That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read online

  The studio was situated next to the art college at All Saints and was to all intents and purposes where we were based. We also had the use of a derelict shop on the corner opposite for voice classes and rehearsals, this later becoming the student union, whilst movement classes were held in the art college gymnasium. The ‘make-do’ nature of the old church and the filthy old shop premises, with its curling linoleum tiles and peeling walls, which had literally not been touched since the day the shop moved out, together with the scattered layout of the facilities, gave the course a feeling of having been shoved in as an unwanted afterthought, which did little to promote a sense of belonging to the wider faculty of Art and Design and even less for the collective student sense of self-esteem. In fact, in our second year a demonstration was organised by the third years to protest about the low level of health and safety measures, but I don’t recall many turning up or it making much of an impression. Although I attended the protest and agreed with it in principle, in reality I loved the School of Theatre as it was, with its makeshift, leaky, falling-down premises, and felt that something of importance was lost when, in 1973, the School of Theatre moved to the Capitol building in Didsbury, which was an old television studio with all the character and atmosphere of a civic toilet.

  The second-year production, Summer Folk by Maxim Gorky, was staged in the University Theatre. The role I played was that of Varya, the female lead, and the moment I stepped out on to that stage for the technical rehearsal, I knew that I was home and that this was right. I felt for the first time in my life that I had a voice, and that this is how it would be heard, and this was how I would be seen and measured.

  Our third-year production was The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge, in which I played Pegeen Mike. It was staged at the Library Theatre, which was the main repertory theatre situated underneath the huge, circular library in St Peter’s Square. This venue made it feel real and professional. To be able to inhabit an Irish accent, for the play was set in the West of Ireland, and to be able to use it to express a complex character instead of my usual comic caricature of my mother or grandmother, was a deep thrill.

  It was here at the Library Theatre, in a cold scene dock (the first place where scenery is stored), that I did one of my very first auditions for a job: the Sylvia Plath poem ‘Daddy’, my beloved Lady M. and a piece from Juno and the Paycock. I was auditioning for the 1974 autumn season, and the woman who took the audition, whose name I have completely obliterated from my memory, was in a fairly grim mood, with a ‘just hurry up and get on with it’ air about her. Although we were in the scene dock, it was cold and draughty for the time of year, which was May, and she was wrapped up in a vast winter coat and swathed around the neck and mouth with a big, woolly scarf, so that I could barely hear a word that she said. The speed with which she got me in and out was, to put it kindly, insensitive or, to put it another way, bloody rude. I didn’t get in, unsurprisingly, and subsequently discovered that this woman had had all her teeth out on the morning of my audition. Nice of her to turn up, really.

  Before sticking my head above the parapet with regard to getting a job, however, I applied to Granada Television and was awarded a bursary for a one-year postgraduate course in acting and stage production at the Stables Theatre, next door to the studios. The course was jointly run by the polytechnic and the university combined, and about fourteen students enrolled in the autumn of 1973. We functioned like a complete company, with student actors, student directors, student stage designers and student administrators.

  After getting off to a wobbly start by staging a mutiny over the choice of our first play, The Hollow by Agatha Christie (the lecturer’s argument for it being that this was the kind of unexciting thing we could expect to be doing in rep), we went on to do ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: guess who I played? Then a little-known piece, written in 1915 by Leonid Andreyev, titled He Who Gets Slapped, set in a tatty French circus, in which I played Madame Zenida, a liontamer. Our final production was The Marriage of Figaro in which I took the part of the maid. It was during the preparation for this that I started to audition for work. After my disastrous audition at the Library Theatre, I heard that the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool needed a couple of actors for the summer, so I applied, securing an audition for the following week.

  The Everyman was one of the most unique, innovative and exciting repertory theatres of the day. Alan Dossor was the director, but at this point he was taking time off and Jonathan Pryce, the actor, was directing while he was away. Therefore it was Jonathan who took my audition. One of my pieces was again Juno and the Paycock, which I had left till last, considering it my coup de grâce. I couldn’t wait to do it, but when I told Jonathan with some excitement what my final piece was to be, he announced that he had played it only recently and knew it very well. This would not normally present too much of a problem but I had decided to beef the piece up a little, adding a gag here and a gag there, generally rewriting it to suit myself, even adding a little song at one point in it. It never struck me once, even after my experience of auditioning for Edward Argent, that (a) perhaps I should play the script as written or (b) that anyone would even notice or care. And such was my arrogance, I was only slightly put out that Jonathan already knew the piece and that was because it might spoil any element of surprise. Nevertheless, I still launched into it, thinking my version a great improvement on Sean O’Casey’s. Luckily Jonathan found it funny, but looking back he was more likely to have been amused by my youthful conceit than my comic invention. He gave me the job and I started work on 14 June 1974.

  From the minute I stepped down from the train at Lime Street station, I knew that I would love Liverpool. As I was struggling with a huge bag, a short, rotund woman who happened to be walking by at the time said, ‘Come ’ead, love, let me carry that for ya. No, come on! That’s heavy, you’ve got enough to carry!’ And she carried my biggest and heaviest bag to the taxi rank for me.

  Then when I told the taxi driver that I wanted to go to the Everyman Theatre, he said, ‘It’s only up the road, you know, love?’

  ‘I know but it’s really steep and I’ve got too much to carry.’

  He drove me there and refused any payment.

  ‘No! Go on, girl. You gerron that stage and knock ’em dead.’

  The Everyman in those days was housed in an old cinema called Hope Hall. It had very little in the way of dressing rooms: possibly one for the boys, downstairs stage left, and two for the girls, downstairs stage right, both extremely cramped; and it was also dusty and rat infested. I remember an electrician being called in to look at the electrics, which required him to go beneath the stage. He took one look and said, ‘I’m not going under there. There’s hundreds of pairs of eyes looking at me!’

  The theatre was, and still is, situated at the top of Hope Street. The Catholic cathedral, looking as if it was about to launch itself into outer space, which the locals referred to as Paddy’s Wigwam, stood at one end and the magnificent Protestant cathedral at the other. It had been arranged for me to stay in a bedsit at the top of a Georgian house in Canning Street, a five-minute walk from the theatre. Below me in another bedsit, and also working at the theatre, was Geoffrey Durham, who later became the magician, the Great Soprendo, and the husband of Victoria Wood.

  He was a fantastic actor. One of my fondest acting memories is of Geoff making a splendid entrance in a superb production of Brecht’s Coriolanus at the Everyman. As we did not have enough actors, he was playing the whole of the Roman army. He walked on with a majestic presence but, unbeknownst to him, a wire coat-hanger had become attached to his bent elbow and was swinging from his sleeve like a handbag. I entered soon after, playing Coriolanus’s wife, I’m ashamed to say, crying with laughter, my face twitching with the effort of keeping it straight.

  However, acting never really did it for Geoff and the embryo of the magician that he eventually became was already forming in that bedsit below mine. I would often pop down when at a loose end and watc
h him do mind-boggling stuff with a piece of rope, or hair-raising stuff with his fire-eating equipment, once seeing his whole beard catch alight. I sat there for a minute thinking that it was all part of the act and it was only when he began to slap his own face rather viciously that I realised it wasn’t.

  Below Geoff, on the ground floor, lived an alcoholic recluse called Mikie. More often than not I would return late at night after a show and fall over Mikie’s prostrate body lying on the floor in the complete darkness of the hall, where the bulb had blown in 1952 and had never been replaced. Mostly, even though I would end up inadvertently treading all over him as I got to my feet, he didn’t wake up and by morning he was gone. On certain nights, when in a lighter stupor than normal, he would rear up, howling terrifyingly like a wounded ox, and on one such night he caught hold of my ankle as I scrambled for the stairs and would not let go. In a complete panic, I kicked out violently, not caring what my boot came into contact with, as long as I got away, which of course I did. A day or so later I saw Mikie in the street, diminutive and dishevelled as usual, and I expected his face to be black and blue from the encounter, but not at all; in fact he looked surprisingly chipper. Then as I got closer I noticed a bruise on his chin like part of the perfect imprint of a boot.

  I had been taken on at the Everyman to replace a member of the cast of a pub show titled Flash Harry. This was performed by Van Load, the part of the company that went out to Liverpool schools, pubs, parks and sometimes the streets, though I think the last was abandoned when, during a performance of a show on the streets of Kirkby, the police had to escort the actors home after they were threatened by a group of twelve-year-olds wielding golf clubs.

  The main company were leaving to go down to London because the show they were in was transferring to the West End. It was a musical about the Beatles, titled John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, whose book and music were both written by Willy Russell. Cast in it were Bernard Hill as John Lennon, Trevor Eve as Paul McCartney, Philip Joseph as George Harrison, Antony Sher as Ringo, George Costigan as Bert and a young Scottish folk-singer friend of Willy’s with the voice of an angel by the name of Barbara Dickson as a kind of musical narrator. It turned out to be a huge hit, transferring to the West End from the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in 1974 to rave reviews, and going on to similar success on Broadway.

  Flash Harry, on the other hand, was a raucously funny show about a Liverpool flasher in which, amongst other things, I was to play his mother. My first spot in the show involved a monologue on the trials and tribulations of being the parent of a misunderstood flasher and I stood at the microphone, knitting a long woollen willy warmer as I spoke. I had to learn the Scouse accent, for which the legendary Winnie was drafted in to teach me. Winnie, the cleaner at the theatre, put many an actor through their paces when it came to learning the Liverpool lingo. A kind, witty and gentle woman was waiting for me in the middle bar downstairs, which was still littered with empty glasses from the night before, and stinking of stale beer and cigarettes.

  ‘So you want educatin’, do ya?’

  And she took me through my speeches, writing them out phonetically.

  The show was a bit of a free-for-all, hanging loosely around the central tale of the flasher and his escapades, and our contribution was pretty much left up to us. Geoff Durham, who was also in the show, did his own, brilliant version of the song, ‘The Laughing Policeman’. So when I told Roger Phillips (now a famous local character and radio host in Liverpool, but then our director) that I did a passing impersonation of Shirley Bassey, a sparkly dress, covered in green sequins, with huge holes cut into it around the waist, was fished out of wardrobe, a wig was bought from Woolworth’s and Birley Shassey was born. I absolutely loved doing it and felt that now I really had come home! The number I chose for the show was ‘Hey, Big Spender’ with my innuendo-filled version of ‘Goldfinger’ as an encore. Accompanied by Roger on the tinny old Everyman piano (with drawing pins stuck into the tips of the hammers inside to add a honky-tonk, harpsichord twang), I would wander down off the stage, sashaying around the tables and draping myself over dockers and the like, singing, ‘I don’t cock my pork for everyman I see!’ in some of the roughest pubs in the universe.

  The audiences were - almost always - at least as funny as we were and every time we took a breath in, there was the possibility of a sharp one-liner being pinged at us from somewhere in the crowd. We rarely had any real trouble, which was quite something as the punters didn’t pay to see the show; we were generally booked by the landlord, just turned up in their pub and got started. ‘It’s the long ’airs from the Everymans’ is how I once heard us described.

  The one really hairy occasion that I recall was when we were doing Alan Bleasdale’s Scully. This we adapted ourselves from his novel about the life of the eponymous Scully, an anarchic, Liverpool lad with a dysfunctional family. It also happened to be a popular Saturday morning local radio slot with Alan reading the serialisation of his book. We were appearing one rainy Wednesday night in a particularly heavy pub in Cantrell Farm, a suburb of Liverpool that for my mother would definitely have come under the banner of ‘bottom end’. Peter Postlethwaite played Scully and was supported, amongst others, by Bill Nighy, then a handsome blond mixture of James Dean and the lead singer of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. He had a brilliant, soulful singing voice and the ability to whip out his mouth organ at any given opportunity to play blues and rock riffs; nearly every girl in Liverpool was in love with him. Also in the cast was Matthew Kelly, who had been in the year above me at drama school, then a six-foot-five-inch stripling who, with his full lips and long hair, looked like Mick Jagger’s more handsome brother but with a warm, camp wit that audiences loved. There was also Kevin Lloyd, with his cheeky, dark, Bisto Kid looks, and myself as Scully’s gran.

  Some way into the show, we had all clocked a scruffy, peevish-looking drunk sitting at a table in the corner of the room. Suddenly he shot up from his seat, during one of Pete’s monologues, and zigzagged his way to the front of the stage. At first we ignored him, as drunks often approached the stage; either they would get fed up with being shouted down by both actors and crowd and go back to their seats, or fellow members of the audience would coax or threaten them into retreating. However, this bloke was on a mission. He stood there, face flushed, spit flying hither and thither, finger jabbing the air, veins sticking out on his neck like cables, and berated Pete at the top of his voice. Eventually, after an unintelligible string of rants, he lunged at Pete, sending the microphone and a couple of people’s drinks on the front row flying. Two or three blokes pulled him off and the show came to a standstill. Sensing the lull in the proceedings, the man then grabbed his opportunity and, struggling free from these blokes, took the floor, swaying about like a drunk in a pantomime and looking down the barrel of his forefinger at Pete.

  ‘I ’ave ’ad enough of you! No! I ’ave! I’ve been driven mad by ya! I had to put up with you on the radio every Saturday morning for fourteen months while I was in Walton Gaol. I swore to me mates and I promised meself that if I ever came across that friggen’ Scully when I got out, I’d friggen’ well kill him. And ’ere yer are in me own friggen’ pub! I’ll friggen’ well rip yer friggen’ ’ead off!’

  And he lunged again, this time held back by a jeering, laughing crowd. Eventually Bill and the others calmed him down by setting him up with another pint and explaining that Pete was just an actor and was not Scully at all, and that Scully, the young lad, was just a character in a book. He looked incredulous and a bit miffed by this explanation, the chance to beat Scully’s brains out having been snatched so cruelly away from him, but the promise of more beer as an alternative to being turfed out on to the street seemed to do the trick. The show was got through without further ado with him and Pete now such good friends that they were almost planning a holiday together.

  Another instance of what you might call trouble was when, later on in the season during the run-up to Christmas, we did Dick Whittington
and his Pussy. Matthew Kelly played Dick and I played his Pussy, in a manner of speaking. It was a show that we largely wrote ourselves and, as you might imagine, it was packed from start to finish with gags about genitalia. ‘Would you like to see my Pussy?’ or ‘Have you seen my Dick?’ Well, you get the picture.

  After we’d been performing it to packed pubs for about two weeks, we got word from the landlord of our next venue that someone had reported us to the vice squad, so could we possibly tone the show down somewhat and also take out any swearing as the boys in blue would be paying us a visit that very night. We held an emergency meeting, in which we removed from the script the more salacious jokes and all the swearing. When we went to our gig and started the show, there wasn’t a policeman in sight but just as we were beginning to relax and go back to the old script, we spotted them coming in at the back, supposedly incognito but actually unmistakable: huge, with very short hair (remember it was 1974), navy-blue overcoats, pale-blue shirts and great big feet in great big policeman’s shoes. So back we went to the expurgated version. This did not please the audience, who stared silently and balefully at us, some turning their backs and talking amongst themselves. A show that was normally a riotous one and a quarter hours long, without the risqu’ jokes and the swearing ran for just a measly twenty minutes. But the coppers left happy enough, wondering what all the fuss was about.