by Jasper Rees
In November Victoria was full of optimism as she decided to resume therapy – ‘going to the Bonkers man’, as she called it, where she was able to work through marital tensions. Her new therapist was recommended by a friend in show business with similar issues. ‘Some,’ she said, ‘are very deep rooted, and some are of the sort any couple would have when one person is overstretched and feels resentful and unsupported (and I have to say Geoff feels overstretched and unsupported as well, which he is …).’74 The process was helpful to her in normalising her agony. ‘I found it very comforting to talk to a therapist who had talked to lots and lots of people,’ she later said.75
Over Christmas there was a climactic crisis. They had one of their stormiest rows yet at the culmination of which Victoria and Geoffrey found such a void opening up between them that, to at least one of them, only one solution seemed feasible. Geoffrey announced that he would move out of the house and find somewhere to live nearby. In the new year, at the suggestion of her therapist, they tried marital counselling again and stuck with it for several months. ‘Things have been extremely difficult here,’ Victoria told Jane Wymark in January, alluding to ‘a backlog of ancient deepseated problems with a top-dressing of overwork, operations – lots of things – but anyway – it has all been v painful though it is a bit calmer now.’76 In order to protect the children from disruption, they agreed to buy a flat locally and found one in the mansion block where, in the 1970s, they used to rent a room off Jane Wynn Owen, only for it to fall through. Geoffrey moved out of the marital bed and into the spare room, but some routines remained intact. When Victoria needed an eye cast over the rushes of her stage show, as ever she trusted his judgement, while he in turn asked her to write a joke for his magic show. She gave nothing away in a Radio 4 interview with BBC head of entertainment Paul Jackson recorded before an audience in Manchester at the end of January. She even told a story about how, straight after her hysterectomy, she moved a piece of furniture that had defeated Geoffrey: ‘I thought, I bet I can bloody get it through the door … I’d only just come out of hospital and I thought, he’s going to be so mad when he sees it’s gone through, I had to push it back. He doesn’t know that. He’s going to go mad now.’77
A few days later the tour resumed in Newcastle, from where Victoria wrote to Jane Wymark: ‘It was never a perfect marriage. But there was always a Huge Bond, however dysfunctional.’78 She was hopeful that Geoffrey might come to see her as ‘just a barmy middle-aged over-achiever who’s willing to have a go at changing, then maybe we can re-structure the whole thing and move on together’.79 Later that month, as she was about to drive off to Margate, Victoria found herself ‘veering madly between self blame “If only I’d had therapy earlier, been nicer … blah blah” and self justification “but he never did this, that …”, all so pointless’.80 Citing the problems caused by ‘mutual busyness, unintentional neglect, years old stuff about the children, whatever …’, she was more inclined to try again than Geoffrey, while very understanding of his writhing agonies. ‘Of course he is terribly miserable as well, but feels he has no choice,’ she added, then confessed that she herself felt ‘pretty shredded, and am just hoping the old Great Healer does its job, and sometimes I can count my blessings which are many, we are certainly buffered (why did I just type buggered …) in all this by dosh, jobs, no extra marital hanky panky’.81 When Geoffrey voiced his fear of being alone for ever, she predicted he’d soon meet a Quaker. She took up this theme with her therapist, imagining Geoffrey with ‘some peaceful but fun loving Quaker with whom he finds the true love previously denied him by angry pants Woody’.82
As the tour took her round Britain, she found no difficulty in continuing to talk about her marriage – or her scripted version of it – on stage. ‘She made up a marriage and talked about it,’ says Geoffrey. ‘The fact that her marriage was in desperate trouble didn’t affect the jokes she was telling about a marriage. They really were separate. She could do it because it was a show.’ Her misery was evident to Julie Walters, who, in March, caught the show in Brighton. ‘Vic didn’t really talk too much about feelings,’ she says, ‘but I could see that things were really not good. There was a feeling of bemusement and sadness. She was clearly devastated by it. She seemed reduced when we sat down after. She seemed in some ways a lot softer and more vulnerable.’
Victoria pasted photographs of the tour into an album – the children backstage in Edinburgh, Nick Skilbeck paddling in the sea at Bournemouth, her in a vast empty auditorium in Cardiff. The very last performance was a Sunday night in mid-April which brought Victoria back to the Albert Hall to do a benefit, yet again, in aid of the King’s Head Theatre, of which she was now life president. ‘When I stood on the stage of the Albert Hall for the last time,’ she said, ‘I had a good look round and thought, that’s it. I just said to myself, I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.’83
Back at home there was only confusion. ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen,’ she told Jane Wymark. ‘I realised that none of my brilliant disaster avoidance techniques were working.’84 In their final session of marital therapy she and Geoffrey agreed to part, but there was still no certainty if or when he would leave. ‘I am not counting on anything,’ Victoria told Jane. ‘Over the months I have had to develop a sense of self-preservation.’ She rehearsed the now familiar themes of overworking and operations while stressing that the marriage had had its good parts – ‘there have been tons of those, there really have’.85 They made an offer on another flat a short walk away which was eventually accepted.
One weekend in June Victoria flew to Manchester and took a taxi to the Lake District to join her sisters at a hotel in Grasmere. She paid for three rooms, with a suite for herself so they had somewhere private to talk. Penelope collected Helen’s ashes from Skipton and had Stanley’s couriered from Bury and then transported the two urns in the boot of her van. A footpath led west from the hotel up onto the Langdale Pikes, where their parents had fond memories of camping as young courting communists. Victoria carried her father’s ashes in a rucksack; Penelope took Helen’s. ‘There was a lot of gallows humour,’ says Rosalind. ‘Vic sped ahead, leaving us behind. She was annoyed that we were so slow, but she was at peak fitness. When we reached the top of the hill we lit some candles and incense and threw the ashes into the air. The wind immediately blew them back in our faces, which caused much hilarity all round.’ They took a picture of the three of them grinning broadly in cagoules.
One day in July Victoria and Geoffrey joined the children in their basement playroom and broke the news that he was to move out of the spare bedroom and around the corner, but that as parents they would play as equal a part as possible. ‘I don’t think I saw it coming particularly,’ says Grace. ‘I was aware of problems. It was short-fuse type stuff, being impatient with each other, losing their temper with each other. I was not aware of any kind of escalation and to an extent that was present when I was a little child as well. They were quite calm. I think they handled it really well. Despite not having anticipated it I also wasn’t wholly surprised.’ Henry by contrast ‘was pretty unaware. I never had a conscious thought about it at all. I think we both cried. It was a sad atmosphere. Dad was just going to move down the road and they’d already figured that out, which is very them.’
Victoria took Grace and Henry to stay with the Glossops, who had a place in Villars-sur-Ollon in the Swiss Alps. While they were away, Geoffrey vacated the spare room in Highgate and moved out. The only witness was Victoria’s assistant Cathy Edis. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ he confided to her as his relationship with Victoria came to an end after twenty-six years. Victoria started to spread the news among friends, who wrote kind, commiserating letters back. At some point the rest of the world had to be informed too. In August the newspapers were full of the murder in Soham of two ten-year-old girls, and Geoffrey worried that their news would be fallen on as light relief, so they waited. In late October the tabloids were feasting on the private a
ntics of Angus Deayton, who duly lost his job as the host of Have I Got News for You. ‘I rang Victoria,’ says Geoffrey, ‘and said, “I think today’s the day.”’ She agreed.’ They informed Neil Reading, who issued a press release. ‘The separation is entirely amicable,’ it advised. ‘There are no other parties involved. They have asked for their privacy to be respected.’
The next month Victoria at the Albert was released in time for the Christmas market. Whether it was truly a portrait of Victoria’s marriage or not, it was the only testimony her fans had to go on. ‘I think I said I loved him,’ she would say. ‘I said that, that I didn’t want to be with other people. I mean I absolutely meant it.’86
20
ACORNS
‘It’s a musical. It isn’t about anything.’
Acorn Antiques: The Musical!, 2005
‘Dear Victoria Wood. I am a fan.’1 Victoria received many such letters from devotees. Only one of them ran the National Theatre of Great Britain. Trevor Nunn first made contact in 1996 when about to take over as artistic director at the National. His was a name to revere: Victoria had seen his Royal Shakespeare Company productions as a schoolgirl. Nunn urged her to write a play about England, but dinnerladies intervened. Then, in December 2001, they finally met when Victoria went to the South Bank armed with a pitch. ‘I was delighted to see you at the National,’ he wrote early in 2002 ‘and even more thrilled that you came to talk about a new musical piece based on the sublime Acorn Antiques characters.’2
The idea came to Victoria when she passed a poster for the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! ‘I wanted to do a musical and I thought on and off, how could it be? How could I do it? And then suddenly, I just thought, Acorn Antiques, is that my Mamma Mia! ? It’s my thing. And it’s very dear to my heart. I thought it would look so nice on the posters.’3 Her spoof daytime soap was the one creation of Victoria’s that she could never quite lay to rest. Its most recent exhumation, on The Sketch Show Story, was broadcast only two months before Victoria met Nunn. During the tour she started mentioning it to her pianist Nick Skilbeck: ‘She was quite guarded about it at the beginning. She said she was thinking of doing a musical version of, as she said, “a sketch that I used to do”. Then she asked me who she should approach. I said, “Trevor Nunn is probably the best person to speak to.”’
Nunn was the world’s preeminent director of musical theatre – his long-running productions of Cats and Les Misérables had broken records in the West End and on Broadway – but Victoria couldn’t be sure he was steeped in Acorn Antiques: ‘He seemed to have seen it. He went, “Ooh, fantastic idea.” I know he is very, very charming, but I didn’t think that he was completely lying to me.’4 At the meeting Victoria floated the names of Julie Walters, Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston, hoping they might wish to take part, though, after her arduous experience of writing and performing in dinnerladies, she had no desire to be in it herself. ‘I don’t want to be onstage at the moment,’ she told him, and suggested Imelda Staunton for Miss Berta. Schedule permitting, it was agreed that Nunn might direct it in the Cottesloe, the smallest of the National’s three theatres. ‘But whoever ends up trying to keep those girls in order,’ she wrote, ‘I hope we can meet and discuss it all along the way.’5
Victoria proposed a deadline for delivery of nine months hence, soon loosened to a year, and managed to negotiate a promotion to the much larger Lyttelton Theatre. But with her spring tour schedule for At It Again vastly expanded, she realised she would have in effect only six months to write a full-scale musical. She didn’t tell Nunn about the deepening crisis at home. ‘Although I could really push and have the whole thing written in time,’ she explained in February 2002, ‘I feel I shouldn’t. I have overloaded myself with work for about the last three years … So for once I’m trying to be sensible and not just crash about, pushing myself to the limit, and trying to be with my family at the same time.’6 Instead she would work on the musical under her own steam, aware that in doing so she would probably sacrifice the chance of working with Nunn at the National, which he was due to leave in April 2003.
A Victoria Wood musical had occurred to others too. Days after she postponed Acorn Antiques, Victoria heard from the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, which suggested a musical version of Pat and Margaret (another new adaptation was about to open at the Salisbury Playhouse). ‘I have cleared the next few months because I really want to have a good think about what to do next,’ she replied.7 In fact, for the rest of 2002 she put all serious work to one side as the marriage breathed its last. She was in no mood to write: ‘I didn’t feel very funny.’8 Her main commitment for the autumn was to perform at a fundraiser for the women’s health charity Wellbeing of Women. The booking came about when, in the green room after seeing her perform at the Albert Hall a year earlier, her gynaecologist Marcus Setchell joked, ‘I ought to have 10 per cent of the takings – there wouldn’t have been a first half of the show!’ She promptly offered to do something for a charity of his choice. Her set at a Savoy Hotel dinner for 400, featuring much talk of hysterectomies and ending with Pat the trainee fitness instructor, raised over £35,000.
After Geoffrey’s departure, the atmosphere in the house tended to be sombre. ‘Stating the obvious,’ says Grace, ‘she was really unhappy that it had happened. She didn’t filter that much, she didn’t overly protect us, and also I was quite angry about it all in a very normal thirteen-year-old way. We’d talk about it, and occasionally she’d open up as well. I did get a sense aged fifteen and beyond that she wanted me to be her friend and be another adult as well as being her kid.’ Henry was ten when the separation came and had a feeling of being insulated from tensions going on over his head but picked up on his mother and father keeping things civil: ‘They were both very vigilant about going to every parents’ evening. It could be awkward, but also not, depending. There was also a rapport as well. It wasn’t buddy-buddy, but it was different shades of polite.’ Victoria had no need to protect friends, who now assumed ever greater importance for her, from the true extent of her rawness. ‘Vic told me that just before Geoff left,’ says Jane Wymark, ‘they were standing together in the kitchen and he made a joke about the dire state of their tea towels which made them both laugh out loud. She said she couldn’t believe that he was going to go. When he did she was very unhappy, but her focus was on making the situation stable for the children.’
On Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other weekend the children would be with their father. When she was on her own, Victoria booked to see every musical on in London and beyond. Then, while the children were with Geoffrey after Christmas, she made her first ever pilgrimage to New York. Her guide was Catherine Ashmore, her university friend who now did all her production photography: ‘Vic wanted to do her meticulous homework and see as much variety of stage musicals as possible. New York was the place. We had great fun and adventures. One clanger of a show made us rush for the exit at the end and run a couple of blocks before we felt free.’ Sitting through bad shows was not necessarily a waste of Victoria’s time. She bought tickets to an ill-fated Romeo and Juliet which blundered into the West End in the autumn of 2002. ‘It was just awful,’ she said, ‘but it was very inspirational in a way. It was instructive the way they’d constructed their lyrics and the pompousness of the music.’9 As she sat down to compose, it would provide her with opening lines for Miss Babs and Miss Berta:
Two sisters both alike in dignity,
Manchesterford is where we lay our scene.
Their trade was knick-knacks of antiquity,
No squabbles marked their day-to-day routine.
When Trevor Nunn had only weeks left at the National, Victoria went to see him again. ‘I still want to do it,’ she said. ‘Should I do it here?’ He advised her to think of doing it as a commercial production. Thus, with no commission from a producer, for much of 2003 Victoria worked on her first musical since Good Fun nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Having parodied a soap in which everything goes wrong in a television studi
o, she decided to explore the ways in which things malfunction in a theatre. What she came up with was an ambitious hybrid. ‘It’s two musicals in one,’ she explained. ‘It’s a rep musical and then it’s a West End musical. There’s a musical where it goes wrong and a musical where it goes right.’10
In the earliest handwritten draft, three of the original cast have reassembled in Sutton Coldfield to work on a dystopian version of the soap. This is the concept of a pretentious small-time director called John, somewhat based on her old tutor Clive Barker. ‘As a clever joke he’s called it Acorn Antiques,’ Victoria explained during the writing process, ‘so he can get the middle classes into the building to show them his terrible vision.’11 His plans are thrown into disarray when Bo Beaumont barges uninvited into the first rehearsal and proposes jollying things up by importing songs and tap from a Fifties musical she was once in called Café Continental. Her artistic vision and the director’s do battle in a chaotic dress rehearsal attended by members of the Enoch Powell Society and an underwhelmed producer who flatly refuses to take it to West End. But Bo wins the lottery, enabling her to bring it in herself. The second half was to be Bo’s musical. In this more benign plot, Acorn Antiques is threatened with closure when the whole of Manchesterford’s high street is put up for sale. A coffee chain called The Guilty Bean threatens to buy up the shop in a takeover led by a Miss Bonnie, who turns out to be the long-lost sister of Miss Babs and Miss Berta. ‘It’s about that balance between fear of things changing but things having to change,’ Victoria said of this early draft. ‘It’s done in a very light way, but that’s what it’s about.’12