by Jasper Rees
At the end of the fortnight there was a performance for an invited audience of fifty or so friends and colleagues. With no set beyond the odd antique lamp, Nunn differentiated between the two musicals by placing the guests in the middle of the room and playing each half from opposite ends. They laughed and laughed from the opening lines of Mrs Overall in a song called ‘Residents’ Parking’:
Oh! Miss Berta and Miss Babs!
Has one of you got crabs?
I said you should get jabs.
They were treated to plenty of theatrical in-jokes that would not make it to the West End – one about the producer Michael Codron, another in which Bo touted her stage credentials. ‘Joan Littlewood? That was my cap actually. Samuel Beckett? I wasn’t born a telly star – I did eight weeks in a bin for him at Pitlochry. Metal too, none of your lovely big wheelies.’
Victoria came away from Kennington aware that there was work to do: ‘The numbers came out really well, and the first half had a good shape to it, but the second half didn’t quite come off as a story. It was a verbal idea about acorns turning into oak trees, and it didn’t happen onstage.’33 A climactic song called ‘Little Acorns’, sung by Mrs Overall, did not survive beyond the workshop (‘This acorn’s only tiny, nature’s own trainee / Not whingy though, or whiny’).
The musical had other hurdles to overcome. ‘I absolutely loved doing the workshop,’ Julie told Victoria. ‘Considering how much we got done it was very relaxed and unpressured. That’s where old Trevor is so good. He understands how to deal with actors.’34 Celia concurred: ‘You have written something quite magical, unique, uplifting, touching, mad, fun and hilarious and songs to set the Thames on fire.’35 Even though the original stars were full of praise, Victoria was aware that they would commit to a limited West End run only, and she briefly considered an out-of-town try-out with a less starry cast. In addition, Mrs Overall was too energy-sapping a role to do eight times a week, and Julie had the option of reprising her role in a new stage-musical version of Billy Elliot. Rather than go through agents, two months after the workshop Victoria wrote to her: ‘From our point of view, it’s your part, you’re brilliant in it, you would bring in the punters and obviously you’re worth every penny …’ But she accepted Julie might not end up doing it: ‘We’re all in this to make a living and have a good time: as long as you’re in the front stalls for the first night waving a macaroon I’m happy.’36 Victoria had certainly anticipated Julie’s presence in a stage direction in the workshop draft: ‘Enter Mrs O – to entrance round which she acknowledges.’ There could be no applause on Mrs O’s first entrance without Julie, who replied: ‘My feeling is – either we’ll thrash out a deal that’s good for both of us or we won’t – and there will be no hard feeling. Whichever route you choose I’ll be there on the 1st night with my macaroon.’37
A solution had already suggested itself to Victoria the previous autumn when she saw a flyer for Thoroughly Modern Millie with Maureen Lipman and Marti Webb alternating in one of the roles. ‘I could do the Monday nights nobody wants to do,’ she said. ‘Or if Julie didn’t want to do her matinees. Also, there’s a bit of a groan moment when they say so and so will not appear at the matinee. If you can put someone in who’s fantastic, they could collect Mrs Overalls.’38 The answer which emerged was to do both Monday nights and Wednesday matinees herself. Meanwhile Celia, who had always avoided long West End runs, weighed up options. ‘Julie and I talked,’ she says, ‘and she said, “I’ll do it if you do it.”’
A break from writing came with an invitation from the League of Gentlemen, who were transplanting Royston Vasey to the big screen and, in a historical section of the script, had written cameo roles for a northern King William and Queen Mary. To play them they approached Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. ‘We thought these are our king and queen of comedy,’ says Steve Pemberton. ‘This will be a little treat for us. Alan said his acting days were behind him. Victoria didn’t do that much outside of her own writing. She was delighted to be asked.’ She flew to Dublin for a couple of days and found herself magnificently togged up with a towering wig, rouged cheeks and a fat beauty spot. As a sweetener they encouraged her to change her lines. She found just the right royal words to receive a line of beggars: ‘Have you staggered far?’
Back in London, Victoria and Harriet Thorpe pledged to stagger far for a second year running with the MoonWalk. This time Victoria was commissioned by Sioned Wiliam at ITV to make a half-hour film to raise awareness of the charity ‘Walk the Walk’. One night in mid-May Victoria and Harriet followed by two film crews walked for 26.2 miles through central London. ‘We’re doing this for our breasts,’ she told an excitable crowd in bras at the start. ‘It’s doing fuck all for our bunions, but never mind.’ She and Harriet got round in eight hours, pumping arms, singing, playing word games and inventorying their aches. Among hers Victoria listed ‘blisters the size of Dutch caps’. ‘I’m so glad we did it,’ she wrote to her various sponsors, ‘but to be surrounded by fifteen thousand women in bras, all whooping, did make it feel like a huge rather nightmarish hen party.’39 Victoria Wood: Moonwalking, a moving gem assembled artfully by Ben Warwick, was shown in October. In her voiceover Victoria summarised the mission: ‘Everyone who has cancer has to go through it on their own. All you can do is walk alongside. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re just putting one foot in front of the other walking alongside the ones who aren’t here, the ones taking their own harder, longer journey.’
Victoria spent the middle months of 2004 attempting to fashion a plot for the second half of the musical. ‘Your second act outline made me laugh,’ wrote Trevor Nunn in May after reading a draft, ‘but I think I have given you a bum steer.’40 He gave her a forensic set of notes. ‘I really want to know what you think,’ she replied, ‘and am quite prepared to get stuck in again and take it in another direction.’41 The second half now opened with ‘Manchesterford’, a cheerful welcome by a streetful of right-wing shopkeepers who smugly sing of a world unvisited by modernity:
Our water’s sweet, our bread is full of bran
No drunks or beggars mar the civic plan
We’ve shipped them all to Douglas, Isle of Man
By gum by golly it’s jolly nice round here.
The town’s peace is threatened when the Countess of Manchesterford decides to sell off the high street to the likes of the PashminasToGo, the Hong Kong Thong and Panty Hut, and the Drop-In Silicone Breast Centre. Acorn Antiques can be saved from an aggressive takeover by The Guilty Bean only if the money left by the father of Mrs Overall’s triplets can be found. In an idea lifted from dinnerladies, he appears on video to deliver his living will. In a rousing finale, the Manchesterford Players’ perform ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Mrs O!’ in the style of the finale of A Chorus Line.
There were interruptions to the writing process. That summer Victoria took the children to Canada on their most adventurous holiday yet. After a happy first leg spent on Vancouver Island, canoeing and jumping off bridges into freezing water, they had a highly stressful transfer to Calgary. After landing late, they drove into the night looking for their hotel and realised they’d gone wrong. Tempers flared. ‘At about one in the morning,’ says Grace, ‘we said we are going to knock on the door of the first house we see. We didn’t see another house for two hours.’ Eventually they headed towards some distant lights, which turned out to be Calgary, where all the motels were block-booked for a Christian conference. ‘We ended up sleeping in the car. The silver lining was that we set off at six o’clock in the morning and saw the sun rise over the Rockies.’ On her return there was jolting news for Victoria: at the age of fifty-three Bob Mason had died of cancer of the oesophagus. He had become a successful character actor who also scripted three dozen episodes of Coronation Street. At a handover Victoria asked Geoffrey in and told him: ‘She knew more or less what he was working on most of the time, and his death came out of the blue. She was quite shocked.’
Long before rehearsals were due to begi
n, Victoria started to have lessons to master Mrs Overall’s comedy tap routine in the act-one closer ‘Tip Top Tap’. ‘I’ve never danced before,’ she said. ‘I’ve never even danced socially.’42 Her coach at Pineapple Studios, giving her two private sessions a week for six weeks, was Stephen Mear’s assistant Sammy Murray, a cheerful former dancer from Yorkshire. ‘When she first came in she was terrified of looking herself in the mirror, her head was down and she barely said a word to the point I used to go back to Stephen and say, “She hates me.” It got quite upsetting. After about three weeks, half the session was just sitting down getting a coffee and talking things through. For me that was a turning point. Not only did her tap get better but also the trust started happening. She used to send me messages: “Practising my tap as I’m doing my soup.”’
Victoria was distracted as she learned tap because the production still had no home. The task of finding a theatre was in the hands of Phil McIntyre, but competition for a West End house with an orchestra pit was intense. The Cambridge Theatre and Shaftesbury Theatre were tried. In July there was a rush to tie down the London Palladium, despite Trevor Nunn’s practical objection that its wide acres would simply swallow up the first half of the show. They turned their attention to the Piccadilly Theatre, where Jailhouse Rock was struggling but had to go below its break-even threshold for three consecutive weeks before the landlords could give it its notice. ‘We had one week to wait,’ said Victoria. ‘By the Tuesday of that week their figures started to climb up. I felt terrible about it. I didn’t want them to fail. I just wanted to be able to go somewhere.’43 Her distress increased when it looked as if a theatre would not come free at a time when Trevor Nunn and Julie Walters were available: ‘I was so upset that it was being taken away from me. I just felt this was the time. And I just felt robbed. I was so depressed.’44
Eventually the Theatre Royal Haymarket was booked. Julie’s determination to do no more than sixteen weeks, plus the 900-seat capacity, meant that an expensive production could not recoup its costs unless ticket prices were pushed to unprecedented heights of £65 for a seat in the stalls. Despite grumbles in the theatre press, tickets for Acorn Antiques: The Musical! sold fast after Victoria and Julie posed in Marigolds at the launch.
The cast which assembled for rehearsals at the Jerwood Space in Southwark included new faces. Josie Lawrence was cast as a Brummie wardrobe mistress in the first half and Miss Bonnie in the second. Neil Morrissey was John the saturnine director in the first half, then a ruthless loan shark called Tony who unleashes Miss Babs’s repressed nymphomania. Several of the workshop ensemble returned – at Victoria’s suggestion, they weren’t all sleek athletes but a cross-section in varying shapes and sizes with charismatic faces. The role of Berta went to Sally Ann Triplett, twice a Eurovision contestant in the early 1980s but more recently a star of Anything Goes. To her fell the task of singing a ballad called ‘Remind Him’, which Victoria composed to provide Berta with a romantic hinterland. The song tells of her secret crush on Mr Clifford, who has lost his memory, but it was apparent to those around Victoria that the sweetly generic lyrics about pining for a lost love drew on her own lingering sorrows:
Once we were together and I didn’t see an end
Didn’t see what changes could arise
Now he’s not a stranger but you couldn’t call him friend
Still my dreams survive.
At one point, when Victoria was not in the room, Trevor Nunn shared his suspicions with the company. ‘It’s astonishing,’ Gareth Valentine remembers him saying, ‘she has recently parted with her husband and it was a very dark time for her and this ballad I’m convinced is a love letter.’ She flatly denied any such connection to Ben Warwick, who hovered during rehearsals while making a behind-the-scenes documentary for ITV: ‘She played me the song on the piano. I said, “I certainly know who that’s about.” “Who? No, that’s not about Geoffrey.” She was adamant.’ Still, it would make her weep when it was sung in rehearsal.
Before rehearsals started, Victoria shared her worries with Gareth Valentine that the rehearsal draft was too long. ‘Trevor is known for not cutting stuff,’ he advised. ‘If you want to cut any fat out of it, now is the time to do it. Don’t get it into that rehearsal room domain, because he won’t cut.’ The show had grown bloated partly because Victoria felt she had to dole out songs to the principals. ‘They all wanted their moment,’ she said during rehearsals, ‘and in the heat of the moment you bung in as many numbers as people want.’45 There was one critical omission: Miss Babs was alone in not having her own song. Celia had always self-effacingly accepted her status as a butt of jokes, which did not relent in Acorn Antiques. When Mrs Overall takes a truth drug, she calls Miss Babs a ‘snotty thick-ankled cow’ and a ‘dozy big-breasted pillock’. Now she plucked up the courage: ‘Victoria was very good about saying, “If anybody has got something they want to talk to me about, then I’m here.” I thought, I’ve got to say something. At the eleventh hour I went to her one lunchtime. She said, “Oh, it never occurred to me. I can’t really now. There’s no room.”’ In fact, it had occurred to Victoria. A draft completed since the workshop even had a number titled ‘Babs’ Song’. Though grouchy about shouldering the extra work, over the weekend she bashed out a short, brash fantasy number. She recorded ‘Have You Met Miss Babs?’ at her piano, handed the tape to Gareth Valentine on Monday morning and it was swiftly dropped into the show.
While it took all Trevor Nunn’s formidable stagecraft to wrestle Victoria’s two-headed hydra onto the stage, the one area where Victoria did not defer to him was comedy. He revealed his unfamiliarity with her work one lunch at the Jerwood Space. ‘There was Trevor, Victoria and me and the rest of the cast behind us,’ says Gareth Valentine. ‘And Trevor said to the women, “Two soups, please.” And the entire cast broke into laughter and Trevor was the only one not in on the gag.’ Later, during a technical rehearsal, a set of magnetic letters fixed to an upstage window clattered to the floor when a door slammed. ‘Vic and I hit the floor laughing,’ says Lez Brotherston. ‘Trevor was going, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” Vic went, “We’ll keep it, Trevor. It’s funny.”’ Julie quietly deferred to Victoria in this area: ‘Occasionally Vic would come up and say, “Do that note now but don’t do it on the night.” And I’d go, “No, I know.” It would be comedy stuff which just wouldn’t work the way Trevor said.’ But her director was fiercely protective of the production. At one point Phil McIntyre was looking to cut costs and zeroed in on an expensive arcade that was part of Lez Brotherston’s set design. Nunn insisted on keeping it and said that, if need be, he’d pay for it himself.
Unusually for a West End rehearsal schedule, the company took a week’s break over Christmas so Victoria could be with the children. It was during this period that she somehow found time to spoof another soap, courtesy of an invitation from Vanessa Whitburn, the editor of The Archers, who wanted her to write an episode for Comic Relief. Victoria threw herself into a plot about prize marmalade, a pigsty conversion and a mystery celebrity who turned out to be Stephen Fry. While stuffing in one-liners that gently twitted the show’s conventions, she smuggled in some of her own signature words too – Vimto, mangle, Crossroads. Victoria asked if she could come to the recording a few weeks later, where she helped the studio manager with sound effects and signed the cast’s scripts.
When rehearsals resumed Victoria started to fret that Julie wasn’t sleeping as she attempted to learn Mrs Overall’s dance routines. ‘I was so engrossed in it I had terrible insomnia,’ says Julie. ‘I had to go and get sleeping tablets. She came into the dressing room once and I saw there was a look of worry on her face.’ A second concern was the length of the show. ‘Oh God, it’s so fucking long,’ she told Gareth Valentine. ‘I know exactly what to do and he won’t cut it.’ ‘People have got to catch buses,’ she told Trevor Nunn. According to Stephen Mear, her director ‘absolutely adored her and that’s why he didn’t want to cut anything. Vic said, “Cut anyt
hing you like.” But he said, “You’re a genius.”’ A song called ‘Gravy Train’ did eventually bite the dust.
To whet public appetite, the original sketches were released on DVD in January, while Victoria eventually accepted that BAFTA could help sell tickets by offering viewers a foretaste of the show. Victoria Wood: A BAFTA Tribute was broadcast a week before the first preview. To open and close it, David Firman arranged a cheerful brass version of ‘Feeling in the Mood Tonight’, her 1993 show opener. Recorded at the Prince of Wales Theatre, it attracted a guest list from all walks of Victoria’s life – the stars of dinnerladies and All the Trimmings, the Robbins siblings, her favourite channel controller Peter Salmon. Opening the evening, Susie Blake revived her caustic continuity announcer to introduce some of the forthcoming guests, including ‘Julie Walters, star of Calendar Girls. She was the one behind the sink plunger. But first, a word from the star of some other films I haven’t liked: Richard E. Grant.’ Some stars paying tribute got their facts wrong or, to Victoria’s frustration, misread from the malfunctioning autocue. Not every mistake was accidental. Steve Pemberton paid tribute to ‘Victoria Woods’ and ‘heard this tutting and muttering in the audience. Ronnie Corbett was most offended. I’d like to think mega-fans would have understood the reference.’ The evening climaxed with Victoria’s entry, to a standing ovation, to accept her BAFTA from Jim Broadbent and Boadicea Overall. Then she introduced the new version of Acorn Antiques. The soap, she said, had been cruelly axed after losing a ratings battle with When Celebrity Breast Enlargements Go Wrong but had now become a musical. With a performance of ‘Tip Top Tap’, viewers were offered a first glimpse of Miss Babs, Miss Berta and Mrs Overall singing and dancing (Mr Clifford was exempted as Duncan Preston couldn’t dance). The act-one showstopper, boosted by Chris Walker’s riotous orchestration, was one of Victoria’s favourite moments in the entire musical. ‘Watching it in rehearsal,’ says Gareth Valentine, ‘she would glow and tap her feet. She really enjoyed the sound. It was the only time I ever saw her content.’