Camp David Page 9

  ‘A living god?’ said Robin. ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Well he is!’ I protested.

  ‘I know he is, but he must have thought we were a pair of weirdos.’

  After a pause I said, ‘We are a pair of weirdos.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Robin.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said brightly. ‘I can apologize to him later when we see him at the play.’

  Robin’s face darkened with worry. ‘Oh yes, the play. Well we can’t go now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll know we’re stalking him.’

  ‘We are stalking him,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but we just can’t go. He might put two and two together and I could lose my job.’

  ‘No more stalking today then?’

  ‘No, let’s just go to the cinema.’

  So we went to see the Pet Shop Boys film It Couldn’t Happen Here at the Odeon, Tottenham Court Road instead.

  A very important person stepped into our lives at this point, a new English teacher at Reigate Grammar School called Mr Grant. He had the appearance of Billy Bunter* and even dressed in pre-World War II style complete with neatly combed hair and round wire spectacles. However, his ideas were modern, and what’s more he desperately wanted to direct school plays.

  Spotting the potential in Robin and me, he asked us if we wanted to appear in a production of Ball Boys by David Edgar. This was a short contemporary political play about two ball boys at Wimbledon who strangle a tennis champion with string from a racket. This was a production way outside Mr Louis’s conservative ideas about drama – dark, homoerotic and sadistic, much like the 1929 play Rope by Patrick Hamilton. As it was too short to put on in the evenings on its own, we performed the play at two lunchtimes. We recruited the tall blond and handsome Edward Luck (who had never lived down taking out his penis in the language laboratory) to play the tennis champion.

  Mr Grant had a completely different approach to Mr Louis. Instead of giving us all preset moves, he allowed us to find our own way around the play and the stage. We had to find the characterizations, rather than copy what the teacher did. Needless to say we loved every moment of it. We were finally learning how to be actors, rather than copying the teacher.

  There was a moment when Robin, playing One-Eye, had to snap a tennis racket over his knee. So a racket was sawn in half before the performance and reassembled so that it would break at the appropriate time. However, before that point in the play there was another sequence in which we mimed a game of tennis. When Robin pretended to serve, the head of the racket flew across the room, nearly decapitating some poor fourth former in the process. We looked out at the audience even more stunned than they were, and in a state of shock got through the rest of the play.

  A thwarted Mr Louis turned up the second lunchtime, not to watch the performance but to berate Robin and me. ‘You are meant to be in the school canteen now supervising the dinner queue!’ he bawled.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I forgot,’ I said. In the excitement of the play we had forgotten our prefect duties.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ he screamed. ‘Unbelievable!’ With that he turned on his high heel and slammed the concert hall door behind him. Robin and I waited a moment and laughed. We had outgrown him.

  Even more audacious was Mr Grant’s production of The Collection by Harold Pinter. This short play was written in 1961, and Laurence Olivier took the role I was cast in for a television adaptation in 1976 – so no pressure then. The play concerns a young man named Bill (Robin) leaving his ageing gay lover Harry (me!) to have an affair with Stella (Helen Punt, sister of Hugh from the comedy double act Punt and Dennis), to the anger of her husband James (Robert Shearman, who now is a playwright that Whovians will know wrote a brilliant episode of Dr Who entitled ‘The Dalek’).

  I had a terrific speech as Harry that made me aware of how great dialogue should sound.

  ‘Bill’s a slumboy, you see, he’s got a slum sense of humour. That’s why I never take him along with me to parties. Because he’s got a slum mind. I have nothing against slum minds per se, you understand, nothing at all. There’s a certain kind of slum mind that’s perfectly all right in a slum, but when this kind of slum mind gets out of the slum it sometimes persists, do you see, it rots everything. That’s what Bill is. There’s something faintly putrid about him, don’t you find? Like a slug …’

  I loved that speech so much, I immediately fell in love with Pinter’s work and saw every play of his I could. For me, as a writer of dialogue Pinter is without equal, someone whose work makes you aspire much more with your own writing. Just a sighting of the great man was enough to make my heart beat faster.

  Wednesday 4/4/2001

  I had a strange premonition I was going to see someone really famous at the National Theatre. And indeed I did, along my aisle at Pinter’s adaptation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past was Pinter himself. In a black suit with a black shirt. Poking out of my pocket was Michael Billington’s biography of him! My dream is to be introduced to him, so I resisted the temptation to launch myself upon him.

  In 2008 I would sit next to Harold Pinter in his book-lined study. For an actor this was the modern equivalent of being invited to meet Shakespeare. Pinter is one of the most celebrated playwrights of all time, and like Shakespeare I have no doubt that his work will be performed for ever. I was in the great man’s study with Sir Michael Gambon, David Bradley, Nick Dunning and the pointlessly handsome director Rupert Gould to read his play No Man’s Land to him. Soon we would open the play at the Gate Theatre in Dublin before taking it to the West End. Everyone else was too intimidated to sit next to Pinter himself, including the great Gambon (I had waited twenty years since seeing the television masterpiece The Singing Detective as a youth to work with him), so I was forced to take the chair.

  ‘I was in a production of The Collection at school,’ I told the legendary playwright.

  ‘Was it any good?’ he asked.

  ‘Some say it was the definitive production,’ I answered cheekily, and Harold laughed.

  I made the greatest playwright in the world laugh.

  A few months later on Christmas Eve Harold’s long battle with cancer would end, and Michael, David, Nick and I would return to the stage on Boxing Day trying our best to honour his memory by giving the greatest performance of No Man’s Land we could.

  Back in 1989 Robin, Helen, Robert and I were called to Mr Grant’s house to discuss The Collection.

  ‘What do you think is the nature of the relationship between Harry and Bill?’ asked Mr Grant, like most teachers asking a question he already knew the answer to.

  ‘They could be friends,’ I said.

  Mr Grant said nothing. It was an extremely bold choice for a school play: The Collection explores infidelity, homosexuality and how people can be imprisoned in relationships. The four of us all felt incredibly grown-up being part of it. I even smoked a cigar on stage; there were references to stroking a pussy, and Mr Grant played Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ before the play started.

  However, the choice of play was too daring for a deeply conservative school like Reigate Grammar, and it was given a bad review in The Pilgrim, a magazine that never ever gave any school play a bad review …

  Here were the heavyweights, the local RSC, Dashwood, Punt, Shearman, Williams. I placed them unisexually in alphabetical order, so as to not indicate favouritism.

  Harry (David Williams) and Bill (Robin Dashwood) have some conversational passages together which require very nice timing and more than a little menace. Harry’s words at times should convey a cold menace to Bill, but it seemed to me that throughout, Robin was exhibiting complete self-possession and lack of concern. There should be tension between all the characters. It is quite awfully difficult to achieve this, and I have to give my opinion that this production failed to achieve it.

  I saw Jim Grant at a fundraising evening at Reigate Grammar School in 2012, and he called the review ‘a stin
ker’. He still seemed quite hurt by it.

  So as my days at Reigate Grammar School drew to a close, it was time for the exams that would help determine all our fates. I sat in the sports hall for hours and hours on long hot summer days. I wrote and wrote until my left hand ached as I took A levels in English literature, history and business studies. I still have no idea why I chose that last one.

  The final event in the school calendar was the end-of-term ball. This was when we could say our goodbyes. Some for good. I wore a dinner suit and a horrid little red bow tie, and posed for my mum next to my Ford Fiesta, hoping that I looked like James Bond. I didn’t get to kiss Zoe that night, but as we stepped out into the summer night to take some air, I looked up at the stars and the moon looking down at us and wanted the night to last for ever. Never again would I be able to see her every day, a thought which drained the world of colour.

  It was a school legend that the most anti-authoritarian boys swam in the school pool at midnight after the leaving ball. The caretaker was wise to this and waited by the pool to intercept everyone who wanted to leave the school with this badge of dishonour. That year nobody managed it – except Robin and I, the boys least likely to. We were clever enough to wait an hour or so until the caretaker had gone to bed.

  We scaled the fence, stripped down to our boxer shorts and dived in. The water was warm and silky. The moon reflected on the water. It was the most magical swim of my life. Moreover, it was the perfect way to say goodbye to the school that we had loved and loathed for the last eight years. I drove Robin home in my little pale blue Fiesta, singing ‘Maybe This Time’ from Cabaret as we sped down the Reigate Road in the early hours.

  12

  Enter Daffyd

  A group of thirty young people who wanted to be actors more than anything in the world sat on some grass outside St Aloysius School in north London. It was August 1989 and I had been waiting for this day for years. After two unsuccessful auditions, my third trip up to London to the National Youth Theatre’s rehearsal rooms on the Holloway Road had proved successful. One summer day the letter arrived. By chance I opened it sitting out in the garden eating a choc ice with Zoe, who had given me a lift home from RGS in her poo-brown Ford Fiesta, and for a moment everything seemed right in the world. A beautiful girl, an ice cream and a letter that meant I was a step nearer being an actor.

  Sporting a pair of ghastly purple shorts that clearly showed the outline of my genitals (it did say wear ‘loose comfortable clothing’ in the letter), I made my way to the school. For the next three weeks these thirty strangers and I would devise a play. It was a disparate group – from Clive Manyou, black and from a council estate, whose place on the course was being paid for by the Prince’s Trust, to Joe Talbot, head boy at the most expensive public school in the country, Millfield. We were all waiting on the grass for the director to turn up. It seemed unrealistic to expect a film star to arrive, but a film star was who walked up to greet us that day.

  In his baseball cap and jeans, it wasn’t easy to recognize him at first.

  ‘I’m Ralph,’ he said in rough tones. ‘Ralph Brown. I’m an actor and I’ll be taking the course this year.’

  Still the name didn’t give him away, but there was something very familiar about him.

  ‘Are you the bloke who makes the Camberwell Carrot in Withnail and I ?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Ralph modestly. ‘I played Danny the drug dealer in that film.’

  We all looked around at each other. We couldn’t believe it! He might not have been Harrison Ford, but he was in one of the funniest scenes in one of the most celebrated films of the time, the brilliance of which the passing decades have still not dimmed.

  In that famous scene Danny rolls a joint with twelve skins so long it resembles a carrot. The film follows the story of two out-of-work actors, which is what most of us were destined to be. Even after one viewing, Ralph’s lines (written by the occasional genius Bruce Robinson) about hairdressers being in the employment of the government and hairs picking up signals from the cosmos were burned in my memory.

  After memorably playing a racist copper in the first series of The Bill, Ralph had become a much-sought-after film actor, having appeared in major roles in Buster and Scandal. (Since then he has acted in Alien3, The Crying Game, Wayne’s World 2 and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.) All we wanted to do was ask him questions about Withnail and I, but Ralph wanted to move from acting into writing and directing, so devising a play was as important to him as it was to us.

  The theme was the environment, with global warming a relatively new crisis in the late 1980s. Although it may seem corny now, in 1989 it was a new topic, and infinitely more original than Aids or nuclear war, the staple themes for youth theatres creating ‘issue’ plays around this time. One such NYT-devised piece I saw at the time had two girls holding hands and berating the audience ‘Who says our love is wrong?’ in much the same way Daffyd from Little Britain would many years later.

  In fact I met the person who provided the inspiration for Daffyd that year. Although there were many gay people in the NYT, not many were out about it. They were still teenagers, and Aids had provoked a huge upsurge in homophobia. Shadwell was different. Shadwell was not in fact his real name. It was Paul. However, being from Wales he had picked up the nickname (the comedian John Sparks had a morose Welsh poet called Shadwell on the Channel 4 sketch series Absolutely at the time). Shadwell was gay, and it was the first thing he told anyone about himself.

  ‘Hello, I’m Shadwell and I’m homosexual,’ he would say to new NYT members on the Tube. ‘I am the only out gay in the whole of the youth theatre.’ Because Shadwell was out everyone in the NYT knew him, and his Welsh accent made him instantly imitable. It was if his whole identity was based around his sexuality, not that there was any evidence of a boyfriend or sexual encounters. There was something comical about the way he said ‘homosexual’ in that musical Welsh accent of his. Mimicking him at the time, I played out the scenario for my friends of someone else in the NYT who was gay too. ‘No, I’m the only gay in the youth theatre!’ I would say. Unbeknown to me, my brain stored up the idea, and many years later when Matt and I were trying to think of ideas for a character-based sketch series, Shadwell still shone bright in my memory.

  Ralph Brown was a cool character and set a very cool tone. One day he announced he wanted us all to dance to the rap song ‘Do the Right Thing’ by Redhead Kingpin and the FBI. Ralph enlisted two friends who danced with the Cookie Crew to choreograph it. Of course I was utterly hopeless at any form of dancing let alone hip-hop, but I threw myself into it anyway. My lack of dancing skills hardly mattered – as long as you excelled at something you were noticed – and I excelled at making the others laugh, and it wasn’t just the purple shorts.

  I really made Ralph laugh one day when, as part of a stage fighting workshop, I started my demonstration with my hands around another boy’s throat and uttered the bizarre line, ‘You’ll never work in the circus again, Charlie Chan!’

  Those who didn’t live in London stayed at the Tufnell Park student residences. Most of us sat at the bar all evening, pausing briefly to go out and buy some chips for our dinner. I didn’t drink – I was too inhibited to get drunk – but I loved that everyone else did. We played spin the bottle, and these attractive young people talked about sex, and I listened with great interest. Some of them even had sex up in the small hot bedrooms, though this activity once more eluded me. However, it was as if we had all finally found our soulmates, the formerly isolated acting types from secondary schools around the country were finally all together and revelling in each other’s company.

  On 20 August 1989 I turned eighteen. After rehearsals a group of the guys took me out to a local pub and kept on buying me drinks. The only alcoholic drink I could bear was vodka and orange, as you couldn’t taste the alcohol. When we returned to the halls of residence I was led stumbling into the bar.

  ‘SURPRISE!’ they all shouted. There
were balloons and a ‘Happy Birthday’ sign and a cake. Not since I was small had I been given a birthday party, and that these people who had known me for only a couple of weeks had organized a party for me made me feel really special. We all danced to ‘Do the Right Thing’. Finally I had left behind the sometimes brutal atmosphere of school, and was now with people who mostly had the same playful side to them that I had.

  One morning I called my mum from a phone box that reeked of urine next to Tufnell Park Tube station to find out my A level results.

  ‘Well … ?’

  ‘You’ve got into Bristol, love! Three Bs.’

  Bristol University was the most prestigious place to take a drama degree, and my grades meant that I had a place. I was thrilled but didn’t want to look too pleased with myself as some others on the NYT course were in tears at hearing their grades.

  In the finished production, called Zone, I was given an amusing piece to do. The premise of the play was that at some time in the future humanity had so raped the earth only a selected few got to live in a special area called the Zone. My role involved selecting those who gained entry, so I could be amusing and dark at the same time – much as I am now.

  ‘I am so sorry, madam, you can’t come in. You are rather large and will take up too much room. The Zone is quite small, you see.’

  We performed at the newly built Business Design Centre in Islington. The mums and dads sat baffled in the audience, but other NYT course members cheered and stamped their feet as if Zone had changed theatre for ever. Being young and naive, we all thought Zone would tour the world and halt the earth’s impending environmental catastrophe, but of course it was never heard of again.

  Someone who was heard of again was Daniel Craig, who that year was in an NYT production of Marat/Sade in the West End. Arguably the best Bond ever played Marat and so was topless in the bath for the entire performance. His presence, voice and torso marked him out for future greatness, and needless to say all the girls and some of the boys in the NYT fell instantly in love with him. The actor who played opposite him in the role of Sade was equally mesmerizing, Dickon Tyrell. However, Dickon never went on to be on the cover of Vanity Fair or marry Rachel Weisz. Indeed, I can recall many other brilliant actors in the NYT who we all thought would be international stars whose careers never took off. Further down the cast list of Marat/Sade, playing one of the inmates of the asylum, was a young Jamie Theakston. Now I wish I could see the play again – watching the ex-children’s TV presenter in the background pretending to be a mental patient might just be the funniest thing in the world ever.