Being Boycie, page 7
At the start of 1964, although Dickie Burnett might have had me back at Bexhill, if I’d asked, Vincent had got me a spring season at the Playhouse Theatre in Kidderminster.
Kidderminster, where the West Midlands meet the Marcher counties, was a strange town of middling size, dedicated to the manufacture of carpets, where a lot of the most famous carpet makers in the world had their factories and headquarters. There had also been a long tradition of support for the performing arts in the town, and they were proud of the fact that since the war, a voluntary organisation called the Nonentities had kept the Playhouse going, bucking the growing trend of provincial theatre closure.
I appeared in four plays there and was beginning to think I really was a proper actor now. Perhaps the best of them was The Private Ear and the Public Eye, which I’d done in Eastbourne, although on this occasion, as the more playable and rambunctious of the two males. Trap for a Lonely Man was a terrible play, but good fun. I was a tramp, Merluche, playing opposite David Griffin, a goodlooking young chap who later became known in Hi di Hi and Keeping Up Appearances. David’s character was a detective disguised as a Catholic priest, who is supposed to shoot me. In one performance, he pulled out his revolver, pointed at me and pulled the trigger.
The dialogue could have been written: “Click... click....Fuck!’
Someone hadn’t done their preparation, and there was no dramatic blast of gunfire, while I stood there, poised to collapse in a heap, suffering from terminal bullet wounds, and David gazed with apparent disgust at the dysfunctional six-shooter (although it was the starting pistol held by someone in the wings that had let him down).
I carried on standing there, dithering, while David thought on his feet, picked up a convenient knife from the table beside him, as if in slow motion, and lunged at me, stabbing furiously. Inevitably I had to rethink my death. As a child (you may remember, if you’ve been paying attention) I was famed among my peers for the quality of my dramatic death scenes, and it was the work of a split second to transport myself back into an appropriate one. I responded to David’s plunging knife by clutching the place where the blood should have been, and sinking with agonised slowness to my knees before hitting the stage floor.
There were some awkward moments later in the play when references to the ‘shooting’ had to be hastily replaced with the ‘stabbing’.
The effect of this cock-up was that every other time we came to play the scene, David and I, with absolutely no control over our actions, dissolved into hopeless giggling.
The spring season was rounded off by a production of Distinguished Gathering, an itinerant production brought to the theatre by the tremendously famous and popular Vic Oliver. He cast most of the play from our company, giving me initially a fairly insignificant role, although, encouragingly, before the run had started he came down and said, ‘No, no this casting is wrong. He should play the policeman.’ He stabbed a finger in my direction.
Unfortunately I didn’t possess an appropriate suit to wear. Vic didn’t waste any time; he went off and came back with one of his own suits which, though a little baggy on me (for I was a slender waif then), did the trick. Once again, playing opposite David Griffin, I was questioning him – ‘Where were you on the night of the
fifteenth?’ – and we found ourselves giggling uncontrollably. It kept happening – a comprehensive ‘corpse’, night after night, with the management getting very pissed off, although we explained we could do nothing about it – the strangest of physiological reactions, as testified by Brian Johnston’s famous prolonged giggle after inadvertently talking about ‘leg-over’ in the midst of a radio commentary on a cricket test match. The process, once triggered by the ‘stabbing’ in Trap for a Lonely Man, seemed irreversible, and I think if I played opposite David again now, it would still happen.
In the middle of my run at Kidderminster, as if by some miracle designed to keep me happy, on March 26th the Rolling Stones came and did two gigs at the Town Hall. I could only get to one of them, and in this larger venue, a year on since the first time I’d seen them, I just knew they were the most exciting band I was ever likely to see. They’d released three singles by then, and an EP (with four tracks). Not Fade Away had got to No. 3 in the UK charts and just snuck into the US Top 50 – it seemed they were already getting known around the world. I was very glad I’d seen them in their early days at the Richmond Crawdaddy.
A couple of weeks into my stint at The Playhouse, the company’s designer, Jean Burkenshaw, told me she knew Colin MacIntyre, who ran the Civic Theatre in Chesterfield and was then putting together his autumn/winter season. Evidently she thought I was up to the job, because she suggested I ring and ask if I could go over to audition.
I took a punt and hired a Mini to drive up to Derbyshire, and returned to Kidderminster in triumph, having scored my first job as ‘actor only’ to start in October. That left only the summer months to sort out.
I enjoyed the Kidderminster Playhouse, and admired the almost alarming dedication of the Nonentities who had kept the place going. I understood that they felt very strongly that this theatre was their baby, and they guarded it jealously. They came around a lot while we were there, checking that we were looking after their precious theatre properly, and to make sure that these callous professionals would maintain the same standards as their amateur groups.
Sadly they were somewhat betrayed by their local council, and within four years the place was flattened and serving as hard core beneath the Kidderminster ring road – in the name of Progress.
By the time the Kidderminster season closed, Vincent Shaw had arranged an audition for me with David Kirk’s company. They were doing a summer season of two North Country plays at The Palladium in Llandudno, North Wales’s premier resort. I got the job and was asked to turn up at rehearsal rooms in Kilburn. Here I met the rest of the company, including Carol Robertson, one of the most attractive stage managers I’d yet come across. Although she’d never aspired to be an actress, Carol was lovely looking, and almost a caricature of a theatrical female, with a soft drawling voice (edged in steel when required), vast, expansive gestures and a long, gold-tipped cigarette always held between two long fingers and waved in the air like a conductor’s baton.
The star for the Llandudno summer season was a battle-hardened, fortyish North Country comedian, Ken Platt, remembered for his grim catchphrases – ‘I won’t tek me coat off; I’m not stoppin’, which he produced at the drop of a hat for years, with variation – ‘I won’t tek me coat off; I’ve got me pyjamas on oonderneath.’
Ken was also credited with coining the term, ‘Daft as a Brush’, which I suppose deserves a mention. A former wartime Combined Services Entertainer, he was also guilty of that crime against humanity, playing the ukulele while singing George Formby songs – only marginally less heinous than his 1958 recording of Snowy the Christmas Kitten, which included the deathless couplet, ‘He’s my pretty, Christmas Kitty.’ He’d appeared in a lot of big radio variety shows, and had an early TV show of his own. In 1958 he’d had some success in a straight play which David Kirk had written, Love Locked Out, at The Alhambra in Morecambe, which was to be revived as the keystone production of the season at Llandudno.
While we were there, we went to see Ken in a recording of a BBC Light Programme variety show, at the Grand Theatre (now the Broadway Nightclub & Disco). He was second on the bill to a rather irritating little Arthur Askey (‘Ello, playmates!’), and further up the ladder from Eddie Reindeer, who came on wearing a full reindeer outfit, including head, to massive applause. I was sitting just below Mr Reindeer as he was bowing very low to acknowledge the applause at the end of his turn, with antlers nearly scraping the floor, using the opportunity to yell, ‘More! More!’ at the top of his voice, in the hope, I suppose that the BBC microphones would pick it up without identifying him – evidently a popular ploy among the‘turns’ when they were on the radio.
The Palladium itself was a grand old theatre (now a Wetherspoon’s), then still doing good business with the holidaymakers and weekenders who streamed down from Merseyside and Manchester for their seaside breaks, although there was a fair bit of competition for the punters’ money from the four other theatres in the town: The Happy Valley, The Pier Pavilion, The Arcadia and The Grand. So venerable was the theatre that it had retained some very old connections. The dressing rooms were located off a musty corridor, high up the back staircase behind the Victorian fly tower. One night while I was busy being ASM, I came up to do something after the show while the rest went off to the pub. I was just tidying things away up when suddenly from the gloomy, cobwebbed corridor outside a door slammed, followed by urgent, angry footsteps clumping past the dressing room. I felt suddenly very cold as I heard them carry on, down the stone steps. I couldn’t understand; as far as I knew there was no one else left up there. I went out into the passage, and glanced where the door had been slammed. At the end of the corridor through which the interloper must have come was a door to an old abandoned lavatory, which was padlocked shut, evidently unopened in years. Yet it was the only door that could have been slammed. I shivered, nervous as hell, and couldn’t wait to get out.
I rushed down to the pub, where I was greeted by a couple of the local stage hands.
‘My God,’ they said, ‘you look like you’ve seen the ghost!’
I was obviously looking pale and drained. I told them what I’d heard.
‘Oh, yes – that’s him. He’s back, is he? He hasn’t been out for five or six months.’
I was quickly surrounded by other interested people offering their reassurances.
‘Don’t you worry; he won’t harm you. He was disappointed in love, see – unrequited, so he killed himself.’
I was deputy stage manager for the two shows we were putting on, Glamour & Chips, along with Love Locked Out. Apart from Ken Platt, ours was a typical little provincial company with all the oddballs and eccentrics I’d learned to expect. Love Locked Out was fun – a North Country version of the Lysistrata, when all the women go on strike and withhold their sexual favours, until their men finish the strike which they are staging. In Glamour & Chips, the daughter of a chip shop owner has gone off to become a famous actress, only to get bored with it all, and decides to come home to work in the fish’n’chip café – as if that ever happened! I had a small part in it as a photographer, though nothing in Love Locked Out, and I was mainly occupied with stage management for the summer season, with the bonus of working every day with Carol Robertson.
She and I went out when we could to taste the giddy nightlife of Llandudno in August. The choice venue was the Happy Valley, a gift from Lord Mostyn to the town to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. The area was landscaped as gardens, acres of lawns, two miniature golf courses, and the Happy Valley Entertainers open air theatre, where Carol and I went a few times The theatre was owned then by Scottish comedy actor, Alex Munro. One night, before the show, he came out with a great flourish to make a big announcement.
‘Ladies and gentlemen! I’ve got some wonderful news about my daughter. My lovely daughter Janet – I’m sure you’ll have seen her in Swiss Family Robinson and The Day the Earth Caught Fire – has just got married to the world-famous actor, Ian Hendry.’
The audience gave a great sigh of appreciation and applauded, while Alex Munro beamed with pride.
Another time we went to see a comic called Kenny Cantor where he was appearing at the Pier Pavilion Theatre. It emerged that he had been pursuing Carol fairly vigorously, although I didn’t get the impression he’d made much progress. I was surprised by how much this affected me, although Carol and I had certainly been getting on well. We always seemed to have a lot to talk about and, although there was no great Hallelujah! moment between us, before the six-week season was over, we found that our relationship had developed organically into something serious, and we’d become an item.
When the season came to an end, Carol was offered a job as stage manager at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. The first thing we did when we arrived in the South was to go and see her parents at home in Surrey, and things looked set for a long lasting if not permanent relationship. I helped her settle down into a house in Windsor, and at the end of September headed off for a longish season in Chesterfield.
At the Civic Theatre I’d been engaged for the first time as ‘actor only’, and in the ten productions we got through up until Christmas, not all performances sank entirely without trace. One cub critic on the local paper, aspiring to be the next Kenneth Tynan, even declared that ‘Challis’s performance was so strong that every time he left the stage he left his aura behind him’. In the absence of more subtle interpretations, I took this as a compliment, although the stage manager, when he’d read it, muttered something about having to clear it up afterwards.
Colin Macintyre was a terrific director to work for. He’d acted in the past but now restricted himself to directing, and ran the show with the help of a very able theatre manager, Derek Coleman. It was a good company with several notable actors, one of whom, Jon Finch, went on to work in Hollywood with Polanski and Hitchcock. Jon was our matinée idol and had all the girls waiting for him at the stage door. One of the girls in the company was Hazel Williams, a beautiful but vulnerable creature who’d been crowned Miss Wales, 1963.
Hazel was hopelessly in love with Jon.
When Elizabeth Counsell, the actress daughter of John Counsell who ran the Theatre Royal in Windsor, came to Chesterfield to take a part opposite Jon Finch for two weeks, it was a safe bet that a relationship between them would develop. During that fortnight, some mysterious and not very flattering descriptions of Elizabeth were scrawled in lipstick on the playbills outside the theatre. The lipstick was the same colour as Hazel’s, but it was never entirely established that she was responsible.
I didn’t envy Jon too much, though; there were other actresses in the company – one especially, Penny Dixon, a pretty girl with whom I fell briefly in love until I realised how much Carol meant to me. After that I became quite used to thundering up and down the noisy concrete thoroughfare of the M1 to snatch the odd Sunday night with Carol. She was doing well at the theatre in Windsor and happily settled in a pretty, early 18th century terrace house close to the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park – an oasis of calm in my frenetic life.
I gained a lot of experience in Chesterfield with the variety of material, and found myself genuinely dedicated to making each show a success. In Wilde’s The Importance of being Ernest, I played Dr Chasuble (showing, at the age of twenty two, my capacity for character roles without having t0 wait until I was forty as Oliver Fisher had predicted in Bexhill). I played Trinculo in The Tempest, after just a week’s rehearsal, Sergeant Rough (with ill-fitting wig) in Gaslight, and Jack the Ripper in The Lodger.
I was enjoying the season, and as often happens, even over a short sojourn in a provincial theatre, the company soon became known around the town. We were treated to a lot of conviviality, usually in a great barracks of a watering-hole in the middle of Chesterfield called the Queen’s Park Hotel, where the whole life of the town seemed to be played out in its never-closing bars and function rooms.
After ten productions, finishing off with a great Christmas Revue, although Colin wanted me to come back and do another season, I was ready to move – ready, I thought, to take London’s West End by storm. I left Chesterfield and, in the new year of 1965, moved more or less permanently into Carol’s house in Windsor, from where access to London was easy.
After Christmas, my next ‘job’, in the absence of any immediate prospects via Vincent Shaw, was as a ‘dresser’ at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, where Carol was working, and I found myself helping out with quick changes for such luminaries as Hugh Paddick (Huge Padlock) in the Farjeon Review with Dilys Laye and Joan Sterndale Bennett, as well as Jenny and Elizabeth Counsell, twin daughters of John Counsell.
One of the regular directors at the theatre then was Joan Riley, a woman of some presence and a salty tongue. I was surprised once to hear her during rehearsals speaking very loudly to the cast. They were fooling around, cursing and giggling, which prompted her to bellow, ‘If you’re going to bugger about, you can all fuck off for lunch!’
I had never heard a woman swear before, and I was rather shocked; I’m used to it now, of course. Joan was married to a fine character actor, Frederick Piper. Their son, Mark, a stripling of fifteen, was also working with me at the theatre. He and I became friends, though after I moved on, as happens too easily in my job, we lost contact. In a nice touch of serendipity, some twenty years later when I met and worked with actress Sue Holderness, I discovered that she was married to Mark and we’ve known each other for twenty-five years since.
The arrival of spring in 1965 provided a critical watershed in my life when Vincent Shaw got me two important auditions. One was with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where I was seen by Peter Hall’s sidekick, Maurice Daniels (known affectionately as Doris Manuals).
The other was for a part in Portrait of a Queen, in which Dorothy Tutin played Queen Victoria in a big and powerful performance. The very day after I’d been offered – and had accepted – a part in Portrait, I was offered a job at the RSC. I almost cried with frustration, I would have so loved to have gone to Stratford-upon- Avon. Nevertheless, after my various excursions around the country and five seasons in provincial rep, miles from the centre of things, I was more than happy to be working in the heart of Theatreland.
