose I must have passed them, for no trouble arose and no stern interviews were sought. My Cambridge proceeded pleasantly enough without the intrusion of academic study: a university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different. A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books. That was my theory at least, and I was living by it. Such serene and lofty views of education as against vocational training were beginning to madden the new political leadership. Thatcher was an industrial chemist and a lawyer, after all, both disciplines that need Gradgrindery and training and require no education whatsoever – as she demonstrated. Our kind of loose learning, as they would regard it, this cleaving to the elitist tradition of the Liberal Arts, this arrogant Athenian self-indulgence was an enemy, a noxious weed that required summary eradication. Its days were numbered.

The 1979 Queens’ May Ball took place. I donned the
tailcoat that I had rented for the week, all ready to … well, to have myself a ball. We happy, flushed, proud and excited members of the committee met for champagne half an hour before the kick-off. Ten minutes later I was in an ambulance on my way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, an oxygen mask over my face, fighting for every breath. Bloody asthma. It would be another two years before I fully understood what had brought it on. I often succumbed to attacks at weddings, fêtes, Hunt Balls or events of that kind. On such occasions there were usually flowers and summer pollen about, so it had never occurred to me that the cause of my face going blue and my lungs closing for business was actually champagne. A ridiculous allergy, but one doesn’t choose them.

At Addenbrooke’s an injection of adrenaline had such an immediately restorative effect that I was out of the hospital, in a cab and on the way back to Queens’ by ten, two fresh inhalers for emergencies spoiling the sweep and cut of my dress trousers. I was determined not to miss another minute.

May Balls traditionally end with a breakfast, and many party-goers like to welcome the dawn on the Cam. Even at that young age I was a sentimental and slushy fool, maudlin (pronounced Magdalene) to a dreadful fault. I am none the less so now and shall never find the sight of young men in dégagé evening wear punting their loved ones along the river on a summer’s morning anything other than agonizingly romantic, piercingly lovely and heart-stoppingly adorable.

After the term ended, I took myself off as usual to North Yorkshire to teach a little Latin, umpire Cundall Manor’s
Second Eleven, prepare the games fields for Sports Day and, in such spare time as I had, learn the role of Oedipus as well as lines for my various parts in a production of Charles Marowitz’s
Artaud at Rodez
which the Cambridge Mummers were presenting and in which I had also, perhaps foolishly, agreed to appear. Foolishly because, each day for a fortnight, the moment the curtain went down on
Artaud
I was going to have to hare off to the venue where
Oedipus
would be due to start half an hour later. Old Edinburgh hands said I would be cutting it fine, especially if I had complicated costume to doff and don or heavy make-up to remove and apply, but cutting it fine was one of the things I liked to do.

For three weeks in late summer Edinburgh is the world centre of student drama. I was to perform at the Fringe every year for the next five years at least. Most who go cannot fail to fall instantly in love with the city as much as with the event. Within a couple of days the muscles on your shins ache from the unaccustomed steep ascents and descents of the town, the numberless stone steps and narrow wynds surprise your muscles – if you were used to the easy, level streets of East Anglian towns and a sedentary life it did more than surprise them, it shocked and outraged them. The ancient towering grimness of Edinburgh’s old tenements with their stone staircases and minatory blank gabling made me feel that at any moment Burke and Hare, Deacon Brodie or Mr Hyde were about to rise snarling from the steps of the Grassmarket. What did arise were, of course, nothing more terrifying than young drunks bearing polystyrene trays of Spudulike with cheese. In those days baked potato take-aways provided the cheapest form of filling nutrition a student could require. Scotland really was another country. The diet was different: aside from Spudulike the chicken carry-out shops offered the delicate
specialité du pays
– deep-fried Mars Bars, Wagon Wheels and Curly Wurlys. Scottish banknotes were different, the language, the weather, the light, even the Kensitas cigarettes were unfamiliar. A pint of heavy was the preferred drink, heavy being bitter or at least a gassy something that gestured towards the idea of it.

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.