Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Some time early in my first term I walked into Andrew’s room and killed our friendship. The exact circumstances of the quarrel have completely gone. I can sit here now and revive the tightness. But what on earth was it about? We hardly did anything more elaborate than walk to other colleges to look at their bars, or take a rowing boat on the river, or go to a late film at the Cambridge Arts Club. I can remember that I was convinced he had excluded me from his set. Perhaps he had. I was the one behaving like a girl in a Jackie comic though.

  For a year Andrew and I continued to live next door to each other, exactly where we had been put. We shared a communal kitchen and a fridge. At some point in the summer term, I sat again in Andrew’s room, talking about some plan, probably a play that I was doing, and I reached across and moved some books on the heavy coffee table that was part of the furniture in every room in that block. It would have been the same coffee table that my son would have in that same room in his time there. As I got up, feeling myself now somehow remote from him, someone who had been such a close friend, I noticed that he reached out carefully and reordered the books. He lined them up exactly as they were supposed to be, one on top of the other, spines facing towards him, edges carefully touching, and waited until I left. Did I see Andrew much in the following two years? I don’t think I did. I moved on, didn’t I? I moved on from the friends across the roof garden too.

  ‘Yes, I’ve just been up on the roof garden,’ said the Master.

  ‘Where is that?’ His wife, Caro, asked.

  ‘Up on top of South Court.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘No, the head gardener has barely touched it in the thirty years since the place was built. There are all these shrubs in beds. They are completely overgrown. He’s going to cut them back for me.’

  But I had been elevated to the Footlights. I had been chosen by open audition for the May Week revue. I had been on tour and visited the Edinburgh Festival. Now, at the beginning of my second year, I was expected to appear in a smoking concert in a lecture room in Trinity. I didn’t need Andrew.

  There were no backstage facilities. On one side there was a set of steps and a couple of drapes behind which the performers ineffectually tried to hide themselves. And shortly after the beginning of my second year, I hid behind them myself, waiting to go on for the first time. You took responsibility for your own material, and it seemed that the more old-fashioned that was, the better you were likely to survive. I was a second-year now, still a relative junior and a smoker-virgin compared to Clive Anderson.

  Clive had come from a clone of my own school, further around the London compass — Stanmore in fact — along with someone called Michael Portillo. At least, I don’t remember Portillo ever getting up in the Trinity lecture hall wearing a skirt and horned helmet, waggling his hands around and stepping back and forth distractedly making puns about Vikings, but that’s how I first encountered Clive.

  For my first appearance, I wrote a pirate monologue. The entertainments at a smoker were entirely derived from an already extinct tradition of concert parties. Comic songs were popular. I wrote some myself: ‘The Fork Lift Truck Driving Song’ and ‘Cow Poke’ (‘I’m an old cow poke, and I surely do miss the range now There were no ladies there but we didn’t care. We were too busy poking the cow’). Sketches were performed wearing rudimentary costumes. There were women about, but it was quicker to wear a dress and guarantee a laugh even if the script didn’t. Nobody performed ‘stand-up’. Stand-up comedians had gone into a temporary cultural abeyance, in working men’s clubs up north. We wanted to be Monty Python. So we put on a silly hat and pretended to be an improbable Frenchman or a Viking or a pirate.

  I hobbled into the lights with one leg tied up behind the knee and a broom as a crutch stuffed up under my armpit. I had a stuffed parrot too. The parrot sat on a heap of white plaster. There were lines — ‘He adjusted the albatross around his neck with his good hook’ — but I wasn’t delayed by them for very long. Half-way through I pretended to become increasingly distracted by the pain from my broom handle and carefully transferred to my other armpit. I then fell heavily sideways. That got a laugh too.

  But Footlights was only one of my distractions. That autumn term I was also the newly appointed president of the Cambridge University experimental theatre group — ‘The Mummers’.

  By the beginning of 1973 I was already sitting at meetings with a furrowed brow, trying to decide what ‘experimental’ theatre was. I bought books on Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. I mugged up on Mayakovsky I prepared myself to confront the inevitable challenge: ‘was I Brachia enough?’

  It was the 1970s. We were all eager to be alienated by our theatrical experiences. Equally clearly, nobody understood what that meant.

  The great actor Ekkehard Schall was asked to define ‘alienation’. I was grateful that he was prepared to do so. He was reassuringly brisk. ‘Alienation,’ he explained, ‘is a character on stage performing a double take.’ This was more like it. I understood double takes. I could even do them myself: look, think, look again. Mug for a laugh.

  So, it seemed that the experimental theatre was not so very far removed from the completely un-experimental theatre as advocated by the more conservative members of Footlights. I decided that cinema was the natural home of the natural and that theatre should be the home of the unnatural. Music, lights, dance were what we needed, properly alienated of course. ‘Let’s put on a bit of a show, then.’

  Having wrapped the two opposite poles of Cambridge theatre into one convincing whole, and since I was now in charge, I would decide what. was ‘experimental’ anyway I went in search of ‘epic’ plays to direct which would allow for plenty of mime, posturing, effect and alienation, and lots of double takes, of course.

  Naturally, I had no real idea of what a director did. I had been subject to Mr Baron’s emotional tyranny in school plays. I had watched at least two others try to tell me what do at university but I had no idea what constituted ‘stage craft’. I had hardly been stage-struck as a boy, though in the last few years I had discovered matinee tickets in ‘the gods’ and I had been, on my own, to see everything accessible in the West End — staring down from a great height on remote explosions of glittering brilliance like Adrian Mitchell’s musical version of William Blake or Peter. Nichols’ biographical play Forget-Me-Not-Lane or Alistair Sim in The Magistrate. I lived my early theatrical excitements from up high. Perhaps this was another reason why I needed a lot of arm-waggling and plenty of bangs in every student production that I directed.

  There was a photograph on the wall of the Amateur Dramatic Club theatre. It had been long enough behind the glass to have the slightly wavy corners of a dried-out print. The sleek and comforting visage of Peter Hall beamed out, and underneath he had written: ‘To the ADC. Thank you for allowing me to learn from my mistakes.’ It was timely.

  Yes, as well as the Footlights, it was from this little theatre that the titans of British theatre had emerged. They had, in the last twenty years, revolutionized not only productions, but more particularly, from our point of view, the very status of the university-educated director. The notion of actors being bossed around by uppity bearded teenage know-it-alls (instead of semi-retired actors) was relatively recent and still enjoying its peak. What had filtered through was not so much the methodology as the hierarchical implications. Were there any more glittering exemplars of creative and artistic power than Jonathan Miller, Trevor Nunn or Peter Hall? They bestrode the arts pages — colossi in cable-knit sweaters — without even having had to write anything, or anything difficult like that; just by ‘interpreting’, organizing people and reading ‘the text’ carefully We could do that! There were Cambridge actors, of course: McKellen, Jacobi, Redgrave (Corin, not Vanessa or Michael). They had all burst out of this great period of fecundity too, nurtured by the frightening Dadie Rylands and the brainy John Barton. But you didn’t need a degree to have acting talent. It was spawned all over the place. It was a
bit of a liability to do too much thinking as an actor, and acting was a rather crowded field. There were plenty of acting heroes with no A levels. It was directors who cracked the whip.

  Years later, David Tomlinson explained over lunch in Boodles that senior actors of the post-war period subscribed to Robert Morley’s dictum. The director was someone who got your coat if you happened to have left it in your car. By the late sixties the director was the one who arrived in the car. God knows, it wasn’t that we wanted to direct professionally I had no coherent forward thinking at that stage. I had been propelled entirely by circumstances to a Disneyland in the fens. I had no sense of beginning, planning or auditioning for a career. But just as little boys had once wanted to be engine drivers, so little undergraduates like me rather fancied being stage-directors, and there was Peter Hall on the wall to tell us this was all right. Off I went to make as many mistakes as I could, so that I too might learn.

  The ADC was a strange warren. Its white gable end was decorated with a black lion. Inside, a blank staircase led up to a corridor and beyond that to an unprepossessing entrance and a very dark and bare auditorium. It had none of the trappings of a theatre — no curly plaster detailing, no cherubs, no red walls or half-shaded boudoir lights around the balconies, because there weren’t any balconies. The seating raked straight backwards. The walls were painted a grim battleship grey, and the stage had a stripped proscenium arch with two black entrances cut in the fabric like pillboxes on the Atlantic Wall. It wasn’t that modern-looking, either. The ambience owed something to the 1930s and Edward Craig. It was an almost charmless place, tacked on to the back yard of the Union and sharing space with fire escapes and a bicycle shed, but from now on I was to spend a lot of my time there (certainly more than in college), hunched around one of the low tables in the bar which, even if no one was attending the play, filled up towards the end of the evening, as the pubs shut, with the camp, the loud-mouthed and the ambitious.

  Eventually I was to end up president of the ADC, and vice-president of Footlights too. I became obsessed with running committees, organizing meetings and directing plays, allowing time for a little acting on the side. I returned to my college late at night, too late to see if Charles Lambert was still up, or any of my college friends were hanging about in the JCR. I was hurrying on.

  For the time being, at the beginning of my second year I decided to put on The Dream Play, Ingmar Bergman’s version of Strindberg’s rambling answer to Peer Gynt. It was my duty to direct it. At the beginning of term, I held auditions in a room in Emmanuel above the old hall, and for the first time, in 1975, encountered the divine Charlotte Chesney.

  It was a long room with a slightly twisted floor. Two girls came in together. I wonder if the distance contributed, because I can remember I had the leisure to assess their calf-length tweedy skirts, their striped red and blue tights and their startling manner. I would have been with Lawrence Temple, of course, who was going to teach me about lights and staging and all the other skills that I felt it unnecessary to learn before pushing myself forward to be in charge. He was a London day school boy He must have known Charlotte and her friend Cassandra already They were London day-school girls, in their first term, and despite being convulsed with laughter (bold enough in itself) they seemed to me to have at least two coats of sophistication that my suburban friends in college rather lacked.

  Charlotte in particular had a strong, giggling voice which I found exciting for its unabashed poshness. Medium height, dark hair and a snorting upper-class manner — it was very sexy. They both wanted me to give them a part, which would mean that I would be required to boss them around a bit. Yes. Well, I was up for that.

  There weren’t all that many women around in Cambridge in 1973. All colleges were single-sex. Girton, New Hall and Newnham were admittedly a single female sex but they were deliberately situated a little out of town. Meeting women involved a series of chivalric challenges — social braggadocio, followed by acts of physical bravura. There were college bars (Caius springs to mind) dominated by men from single-sex schools huddling in knots, clutching comfort pints and swaying slightly as they cast agitated glances at the three per cent of females lured into the place, but it was a bold move to cross the borderline under these circumstances. Nonetheless I managed the romantic challenge of chatting up a trainee nurse. That was the braggadocio. She invited me back to the nursing home for the physical bravura. She took me round the back of the building and showed me the twelve-foot wall and then disappeared to use the front entrance. I scrabbled up, sprained an ankle, limped across a darkened lawn and waited in the shadows of a fire door, before finally getting to share her narrow bed.

  It was the sleeplessness of these arrangements that bothered me. There had been a couple of perfectly nice, wispy girls, studying at the technical college, who had made the mistake of acting on an invitation from a friend to visit him in his rooms. Six or seven wild-eyed youths mobbed them in a tiny bed-sit, laughing rather too loudly, smoking Number Sixes and passing a guitar around to pluck the opening chords of songs they didn’t know how to finish. Gradually, by a process of elimination, they dropped out to go to their own beds. The engineers would have gone first with their early start, the English undergraduates last, and after a raid at about four in the morning to steal biscuits from a food cupboard on the other side of the college, a relationship formed on the basis of utter exhaustion.

  With Janis, the exhaustion never stopped. She was such a tall girl. If I clambered into her bed on the floor of the room she shared on the other side of Castle Hill, then we had a sleepless night trying not to wake her room mate. If she came back to Emmanuel it was usually a late decision, because, with some justification, she remained uncertain of the extent of my commitment until we had both drunk rather too much to cope. She had to climb over the gate into the back of the college in a long printed cotton skirt and fell on top of me. In the morning she went to classes. I had to stay in bed until noon.

  I wrote to my mother in the summer of my first year. I told her that I no longer had a girlfriend. ‘She said she had always been out with nice people before,’ I explained, sheepishly.

  I was surprised to find that letter. It was one of about six from my first two years, folded away along with school reports from Conifers, hand-made birthday cards and my three swimming certificates from Epping Junior, and collected together in a Basildon Bond writing-paper box. I must have been replying to one from her. Every single one of my letters begins, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long.’ I was frightened to look at them. What self-perpetuated myths was I going to destroy?

  There was nothing to fear, except perhaps their innocence. As I scanned their bald, one-page accounts, only one directly addressed to my father, I recognized the tone, because it was the same dose of filial reassurance that my son dishes out to me today by mobile phone. I was working at my studies. I was proud to tell them that my supervisor had called my essay ‘a monumental and sane piece of work’. (On what, I wonder? I can barely recall the individual papers on the History syllabus.) I was even arranging to get a travel grant to work in a library in the vacation. What touched me, because my memory has suppressed them, are the little nuances of, if not homesickness, then at least home-awareness: my concern for my sister’s exams and my interest in the pets: ‘Have you got a wig for the cat?’ I inquired. Epping was not as far away as I imagined.

  16. Mr Big

  At the beginning of my son’s second year I had to hump the bass amplifier back to Cambridge, knowing perfectly well that he never played the damn thing, suspecting that our ferrying was wholly unnecessary and trying to persuade him to plan ahead a bit more.

  ‘There isn’t room for him to leave it,’ Jo explained. ‘His room has to be used by a summer-school student.’

  Did it? Is that what happened when I was there? All that sort of stuff, the arrivals, departures, even any memories of contact with home had withered. ‘No, no. He must be able to store it. There’s a room somewh
ere where you put it, surely’

  ‘It’s not like it was when you were there.’

  ‘There are Chinese students now. You don’t think they take all their stuff back and forth to Shanghai every term.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. The storage room’s full. It’s too late now’

  It was the principle. ‘You have made this up. As if I don’t know what I’m talking about. Your mother and I have now had to have an argument. I know what goes on.’

  But I was grudgingly there to help. I was prepared for atonement, except that I needed to retain my own ground. He became itchy when we got there and stood to one side with his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, the thumbs on his belt, looking tense.

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘I’ve got people to see.

  ‘I’m not coming all this way…’

  We ate in the Loch Fyne franchise. He telephoned Rupert, and Rupert said he’d come and meet us there. We talked about his term in the stop-start way of fathers and sons. He was serving in the college bar.

  ‘That’s the limit of your extra—curricular activity?’

  ‘There’s too much work for anything else. I’m on the college catering committee, but last term I had a meeting on the Sunday night, and my supervisor told me that I had to make a choice between architecture and college politics.’

  ‘After one meeting?’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  I poked my halibut. His life was at the college and in the Architecture department. They worked until nine at night. When they weren’t in their studio they were hoarding time to prepare for their studio. It was better to change the subject. I recognized that I was veering into a middle-aged paternal foolhardiness. I could feel it welling. It needed self-control.