You go in and do your two pieces, one modern, one classical, while they sit in a line behind a desk in front of you like on a TV
talent show.
It was an intimidating atmosphere. Christopher was snooty.
And Yat muttered mysterious things; he asked me what my favorite color was. “I like purple,” I said. “Oh, purple.” He responded as if my answer had given him all the information he’d ever need on me as a person. “People who like purple are vain and are unable to cope with the adult world.” A lucky guess.
I’d got all nice and drunk before the audition. One of the second years who was on the panel—Adam—later reminded me of some of the things I did, so I can now recount them with clarity.
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I do remember being formally announced—“This is Russell Brand”—and swaggering drunkenly into the room. “So,” said Christopher Fettes, in his perfect clarinet voice, “what are you going to do for us today, young man?” And my reply to Christopher Fettes—this elegant, Oxbridge-educated man (Fettes College in Edinburgh, which is where Tony Blair went to school, is named after the Fettes dynasty)—was, “I thought I might wop out a bit of acting.” When Adam recounted this to me, he placed par ticular emphasis on the word “wop.”
“OK,” he continued crisply, “so what have you got for us?”
Over the thirty years that they’ve run that school they’ve trained Simon Callow, Colin Firth, Paul Bettany, Tara Fitzgerald, Pierce Brosnan, and numerous other very good actors. I walked into the performance space, took the chewing gum out of my mouth and stuck it out on the wall, did a piece from Pinter’s Th e Home-coming (“One night, one night, down by the docks . . .” that bit), then pulled the gum off the wall, put it back in my mouth and sat down again.
Next I had to do a piece from Antigone. It’s a speech where Haemon implores Creon to show clemency to Antigone, who’s buried her brother’s body after some war—obviously I didn’t read the whole play, so I’m not sure what the fuck went on, I was doing it how I would talk to my dad if I wanted something from him: “Oh come on, show a bit of clemency. You’re a powerful man, let’s not fuck about, people listen to you . . .”
I didn’t know how to take direction at that time, I bristled when they offered guidance. “He’s educated, so it’s like a lawyer in court,” Christopher said. I just went “Yeah, alright,” and did it the same again. I didn’t like people telling me how to act, I found it insulting, so I’d pretend to listen then carry on with my instinctive interpretation or, depending on how drunk I was, ar-144
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gue. Or cry. Despite my surly, drunken behavior those three brilliant men saw fit to accept me into the Drama Centre, snatching me from the dole queue and handing me back my dignity.
Actually I continued to sign on throughout my time there and my dignity was diminished. If anything. V
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It was obvious that Drama Centre was a magical place from looking at the building. The school was in an old Methodist church in Kentish Town, where it was rumored that the brilliant Irish poet W. B. Yeats and devil-worshipper Aleister Crow-ley had once engaged in a bizarre cult.
Central to the training are the teachings of Stanislavski. Th e
basic principle of Method acting is that you should draw on your own personal experience—“You know how you felt when you were seven, and your dog died? Well, think about that when you’re playing Hamlet.” It sounds simple enough, but it involves learning lots of techniques to heighten your capacity for emotional recall. Those techniques were westernized from the original Russian templates by people like Lee Strasberg, who taught James Dean and Al Pacino, and Stella Adler—another teacher in New York at the time—who taught Brando.
Drama Centre London transplanted those ideals from New York, along with at least one teacher who had trained there (in the form of the aforementioned Reuven Adiv), and set out to teach its young students how to approach acting like a craft.
Fettes was an articulate, stylish and brilliant homosexual man who could also be quite clipped and brutal on occasion.
The students deified Christopher, Yat and Reuven. Th ey were
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great men—excellent teachers and wonderful characters—but obviously that gets exaggerated when you’re a young person trying to learn acting and these people hold the key to knowledge and they’re in absolute authority and they’ve created this system where their word is law. As a result, Drama Centre was a very intense place.
It was no coincidence that its nickname was (and still is, even though Christopher has moved on, and Yat and Reuven have both died) “Trauma Centre.” Going there was like being a member of a cult. The first day I went to Drama Centre, I didn’t like it. I scanned the room to get a sense of my contemporaries.
There was Romla, the daughter of George Walker, who owned William Hill—his brother was Billy Walker, the boxer—she was quite an imposing character.* Then there was Jamie Sives, a really good Scottish actor, who went on to work in some excellent films. And Karl Theobald, the brilliant comedic actor, who would later be in Green Wing. Initially these people seemed quite intimidating.
The ideal of the impoverished artist really pervaded that school. They liked people from modest backgrounds, who were good-looking and talented. And drinking neat liquor from the bottle, with all my long hair and my shirt undone and my beads, not so much the lizard king, more a gecko duchess, I fi tted in nicely with their idea of what a creative person should be.
The social makeup of Drama Centre was based around a fairly clear divide between the working-class kids, who were there on grants, and those from the middle-class families which could afford to send their kids to a place like that. I’d managed to wangle myself a grant from Essex Council. As if determined
* William Hill is a famous high street bookmaker, inwardly gurgling with tiny pens, discarded paper and broken dreams.
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to uphold the county’s reputation for philistinism, Essex Council only give out three grants a year for the whole of the arts. I was proud to receive that grant, especially in the knowledge that I’d fought off competition from all of Essex’s poets, paint ers, dancers and stage hypnotists to get it.
A charity, the Stanley Picker Trust, gave me a thousand pounds a term in response to begging letters that I sent. I don’t know who Stanley is, or was, but thanks for that money; it went to a good cause.
There was also a fund, Friends of the Drama Centre, which gave the financially insolvent students—myself included—extra money for maintenance. I did my best to spend every penny of that money on drugs, while living on people’s floors, wearing shit clothes and drinking filthy five- quid- a-liter vodkas named after Rus sian authors. Tolstoy Vodka, Dostoyevsky Vodka. I may not have read their books, but I was devoted to their stinking booze.
I selected friends that were in a similar financial situation from comparable backgrounds who were as mad as I was: Mark Morrissey—who claimed to have been in prison for robbing a post office when he was seventeen, which I thought made him incredible glamorous, but was never sure it was true—and Tim Renton, this Geordie bloke who was a bit nuts.* I ended up living with these two above a pub in Kentish Town.
Mark Morrissey was an amazing character. He’d been brought up by his nan. I love people who’ve been brought up by their nans: nan-kids. They speak funny, because they’ve missed a generation of talking—“Alright, nan . . . Countdown’s on in a
* “Geordies”—fiercely proud inhabitants of Tyneside. They were traditionally miners and shipbuilders, industries that were destroyed under Thatcher, and their pride now largely focuses on their inconsistent and financially troubled football team. Their identity is more regional than national.
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minute. Shall I get some working-out paper,
it looks like we’re in for a cold snap?” Although Mark wasn’t a square like most nan-kids, or a boffin, he did waffle on in an anachronistic vernacular.
Here’s an example of something Mark Morrissey said which was funny. In the first year at Drama Centre, they make you build the sets and work as crew, including preposterously dangerous work with electrics for the final year students’ productions. When they allocate which department you’re in—set, electrics, makeup, wardrobe, front of house—you pray for one of the cushy numbers like make up or front of house, like in prison, where as far as I can assess from Porridge, you want to work in the library or in the kitchen. I got the equivalent of breaking up rocks in the unforgiving midday sun for every one of my three terms—electrics. On wardrobe you just sit drinking tea with actresses. I, however, was drilling holes and running wires through walls and ceilings. It was terrifying, “I could actually die,” I thought. “This cable doesn’t know I’m a student being taught a valuable life lesson, it’s a conduit for electricity, it’s going to assume I’m qualified.” It’s not like a rollercoaster, where no matter how scared you are you know that it’s sanctioned fear, you can’t actually die. Life is not a theme park and if it is the theme is death. They make you work eighteen-hour days.
I was especially stunned by it because—as may already have become clear—I prefer not to work on anything where I’m not being looked at and there’s no chance of getting applauded at the end. I didn’t like doing electrics. I’ll do magic tricks. I’ll do card tricks. I’ll do sex tricks, tricks of the mind, tricks of the heart and soul, but electrics—that’s no job for me.
At three o’clock in the morning, all tired and pissed and stoned, doing everything I could to avoid work on trying to get 150
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theatrical flats erected—I shouldn’t have to write a sentence like that, I’m not saying it’s beneath me, it’s above me. It makes me confused and emotional. Putting hinges on planks, trying to work out angles, banging my thumb like Tom out of Tom and Jerry—why did he have to do so much carpentry?
Mark Morrissey looked like Humphrey Bogart and Rodney Bewes (the dark one from The Likely Lads). He stood in overalls smoking roll-up fags like Sid the Sexist, with his eye-rolling, factory- floor sense of humor—and his “Oh Christ, what’s the point?” attitude to life. He looked at my shoddy work, tutted, shook his head and said, “I dunno. [pause] Men on the moon?”
I loved that. That’s the sort of thing people said in the ’70s when lunar travel was a big deal. It implied my workmanship was so poor that it was detrimental to mankind as a species. He also, on one occasion, when I passed on the accurate accusation that he’d nicked a mate’s textbook, charged me with “listening to the ravings of a madman.”
It was a mark of how successfully Christopher Fettes had created this environment where we were all constantly clamoring to impress him with our vocational devotion that Mark—a natural rebel—piped up in class with the incredibly insincere statement, “I went down to the National Gallery the other day and just stood in front of Van Gogh’s Sunfl owers . . . And I’m not ashamed to admit this: I wept.”
“Ooh Mark, you’re so fucking sensitive,” I sneered afterward; jealous of the attention Morrissey’s outrageous gambit had gar-nered him. “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”
For most of that first year at Drama Centre, I lived like the Hulk, or the Littlest Hobo, peripatetically drifting from one girls’ flat or halls of residence to another. Simone Nylander—the girl in Grange Hill who was always going “I want to help you 151
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Ro-land”—was one of them. She wasn’t like she was in the program, though. She was sexy by then. She was a Ghanaian princess.
A lot of Ghanaian people seem to be royal, in my experience.
I think their royal family is badly structured, because about eighty percent of the Ghanaians I know claim royal lineage. I don’t wish to cast aspersions on their socioeconomic system, but it is, I imagine, pretty grim for the other twenty percent if four-fifths of them are kings, guzzling pearls.
I stayed round at Simone’s house for a while. She had very good manners and was really well brought up. I was a little thug.
I once spat in her wastepaper bin. She thought that was bad. In fact, she reacted to this lapse in etiquette by throwing all of my stuff out of the window in bin bags. That was always happening.
I’ve squandered the best years of my life watching bin bags arcing out of the windows of disillusioned women. I shouldn’t bother to unpack, I should just leave my stuff outside by the bins.
Once I moved into the Queens Arms in Queens Crescent with Mark and Tim, life got ridiculous. It was a problem pub that no one could ever run properly. We had to do three shifts a week behind the bar in lieu of rent. I had all the worst possible traits you could have as a barman: I gave drinks away for free, stole from the till and got drunk at work. I couldn’t pull pints, I didn’t know how to change a barrel and I was an alcoholic. Th ey
had moody twenty-pound notes stuck up on the wall, and I’d take them down and spend them. They were free money those notes. Me and Mark Morrissey, every morning on the way to school, would pour a tumbler of vodka or gin, or on Friday, cocktail day, both, then go in to Drama Centre and recklessly do ballet drunk.
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called Alan—were downstairs having a drink after hours.* Mark wandered over to the piano, announcing that he was better than Liberace—and I didn’t see him again till the next day. Th e
piano was only six yards away. God knows what happened to him.
I noticed two women outside—Norwegian—and we invited them in, gave them booze and chatted them up. As is always the case when there’s two or more women, it was a question of working out which of them was most likely to have it off . Th at’s
always a difficult call to make, which is why one of the fundamental tenets of womanizing is “two birds is worse than none.”
You’ve got to divide in order to seduce. Obviously the rules change when you’re famous. In that case two is often better than either none or one.
“Now, you’re both very attractive, but would you be so kind as to tell me which one is likely to have sex with the least fuss?”
That’s what you want to say but many people, squares I call them, consider that to be impolite. “Do you want to come back with us?” they asked. “We only live over the road. You’ll have to be quiet, though, because of our landlord.” So we went over the road and carefully did the drunken creep up the stairs, where we carried on the evening, with me endlessly skinning up and chopping out lines because booze was no longer accessible.
After hours of fruitless living Alan, the gutless coward—like most men, not as committed to the womanizing cause as I—said, “I think I’ll turn in now,” and went back to the pub. I thought, “No, I’m sticking this out to the bitter end.” By that stage I’d selected the more suitable target, Petra, the brunette;
* “Scousers” are inhabitants of Liverpool. The city was originally built around the docks, which were once more destroyed when Thatcher crushed the unions. They take the name
“scouser” from a regional dish, and are famous for their two great football teams, the Beatles and their sense of humor.
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the other one had mentioned religion and that’s always a bad sign unless it’s paganism.
We got into bed. I was a bit delirious by this stage, but we got off with each other for a bit, and then I fell asleep. The kind of sleep you have when you’re pissed and on drugs, where sleep mugs you at the end of the night. Not a gentle, consensual dropping- off, where you think, “Right, I’ll just have a read of my book.” Sleep loutishly koshes you off to nod as if its true intention were to put you in the grave.
I lay contented. The day’s triumphs and disasters all nonsense now as half-baked dr
eams cavorted through my bonce, showing off like toddlers. I felt a shove on my shoulder, my dream weaver worked to incorporate it into his script. “Ooooh, you’re in a meadow, but instead of corn, it’s a field of eels, growing in slithery acres . . .” SHOVE HAPPENS. “Erm, don’t worry about that shove, it’s all part of this brilliant dream I’m weaving . . . one of the eels has shoved you . . .” There was another shove. Th e dream
weaver frantically tried to hold his narrative together. “Oh what’s this? An eagle is swooping down to eat the eels and has accidentally shoved you on the shoulder . . .” At the third shove the dream weaver gave up. “Alright I admit it, there is no eel field, no eagle. I was making it up. You might wanna look at your relationship with sex though, I was trying to tell you through symbols but it’s bloody difficult with all this shoving.” “Yeah,” I thought. “What is all this shoving?”
I concluded that I might need to open my eyes if any closure on the shoving were to be reached. When I did, I was greeted with a sight that was as ridiculous as the dream eel fi eld. Directly in front of me, at the opposite end of the bed, was an old woman, beige and alarmed. Toothless with a shawl, it’s diffi cult
not to think of her as a crone. If you see the words “refugee woman,” an image will come into your mind. That image is 154
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what I was looking at. To her left were two huddled, baffl ed
children. To her right were two more huddled children. “I don’t remember going to bed with all these children,” I thought. “Perhaps if I continue looking round the room an explanation will appear.”
To my left, children. To my right, more children. “Well this is a turnup, there’s certainly no shortage of huddled, refugee children in here.” Finally, and with due trepidation, I glanced in the direction of the shove, and there, standing next to the pale and embarrassed Petra, was a man.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 13