Small Man in a Book

by Rob Brydon

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Yes!’

  Emboldened by Harold Pinter agreeing with me in the Ivy, I went further. ‘Harold,’ I said, ‘I’m glad to have met you. In 1984 I auditioned for RADA with a piece from The Homecoming. I didn’t get in …’

  He waited.

  I debated whether to carry on along my intended path – I could, after all, fall flat on my face. Then I remembered something Anthony Hopkins had once said when interviewed by the remarkable James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio. He had been asked if he had any advice for young actors, and replied that all actors should leap into the abyss and trust their talent. I decided to chance it.

  I continued, ‘I can’t help thinking that if you’d tried a little bit harder with the writing, things might have been different.’

  Silence.

  He looked at me quizzically and an eternity passed as a chill wind blew through the Ivy.

  Then he laughed, long and hard. Without pausing.

  I breathed out.

  So, as I was saying to Harold Pinter at the Ivy, I failed to get into RADA. I had found the whole experience of auditioning there to be pretty intimidating; it was as if I knew in my heart that I wasn’t good enough, or what they were looking for. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready. I like to think that if I auditioned now I’d get in. But then – no chance. The whole place spooked me; the other kids who were there to audition on the same day all seemed so much older than me, so much more mature. They all seemed to be wearing long flowing coats and had wild Byronic hair, which danced on their heads like a shampoo commercial as they strolled confidently along the corridor outside the audition room, text in hand.

  These auditions at the London drama schools were hugely significant staging posts in my life and yet I only have the vaguest of memories of the actual RADA audition itself, a hazy image of a panel of judges united in their cosmopolitan disappointment at what had just been presented to them in such a provincial manner. I slunk away from the imposing building on Gower Street and walked, defeated, along the London roads, sure that I wouldn’t need to be looking for digs in the capital any time soon.

  The audition for Central was a similar experience, and the whole business of coming to London in the hope that the schools would recognize they had the next Richard Burton on their doorstep was destined to be a failure. With hindsight, I was never going to be accepted at either of these prestigious establishments; on the wall at RADA is a beautiful wooden board listing the school’s medal winners through the years, including Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Albert Finney, John Hurt. These are serious actors, and the would-be students waiting in the corridor with me seemed serious also; they looked to me as if they were concerned with acting as an art form that could explore the human condition. I wasn’t.

  I was always looking for the laugh; there was no place in my mind for subtext or layers, beyond classic misdirection in the setting up of a joke. It amuses me, on reflection, to think that when I finally did break through with Marion and Geoff and Human Remains, I was very much involved with examining the human condition. That’s really what the shows were all about.

  I travelled up to London twice for the separate auditions, and the intervening years have meant that I can’t really differentiate between the two trips much beyond a hazy memory of an abundance of glass at Central. But I do know that my chosen treats while up in London were hardly those of the serious drama student.

  For one of the stays I went to see Run for Your Wife, the Ray Cooney farce, in its original West End production. I had a last-minute seat in the Gods and laughed till I cried at James Bolam dashing between his two wives. On the other visit I went and watched Live from Her Majesty’s, the ITV variety show hosted by Jimmy Tarbuck. If I had been there a week later, I would have witnessed the death of Tommy Cooper. I’m glad I wasn’t. Run for Your Wife was excellent, the timing of the ensemble cast was perfect (as it has to be, for a farce to work).

  I saw the play again a few years later when a new cast toured and visited the Grand Theatre in Swansea. This time the lead role was taken by the mighty Les Dawson, and as a result the play became The Les Dawson Show. He would break off in the middle of a scene and cross the stage like a gorilla, pretending to pick fleas from the hair of his fellow actors. Now and then he’d make eye contact with audience members and raise his eyebrows suggestively, causing not just the audience but also the cast to burst out laughing. It was still funny, just a different kind of funny.

  One of the auditions, I forget which, took place at ten o’clock in the morning, meaning that I would have to stay in London the night before if I was to get there in time. Money was tight and so finding accommodation was something of an issue. Luckily Dad was in London that week on a course, staying at a hotel next to Heathrow airport, and he came up with the idea that I could stay with him, at the company’s expense. Knowing that he finished each day at around four thirty, we decided that we would meet at Heathrow, more specifically at the terminal, where Dad would pick me up in his car and we would go on to the hotel. I think the last time Dad had been to Heathrow there had only been one terminal; I’d never been to Heathrow before (all my flights up to that point had been from Cardiff/Wales Airport or, as it was known at the time, Rhoose Airport). While never enjoying the reputation of a Charles de Gaulle or JFK, Rhoose Airport was nonetheless a glamorous location for South Walians in the 1970s. I even had a birthday party there.

  Given my limited airport experience, I was shocked on arriving at Heathrow to find that a) there was more than one terminal and b) no one had baked me a cake. By a stroke of luck which, had it been featured in a film would have preceded me being accepted by the London drama school, Dad just happened to drive by as I was wandering lost outside one of the four terminals. I hopped in the car and we headed off to the hotel together.

  As I say, in a film I’d have stormed the audition the next day.

  In life I didn’t.

  In the spring of 1984 the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama represented the last of my attempts to win a place at drama school. It appeared a far less intimidating building at which to audition than its London counterparts, and on the day of the audition itself displayed a welcome lack of long-haired and long-coated applicants strolling through the corridors, text in hand. It felt cosy and attainable, helped I dare say by the wonderful times I had spent just up the road with the National Youth Theatre of Wales. Whereas the audition panels of the London schools had seemed to view me with a mixture of no curiosity whatsoever and a soupçon of sympathy, I got the impression that the Cardiff panel felt they were looking at someone who might have a talent. I instantly worried that it might be a Welsh thing, that people would only ‘get’ me in Wales, where so far I’d been met with almost universal praise and encouragement. Maybe the Severn Bridge was made of kryptonite and, once across it, I was no more than a bumbling if well-meaning Clark Kent.

  The audition pieces were the same as for RADA and Central, but this time when I sang the ‘My Little Girl’ section from Carousel’s ‘Soliloquy’ it elicited warm smiles and a collection of appreciative glances. Maybe it’s easier in the provinces. It’s been my experience while touring my live show around the UK that London crowds are often harder to please than their country cousins. Partly this can be put down to the capital’s culture seekers being spoilt for choice. London has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to options for an evening of theatre or comedy, and all stand-ups will surely recognize the almost palpable sense of gratitude that a more provincial audience can exude as they welcome their comedian of choice to the stage. London audiences also lack the sense of community so evident within the auditorium of King George’s Hall in Blackburn, or some such lovely old northern venue.

  When playing the West End for three weeks in 2009 I soon developed a technique of repeatedly referring to that night’s audience as ‘London’ in an effort to force them into a single identity as a recognizable group, rather than a large crowd made up of many individual, disparate au
diences. This was the complaint I’d hear from comedians who had become stuck on the Jongleurs comedy club circuit, that the crowd would be made up of many groups, often stag parties, hen nights or office dos. This is always harder for the comedian to control, as each group has its own dynamic, although it can be argued that it’s excellent training. (The ‘excellent training’ argument is only good, of course, if the Jongleurs experience is just a stage of your career and you move up to theatres filled with your own audience.)

  Discovering that I had been accepted at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama was a relief. I had no Plan B waiting in the wings and don’t know what I would have done if they’d said no; luckily, the problem never arose, and in the September of 1984 I set off for Cardiff and the beginning of a new chapter.

  It didn’t feel like a new chapter. Things never did in those days, although now, looking back, it’s almost impossible not to see one’s life in chapters – some more readable than others. To start with, given that Cardiff was not that far from Baglan, and because we hadn’t sorted out any accommodation, it was decided that I would commute to college each day until suitable digs had been found. I felt like a young Reggie Perrin: ‘Morning, Joan. Fifteen minutes late, escaped panther at Bridgend …’

  Digs were found sooner than expected. On the first evening, at a ‘getting to know you’ event at the college bar, I got to know a music student who told me there was a room going in a house he’d found in Roath, a mile and a half or so away from the college. I would imagine that the ‘getting to know you’ evening involved many of the young students getting to know each other in a far more interesting way than I got to know the accommodating music student. (Indeed, there were rumours during my time at the college of very exciting student-tutor shenanigans going on.) Needless to say, I never witnessed any – not even a sniff. I was too busy clutching my little piece of paper with the details of the house belonging to Mrs Williams, in Oakfield Street, Roath. I duly presented it to my parents and then sat back as they took over.

  The next evening, Mum and I drove to Cardiff and visited the very nice Mrs Williams. She and her husband lived with their daughter on the ground and first floor of a large Victorian terraced house. My new musical friend took a room on the first floor; the top floor had a small cold-water kitchen fit to burst with empty milk bottles that previous occupants had been too lazy to carry downstairs and, off a small landing, two bedrooms in the eaves, each with romantic, sloping ceilings. The room nearest the cold, tiny kitchen was taken by another musician, a composer with appalling personal hygiene yet an almost Olympic ability when it came to sexual encounters with fellow students. Many was the time I’d be woken in the middle of the night by the sound of his exertions, accompanied by the familiar smell of yet another curry wafting from his oversubscribed pleasure dome. For a rather naive chap from Baglan, who’d never had a girlfriend – or even properly kissed a girl, for that matter – it was a bit of an eye-opener.

  Looking back now, the room at the top, as indeed it was, lacked some of the creature comforts enjoyed by my fellow students in their set-ups. There was no central heating, just a small gas fire attached to the wall, so that during one particularly cold winter I would go to sleep each night wearing pyjamas, a tracksuit and socks. I would sleep until about five, when I would be woken by the cold. I would creak frostily out of the bed and walk the two paces to the fire, which I would light with a match before returning to the relative warmth of the duvet. By the time I woke properly at seven thirty the room had a semblance of heat and I would sit on the floor cross-legged in front of the fire, eating my breakfast of Ribena and two Tracker bars while watching early-morning television on the portable set.

  This hearty breakfast was in keeping with my general culinary outlook at the time, which might best be described as ‘limited’. My cooking, such as it was, consisted of emptying a tin of Goblin beefburgers into a large saucepan. Any potatoes would be tinned too. In many ways I was doing my bit to keep the British tinned-food industry in business; my meals soon assumed the appearance of an exhibit at a Second World War museum.

  The walls of the room were decorated with images of my heroes on pages ripped from magazines. Richard Burton as Hamlet in Gielgud’s New York production of 1964, taken from an original vintage copy of Life magazine. There were various shots of Elvis and Springsteen and a front-of-house poster for Al Pacino’s Broadway production of Mamet’s American Buffalo, performed in London the year before I came to college and the subject of much inner debate on my part. Shall I go? Can I afford it? How will I get there? I didn’t go. I wish I had. Towards the end of my time at college my room was graced by a huge, half-complete, billboard-size image of Bruce Springsteen torn from a wall near the National Theatre while on a college trip to London.

  The soon-to-be liberated poster.

  It was my first ever visit to the National. We’d gone to see The Duchess of Malfi, but on arriving at the South Bank I noticed that Anthony Hopkins was performing a matinee of David Hare and Howard Brenton’s play Pravda that afternoon, so I bought a standing ticket and saw that instead. It was, at that point in my young life, the finest piece of theatre I had ever seen. I can still remember the scene on the moor/heath as Hopkins circles Tim McInnerny like a shark. I remember thinking to myself, Good God, I haven’t taken my eyes off him since he came on the stage. It was a stupendously good performance.

  The Springsteen image, an advert for his latest single, ‘Cover Me’, was wrenched off the wall on the way back to the coach. As it came down it brought with it not just the previous four or five adverts that had been pasted underneath but also a small portion of wall, which lent the piece some weight (both literally and figuratively). I clutched it proudly all the way back to Cardiff on the coach, as though it was some kind of religious artefact, before hanging it proudly on the wall of my tiny room in Mrs Williams’s house. Here it served a dual purpose: on the one hand it announced my love of the Boss, and on the other it covered up a patch of damp.

  This would not be the only time that a college trip to London took a slight detour from the planned itinerary. It was the mid-eighties, the miners were striking, Margaret Thatcher was threatening to impose tuition fees and many of my fellow students were actively political, joining picket lines and holding meetings. I’m a little shamefaced to say that all this passed me by. In my state of naive ignorance – or was it indifference? – I learned that there was a trip planned to London, where we students would join forces with others from around the country and march en masse to the seat of power in Downing Street and, in so doing, effect some change. I signed up for the outing, happy to play my part in this positive action.

  It was unprecedented and quite out of character. I’d like to tell you I was undergoing a political awakening, but the reality is I was probably thinking of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, whipping the crowd outside the besieged bank into a frenzy with his cries of, ‘Attica! Attica!’ At this stage I still had enough hair which, at a distance (some considerable distance) and with a good following wind, to my mind you could confuse me for a young Al.

  On the allotted day we all climbed on to the coach and wove our way out of Cardiff towards the M4 and our chance to be heard. While on the coach somewhere between the service stations of Leigh Delamere and Membury, I glanced at a copy of the Guardian, brought along by one of my edgier friends, no doubt to get the latest on the planned march. As was my wont when faced with a broadsheet newspaper, I went straight for the culture section and the theatre listings, curious to see what was on in the West End. My eyes settled on the National Theatre’s offerings, always more interesting than its commercial rivals’, if only by virtue of its three separate performance spaces. The first, the Olivier, was obviously named in honour of the great actor that I knew from Marathon Man and The South Bank Show. Then there were two other mysteriously named venues: the Lyttelton and the Cottesloe. Were there actors named Lyttelton and Cottesloe? I’d certainly never heard of them. Why weren’t these thea
tres named after Gielgud, or Richardson? Or, better still, Burton?

  Scanning the current productions, I was delighted to see that Barry Humphries was giving a ‘platform’ that afternoon at two. I had no idea what a ‘platform’ was; surely it wasn’t simply a platform? Although, if it had in fact been no more than Barry Humphries standing on a platform, I would still have wanted to go. He was one of the comic delights of my childhood – Dame Edna and Sir Les Patterson first and foremost, but I was aware also of his slightly lesser-known creations Sandy Stone and Lance Boyle (although in blissful ignorance of the double meaning of the latter’s name).

  On stepping off the coach in London, I made straight for the National Theatre and bought myself a ticket for what I discovered would be Barry talking about Sir John Betjeman. Let’s say it was due to begin at two o’clock; by ten past the hour the stage was empty, save for a small table, a chaise longue and an oriental-type screen, the sort that saucy ladies disrobe behind, draping their silky undergarments over the top as they go. The audience began to get a little restless, when suddenly a doddery old figure shuffled on from the wings and took centre stage. The immediate reaction to his appearance was laughter, as we were sure that this was Barry Humphries in disguise. The laughter came to an abrupt halt once this old chap started to speak and it became apparent that it wasn’t Mr Humphries trying to pull the wool over our eyes, but simply someone connected to the organization of these events who had come out to brief the audience on future happenings. We squirmed in our seats in embarrassment, as he must surely have heard the laughter while crossing the stage. I felt more than a little guilty at the poor chap’s predicament.

  He pressed on, undeterred. He was not a natural performer, rather flat and dull in his delivery, and after a while began to stumble a little with his words. Finally, introducing Barry Humphries, he announced him as ‘Brian Humphrey’. It was then that the wool was pulled away from our eyes. The laughter began as this doddery old fellow stepped behind the screen and, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box as Superman, walked out the other side to reveal himself as Barry Humphries. How can I communicate to you just what a shock it was? He had taken us in completely. I was bowled over by his ability to come onto the stage and completely fool the audience, making us feel guilty for ever doubting him. He went on to give a marvellously entertaining talk on Betjeman, telling us how the poet had been an influence on his own writing and then performing a Sandy Stone monologue, involving the recital of a shopping list, by way of illustration.