by James Corden
Jacquie told me not to get too downhearted and that, however I might feel about the play, I should still go and meet with Toby Whale, the casting director. If he liked what I did, then I’d most likely be called back to meet Nicholas Hytner, the director, and maybe even Alan himself.
In the days that followed I worked as hard as I could to get to grips with the scenes where lots of the boys spoke – they were brilliantly written, snappy back-and-forths between a teacher and his class of eight boys. I didn’t want to count myself out of any role at that point, so I learnt as much as I possibly could of all of them. I’ve never worked so hard for an audition.
The week after the script came, I was in the casting rooms of the National Theatre, sitting down in front of Toby Whale. (Toby is one of the most brilliant and lovely casting directors in the country. So brilliant and lovely, in fact, that he would go on to cast a TV show you may have heard of called Gavin & Stacey.) The first thing he asked me was whether or not I liked the script. Like it? I said. I loved it; I understood every word, never got lost and absolutely knew what was happening at all times.
It’s normally at this point that the casting director will suggest reading some scenes through, with him or her playing the other parts. If it’s a television or film casting, they’ll press record on the video camera and away you go. So I was pretty confused when Toby stood up and said, in a breezy, easy-going tone, ‘OK, James. Let’s go through, shall we?’
I looked up in surprise. ‘Go through to where?’
Now it was Toby’s turn to be confused. ‘Through to meet Nick and Alan. Where else?’
It took me a couple of seconds to register the information. Toby was already heading off down the corridor, but he turned and stopped when he heard me call out, in a squeaky voice, ‘Nick Hytner and Alan Bennett?’ He just nodded, smiled and carried on walking.
The look on my face must’ve been pretty familiar to Toby by then. All day, I imagine, a stream of young actors must have been coming in thinking they were there for a general meeting with Toby before the real auditions began, and then having the rug slipped out from under them as they realised this was the audition and it was now or never. This was a pretty dastardly move.
But there wasn’t time to debate the rights and wrongs. I was busy feeling sweatily nervous. I was hot, panicked and now, of course, wished I’d worked even harder on the script. But what could you do? I took a deep breath and stepped through the door and into the room.
I’ve realised in the last few years that something happens to me when I get nervous. I don’t know why or how it happens, but it can either be harnessed as a force for good or it can manifest itself as pure evil. (Well, ‘evil’ might be pushing it, but ‘not good’ doesn’t really work.) Basically, when I’m at my most nervous, I act my most supremely confident. When everything inside me is turning to jelly, my outer shell seems to harden and I exude this aura of confidence. Some people would say this is a good thing, and they’d be right, sometimes; but occasionally, and I hate it when this happens, believe me, those nerves turn into the kind of overconfidence that unfortunately comes across as arrogance.
Now, I don’t know which level of nervousness my audition with Alan and Nick would be gauged at: confident, cocky or big-time arrogance. I don’t even remember much of the meeting – I wish I could. All I know is that when Alan wrote about our meeting in his book Untold Stories, he said that I walked into the room and immediately took over the audition. The one thing that did stick with me was that they both laughed a lot during the read-through, which I guess couldn’t have been a bad thing. But, walking away, I didn’t know if I’d done enough (and I still didn’t even know what part I was auditioning for); all I knew was that I’d tried my best.
I left the theatre and called Dad straight away. As he often does, he managed to sum up exactly what I was feeling. ‘Well, if you’ve not got it, at least you’ve met Alan Bennett.’ He was totally right; at the very worst I’d met a living legend. That was all I was thinking as I stood waiting on the platform for my train home. And then my phone started ringing in my pocket.
It was Jacquie. She sounded slightly panicked. ‘Have you got on the train yet?’
‘No, I’m on the platform. Why?’
‘You should come into the office. You’ve been offered the play, but Messiah need an answer today, and Fat Friends has been recommissioned. They all clash, and we have some decisions to make.’
No way. I’d only left the audition an hour ago and I’d been offered the job already? Things like that didn’t happen to me (nor has it ever happened since, incidentally).
When I got to the office, Jacquie told me that I’d been offered the part of a boy called Timms. I picked up the script and flicked through it as fast as I could. I then did it again, only this time much slower, because I was finding it hard to find any of Timms’s lines. It slowly and painfully dawned on me that it had nothing to do with my page-turning pace: Timms only had four lines in the whole play, and one of them was, ‘Yes, sir.’ Talk about back to earth with a bump. I swore I could smell some roasting meats …
I didn’t know what to do. I told Jacquie that it was my dream to work at the National Theatre, but to turn down two well-paid parts in successful TV dramas seemed silly for a part with four lines. But Jacquie was having none of it. She was adamant that I should do the play. She got on the phone and got busy trying to work out a way I could do all three. I sat in Jacquie’s office for three hours that day, waiting for this merry-go-round of phone calls to come full circle, when, out of the blue, Alan called her office directly. He spoke to Jacquie for a few minutes before she handed the phone to me.
‘Hello?’ I said in a croaky, nervous-schoolboy type of voice.
‘Oh, hello, James,’ said Alan in his lovely northern lilt. That was basically enough for me right there. I would have dropped everything else at that point, because Alan Bennett had made the effort to call me personally. But, amazingly, he went on to say that he knew that the character of Timms wasn’t written up as much as the others, but that if I were to commit to doing the play, he would write the part up and give me something I could have fun with. He ended by telling me that I would have to trust him, because he would only change it with me in mind.
Ummm … OK. My jaw nearly hit the floor. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and who I was hearing it from. I looked at Jacquie and she too had the biggest smile on her face. I told Alan that I was totally overwhelmed and that I couldn’t wait to be involved; then I kept saying thank you, thank you, thank you, and he told me to stop being so silly.
I put the phone down and started to smile, and didn’t stop smiling for about two weeks. I felt so happy. I was going to act at the National Theatre, to work with Alan Bennett and be directed by Nicholas Hytner. This was going to be one crazy adventure.
CHAPTER 14
BEST MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT:
‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ by Thin Lizzy
BEST WATCHED WITH:
The Madness of King George
BEST ENJOYED WITH:
a ham and cheese toastie
YOU WANT REAL adventure? Try getting the train from Beaconsfield to London Marylebone in rush hour. It’s a nightmare. Beaconsfield is basically a village made up of quite posh and wealthy people who work in London, have lived in London most of their lives, but who have chosen to move out to Buckinghamshire so they can have a big house with a nice big garden for the same price as the small but perfectly formed and well-located mews house they had just a short walk from Regent’s Park.
They love it. But they also want others to love it, so they’re constantly encouraging friends and colleagues to up sticks and join them out of London. They’re always talking about how many en suites they have and how much better the schools are for Tilly and Oliver, or how they can be in Soho within an hour. An hour! They have achieved full-blown domestic bliss and it’s the best move they ever made. All of which, I’m sure, is true.
However, on a co
ld February morning, when they’re standing on the packed train platform waiting for the delayed 7.45 a.m. that stops at Gerrards Cross, shielding their faces from the side-ways rain that’s lashing against their reddened cheeks, it couldn’t look like more of a lie. Grown men and women stand shoulder to shoulder, praying that they’ll be the lucky ones who get a seat, muttering under their breath that this whole move was a mistake, daydreaming of the time when they were just four Tube stops away from work, and occasionally tutting at the irritating young person standing a few feet from them who has his iPod up way too loud. And that irritating young person they’re tutting at … well, that would be me.
(I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to all the men and women who frequented the Chiltern Railway from Beaconsfield to London during the years 1997 to 2004 for just how loud my music was at the time. What was I thinking? It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be listening to ‘Mama’s Always On Stage’ by Arrested Development at full volume at 8 a.m. It’s only now – as a responsible father – that I can begin to see that this is the last thing you want as you try to kick-start another two-hour round trip to work in an environment that is at best uncomfortable and at worst tear-inducingly unpleasant.)
But this one morning in question, there was no overly loud music, no angry looks my way, no nothing in fact. Just nerves. I stood on the platform gripping the revised script that Alan had sent over. He’d been good to his word and Timms’s part was now way more substantial, but – and you’ll like this – a lot of his new lines were in French. Ahhhhh, man. Why’d it have to be French? Was this some kind of karmic retribution for all those hours I’d messed around in European Studies? Had Mr Hopkins dropped Alan a line? The only French I knew was, ‘Quelle est la date de ton anniversaire?’ and that wasn’t even in there.
Alan seemed to have written the part as a sort of class clown. It was basically me at school: attention-seeking, boisterous, up for constant fun, but not thick or nasty in any way. I knew I could do this. Throughout the journey I flicked back and forth over my lines, hoping my northern accent was good enough and praying that I’d have the courage to just be myself when the time came and not be crippled by wanting to impress like I had when I worked with Mike.
I was so determined not to be late that I got to Waterloo Station an hour early and was the first one of the cast outside the stage door. I checked myself in on the sign-in sheet and then glanced down at the other names. Other than Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths, whose involvement had been announced some time before, there were no names I recognised. Richard was one of my favourite actors, who’d been Uncle Monty in one of my all-time best-loved films, Withnail and I, and Frances was an almost god-like figure who’d been a massive part of the success of one of the country’s favourite sitcoms, Rising Damp. I wondered what it’d be like working with them. Generally, when you’re spending time day in, day out alongside such brilliant actors, you can only ever learn from them. I hoped this would be the case with them.
But, as I said, underneath those two, there was a list of unfamiliar names; among them the seven other guys who’d be playing my classmates. The dynamic between the group of boys would be so vital to the play’s success that I couldn’t help but dread what the other guys would be like. Would they be a group of theatrical darlings who would look down on me for not having trained professionally? Or laugh behind my back because this was the first play I’d been in? God, this was actually worse than being back at school.
I sat outside the theatre, stressing over all the possible scenarios for so long that when I next looked down at my watch, it was 9.58 a.m., two minutes before I had to be inside. Shit! How had I managed to get there so early and still nearly end up late?
I rushed down the maze of corridors that run underneath the theatre until I got to Rehearsal Room Two. I stood outside for a moment, took a deep breath, closed my eyes and gave myself a pep talk: Just be yourself, James. Don’t be how you were with Mike.
I opened my eyes to find a really good-looking young guy standing in front of me. ‘You all right, mate?’ he said in a sort of posh cockney accent.
‘Yeah, I’m fine, thanks. Just a bit … y’no?’
He smiled, chuckled a bit, then said, ‘Oh, don’t be nervous. It’s gonna be a laugh, this. I loved you in All or Nothing – it’s my favourite Mike Leigh film. I grew up round where it was shot. You made me cry in that film. Amazing piece of work.’
It turned out that the young, good-looking, posh cockney was Dominic Cooper, who would go on to become my flatmate and one of my closest friends. I’ve told him since, of course, but I still don’t think he’ll ever really understand how those few words he said to me then so completely put me at my ease. My shoulders relaxed, my nerves vanished, my tummy unknotted itself and, as Dominic and I walked through the door into the vast rehearsal room, I felt calm, excited, confident and relieved, all at the same time.
The cast and stage management were standing around drinking cups of tea, being polite to each other, when Nick called everyone to sit round a long table in the middle of the room. We sat down and then, one by one, went round the table introducing ourselves and telling each other what parts we were playing. After that, we read through the entire play.
The other actors were brilliant: Stephen Campbell-Moore was already amazing as Irwin, the young supply teacher; Samuel Barnett was Posner and he read the part as if it had been written especially for him; Jamie Parker played Scripps and I remember him having the most incredible voice that made him sound as if he’d born on stage; in fact, everyone was incredible – Dominic was Dakin, Russell Tovey was Rudge, Andrew Knott played Lockwood, Samuel Anderson, who quickly got nicknamed ‘Zammo’, was Crowther, and the youngest of the bunch, Sacha Dhawan, played Akthar.
The read-through went really well (even the French was all right because no one, it turned out, was particularly fluent), and at the end everyone applauded; there was this wonderfully positive vibe in the room. Afterwards, the stage management crew went back to the business of building the set, which left us – the twelve cast members, Nick and Alan – all alone in this vast rehearsal room.
I reckon this is always the trickiest moment for a director. Where do you actually start? How do you begin the process of ‘putting on a play’? Do you just stick the whole cast on the makeshift set and start ordering them on from stage left and stage right? Or do you insist on spending hours playing theatrical games, chucking imaginary beanbags to each other whilst pretending that the floor is on fire? Believe me, this stuff happens all the time.
But luckily not in Rehearsal Room Two when Nick is in charge. Many people regard Nick as one of, if not the best theatre director in the world. And they think this because of his amazingly varied and brilliantly received spectrum of work, from opera at Glyndebourne to Shakespeare to Miss Saigon, and the fact that most of his productions end each night with a standing ovation. Personally, I think Nick is the best in the world for slightly different reasons: one of the main ones being that when he was sitting round a table with a group of young, mostly inexperienced actors, some of whom had trained, some of whom had not, some of whom he knew and most of whom he didn’t, he said this:
‘There’s a lot going on in this play and I think the best thing to do is for all of us to take a vow of stupidity. We must all agree that no one in here knows more about certain things than others. That way we can all learn together and nobody should ever have to feel stupid or be made to feel stupid about putting their hand up and saying they don’t understand something. We’re going to just sit here for a couple of days, and together we’ll go through everything. OK?’
In that one moment he put everyone in the room on a level playing field. I know, from having spoken to the other guys, that all eight of us felt relieved that he’d said it. Feeling much more relaxed, we sat and chatted about school and poetry, but mostly we talked about history. We would pass poetry books around that were referenced in the play and each read a paragraph. T
here were times when some of us wouldn’t completely understand certain aspects of what was written, and on those occasions we’d turn to Alan, who, in his own wonderful words, would explain it in such a way that anyone could’ve understood. Suddenly, dense mountains of words that had previously been closed off came alive and had meaning. We would laugh at each other’s stories from school – I told some myself and, occasionally, if he liked a phrase, or found something touching or amusing, Alan would jot it down in his notebook.
There was one unforgettable afternoon when Alan read to just us eight boys, on our own in the rehearsal room, for an hour. You could’ve heard a pin drop. He would read different poems and then talk about why or where they were written and what he thought they meant. Hearing him read Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ is something I’ll never forget. If you don’t know that poem, put this book down and go and look it up now. If it’s not Larkin’s best poem, then it must be his most repeated.
Alan has spoken many times of how rude all of us boys were. About how, even on day one of rehearsals, he overheard Dominic on the phone to a friend, talking loudly enough that Alan would hear every word: ‘Oh, I’m doing a play by some bloke called Alan. Not Ayckbourn, the other one.’ Alan said he found it refreshing and liked that we were making him one of the gang. And he totally was.
For all his accolades and awards, the most important thing I can say about Alan is that he still lives in the world he cares and writes about. He has seen and done it all, and yet he couldn’t be more approachable and encouraging to others. There is no establishing status, no enjoyment at the fact you might feel slightly uncomfortable in his presence. He, like so many of his brilliantly written words, reaches out to you and makes you feel at home. As far as he’s concerned, whether you’re an actor or the security man on the stage door, you are valid and will have something to say, or something worth listening to. I asked him once why he had never accepted a knighthood or something similar, and his answer wasn’t anything to do with a statement about the monarchy or a deeply held political view. He simply said that as a writer he felt he should still be a person in the world that normal people live in. Believe me, I could fill chapter after chapter of stories and conversations we had with Alan – fascinating anecdotes about Peter Cook, or the time when Morrissey called by his house. They are his stories, though, and not mine to tell here. But, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I sneaked in just this one. (OK, bear with me on this as some of it happens a few years away from the rehearsal rooms of The History Boys.)