The Fry Chronicles (35 page)

Nicholas and Richard (I was not present) blanched nervously.

‘However,’ continued Church, ‘for the period that he will be away rehearsing and performing he will exactly miss out on the three weeks in which we will be covering Chekhovian characterization and performance. So I am duty bound, I am
duty bound
to warn Simon that if he goes ahead with this play it will leave one heck of a hole in his Chekhov technique.’

He was a fine man, Tony Church, and one endowed with an excellent sense of humour, so it is to be hoped he would not have minded my repeating this. The idea, the
idea
that any actor would somehow be left deficient by missing out on three weeks of drama-school Chekhov teaching is so preposterous, so frankly
insane
that one simply does not know where to begin. If ever I am asked by aspiring young actors or their parents whether or not they should go to drama school, the memory of Tony Church and his fear for Simon’s Chekhov technique almost makes me tell them on no account to go anywhere near such useless palaces of self-regarding folly and delusion. Of course, I do not offer any advice at all other than suggesting that budding actors should follow their hearts and other such sententious and harmless ullage, but one does wonder, one really does.

Simon Beale, under his Equity name of Simon Russell Beale, has become almost universally recognized as the finest stage actor of his generation. For many, the greatest of his theatrical achievements have been his interpretations
of – yes, of course – characters in the plays of Chekhov. His stunning performances in
The Seagull
at the RSC,
Uncle Vanya
at the Donmar Warehouse (for which he won an Olivier Award) and
The Cherry Orchard
at the Old Vic and in New York have earned unanimous praise. I wonder if any of his Guildhall contemporaries, the ones lucky enough to have stayed in school for those vital lessons in technique, have enjoyed comparable success with Chekhov?

The production of
Latin!
was, in its own small way, accounted a success. Simon was brilliant, and a glowing review from the great Harold Hobson made me very happy indeed.

The weekend after
Latin!
completed its little run I stayed at Richard Armitage’s house in Essex. The house was called Stebbing Park and it was a fine old mansion set in many acres of gently rolling countryside. The village of Stebbing is close to Dunmow in an area of Essex that belies the county’s unfortunate and unjustified reputation.

Stebbing Park came into its own every summer when Richard held a festival of cricket. David Frost, one of his first clients, would keep wicket, Russell Harty would lie on the boundary ropes and admire the thews of Michael Praed and other handsome young actors, Andrew Lloyd Webber would arrive by helicopter, the controllers of BBC1 and BBC2 would cluster in corners with Bill Cotton and the Director General. It seemed as if Richard could attract every important figure from British screen and stage. Rowan Atkinson, Emma Thompson, Hugh,
Tony Slattery, Tilda Swinton, Howard Goodall and I came every year, as did dozens of other Noel Gay clients, Richard Stilgoe, Chris Barrie, Hinge and Bracket, Dollar, the Cambridge Buskers, Jan Leeming, Manuel and the Music of the Mountains, the King’s Singers, Geoff Love – it was a most eccentric mixture.

On this occasion, however, it was just me, Richard and Lorraine Hamilton, the sweet, shy young woman with whom he shared his life and who worked as his assistant. We had Richard’s chef-butler, Ken, all to ourselves.

After an excellent dinner on Friday night, as Ken poured coffee in the drawing-room, Richard, greatly to my surprise, started to talk about his father. Reginald Armitage was the son of a pomfret-cake manufacturer in south Yorkshire. He had been educated at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, the Royal College of Music and Christ’s College, Cambridge. His musicianship won him the place, at an early age, as music director and organist at St Anne’s church, Soho. The ragtime, jazz and swing that permeated that part of London must have got into Reginald’s blood, for he soon found he had an extraordinary facility with light, bouncy, catchy tunes in the modern manner. To avoid upsetting his worthy Yorkshire parents and the church authorities who employed him, he composed his songs under the pseudonym Noel Gay. An unfortunate name to our ears, but in the late twenties and thirties it suggested that happy, merry world of bright sunbursts that one sees in the surviving suburban front-door frames and wireless-set designs of the period. If there is a song that expresses that image perfectly it is his own ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’.

Noel Gay the composer became a gigantic success. At one point he had four musicals running in the West End simultaneously, a feat only Andrew Lloyd Webber has matched. His most famous tune, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, remains the only song ever written about in a
Times
leader. It also, Richard told me, earned Noel Gay an entry in the legendary black book of names of those who would be first up against the wall in the event of a Nazi invasion. Hitler did not take kindly, it was said, to a piece of newsreel that was very popular in British wartime cinemas which looped footage of the Führer saluting a goose-stepping cadre of Stormtroopers to the sound of ‘The Lambeth Walk’.

I had known very little of this and was touched that Richard thought I would be interested in the exploits of his famous father.

‘Of course, his greatest success,’ said Richard, ‘was the musical in which “The Lambeth Walk” featured,
Me and My Girl
.’

‘Right,’ I said, thinking in a rather puzzled way of the Gene Kelly/Judy Garland standard, ‘The bells are ringing, for me and my gal …’ – surely that was an American song?

‘Not to be confused, of course,’ said Richard, ‘with the Edgar Leslie number “For Me and My Gal”.’

‘No indeed. Of course not,’ I said, shocked at the idea that anyone might do such a thing.

‘
Me and My Girl
,’ said Richard, ‘was the most successful British musical of its day. It has only just been overtaken by
Cats
.’

Richard had one of those endearing habits, very common to agents, producers and magnates generally, of describing everything and everyone he knew as being
more or less the most important, successful and respected example of its kind anywhere, ever: ‘certainly the most significant choreographer of his generation’; ‘the top wine-merchant in Britain’; ‘indisputably the most admired chef in all Asia’ – that sort of thing. It is especially impossible for people like Richard not to have the best doctor in London, the finest dentist in Europe and, favourite of all and endlessly trotted out whenever someone betrays the slightest dorsal twinge, ‘the best back man in the world’. I was already wise to this trait in Richard so could not be quite sure how much of what he said about
Me and My Girl
was true and how much a mixture of this signature hyperbole and understandable filial pride. For, in truth, I had not heard of the musical, nor its title song. I knew ‘The Lambeth Walk’, naturally; it is one of the most famous tunes ever, an
Ohrwurm
, as they say in Germany, an ear worm that once heard burrows its way into your brain and becomes impossible to dislodge. Actually I had always thought it a folk song, based on some ancient tune that had been handed down through the generations. It certainly never occurred to me that it might have been composed in the 1930s by a church organist.

Noel Gay had sent his son Richard to Eton, from where he had followed his father’s progress to Cambridge. In 1950 the young Richard Armitage founded Noel Gay Artists, a talent agency that was designed to enhance his father’s Noel Gay song publishing and production business by supplying singers to perform Noel Gay material. After six or seven years, as the ‘satire boom’ got under way, Richard found himself spreading into the new world of graduate comedy and took to trawling Cambridge each year for young comedy blades. He soon had David
Frost on his books, then John Cleese and others. In the late seventies, in a wild, anarchic burst of originality, he looked westwards and from Oxford he took on Rowan Atkinson and Howard Goodall. By 1981 he was back at Cambridge and had scooped up Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Paul Shearer, Tony Slattery and me.

Now in his mid-fifties, Richard found himself more and more often, he told me, looking back to the beginning of it all. This was all very interesting, and I was touched that someone usually so gruff, old-fashioned and unforthcoming about personal matters should favour me with the true story behind his father and the founding of Noel Gay Artists. I alternately nodded and shook my head in a manner that I hoped demonstrated how sensible I was of the honour he had accorded me and then started to make subtle yawn-stifling gestures designed to indicate that I was ready for bath, bed and book.

‘So this brings me,’ said Richard, choosing to ignore these signs, ‘to my proposition.’

‘Proposition?’

Richard’s hand scrabbled at the flaps of his old leather briefcase. ‘Take this.’

He handed me a thick foolscap typescript. Foolscap, for those under forty, was the English stationery paper size that preceded the now ubiquitous European A4 standard.

I examined the sheaf. Rust marks from the binders stained the cover page, but the double-underlined title was plain enough. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘
Me and My Girl
! Is this the original script?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Richard, ‘it is the copy that came back from the Lord Chamberlain. There is a French’s acting edition, but what you are holding is, as far as I am aware, the version closest to the original text as performed in the Victoria Palace that there is in existence. I’d like you to read it. And then I would like you to consider rewriting it.’

The French’s acting edition of
Me and My Girl.

I tottered upstairs and read the foolscap typescript in bed that night. It was almost impossible to understand. The hero was a Cockney costermonger called Bill Snibson who turns out to be the rightful heir to an earldom. That I could make out. Bill arrives at Hareford Hall, the ancestral home, to take up his position and in a series of mysterious scenes is alternately seduced by an aristocratic vamp, taught his family history and soaked for loans by his wastrel connections. Throughout it all runs the thread of his attempts not to lose Sally, his girl of the title. She is an honest Cockney with a noble heart as,
au fond
, is he.

I describe it as almost impossible to understand and I call the scenes ‘mysterious’ because of the incomprehensible ‘bus’ that was appended to almost every line of liberally exclamation-marked dialogue.

Or:

And so on. Every now and then, throughout the script, there were blue pencil marks in a strong hand that read
No!
Absolutely not. Rewrite. Wholly unacceptable!
and other furious expressions of crazed disapprobation.

At breakfast the next morning, Richard was keen to know my opinion.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘It is quite a period piece …’

‘Exactly! Which is why it needs to be updated for an eighties audience.’

‘That Cockney rhyming slang stuff seems a bit … well, a bit old hat …’

There had been a scene of several pages in which Bill laboriously took the family through the principles of rhyming slang.

‘Ah, but you see it was
Me and My Girl
that first introduced the British theatre-going middle-classes to rhyming slang,’ said Richard. ‘Up until then, it had never strayed beyond the East End.’

‘Ah, right. I see. But tell me, did the original producer really hate the script?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All those comments. “Unacceptable”, “cut this” and so on. What were they about?’

‘I told you,’ said Richard. ‘This was the Lord Chamberlain’s copy.’

My blank expression revealed the unpardonable depths of my ignorance.

‘Until 1968 all plays performed in London had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain.’

‘Oh, so he was the censor?’