When this year’s young fling their clothes off and devour each other on screen, I have to leave and put the kettle on. I mean, how do they do that? What if they haven’t brushed their teeth?
Romance did not flourish in Glasgow. My mother disapproved of people holding hands in the street. ‘Why can’t they wait till they get home?’ she’d say. And eating in the street was unthinkable, as bad as smoking in the street, or wearing curlers till teatime. George Bernard Shaw thought that pushing food into a hole in the middle of one’s face was revolting. He even considered that sexual activity was less offensive. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. You may have to Google it.
Ken Tynan would certainly have preferred it. I remember catching him on TV, telling us with firm conviction that we would be seeing ‘the act’ on stage any day now. He was right. He actually used the word ‘F***’, the F word, and it was startling.
My generation was pretty hopeless. We could smoulder a bit on stage, but we were sexually timid, and a bit lumpy. Or was that just me?
My future mother-in-law burst into tears when she heard her son was to marry an actress. There’s still something disturbing, I grant you, about the word ‘actress’. If an MP or some other outstanding person plays fast and loose with an actress the world is unsurprised. She is certainly no better than she should be, and probably French.
Having been accepted at the Bristol Old Vic, I was told I had to look for digs. Why digs? Why are theatrical board-and-lodgings called ‘digs’? It’s like some archaeological event. It says in my Chambers Dictionary, hiding in a huge paragraph, that it is ‘North American slang’. Really? It also means ‘to study hard’. Quite.
I loved my first digs, when I was still a student. My landlady was tiny, gentle and profoundly deaf. She couldn’t hear thunder, but if there was lightning she covered all the mirrors in the house with towels and retired to a cupboard under the stairs.
Then, on tour, there was the legendary superb cook, highly recommended by Tyrone Guthrie. Mrs Thomas was her name. She worked in a munitions factory and smuggled out sugar and scrubbing brushes. Everyone knew Mrs McKay in Daisy Avenue, Manchester. She had two houses, one for the girls, one for the boys. She liked the boys best, and preferred them to be well known. We all swapped over one night, changing houses. She was rather upset.
We weren’t allowed ‘callers’ either. One actor smuggled his boyfriend in by carrying him upstairs in a piggyback. ‘Cripples now, Mr Cardew?’ Mrs M shouted from below stairs.
We used to rehearse in the local cinema, starting at ten in the morning, when it was dim, dusty and deserted. Then we caught the bus after lunch – I don’t remember lunch. The bus was a cartoon. It had about ten seats in front and the back was jammed full of our gear. There were rails for costumes and barricaded sections for the set – the flats – and a large skip for the props. The boys put up the sets, the girls ironed and sorted the costumes – sometimes we got to do a bit of nailing and I was particularly brilliant with the French brace … Don’t ask.
Our gear included rugs, cushions, drinks,
wellies, books, embroidery, and some of us made rag rugs. This was popular and called bodging. Sometimes we ran our lines, but we were young – we knew them.
We played everywhere possible, for miles around, even Dartmoor Prison, where I seem to remember I made my entrance ascending from a trapdoor. There were occasions when bits of the set weren’t used because the set was too big for the stage. I once made an exit which I couldn’t complete as the entrance was blocked by actors queuing to enter. I just had to reverse back onto the stage, trying to look intelligent and as if I were meant to be there. A door stuck once, irrevocably. They do, don’t they? The actor entered through the fireplace. That was tricky.
We might have been in Sidmouth when nobody could get behind the set at all and had to exit, as one would, from the building itself. You would leave stage left, race round the library to stage right, and enter that way. If it had rained, as it often had, the effect was very comic.
It might have been the following year when we went to the Edinburgh Festival with a play about Mary, Queen of Scots by an Italian. We previewed it in a church hall, halfway up Arthur’s Seat, or halfway down, depending on how you looked at it.
One famous night, we were about to give Queen Mary the last rites, when there was an ear-
splitting, numbing, extended crash, as if Edinburgh Castle had collapsed and was rolling downhill in our direction. Catherine Lacey, who played Queen Mary, didn’t blink. She went to her death, as ever, with great dignity.
Apparently the ceiling had collapsed in our Revue Bar, and we assumed we might have a night off. Not a bit of it. Swept clean, the joists had large bunches of chickweed stuffed into any cracks and blackened old branches were nicked from local trees and fixed to all possible corners, then hung with boots and shoes.
Brilliant. I couldn’t remember what it had looked like before.
We even took the play to Linlithgow Palace, where I was very impressed by Mary, Queen of Scots’ loo. A hole in the battlements with a
dizzying drop to the moat. I hope someone held onto her.
I don’t think they do British Council Tours now like the one we did to South America. Our itinerary, gloriously, went like this: Brighton, Mexico City, Caracas, Quito, Santiago, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Athens and Rome. Sir Ralph Richardson, reasonably enough, wished to tour with people he liked, so he submitted a list of actors he favoured. They were all dead.
We were in Ecuador, and Patsy Byrne and I were excited, beginners, costumed and ready on stage. The band played the national anthem. It was very merry and upbeat, and Patsy and I danced to it, swirling our huge skirts as we did a very energetic jive. The assistant stage manager crept on stage and whispered that we were causing a grave diplomatic incident. In the shadow of the wings we saw stern figures glaring at us accusingly. Fortunately for us, next up was ‘God Save the Queen’, so we had to dance to that too. It’s not easy.
The best thing about Quito was they didn’t know the plot of The Merchant of Venice. Imagine Sir Ralph, sharpening his knife, looking vengeful and about to cut off his pound of flesh when Barbara Jefford, as Portia, says ‘Tarry a little, there is something else. This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.’ At the words ‘no jot of blood’, the audience stood up and cheered. Did they in Shakespeare’s day, I wonder? Oh, I hope so.
When we stopped touring, I took up permanent residence in the icy attic of the local ballet school. I haven’t seen hoar frost on an interior window since. We used to slither downstairs to warm up, clinging to the brass bar of the Aga cooker in the kitchen. I learnt then to love dancers for their courage and insane trust in each other. They are always injured, but they still fly on stage and die in the wings. Boys used to carry their partners aloft by the crotch. A fork-lift, really – and no sniggering.
I watched the girls darning the toes of their pointe shoes. I watched them binding their feet, covering their blisters, wiping blood from their damaged toes, and I sat at breakfast under a pulley full of jock straps and other intimate underwear. An education for a lumpen, guarded girl like me. As far as I was concerned, that kitchen was the centre of the universe. It was where the Touring Western Theatre Ballet Company was born and, besides, there were always warm leftovers in the bottom oven of the Aga. Something heavenly, like a sausage pie.