That's Another Story: The Autobiography Page 22

  In the meantime the police had gone across the street to the Beat Route Club to tackle some other altercation. By the time they returned, at least a couple of hours later, the Black Maria was completely motionless; the man had long since gone silent, but dear old Yella-Belly was still going at it full pelt. It was a marvel that this woman never came near to losing her voice. At this point they opened the doors and let her out, but just before they slammed them shut again, a slurred but plaintive cry of ‘Merciful heaven!’ was heard quite clearly from within.

  After we’d been living in Greek Street for two or three months I had a clear-out and took a bag of clothes over the road, thinking the women might find them useful. A matter of hours later, I saw a massive woman waddling down the street in a pair of my shoes. I take a size three and a half and the woman barely had her toes wedged into them; a sleeveless cardigan of mine was also stretched tightly across the vast expanse of her back. I watched her as she wobbled off. There was something of the little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes, and something in the pleasure that she appeared to take in wearing her new clothes and her deluded sense of her own appearance, that I found immensely touching. After she’d got about fifty yards she stopped abruptly and pivoted around on the spot, looking directly up at our window as if she had known that she was being watched. I quickly stepped back, not wanting to be seen and therefore shouted at. I waited a minute or so and then took another look. She was still standing there and, on catching sight of me creeping up to the window, she placed a thumb in each ear, waggled her fingers and stuck her tongue out, and then with a girlish giggle she turned her back, bent over, wiggled her bum at me and pranced off down the street. Although I’d never been able to properly catch sight of her face when she was in her usual place at the window, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was the commentator. Even if the great wobbling arms - although they were a bit of a giveaway - had been covered, there was no mistaking the mixture of aggression, cheek and a surprising element of charm in the turn of her head and the swagger of her walk.

  It appeared that the majority of the women housed there were mentally disturbed in some way and fell into a sort of no man’s land between mental health care and prison. My husband, Grant, who had been a young policeman at West End Central, told me much later that number 59 Greek Street was well known to the police. They dreaded the inevitable call to go round and it was always palmed off on to the ‘rookies’, because no one else wanted the job. It seemed that the women used to get rather excited by the sight of these young men (Grant was then only eighteen) in their policeman’s uniforms. Once inside the building with its dimly lit corridors, where the odour of unwashed bodies was all pervading and where haggard faces peered through the cracks of half-opened doors from the darkened rooms behind, the young men were subjected to harmless but nevertheless creepy catcalls, and a lot of exposing and propositioning went on. They were told back at the station that it was a home for old actresses. Grant finally admitted that he had laboured under that delusion until very recently. When I put him right he said he’d always wondered what it was about acting that had made so many women go round the bend. And as I said to him at the time, that is an entirely different matter.

  Greek Street eventually got to be too much. Today Soho is much improved and less seedy than it was then, when it gave the impression of being a place in which people came to abuse both themselves and others. The lonely, disaffected and damaged gravitated towards it; you could hardly walk through the little garden in the centre of Soho Square for homeless winos and drug addicts. The detritus and paraphernalia of their lives were scattered around on the grass and in the flower beds: bottles and cans stacked under the benches; needles stuck into the trunks of trees. Above the mostly pleasant aroma of coffee and food cooking in the various restaurants, the traffic fumes and the generalised city smell, there was always the pungent stink of stale urine.

  I used to think sometimes that people - and when I say people, I suppose I mean men, and when I say men, I suppose I mean drunks - came to Soho specifically to urinate. The door into our building was round at the side in Manette Street and it opened directly on to the road, above which was a Dickensian-looking arch linking us to the Pillars of Hercules pub. Being sheltered, fairly dark and out of the way of the main thoroughfare, it reeked, needless to say, of old piss and was forever being mopped and disinfected by the restaurant on the ground floor. On a couple of occasions on coming home late at night after the show, I had trodden in something soft and with an unmistakable stench, only to discover that someone had crapped in the doorway. I suppose you could say that this was the last straw and one morning not long before I moved out, I returned home after doing a bit of shopping to find a man brazenly pissing up against the door. Boiling with rage and without a thought in my head, I took a run at him and kicked him with some force up his bottom, causing him to pitch forward and nut the door with his forehead. He spun around - tall, bearded and unkempt-looking - and I immediately felt sorry for him; in fact I was on the verge of apologising when he began a tirade of screaming, frothing abuse. I backed away, instantly regretting my actions, as he advanced on me, his flies still open and his penis half sticking out, while propelling out a string of invective on a cloud of stomach-churning breath becoming more agitated by the second. I retreated, terrified, one hand held up, palm out, in a conciliatory gesture, unsure as to whether I should let him know about his accidental exposure, but quickly coming to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to bring his nethers into it. He proceeded to harangue me with a curious mixture of hell and damnation, added to the threat that he, himself, could rip my guts out and very much enjoy the experience. I was halfway up Manette Street in the middle of the road by the time I turned tail and ran, and it was a good hour before I returned, peering tentatively around the corner to make sure he’d gone. I spotted him in the crowd milling along Oxford Street a few weeks later and crossed over the road, lest he see me and recognise me as his one-time assailant, prompting the haranguing to start all over again.

  When I finished in Funny Peculiar in the spring of 1977, I discovered to my surprise that I had lost three-quarters of a stone in weight, which took me down to just under eight stone. On the day that I left the Garrick, I looked at the poster-sized picture of me as Irene, the character that I played, at the front of house and wondered what had happened: the girl in the photograph had a rounded face and thicker legs and arms. This is a syndrome that has repeated itself throughout my career. Whenever I am engaged in a long run in the theatre, I gradually lose weight. Just recently in the sixteen weeks that I performed in Acorn Antiques the Musical I lost just over a stone and I wasn’t exactly overweight to begin with, but no matter what I ate I couldn’t seem to keep the weight on. It was suggested that it was due to the dancing, singing and general physicality of the part, which was true to a certain degree, but this weight loss occurred with any part that I played, regardless of the physical energy exerted, if it was played over a period of time. I believe it had more to do with the effort required for me to re-create the part every night, putting a huge pressure on myself to make the audience believe in and engage with it each second that I was on stage, and with the adrenalin rush that this produced.

  Shortly after the run finished we tried to go down the same route with Willy Russell’s hilarious play, Breezeblock Park, as we had done with Funny Peculiar, starting off at the Mermaid, with Wendy Craig in the central role, played brilliantly at the Everyman by Eileen O’Brien, but after a mauling by the critics we took it valiantly into the Whitehall Theatre, with Prunella Scales instead. Playing the very dim, lovable and funny Vera, I had a ball. The show was adored by the audiences and although the cast, myself included, were well received, the play was trounced once again by the critics, despite the fact that several of them were seen to be convulsed with laughter on press night. It came off after a few weeks with audiences roaring their approval to the last.

  15

 
‘We’re Missin’ Brideshead for This!’ - Victoria Wood

  The following year in the summer of 1978, after a stint at the Royal Court Theatre under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark in which I played a New York Jewish lesbian who was also a solo round-the-world yachtswoman in a completely unintelligible play by Snoo Wilson titled The Glad Hand, I took a job at the Bush Theatre, a tiny space above a pub of the same name on Shepherd’s Bush Green in West London. It was, and still is - despite almost having its grant taken away this year in a disgraceful and ludicrous proposal by the Arts Council of Great Britain - a major force in the championing of new talent, especially writers. The proposal was withdrawn after a welter of opposition from actors and writers who had launched successful careers from that tiny stage. Our production was to be an evening of playlets - we were instructed not to call them sketches - written by such luminaries as Snoo Wilson, Nigel Baldwin, Ken Campbell, Ron Hutchinson, Dusty Hughes, who also directed, and a young woman I’d never heard of before called Victoria Wood.

  The evening was to be titled In at the Death and some would say that the audiences were, on most nights. Also in the cast were Godfrey Jackman, Clive Merrison, Alison Fiske and Phil Jackson, while Victoria, fresh out of BBC1’s topical That’s Life, was to provide musical interludes between each sketch - there, I’ve said it - one of which was the glorious ‘Guy the Gorilla’ (‘died of chocolate, not usually a killer’), as well as writing a sketch of her own.

  The sketches were to be based on small snippets from newspapers connected in some way with death: not major articles, but those little pieces tucked away in the bottom corners of the inside pages, probably best found in local papers. Ken Campbell took his from the Malaysian New Strait Times; Nigel Baldwin took his inspiration from the Holyhead and Anglesey Chronicle; and Vic used the tabloids. Ron Hutchinson’s piece was set in Northern Ireland, based around a Ruby Murray lookalike contest. There was a brilliant sketch written by Dusty Hughes about ‘ghouls’, the people who turn up to gawp at road accidents, tube disasters and the like, but the hit of the evening was Victoria’s piece, which was entitled Sex and involved a young woman, worried that she was pregnant, played by me, finding out from this other character, played by Victoria, that she hadn’t even had sex. It brought the house down every night.

  One line that I particularly remember as a rafter shaker was: ‘Well, where are you in the menstrual cycle?’

  ‘. . . Erm . . . Taurus.’

  It was here at the Bush that our relationship was cemented, easily slipping into a friendship on the first day of rehearsals, when we discovered that we had Geoffrey Durham in common, he of the near facial hair-fire disaster, who had lived underneath me in Canning Street when I was at the Everyman. It turned out that he was Vic’s bloke and so here was our first bond. The second, which Victoria informed me of over liver, boil (sic) and onions at the Bush caf’ round the corner from the theatre, was that we had met before. It turns out that she had auditioned at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre when I was a first-year there. I had been drafted in to usher the auditionees into the theatre to do their pieces and had spent the entire time trying to entertain them with stories of my nursing days, previously recorded herein, and generally showing off from my privileged position of already having a place. At first I couldn’t remember her being there and then the image of this shy little girl, wearing glasses and throwing up in a bucket, flashed before me.

  There was actually a third thing that bonded us. One evening early on, after rehearsal, Vic and I were going somewhere or other in her newly acquired Mini van. Wherever it was, we somehow got lost in the back streets of Shepherd’s Bush, God forbid. After about ten minutes we ended up in either a cul-de-sac or a ‘no through road’, so a three-point turn was necessary in order to get out. Victoria swung the car round with great aplomb and being a non-driver at this stage of my life I was hugely impressed by her skill and confidence. Then she backed up and I think we must have been talking because she reversed just a little too far. We heard a bit of a crunch and she pulled tentatively forward to reveal that she had knocked down an entire garden wall. Our escape from that street, apart from the paroxysms of laughter, that is, with the screeching of tyres and the smell of burning rubber, was worthy of a 1970s action thriller.

  It was an interesting time, although I fear that we gave poor old Dusty Hughes rather a hard time, or at least I think I did. I just felt that I knew best. I had come from the great Everyman, a working-class hero; I ploughed my own furrow; and some London-based, middle-class, university-educated bloke was not going to direct me. In those days I still laboured under the misapprehension that certain types of direction were tantamount to slurs on my acting ability and had what you might call a wee chip on my already rounding shoulder. One day, frustrated by the lack of progress in rehearsals, Victoria and I hatched a devilish plan whilst down in the pub toilets. We rushed back upstairs.

  ‘Dusty! What sort of car have you got?’

  He told us.

  ‘Where is it parked?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We think it’s being broken into, it looked as if someone was trying to get into it!’

  And off he shot. Then we put the kettle on and decided on what we thought was the best way to play the particular sketch we had been rehearsing with Dusty.

  Dusty was a talented playwright, going on, two years later in 1980, to win the London Theatre Critics Award for Most Promising Playwright, and he took our undermining, prank-playing and joke-cracking at his expense in very good heart.

  As ever, I was in my element fooling around, which took me right back into class-jester mode. One lunchtime whilst for some reason we were hanging out of the office window upstairs, we spied Harold Pinter standing at the bus stop in the street below.

  ‘Harold! Hello, there! You write plays, don’t you?’ I called.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You’re a writer! We could do with one of those up here!’

  Then a week after we opened we wrote ‘H. Pinter (two tickets)’ on the bookings list just for a laugh and scared the cast half to death, laughing our heads off backstage as we watched the other actors nervously upping their performances to impress the very absent Mr Pinter.

  Backstage at the Bush consisted of an area approximately six feet by six feet and a set of stone steps leading down to the street. These were also used as the fire escape and, once the audience were in, the dressing room. The only toilet facility was downstairs in the pub itself and so this is where we rushed at the interval of an early preview, only to hear, whilst sitting on the lav, a middle-class voice intone loudly, ‘Oh dear, could do better. Shall we bother with the second half?’ After that, it was pint glasses and frequent cries of ‘Don’t drink that!’ as thirsty actors reached for what they thought was their pint of Carlsberg in the dark. It was extremely cramped with six actors all trying to get changed in this space, and Vic and I had many a private joke about the slack nature of a certain actor’s underpants.

  It was also hazardous, not the slackness of the underpants, you understand, but the backstage space. One night we were all on stage, apart, that is, from Victoria who didn’t appear until the last few minutes leading up to the interval. During the course of these we heard a dreadful crash, accompanied by the soft thud of flesh on stone repeated several times, from backstage. When we finally exited we found Victoria covered in blood halfway down the stairs, where she had accidentally slipped and fallen whilst hovering over a beer glass and cut her hand. In doing so she had also knocked over a number of other glasses, splattering the costumes with their contents, and they didn’t all contain drinks. What the second-half audience thought of the badly stained costumes one can only guess at and as for the smell as they dried under the stage lights in that tiny space, perhaps they thought that they were experiencing early Odorama.

  The show did well, being well received on the whole, and it was on the final Saturday that David Leland walked in and asked to speak to Victoria. It turned out
that he was running a young writers’ festival at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and he asked Victoria to write a play for it. She said she would write something for me. I thought this was very kind, but couldn’t ever imagine it happening, and went off to have a not particularly happy time at the Bristol Old Vic, where at my audition to play Phoebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Richard Cotterell, the director, said, ‘Come downstage, Julie, I want to see your f-f-f-f—’

  ‘Erm, is this what they call the casting couch?’

  ‘I want to see your f-f-f—’

  ‘Blimey, Richard, what sort of production is this?’

  ‘Your face!’

  ‘Oh . . . fair enough.’

  I got the part but hated it, unable to get to its centre. Looking back, I think I was trying too hard and expecting too much from it. Perhaps I’d have done better if I had shown my f-f-f—

  It was here at Bristol that I was told the tale of an actor being on that very stage, playing Macbeth during a matine’e. He had started the famous speech, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’, when an aged voice from the stalls was heard to say, ‘Oh, that’ll be Wednesday.’

  And it was here that I read Victoria’s wonderful new play Talent, which she had, indeed, written for me. My character was called Julie and my character’s boyfriend was called Dave Walters. The play centred around a talent contest in a seedy Northern nightclub. Julie was entering the contest and Maureen, her best friend, played by Victoria, had come along for support. It fitted me like a glove, the extreme opposite of the experience I was having with Phoebe. I knew this girl exactly, what she would wear, how she would speak, how she would smoke, cry, laugh, and when she would breathe. And I wasn’t free! It had to go ahead without me and I was mortified. The part was played by Hazel Clyne, but the show was seen by Peter Eckersley, a Granada Television producer, who picked it up to be adapted for television. This meant I had a chance to audition for the part.