by Rob Brydon
Born to Jump.
My more tempestuous relationship with acne was also in its first flush; just a few perfectly anticipated and acceptable teenage spots at first, then a slow and gradual remapping of my face until it could be said that the condition had moved in and declared squatter’s rights. The problem with acne is that friends and family, keen not to upset the sufferer, will often declare that ‘it’s not that bad, really’ when in fact it’s appalling.
It was some years before I finally went to see a dermatologist, who reacted with horror and informed me that my face was home to chronic acne. He put me on a heavy course of vitamin A, which dried out my skin and more or less put an end to the condition, although by now much of the damage had been done and the scars that I still bear today were well and truly in place. Hurrah!
As well as the acting that I was doing in rehearsals for the annual show, I was made aware of the National Youth Theatre of Wales and their month-long course in the summer, which culminated in a series of performances at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre. Some of my fellow cast members had been on the course in previous years and spoke of it in glowing terms. There were a limited number of places available, and students would have to audition and prove themselves worthy of inclusion. So it was that a few of us hopefuls were driven up to a school in Pontypridd on a wet spring day in 1982 and sat nervously in a corridor waiting to go into the room set aside for auditions. Applicants had to perform two pieces of text: a passage from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and, if memory serves me well, a bit of Archie Rice from The Entertainer. The third piece could be anything at all and I had chosen, rather than a piece from a play, to perform a poem. It came from Twelve Modern Anglo-Welsh Poets, an anthology belonging to my mother. The poem was ‘For Instance’ by R. S. Thomas, a particularly bleak and uncompromising poet, best known perhaps for his ‘Welsh Landscape’ in which he describes my perfectly innocent, minding-their-own-business fellow countrymen as:
… an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.
‘For Instance’ is a lament from a man who has been left a widower. I pulled a few plastic chairs into a row and lay across them as though I was lying on a bed. Then, staring up at the ceiling, my sixteen-year-old self began:
She gave me good food;
I accepted;
Sewed my clothes, buttons;
I was smart.
She warmed my bed;
Out of it my son stepped.
She was adjudged
Beautiful. I had grown
Used to it. She is dead
Now. Is it true
I loved her? That is how
I saw things. But not she.
I think I might have managed to force out a tear on the last line. It was all a bit heavy for a young teenager; with hindsight, perhaps a little prophetic of Marion and Geoff, the series of monologues I would go on to find success with many years later (a connection I make only now). As is always the case with auditions, the poor actor leaves the ordeal none the wiser and then tries to forget about it. But I didn’t forget about it; I thought of little else until a few weeks later I discovered, much to my delight, that I had been accepted.
And so, that August on a warm summer’s day, Mum and Dad drove me up to Cardiff and dropped me and a select collection of my belongings off at Senghennydd House, a student hall of residence, just on the edge of the city centre and down the road from the Sherman Theatre. This whole experience was a dress rehearsal for heading off to college, four weeks spent away from home, fending for yourself and meeting new people. There was a lively mix of young personalities and types, all jostling and bumping along, trying to find their place and standing within the larger group. The only thing that linked us was a love of theatre, of acting, of performance – and the fact that, within our respective schools, we were the ones who were good at drama, the standouts, the little stars.
Darkness on the Edge of Duvet.
Here it was different; our position at the top of the league table was no longer assured. It soon became obvious to me that I was slipping down towards the relegation zone and had no need to worry myself with the responsibility of anything approaching a lead role. There were older actors there who seemed light years ahead of me in terms of confidence and accomplishment and, perhaps more notably, worldliness. They possessed a swagger which suggested that they had been around a few more blocks than I had, and might even have lingered a while on the corner of some of them.
On the first day of the course we all sat in the front few rows of the auditorium at the Sherman Theatre, knowing that in a few weeks we would be up on the stage playing to a full house. The Sherman was a modern theatre, built in the seventies, and a world apart from the pre-war design of the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl, where we put on our yearly musical. As I sat mulling over this step up into the big time, all the students were asked to take to the stage, one at a time, and sing a song for the rest of the group. I recall Patrick Brennan, a veteran it seemed of the NYTW, ambling forward confidently to the stage and beginning a relaxed, I’m-in-my-natural-environment rendition of Fats Waller’s ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, all twinkly-eyed charm. Fats Waller? Why wasn’t he doing a pop song of the day? He must be quite sophisticated. He appeared to be decades older than me; he even had a beard. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that The South Bank Show was planning a retrospective of his life and work. Song complete, he sauntered back to his seat to general applause and awe.
When my turn came, I chose to stand in front of my recently appointed peers and sing Michael Jackson’s moving ballad ‘The Lady in My Life’ from his album Thriller. What a sensitive soul I must have seemed. And probably was.
A friend had a camera. I had delusions of James Dean.
So many of them seemed older and smarter than me, and none more so than the mighty Peter Wingfield. Peter went on to become well known for his many roles, including the Highlander television series in America. I met him in between being crowned Welsh National Trampoline Champion and going on to study medicine at Oxford (him, not me); you could say he was a high achiever. His popularity and ease with girls was matched by his spectacular – and I use that word advisedly – ability to put his athletic gifts to everyday use. There was a tall black metal gate that led from the halls of residence out onto Salisbury Road; it must have been over six feet high. Peter would sprint up and vault over this obstacle in effortlessly superhuman fashion, during which feat he would reach a midpoint that would find him upside down, perfectly straight, with his hands gripping the top of the gate and his feet pointing skywards. He would then spring off and sail through the air to the ground, where he would land like Superman, checking the surroundings for wrongdoers.
I would watch, wide-eyed in admiration at this and other stunts, such as the time he suggested some of us visit Cardiff’s now vanished Empire Pool with its Olympic-height diving boards. A few of us ordinary boys splashed around and maybe jumped feet first off the lowest board, desperately trying not to belly flop and do ourselves an injury. In the midst of our adolescent malarkey one of the group pointed to the sky, ‘Look!’ We craned our necks upward whilst treading water. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Peter. He’s leaping off the highest board, spinning, twisting and turning as he plummets downwards and makes a perfect entry into the pool. My hero. I would look at someone like Peter and his levels of skill, which can only have come about through hours and hours of practice, and it would be hard not to wonder: What have I been doing with my time?
Athletics were not the only arena in which Peter excelled. He had the room next to mine at Senghennydd House and my nights were greatly enlivened by the sound of his many and varied conquests as noises seeped through the thin wall that divided our cell-like rooms. I would lie in my bed with my Sony Walkman on, probably listening to Bruce or, if I was feeling adventurous, Hall and Oates, perhaps even Dire Straits, and then slide off my headphones, enjoy a minute or so of the W
elsh Warren Beatty next door, before returning to my more innocent pursuits.
As well as befriending the superhuman Peter, I also found boys closer in experience and outlook to myself. Ian Hughes came from Merthyr Tydfil, the once great industrial town in the Rhondda Valley, and had brought his guitar with him. We spent hours singing Paul Simon and Springsteen songs together in his room. Ian would thrash wildly at his guitar and belt out early Chris de Burgh tunes; his virtuosity with his instrument again caused me to wonder what I’d been doing all these years. He went on to great success in the theatre, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and playing the Fool to Robert Stephens’s King Lear.
The great friendship formed at the National Youth Theatre of Wales that still remains intact was with Steve Roberts, now known as Steve Speirs. Steve also came from Merthyr and though we had never met prior to this course, I’d already heard his name spoken of in hushed tones. He was a legendary figure at my school for his many exploits, witnessed by boys who had met him on previous drama courses and who had come back to regale me with their hard-to-believe tales.
Steve Speirs, at the National Youth Theatre of Wales, aka the evil dermatologist.
Darren Gadd, Nathan to my Sky in Guys and Dolls, was himself no slouch when it came to benign antisocial behaviour; witness his setting off the fire hose one lunchtime in the youth wing, resulting in an impressive archipelago of puddles as far as the eye could see. The deputy head, when confronted with the small-scale flood for himself, remarked, ‘Right! Who has been spitting?’
Darren felt Steve was a man to admire and was sure we’d get on, as indeed we did. He was big, six foot one, prematurely balding (although he would now protest it was a receding hairline), a little overweight and very, very funny. Steve could find humour in anything; he had a deadpan, Tommy Cooper quality that made just looking at him funny. Unfortunately, all jokes require a victim and I unwittingly became the victim of one of Steve’s after moaning about my poor skin and bad acne which, it has to be said, was continuing its advance on my face with a determination that should have won it a Queen’s Award for Industry. Steve listened sympathetically to my woes before kindly sharing with me the secret of a special ‘Valleys’ cure that was guaranteed to work and leave me with a clear complexion. It involved sugar and water, as simple as that. It sounded like it made sense. No one spoke of ‘organic’ anything in those days – although, if they had, this scam would surely have qualified. It involved mixing some sugar with some warm water and then rubbing it, with some gusto, all over the affected areas of the face.
The morning after Steve had been compassionate enough to enlighten me, I made my way into the communal washroom and checked that the coast was clear before beginning the treatment as prescribed by Dr Roberts. It hurt. It stung. That probably means it’s doing me good, I thought, as I persevered with what was surely an early form of the now popular ‘self-harming’. After I felt I’d given my cheeks a thorough going-over, I patted them dry and made my way off to rehearsals. My ravaged, bloodied face and I arrived to howls of laughter from Steve and enquiries from everyone else as to whether I’d got the details of the other driver.
I swore revenge. I’m still swearing.
The whole course was geared towards the final few days of public performance. Each actor would appear in two plays, one on the main stage and one in the smaller studio space. The first year we did Under Milk Wood and a new play about its author, Dylan Thomas, This Side of the Truth, the title being borrowed from one of his poems. I can’t remember what I played in Under Milk Wood; it certainly wasn’t a big part or, as I think I’ve proved quite unequivocally, especially memorable. Perhaps I was one of the drowned sailors that haunt the dreams of Captain Cat. It’s just come to me, I was Nogood Boyo – not many lines and, in my portrayal of him, entirely innocent and naive with regards to what he was doing that was no good.
The play was directed by Hugh Thomas, an actor/director known to us primarily for his recent appearance in Not the Nine O’Clock News in which he played a mad politician in a Question Time sketch, memorably shouting ‘We’re all going to die!’ The fact that Hugh had worked on such a zeitgeist show added hugely to his kudos, yet his popularity had a downside with his frequent departures from rehearsals, as he once again dashed off to the stage door to take a phone call from his agent.
The other play was what would now be termed a ‘biopic’. I brought a smattering of infinitesimal roles vividly to life, although I faltered at what I now recognize was my first stunt. While some action was going on downstage, I stood upstage dressed in a nightgown and holding a lit candle. At a given moment in the proceedings I had to snuff out the flame with my thumb and forefinger, very dramatic. As a child I had an acute aversion to flames, matches, candles and to fire in general. This tiny bit of stage business used to cause me heaps of anxiety as I stood there doing bugger all at the back of the stage while the other actors got to emote their hearts out, considerably closer to the audience. Any member of that audience not transfixed by the principal players may have felt their gaze wander to the little chap at the back with the candle. Goodness me, I think his hand is trembling. Must be cold in his nightgown. The play had a song, written for the occasion by Dorian Thomas, which we all sang in harmony. I think it was called ‘I Remember Dylan’. It has since become the soundtrack to which many of these happy memories are set.
I remember him, I knew him well.
Met him once, he was drunk, yes
He was a boor. He was a gentleman,
He was just a child, yes
I remember him, I knew him well.
Doesn’t anyone else remember Dylan?
Dylan,
I remember Dylan.
Singing was part of the course and we would attempt it every morning with the singing coach, David Blackwell. This would take place on the main stage, which at that time appeared to me to be a vast open space, larger than any stage I’d known. I’ve since gone on to play on stages that are huge by comparison, and now look on the Sherman as a little friendly space, perfect for trying stuff out on. It’s like Bruce Springsteen says in his song ‘Straight Time’:
… you get used to anything,
Sooner or later it just becomes your life.
Any performer or artist who experiences any kind of significant success also experiences major changes to their life, if only in the size of venue in which they perform. After a while, the shock and wonder at the bigger spaces subsides and you just get on with it. Sometimes it’s good to stop and look back down the road you’ve just trundled along; it can surprise you. David would tell us to imagine the sound of our voices coming over our heads like a hood: ‘Pull the hood over your head!’ I think he subscribed to the idea of singing slightly above the note, a good discipline for someone like me who still has a tendency to sing flat. I’m not saying I do that too often – at least, I hope not – but given the choice between flat and sharp I’ll tend to take the flat option.
Before or after the singing session we’d have a period of movement/dance under the instruction of a very lithe Scot called Ian Stuart Ferguson. He would slink around the stage to the sound of George Benson’s version of ‘On Broadway’ and we would do our warm-up. It was good; for a brief moment it was as though we were part of A Chorus Line.
I almost felt like a dancer. For that feat alone he deserves a medal.
With the course taking place in August, the evenings were warm and long and would often be spent outdoors on the grass in front of the halls of residence. Guitars were played, someone plucking the introduction to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits. Food was eaten, drink was drunk, and above us in the night sky Peter Wingfield would soar past, cape flapping in the breeze, en route to Planet Sex. Not really. Although the reality isn’t far off. He would sit on the ledge of his third-floor window, legs dangling over the edge while playing the flute, before enticing a girl back to his room and encouraging her to attempt something similar.
Sylvester Springsteen.
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br /> Steve and I would often walk into the town centre and visit one of the cinemas on Queen Street – the ABC or the Odeon. The two of us went one night to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and both cried when Spock ‘died’. Another time a small group of us went to see Rocky III and I was delighted when one of the girls said she felt I looked a little like Sylvester Stallone (very much my hero at the time).
I think the perceptive girl in question was called Sarah, and I remember having quite a crush on her. In accordance with my crushes at school, this involved me getting on very well with her, teasing her a little, making her laugh and then waiting. And waiting. And waiting while another boy, slightly older and in this instance called Phil, stepped in and claimed the prize with his barbaric, Neanderthal directness. It was the sort of situation where I thought I was making progress, Phil merely popping up occasionally in my peripheral vision, until suddenly it dawned on me: Damn, he’s with her, and it looks like he’s been there for some time.