by Alan Davies
I felt small and embarrassed. Still, I kept attending. I liked the politics there too. There was no shortage of sympathizers with the miners. Perhaps coincidentally, it was Stephen Daldry, artistic director at the Royal Court in the ’90s, who directed Billy Elliot, a film set against the backdrop of the miners’ strike.
I stopped going to those workshops when I went to university in Kent but I was never as enthused about the theatre there as I had been at the Royal Court, where there were many talented kids and good new plays.
What there was at university, though, was support for the miners. There were three pits in Kent and bucket collections daily on campus. If there were demos to attend there were always coaches organized. I was a bit disappointed in my fellow freshers, many of whom had just left school and seemed a bit over-excited at being in the bar legitimately. My time at Loughton had been a big leap from school and more of an undergraduate life in some respects. There always seemed to be someone vomiting in a stairwell during that first few weeks on campus.
The miners’ strike bedded in for the winter and became attritional. The Labour Party leadership and some at the TUC wanted Scargill to hold the ballot he was required to by law.
Only the Nottinghamshire miners were not on strike, and they had the option to go to court to ensure they had the right to a ballot of their own, should the result of a national ballot be to strike (Tony Benn points out in his Diaries 1980–1990 that they had previously done just that over an incentive scheme they wanted to adopt that the NUM had rejected under a Labour government). This made a ballot pointless in the NUM’s eyes.
The Yorkshire miners picketed Nottinghamshire heavily and a divide opened there between miners from the two areas.
Ultimately Nottinghamshire established their own Democratic Union of Mineworkers, with Conservative government encouragement, ironically.
Divisions widened for the duration of the strike: between miners in different areas, between miners and police in the same areas, between unions, between factions of the Labour Party, between family members inside and outside the dispute, and between the North and the South of England (with the exception of those pit areas in Kent). Margaret Thatcher had come to power promising harmony where there had been discord and had delivered the opposite. A more divisive leader it is hard to conceive of.
Scargill, too, polarized opinion, but what can never be doubted was his commitment to the members of his union, tens of thousands of whom lost their jobs.
It was my nineteenth birthday the day the strike ended. That they all went back to work brought no relief, only sadness. So much lasting damage had been done. The NUM’s struggle continued, as pits were closed year in year out, and every effort was made to bankrupt it. Scargill remained its leader for another fifteen years.
1985
Anton Chekhov
‘It is with perplexity that I look upon religious people among the intelligentsia’*
That quote from Anton Chekhov was on the front of my A4 pad at Loughton College. What is it with teenagers and slogans? I owned any amount of badges, posters and T-shirts that had phrases printed on them. They had to be funny or political – they were the general criteria – preferably both. If they couldn’t do both then I’d double up: ‘Together We Can Stop The Bomb’ on my back and The Blues Brothers on my front. I was a part-time activist and comedy VHS collector. Karl Marx beard with Groucho Marx moustache and eyebrows.
I found that Chekhov quote myself, though, and displayed it for all the world (or all my world ) to see. I was warmly satisfied when Allan Rowe, our film studies lecturer, leant over to inspect it and offered a wry grin. Look out world, I have views! Here is a thing I believe. Religious people are flawed intellectually.
I could not consider myself part of the intelligentsia, at a further education college in Essex, but wielding that quotation around the place betrayed a desire to be part of something resembling a clever club. It was a ‘think better of me’ plea, betraying self-doubt that people could think well of me, that I might be bright or humorous.
It was, at least, a great leap forward from scribbling on the buses but perhaps only in the sense that I was no longer writing on buses.
I now revered people who said things that I agreed with. I wanted to follow them, read more of what they’d said and pursue other ideas that I might find agreeable, but why that particular statement of Chekhov’s appealed I’m unsure.
Chekhov’s tormented childhood, in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, with a father who regularly beat him, upset him throughout his life until tuberculosis killed him at forty-four. His father, a grocer and local church choirmaster in the port of Taganrog, six hundred miles south of Moscow, coerced Anton and his brothers into long hours of rehearsals for the choir. Those who admired their singing were unaware of the gruelling regime they undertook. As an adult he said that whenever he passed a church it brought back the memories of an unhappy childhood. His low opinion of religious people has a clear origin.
His father enrolled them in a Greek Orthodox school even though they didn’t speak any Greek. They didn’t learn any either and moved to a Russian school after half a year at their mother’s insistence, though there was often one or more of the six Chekhov children at home, due to unpaid school fees.
The imposition of this enforced singing practice with siblings by a devout and bullying father, rather than leading to a Russian precursor of the Jackson Five or an earlier von Trapp family, resulted only in resentment. Eventually his father was declared bankrupt and fled to Moscow, leaving him behind. Anton thrived in his new freedom despite the financial hardship and trained as a doctor, whilst all the time maintaining literary aspirations.
Chekhov’s despising of the devout is understandable, but religion played almost no part in my life, other than my dad’s insistence on watching Songs Of Praise on a Sunday evening, in the hope they’d sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
There was Sunday school in the ’70s, which I’d enjoyed. The Bible stories were entertaining, especially the Good Samaritan and the one about not building your house on sand. To illustrate this, our Sunday school teacher had two doll’s houses, one resting on a firm surface and the other on a pile of sand. She then showed us the effects of pouring the contents of a watering can over the respective houses. A watering can indoors! I liked that for a start. The house built on sand tilted over slowly and rested at a sick angle, listing. It looked disturbingly wrong, while our teacher looked relieved and pleased. This had given us much to think about, but what?
None of it left any flicker of belief in me. Those who expressed faith left me baffled by the time I was a teenager, and contemptuous enough to highlight my views on the front of my A4 pad. My only belief was that you had to be a fool to believe in something that is a man-made construct. This was conventional wisdom readily adopted. Church was boring, the Adam and Eve tale nonsensical, and the desperate attempts of the modern clergy to attract young people laughable. Any good works done by the Church were unconsidered. It was an easy victory over the establishment for a rebellious adolescent. There’s no such thing as God, you fools, and you believe in it and still expect me to listen to another word you say with anything other than a dismissive smirk. Take this short shrift!
It wasn’t his views on religion that first attracted me to Chekhov, but his plays.
We’d been introduced to Chekhov by Piers the drama teacher as we had to study The Seagull for A Level. Fortunately, there was an excellent production of the play running at the Greenwich Theatre during May 1984, starring Maria Aitken as Arkadina, which I went to see three times for revision. I’ve always loved the play’s opening, where Medvedenko, the smitten but hapless schoolteacher asks the world-weary but young and attractive Masha why she always wears black.
‘I’m in mourning for my life,’ she replies.
That tickled me the first time I read it and seems as good a test for an appreciation of Chekhov as any. If you don’t find that funny, this stuff may not be for you and
you need to raise your game. In ‘mustn’t grumble’ Britain where many people, in fact, grumble all the time, that poetic complaint from a woman tired of much else besides batting away the affection of someone who doesn’t appeal, while at the same time failing to shift through her own gears to improve her lot, ought to resonate with every narky, wound-up, passive-aggressive resident of the British Isles. I’ve liked every production of The Seagull I’ve seen, if only for hearing that opening line. When I was a teenager I decided that if I ever ran a pub I’d name it the Seagull, which is of interest now only because it betrayed the onset of a lifelong devotion to public houses.
Our other A Level ‘text’, as we learnt to call them, was Comedians, Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play about a stand-up comedy workshop preparing would-be comedians to perform in a showcase for a talent scout. The character Gethin Price, who wants to try an experimental act in the search for ‘truth’, rather than follow the derivative style the others on the course favour, was an appealing anarchic figure. He was the rebel in the play so I tried to empathize with him. It was a struggle: his views were close to incoherent to me, and the comedians he idolized were from a bygone age. He hated Max Bygraves though, which was of interest as my dad adored Bygraves. That was a point of contact for me and Gethin at least.
The play offered a foretaste of some of the arguments shaping over the so-called alternative comedy scene that was emerging in London.
The Tower Theatre in Islington was running an amateur production of Comedians which I also went to see three times (parking in Canonbury each time, I decided I’d like to live in the area and thirteen years later I moved into a house round the corner from the theatre).
I learnt a speech from the play, that Price gives as his stand-up act towards the end, for my A Level exam, without ever really understanding it. I tried to make it funny but it isn’t that funny, it’s more angry. I hadn’t cottoned on yet that anger is the source of much humour.
The first year at university we were given a choice of two plays to perform scenes from for our exam at the culmination of our performance course, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Comedians by Trevor Griffiths.
Our group consisted of twelve women and four men, two of whom were already going out with each other. Comedians was an odd choice with its cast of eleven, mainly Mancunian, blokes. We discussed how to split the group, with each half tackling a section of one of the plays. Shamelessly, I announced I was more interested in which part I would play, either Price in Comedians or Astrov in Vanya. There was a silence as the collective ground its teeth. No one else had made any requests about casting. It was decided there would be a female version of Comedians, leaving the boys to take part in Uncle Vanya. No one else wanted to be Astrov.
I enjoyed the subtle nuances and naturalistic style of Chekhov’s comedy but had no self-awareness of my inability to portray them. As with many would-be actors, I was convinced that a prominent role would be the best one for me, and in this case Astrov was funny too, and I thought I was funny.
At the UKC (University of Kent at Canterbury) Dramatics Society meeting in my first term, new members ticked boxes on a form to alert the society to their talents: acting, costume, set design, knowing all the lyrics from The Rocky Horror Show etc. I wrote down one side of my form that I was interested in writing and performing comedy as well as acting in plays.
The BBC had a series on at the time called Comic Roots in which famous comedians traced their personal development as performers back to where it all began. For many, their roots were at university, in all-night undergraduate mirth, leading to sketches, revues, and Edinburgh Festival shows. Michael Palin said his room-mate, who wasn’t part of Monty Python, was the funniest man he knew at university.
As Rik Mayall had met Adrian Edmondson at Manchester University, so I fantasized about meeting a collaborator, but no reply was ever forthcoming from UKC Dramatics, so I wasn’t involved in any drama in my first term. I did some writing, in secret.
Occasionally, I would ask the pair of earnest teachers of our performance course whether they wanted a particular exercise or improvisation to be funny, irritating them, as they struggled to immerse us in the ideas of the great Russian actors’ guru, Stanislavsky, and his quest for truth.
I had already ‘done’ Stanislavsky for A Level, and, bringing my natural diffidence to bear, decided that these two could teach me nothing. Then they had me take part in an exercise where three of us had to run into the room, one at a time, desperately try the two other exit doors, only to find them locked, before running out the way they came in, panicking. I was third in and the rest of the group were in stitches as I wrestled with the two doors, eyes wide in terror, before fleeing. No one had laughed at the first two.
The group had been told that the first person was fleeing a fire, the second a murderer, and that I, in third, desperately needed the toilet. Our teacher apologized for setting us up but his point was made. Comedy wasn’t about playing for laughs which I would certainly have done if I’d been told to run around as if needing the lavatory.
Chekhov wrote, in one of his scores of fascinating letters:
Let the things that happen on the stage be as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at the table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.*
That’s a fair description of teatime at home in the ’70s but more importantly the key to making the plays work. His intention was to show the very people he was portraying, the Russian middle classes, how dreary their lives were, in the hope that they might change, before the world changed them. That they might recognize their foibles and listlessness and, while finding them exquisitely and humorously observed, be inclined to work hard and pull away from such decaying wastefulness. Chekhov died thirteen years before the Bolshevik Revolution did change the lives of all Russians. In Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard a sound, like a breaking string, is heard in the distance and different characters speculate on its cause according to their own view of the world. Could it have been machinery? The onset of industrialization, foreshadowing the future, is mooted but ignored.
We rehearsed and learned our lines for our performance. There was to be an external examiner who would sit with our teachers to pass judgement.
Stanislavsky wrote:
The theatre has invented a whole assortment of signs, expressions of human passions, theatrical poses, voice inflections, cadences, flourishes, stage tricks, and methods of acting which become mechanical and unconscious, and are always at the service of the actor when he feels himself utterly helpless on the stage.*
Unfortunately, out of my depth, and self-consciously awkward, I offered the full range of Stanislavsky’s dreaded ‘signs’, adding one of my own by blushing furiously, my face burning as I struggled without a clue. Acting Chekhov well is as difficult as acting can be. I was afraid of the external examiner’s inevitable damning judgement. In a lull in the scene (I considered any moment in the drama when someone else was speaking to be a lull), I steeled myself to look across and witness the examiner’s disappointment.
He was sound asleep.
Bertolt Brecht
Conversations with a Golliwog, by Alexander Guyan, was staged by UKC Dramatics in early 1985, directed by a vaguely intimidating young Scottish woman with short red hair, prominent cheekbones, and what looked to be a very attractive figure, concealed beneath the statutory baggy old trousers and jumper to discourage objectification. To me she was the Most Beautiful Girl on Campus.
Three of the cast were second-year girls, one of whom was an effortless boy-entrancer with long spiky blonde tresses and exhibitionist tendencies. Her surname was Fox, and, as her first initial was A, she appeared on college notices as A. Fox. There were three boys: one a refugee from a P.G. Wodehouse story, another a serious-minded Boer (is there any other kind?) and me.
This was my first play at university. It was a sad tale of a teenage girl,
suffering from mental illness, who confides in her golliwog, which then talks to her. The Boer, the white Boer, played the golliwog.
There were no black people in the drama department, which alleviated some tricky casting choices. Is it worse to ask a white man to play a golliwog, and have to apply full make-up, or is it worse to ask a black man to play a golliwog?
In a period of intense political correctness, during which we were all being asked to reconstruct ourselves, it was a considered choice not to replace the golliwog with another soft toy that could come to life, though that could have resulted in a serious play about mental health resembling an amateur production of Rainbow, with Bungle in a counselling role.
The women in the cast were pathological smilers, and highly exotic to a lonely boy living in a college room, with a car park (as opposed to cathedral) view and a much-missed girlfriend miles away at Loughton College.
The director and the actresses were rapidly becoming radicalized by the Women in Theatre course that ran during the second year of the drama degree. The course had a successful history of both politicizing previously indifferent students and creating trial-period lesbians from the ranks of its more advanced devotees. These subsequently enraged undergraduates, together with the spread of Radical Feminism generally, made it tricky to be an unevolved straight boy. Compliments to women would back-fire; in fact any comment could easily be misconstrued by newcomers to the battlefield of sexual politics.
I had chosen to live in Keynes College in my first year because it had a reputation for being left-wing. It wasn’t, and it also had no fellow drama students in it, which made settling in difficult. On one occasion a woman was chain-smoking in the Keynes dining hall, making eating unpleasant. There were a few no smoking signs about. I said ‘excuse me’ a couple of times, as she was sitting right behind me. I really should have left it, I didn’t mind that much, maybe she was having a bad day, but everyone knew you couldn’t smoke in there and she was ignoring me. I reached out and tapped her on the back of the shoulder.