Although Tony had hired Brian for The Long and the Short and the Tall, it was actually the next production, Twelfth Night, that he had really wanted him for. Brian was already an incredible actor, even then. He was five years older than me, had had his place at the Birmingham School of Drama paid for by the local council and had been working successfully as a full-time actor for a few years. In fact, he had worked with Tony at the Playhouse two years before, while I was still at drama school, in a Beckett production. Bernard Hepton was director of productions and, coincidentally, Jon Pertwee told me that Hepton was the best actor he’d ever seen on stage. However it was Brian who had caught our director’s eye. He was only in his early twenties but already he had that ability to play any age. In the ‘Scottish Play’ at Watford he once doubled as Seaward, the young lad, and the 70-year-old porter at the gate. With versatility like that Tony thought he would be the perfect Malvolio, traditionally an older man’s role.
More importantly for me, I was given a part as well. Me! Walking out onto the Liverpool Playhouse stage with Brian, Lynda Marchal, Warren Clarke and the rest. Marjorie Yates was playing Viola, Lynda was Olivia and I played her maid – I’m not even sure there’s normally a part for a maid, I think it’s usually a male attendant, but Tony wanted to give me a chance. Such a thoughtful man and he directed it so intelligently. It’s the only production I’ve ever known where the scene taunting Malvolio doesn’t have the actors bobbing up and down behind a hedge as usual. Instead they were part of the audience so everyone could see what was going on. You connected; you could see everything. I think Dickie Marks, the set designer, had to take a lot of the credit for that.
Despite my years with Shelagh Elliott-Clarke, and even appearing on television and in a film, nothing prepared me for the opening of Twelfth Night. Once again Mum and Dad were in the audience and I know they were proud as punch. I didn’t have many lines but even so, they went clean out of my head the second the curtain was up and I could see from the side the packed auditorium, with its deep stalls, circle and upper tier. It was a familiar view but usually I stayed at my post, watching everything from the ASM’s desk. Tonight, though, I would be stepping out there.
It was all over in a blur, of course, word perfect in the end, and soon enough we were celebrating at one of the nearby pubs that used to stay open and cook for us. I couldn’t have been happier.
Brian was just as fabulous as Tony had hoped, but he was a monster to share a stage with. I had to come on and say something to Olivia, while Malvolio was in the room. It was only our second performance and just as I entered the stage I heard him say, under his breath, ‘Here she comes, Sarah Heartburn.’
It was so naughty!
He would do things like that to me all the time. Every night it was something else, just to see if I would start giggling. So, what did he say when I told him to stop?
‘It’s for your own good – you should learn some control!’
There was another classic Brian moment a few months later which still makes me laugh – just as it did at the time, even though I got into a lot of trouble. I was playing a dead body in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, which isn’t a great part – in fact it’s a pretty dull play – but it meant I could still do the book as well. That would have been fine except Scase, the bugger, decided he wanted to have the curtain up so the audience could see the murder scene when they took their seats. That’s all very well, but it knocked half an hour off my meal every night because I had to eat, then tear around getting everything set on the stage, get dressed in the dead nurse’s outfit and lie on the stage behind the sofa. Horrible! Just lying there, stock-still, with my legs sticking out from behind this sofa for half an hour, listening to the audience oohing and aahing about what was about to happen when all I could think about was, ‘Have I set this? Have I set that? Is the clock in the right place? Did I put the lamp out properly?’ Pure torture.
The only plus side was I was carted off soon after the show started. But who was playing the doctor? Brian. He gets bored during good plays, so he was going crazy in this one. Every night he’d vary his lines a little bit, or do something a tad different to keep it fresh for everyone. We’d been doing it two weeks, just one week to go, and he came on as usual to take my pulse.
Now, the line he was meant to say, was ‘Respiration – nil.’
But this night, he added quietly, ‘Aston Villa – 2.’
I could have killed him! Everyone could see this corpse twitching with laughter and they had no idea why.
* * *
Once I’d had a taste of performing, of course, I just wanted more. The problem was, I was so useful to Jenny that she was loath to release me for bigger parts.
‘No one does the book as well as you,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t do it without you.’
The only way I would ever get out of it, I realised, was if I started making mistakes. But sorely tempted though I was, I could never have jeopardised the production.
Not intentionally, anyway.
But unintentionally, a few nights later, I achieved the same result. I had all my notes – mostly memorised – and all the bells and buzzers at my fingertips: cue for lights, cue for curtain, red for standby, green for go … Over the other side of the stage Fred was on the curtain waiting for my cue. I pressed the red light for standby, as usual, and then a few minutes later, when everyone was in place, hit green. Up went the curtain and on with the show.
Now, Fred was a man of fixed habits and, like me, he was pretty bored of the show by then. So after the interval he would raise the curtain then disappear to the pub for an hour or so until he was needed to bring it down again. This night would have been exactly the same except while I watched the crew set up during the break for the second act, I found myself wondering, What would happen if the curtain went up now?
Well, we soon found out. We needed about a minute to clear the props people off the stage so I hit the ‘standby’ button. Or so I thought.
Over in Fred’s area a green light – for go – started flashing so he did what he always did: pulled the curtain up, then vanished out the back door. We were such a tight, slick outfit by then that Fred didn’t even look at the stage – he just trusted me to tell him what to do. So he didn’t witness the surprised looks on the audience’s faces when they saw half a dozen men and women, including a furious-looking Sally, still shifting furniture around, completely caught out by the premature curtain-up.
Panicking, I started hitting the ‘curtain down’ light but Fred had already cleared off to the pub.
Oh Christ, I thought, what now?
Then I heard frantic footsteps under the stage and sighed with relief as Chris Bullock appeared by the curtain ropes, swinging on them with all his might. Sally came storming over and let me have both barrels. A minute later a panting Chris appeared in the doorway.
Here we go, I thought. Get your coat, Sladen.
But Chris just shook his head, smiled and said, ‘Who is my favourite ASM?’
Accidents happen, he knew that. Funnily enough, I got out of doing the book a lot more after that, though.
* * *
The very last play we did at the Playhouse, in April 1966, was Mirandolina. Tony was the raconteur, the front man in it, with David Scase directing. Brian and I played the two little lovers, Berto and Brigida. It was a big moment for me, and I’ve still got a splendid picture of us kissing.
With the Playhouse due to close for refurbishment, Tony asked some of us if we’d like to take some plays under him to St Helens’ Theatre Royal. There was Brian, Jimmy Hazeldine (who later starred in The Omega Factor and London’s Burning), me, Geoff Brightman, and a few others. We would all meet up in the car and go to St Helens, do the play, then travel back along the motorway at night. It was all a bit gruelling but we must have done about four or five plays. My performance in one of them, Pajama Tops, drew kind words from the local paper, which pleased Mum no end. There can’t have been many neighbours who didn’t have
‘the amorous maid, splendidly portrayed by Elisabeth Sladen’ quoted at them when they visited.
At the time I was still living with my parents, so most of my wages were spent on clothes and treats. I don’t think it occurred to me to save anything. Brian was in digs with Mrs Burns in Faulkner Street – she was the theatrical landlady who everyone used. Every time I popped in, I would see Lynn Redgrave and people like that. Warren Clarke stayed there as well, I think. It really was the place to go.
There was only so much of this commuting I could take, so when the opportunity to do a summer season in Lytham St Annes came along, I grabbed it. Duncan Weldon, who had been Kossoff’s manager, was starting a rep company in St Annes and there was a space for me – as an actress! Not an ASM, or a dogsbody. There’d be no shifting costumes or making tea. I was so happy I didn’t even care that it was going to be the workload from hell.
Liverpool had been three-weekly cycles – that is, we had a new play every three weeks. But St Annes was weekly. Weekly! God, it was hard. Trying to juggle the show you’re doing with the one you’re rehearsing at the same time every seven days was a nightmare. Somehow we got through it and every night I would go skipping home to see if I had a letter waiting from Brian. He was working at the Malvern Festival and we wrote to each other every day. Occasionally, on a Sunday when there were no shows, we’d bomb down to visit each other.
Looking back, going to St Annes was the moment I left home. It didn’t feel like it, though. There were no big goodbyes, no sense that I was growing up. There was no plan, no great target that I had to achieve by a certain age. I was just following the next job. That’s what actors do, isn’t it?
I shared lodgings with Sheila Irwin, who had been in the year above at Miss Clarke’s, so it was nice to see her. Our ASM came from Liverpool as well, so it was happy families for a while, especially when my mother came up for a few days after she’d been ill.
I learned an awful lot. The stage was so thin, like a piece of Sellotape. You had to move along sideways; there was no depth to it at all. That took a bit of thinking about. I also discovered some plays didn’t give their characters much to do. The more experienced actors seemed to deal with this by grabbing a prop. So whenever I didn’t know what to do with my part, I’d find a banana and stand there playing with that for a while. Probably a bit phallic, thinking about it, but it’s an extremely effective tool when you’re bored on stage – and you can always eat it. I used the same trick in Doctor Who as well. In fact, they used the same theatre for Who, which was odd.
Two different plays a fortnight was a treadmill, but the end was in sight. When Duncan said to me one day, ‘Lis, how would you like the lead in the last play of the season?’, I was so happy I didn’t wonder what the catch was. Because with Duncan, there’s always a catch …
I soon found out.
Mary Mary wasn’t a weekly – it had a four-day turnaround. Four days! And it was a two-hander, which meant that I would have half of all the lines and the stage time.
My co-star, Paul Webster, who went on to work with the RSC and with whom I still keep in touch today, was a lot of fun but the play was impossible. I remember walking on stage for the third and final act, putting my key in the door, opening it to come on stage, and thinking, I don’t know a damn word. By then it was too late – I was in front of the audience. Paul was the perfect pro, however. He carried me until the curtain, working with the odd crumb I could recall.
Your memory goes when you’re tired, but that wasn’t the only problem. I was so hungry as well. It wasn’t until I moved to Lytham St Annes and had to pay for my own lodgings that I realised how hard it is to get by on theatrical wages – by then up to about eight pounds a week. I couldn’t afford much food and the weight fell off me. When you’re busy you don’t always notice your tummy rumbling and there are only so many bananas you can weave into a show. Afterwards I’d stagger home, famished, to empty cupboards.
Shelagh Elliott-Clarke’s had taught me so much about acting but they hadn’t prepared me for the truth – that you don’t earn enough to have three meals a day, even when you’re the lead.
It will be all right when I finish here and I’m with Brian, I thought.
How wrong could I be?
* * *
Brian and I have never been ones for planning – I don’t think you can be when you’re an actor. We sort of go with the flow and see what happens. So when he finished at Malvern, with no other options, he took a room in our friend Terry Lodge’s house in Clapham, south London. (Terry, like Brian, was another actor from the Midlands.) A few weeks later, I joined him. It was just like when I’d left home – no fuss, no big romantic gestures, just Brian and me living together as a couple for the first time.
The room was big, but bare, and there was no running water in the house. If you needed the loo or a wash, the tap and toilet were outside. But it was cheap – and cheap was what we needed. With neither of us working, just getting by was hard. I lost even more weight because I used to skip meals so Brian could grab something, not that he ever knew. I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t fancy this roll – you have it.’
Looking back, you wonder why neither of us got a proper job – although I don’t know what on earth we’d have been qualified for. But just when I thought we’d made a mistake moving to London, our fairy godmother, Tony Colegate, stepped in. He’d been appointed director at the Manchester Library Theatre and wanted Brian to go up and join the company. At the same time Jenny Smith, our stage manager at Liverpool, offered me an ASM job in Farnham. I didn’t think twice even though I might not get on stage. It was the opposite end of the country to Brian but it was work. That’s all I thought about, that’s all that mattered.
And at least I’d be able to eat.
I wasn’t at Farnham long before Tony called again, this time inviting me up to join them in Manchester. I wasn’t fooled – he mainly wanted me to be his ASM.
‘But there’ll be parts as well, I promise.’
He didn’t have to ask twice. The chance of being back in the Northwest with Brian was irresistible, even if I was back on the book again.
The first play at Manchester was a panto, The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew, in December 1966. Brian had one of the leads, Obadiah Bobblenob, Terry Lodge, our landlord, was the storyteller and I was listed as one of the ‘Poor and Needy’. I had to go on stage in rags, a hood over my head, and pretend to tie something. It was a funny little piece.
I remember David Jackson coming down one day to talk about doing Antony and Cleopatra. David had been at Liverpool with Brian. He was a big, big bloke and obviously very heavy. I was talking about him afterwards with Linda Polan and she said, ‘Oh, I knew Jacks when he fell through his first flat.’ (Linda later appeared with me in K-9 and Company and a couple of other things. It’s funny how these things go round.)
I remember I was in my peasant’s outfit when Jackson wandered by with Tony. He took one look at me and said, ‘They don’t pay the staff very much these days, do they?’
Actually Brian and I were both on the Library’s top pay of eighteen pounds a week, which for doing what we loved was a fortune. After the horrors of St Annes I even managed to save about ten pounds a week. Working such long hours, all day long and into the night, didn’t leave much time to spend anything anyway. If it hadn’t been for a couple of places that stayed open for us I would have saved every penny. My favourite, Tommy Duck’s on Barbirolli Square, used to wait until the actors had arrived after eleven then lock us in. It felt so naughty and, I admit, it was a nice boost for the ego that they went to such trouble for us. But then trouble wasn’t exactly a stranger to Duck’s. The owner, Tommy Duckworth, was an ex-wrestler, I think. If only half the rumours about him were true then he was quite a handful, but he bent over backwards for us and was a real character. You just had to look at the ceiling with its ladies’ knickers pinned to it to realise that.
George Best had his club at the same time, so we went there as well.
Another big play for me was The Promise. It was a gloomy affair, set during the German occupation of Russia in 1942. I played Lika and Brian and Paul Webster were Marat and Leonodik. Our characters were just trying to survive – my raggedy trousers were held up by a tie, not a belt; it was that sort of look. So when they find a can of food, of course, they fall upon it.
It was Brian’s job to open this thing – it was Fray Bentos corned beef – and then mash it up for us to share. One night his hand slipped and raked against the tin’s sharp edge. It was as if he’d cut his jugular. Blood just spurted out – all down his arm and over the corned beef. I thought, He’ll have to go off to get that looked at, but he didn’t flinch. He looked at the tin, then at me and said, ‘Well, it’s only me.’
Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography Page 5