by John Challis
Four days after he’d died, the BBC screened the next episode of Rock & Chips, the last one he had completed. Who knows where he might have taken that.
In the meantime, we had decided that the book should come out in the following September, to coincide approximately with the thirtieth anniversary of Only Fools & Horses. We had formed our own publishing company, Wigmore Books Ltd, to put out Being Boycie in order to have more say in how it was done. Having seen so many ‘celebrity’ autobiographies spoiled by crass editing and bad publishing, I was anxious to retain control over the key aspects of it.
I had offers from mainstream publishers but it made more sense to do it myself. Carol and I got a lot of satisfaction out of overseeing the whole process and now, a year on, I’m delighted we did it that way. However, from the beginning of June, I had to drop everything else to concentrate on Twelfth Night.
As a patron of the Ludlow Festival, I had always let it be known to the committee that if there were anything constructive I could do to help, they had only to ask. This year, I was delighted that they did ask.
There had been a number of splendid Shakespeare productions at Ludlow over the years, particularly, in recent times, a great Merry Wives of Windsor directed by Michael Bogdanov. This time, with commendable courage, the committee had booked a fresh, new talent to direct. Charlie Walker-Wise, who had graduated from Sussex University with a degree in politics, went on to RADA to become an actor. He had appeared in Ludlow in the previous year’s production of Othello. Son of Herbie Wise, who had directed I, Claudius, Charlie wanted to turn his attention to directing and was to make his debut with a regular festival favourite, Twelfth Night.
This was a good choice for me. I knew the play very well. I’d first performed in it as a teenager with my mother’s drama group in Tadworth. I’d played Feste, clown and commentator – a cynical, more or less objective observer that Shakespeare often employed.
I’d had a minor part in the Royal Shakespeare production at Stratford in 1966, when the great Ian Holm had played Malvolio, and I had played Malvolio myself at the production in Stafford Castle in 2000.
There was a lot of work involved for this production – four weeks rehearsal in London, with two weeks’ performance, in the open at the castle. As is often the case in productions like this, the cast – all professionals and some with considerable experience – were working for the Equity minimum. I didn’t feel I could ask for more and so offered to do it without fee. I wanted to help my local town and its festival. I was happy to do it on that basis and they accepted my offer.
I met Charlie and I was delighted to be working with him. When I arrived in London for rehearsals, his strengths were obvious from the first read through with rest of the company. He had cast the play well. All the others knew what they were doing and responded to his encouragement to bring their feelings and ideas for their character into play.
There was more analysis of text and character than I’d come across before, even at Stratford, and extensive reading of every note ever written about the play. This to some extent reflected current dramaschool thinking and to begin with, I was a little wary of it, but in the end, it was clear that it did help everyone to deliver assured, convincing performances, even if not always in ways I would initially have chosen. Charlie explained right away that he was going to set the action on the island of Majorca at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
I’d never been particularly keen about performing Shakespeare in modern dress, always believing that in the end, the text says it all. On the other hand, audiences have told me that it can make the dialogue more comprehensible. In our Twelfth Night, for example,in exchanges like the knockabout cross-talk scenes between Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch (brilliantly played in Ludlow by Paul Trussell and Patrick Brennan) watching them, hearing them deliver their sixteenth- century lines while wearing twentiethcentury clothing of a Bertie Wooster variety made them sound completely modern and relevant and helped the words make more sense than had they been in doublet and hose. The Spanish setting seemed to me less relevant, although I understood the sense in which it was conveying the idea of a decaying, outmoded society.
When it came to the performances, I was more nervous than usual, I suppose because I knew I was playing to a home crowd, as it were, and there would be a number of friends and people I knew in the audience, the vast majority of whom had only ever seen my playing Boycie on TV. There was bound to be some lurking doubt in some of their minds that I could pull off a Shakespeare. I didn’t want to disappoint them with my performance, and I certainly didn’t want to let down the festival. For that, I’d worked as hard on the part as on any I’ve ever played.
Malvolio himself was, and is meant to be, quite cruelly treated in the play. He is a universal character, a martinet who thinks he’s always right, a neo-fascist in a sense, laughed at by the others for his Puritanical attitudes.
I already had a fairly good handle on the character in a way with which, luckily, our director concurred. He was as anxious as I that this should not be a ‘comedy’ performance, and wanted me to understate all the techniques of comedic acting that had become almost second nature to me, both on stage and on TV. I happily went along with this, even where it was hard to keep it under control. I’ll admit that a couple of times in Ludlow when the rain came down – an ever-present risk with British al fresco theatre – I gave in to temptation.
There is a key scene in the play, in which Malvolio finds a letter (deliberately and malevolently planted by his enemies) that he believes is from his mistress (in the employer sense), Olivia, with whom he is secretly besotted. But Olivia’s maid has forged her writing and the letter tells him that although Olivia loves him, she can never admit openly to it. In a key scene on which all the subsequent plot hangs, he reads it to the audience in mounting excitement, never suspecting that it’s a fake.
During one performance at Ludlow, as soon as I’d picked up the letter and begun to read it, the rain started, and was soon bucketing down. Less sturdy members of the audience started to slink away. I wondered, with my normal paranoia, if I wasn’t delivering this crucial scene as well as I should, while the letter itself started to disintegrate (perhaps it should have been laminated) in a very obvious way. Bits were falling from my hand and I had to pick them up to carry on pretending to read. The audience who had remained were loving it.
All actors are whores to some extent, and easily bought by the sound of laughter; I couldn’t stop myself milking it, and was cut short only by the sombre announcement from the back of ancient stone inner bailey: ‘Would the actors please leave the stage.’
We waited only a quarter of an hour before the rain eased, and the emergency copy of the letter had been found. It was dropped in place, Malvolio made his entrance and started to read it again. At almost exactly the same spot, the heavens opened again. The letter started to disintegrate as I tried to salvage it, and of course, the intrepid audience, now strongly bonding with the intrepid cast, howled wtih laughter. Cheap laughter, you may say, but very much appreciated by a bedraggled actor trying to deliver his key secne.
This time the rain eased before we were called of and from then on the bond between the players and the audience who had remained was stronger than ever, and both sides benfited greatly from it.
On a fine night, though, Ludlow can be magical. The open stage in the castle comes into its own when the swifts come out to cavort over the battlements and the occasional pigeon lumbers across a sky turning gold, then pink and the sun shafts through gothic stone windows.
It was a wonderful place to be; it was an outstanding production with a great cast and by a young director who deserves to go a long way. We were all delighted by the reception we had and I was in no doubt that, from my own point of view, it had all been well worth the time and the effort, and I hope that Ludow goes on producing fine Shakespeare far into the future.
The thirtieth anniversary of the first broadcast of Only Fools & Horses fell o
n 8 September 2011. Although we’d been anticipating this milestone for the previous year or so, it still seemed incredible that it had all started so long ago. There was still terrific public interest and affection for the show and its characters, and much was made of the anniversary, as well as the sad coincidence of John Sullivan having died just before it was reached.
Two weeks later, the first volume of my autobiography, Being Boycie was launched at an ebullient, crowded party at Kettner’s in Romilly Street, Soho. I could hardly believe that we had finally got there, and we’d still only reached 1985. After that it was a matter of waiting to see what anyone had to say about it, and if anyone would want it.
A year on, I am grateful to the great many of you who bought and read Being Boycie. Thank you very much for giving me the confidence to write produce Boycie & Beyond, which, if you’ve got this far, I hope you’ve enjoyed.
In both books I’ve set out to give an honest account of how a committed, lifelong actor can find himself an almost iconic figure, not necessarily through any fault of his own. Against this backdrop, I’ve tried to depict the colossal temptations and problems involved in being an actor, and to express my gratitude that I’ve survived them and, with the guidance and thoughtfulness of my wife, Carol I’ve been able to reach a place of happy equilibrium.
If I have any advice to pass on to aspiring young actors, it would be go for it, but watch out and be ready for the rough bits. If you’re not careful, they can hurt but when it’s good, it’s very, very good.
The End.