Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  The books about this are always written by the sons: little Edmund Gosse, junior Samuel Butler, delinquent John Betjeman, adolescent Nick Hornby The poor, stupid, emotional, domineering, wet, weak-minded patriarch is dissected from the pitying child’s angle. Did any one of those arrogant young bastards have any conception of the base and violent feelings that fathers have?

  We walked away back to the college after lunch. Rupert and George became animated. We turned right at Fitzwilliam’ cake shop and along past the Museum of Anthropology, which I had always proposed to visit some day They drifted on ahead, talking and giggling animatedly. They were making plans. George, in fact, was perfectly happy, perfectly integrated, perfectly independent, perfectly satisfied. I dragged along, ten steps behind. Then I left them at the college gate and went around the back to collect the car.

  Sometimes I wonder if they feel that I betrayed them, my own old, original college friends. The people I seldom meet again with whom I wandered around Woolworth’s and Burgess’s, had coffee in the Copper Kettle and went to the Arts Cinema late at night to watch Fellini’s Satyricon — all those vital, critical pleasures of quality nothing time. But if we got back together now, how would we revive that? ‘Let’s go for a walk down to Woolworth’s like the old days.’ ‘Let’s play three chords on a guitar for hours.’ ‘Let’s actually do absolutely fuck all for an afternoon except walk down by the river and make remarks about the tourists.’ Today, if I want to catch up at all, I have to make an appointment. It would be so much simpler if we all still lived in one square mile.

  Charlotte was playing ‘the daughter’ in The Dream Play. We rehearsed it all that term. Jane Rogers, now a novelist, was quietly impressive as the mother figure. My directorial contributions were to arrange people prettily, design a surreal album-cover poster, order colour gradations in the costumes and leer coyly at Charlotte. We had our dress rehearsals in the concrete theatre in Christ’s. It seemed to go together briskly I suddenly thought of something I had overlooked. ‘How long is it then?’ I asked Lawrence Temple, my helper. ‘Where should we put the interval?’

  We looked at our watches. It had lasted about forty minutes in total. The whole play was shorter than an average first half. We went straight ahead without an interval. It should have been a key part of my expensive, state-subsidized education. Nobody has ever complained about a play being too short.

  Charlotte, who remains a friend, came to stay over this last New Year and told me what happened next. (I would say ‘reminded me’, but it was all new) ‘Finally, in the pub the night before the last night of the production, a group of people were discussing what to give you as a present.’

  ‘As a present?’

  ‘Well, you had been the director. And Rose Bechler said, “Well, I know what he’d like as a present, but that’s sort of up to Charlotte.”‘ (This sounded unexpectedly erotic.)

  ‘But what did you say?’

  ‘Well, I was …’ Charlotte pulled her lips down and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I didn’t think anybody else would have spotted it.’

  So, engineered by Rose, Jane Rogers, Johnny Brock and Andy Finkel (who is now Turkish correspondent for the Times), Charlotte and I were set up to ‘get off together’. And later that night she took me back to Newnham.

  I remember that the procedure resembled a slightly ritualized James Bond feint. The porters just weren’t there at the desk very often. Charlotte went on ahead, checked the way was clear, and I sneaked in, in plain sight. We turned right and scuttled down the corridor in an exaggerated hush.

  I liked Charlotte’s room. It had a high, institutional ceiling and a settled, rather ordered atmosphere, with a velvet cover over the bed, a kettle in the hearth and teapot on a trivet. There was some sort of undergrowth in a pot too —a plant, in fact. There was plenty of junk in my room, but nothing that needed tending. Just being in her quarters constituted a little invasion, staying seemed like a conquest of alien territory. It was feminine. It was a carefully arranged and detailed room with patterned fabrics. She kept things in little hand-chosen antique boxes brought from home. I say that it was feminine — it clearly was — but only feminine in a Virginia Woolf, masculine sort of a way There weren’t any teddy bears or rag dolls in Charlotte’s room. Charlotte had strong ideas about taste and ornament, which were new to me — not the Laura Ashley, that was common enough, but the aesthetic touches; the patterned stuff, the wooden stuff, the textile stuff. I was only gradually to discover that these were not chosen at random. Her taste was important to her. Rather vitally important to her, I was to find out.

  ‘But then you went to America on tour with Romeo and Juliet. And you instantly started messing around.’

  ‘We had only had one night together.’

  ‘Yes, but you wrote me a letter.’

  ‘Did I? I’m impressed.’ (All these letters are making me feel like some sort of Victorian lady novelist.)

  ‘So was I. You confessed. Juliet had a thing about you.’

  I was happy to let Charlotte believe that. What sort of cowardice was this, thirty years after the event? I could have said, ‘No, no, I strung her along. I toyed with her affections. I encouraged her, went to bed with her all through the tour and then refused to talk to her on the bus.’ But I didn’t. I was still ashamed. Mortification can flare up long after the details are ashes. I wanted a settled, long-term, intimate relationship and I wanted to shag anything I fancied too.

  And I wanted to go to America. So, Footlights, the Mummers, a new girlfriend — that should have been enough, but I joined the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company too. ‘Educational elite, fine speaking, travel abroad, hands across the sea, special relationship.’ Like Richard Hillary, popping over to Heidelberg to row against the Germans just before the Second World War, the combined amateur theatrical talents of Oxford and Cambridge would vault the Atlantic every year to recite the bard in Boston.

  Rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet took place upstairs in a big pub off the Euston Road, just like for proper actors. This was during the summer of my first long vacation. (The same summer I toured with the Footlights, went to Edinburgh and played the Roundhouse. We took a break to do some minor academic work in Cambridge and appear in a few other plays before heading for the States in the Christmas vacation — ‘No, no, I won’t be with you for Christmas either, Mummy, I’m afraid.’)

  I had been cast as Prince Escalus and ‘old Capulet’. Not ‘Capulet’ himself. He was the one with a lot of furious speeches about his daughter marrying a Montague. ‘Old Capulet’ crosses the stage during the party scene (the one Romeo crashes) and has a single line. But I was also the Prince, a significant influence on Veronese affairs in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

  We were under the languidly watchful eye of a real professional director, Eric Thompson, famous as the father of Emma Thompson, except that Emma Thompson was yet to come to Cambridge and become a film star, so, as far as we were concerned, famous as the father of The Magic Roundabout.

  On the first day, after buying up a couple of large Victorian hat-stands he had spotted in the corner of the pub, Eric stood in front of the entire cast and stroked his luxurious Mexican moustache. ‘I have decided,’ he said, emphatically, ‘that our main purpose in this production must be to tell the story.’

  We sat with half smiles and the fixed attention of sheepdogs. Privately and separately, we thought, ‘Doesn’t everybody know the story of Romeo and Juliet?’ Eric wanted to focus all his attention on the lovers and their passion, and a lot less on fair Verona where we laid our scene, and of whereof I was the noble Prince.

  Essentially my very important part was to run on stage and command the unruly young persons to stop fighting. Two days after rehearsing my first scene I sat with my half-smile and my tongue lolling out, ready for my next rehearsal while Eric fingered his Zapata again. ‘I think we’ll cut this scene,’ he announced after a pause. I gagged, half raised a hand and then went home.

  At the end of the first
week’s rehearsal we had reached the end of the play and were to rehearse the tumultuous final scene and my last great speech summing up the whole sorry mess with appropriate authoritative pomp. Again Eric twirled his moustache. Again he looked off into the half-distance. ‘I think we’ll cut the final scene and end the play here,’ he said. At the point where you might expect the Prince to come rushing on stage and do a big speech on the ‘woe and Rom-ee-o’, there would instead be a sudden and conclusive blackout.

  So at the very beginning of the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company’s production I descended a set of elegant steps, ‘like an animated mustard pot’, in a comically large yellow hat. Having delivered my speech, I rushed back offstage, tore off my Velcroed codpiece and my bright yellow tights, held up by improvised elastic braces, feverishly covered my face with purple lines, smothered my head with a manky wig, and rushed back to the wings from where, panting heavily, I re-entered, gurning and gibbering as an unexpectedly sweaty old man. As I reached the other side it was all over. I spent the rest of the play and the majority of my trip around America slumped in a dressing room waiting to take part in the ‘noises off’ and the curtain call. ‘Crescendo and … blackout.’ Cue furious applause.

  Well, cue muted applause. They quite liked the production in places like Clarion, Pennsylvania, where the set, big enough to fill the Oxford Playhouse, became a doll’s house on the prairie of a university hall stage, but Philadelphia was a tougher call. They were used to giving pre-Broadway shows a shake-down. (‘I’d rather be in Philadelphia’ is written on W C. Fields’ gravestone.) The critics there, in Cambridge and in Oxford or virtually anywhere they had seen Shakespeare staged before, didn’t much care for our simplistic, story-telling approach. Heck, I was only on in the first five minutes anyway Besides, we were off on a complete tour of the eastern seaboard of the United States of America in an old bus, driven by a wise-cracking black driver, through snowstorms, along ‘turnpikes’ and ‘freeways’, past fire hydrants, Howard Johnsons, mall strips, truck stops and all the romantic paraphernalia of a fantasy United States spun from a childhood spent watching old black-and-white films on a Sunday-afternoon sofa.

  We went to New York. Later that week, we also managed by some absurdity of scheduling to call in at Raleigh, North Carolina, where it still appeared to be late summer. Christmas was spent homeless in Washington. But usually we stayed in university dormitories, or ‘student rooms’ in expensive New York hotels, or were put up as ‘house-guests’ by well-meaning friends of the theatre, miles out in the suburbs. Lazing in bed in the morning, we could hear the muffled shouts of husbands and wives arguing somewhere in their breakfast rooms, perfectly aware that they were probably arguing about us. I barely remembered to call home and wish Epping a happy Christmas.

  Our ‘allowance’ was three dollars a day — one dollar per meal. But there was no dollar if food was ‘provided’. After our flabby first night in Philadelphia, a reception was organized by the Friends of the Shubert Theater. We were herded into our bus and driven across the city to an elegant eighteenth-century mansion in an elegant eighteenth-century street. Beyond the veil of snowflakes, we could see an open door and a sumptuous interior. At the top of the steps several distinguished orthopaedic surgeons and tax lawyers were waiting in dinner jackets. Wiffin, our manager, stood up at the front of the bus.

  ‘There is food provided here,’ he announced, ‘so this will be counted as your evening meal.’

  ‘No dollar?’ someone wailed.

  ‘No dollar.’

  Twenty-seven student ambassadors charged through the slush, ignored the outstretched hands of philanthropic dignitaries, scampered across the parquet and fell ravenously upon three or four plates of dinky canapés, consuming everything, including the parsley.

  We were Oxford and Cambridge together, but rather more Oxford than Cambridge, as I recall. Nurses, friars and apothecaries seemed to come from Cambridge; Lords, noble Romeos and fair Capulets from Oxford. Originally, the part of Mercutio was going to be played by a bloke from Oxford called Mel Smith.

  I had been introduced to the male Zuleika Dobson of OUDS at the Edinburgh Festival the previous August — not, that is, to the man himself, but to his reputation.

  In 1973 there was some sort of joint charity event involving both universities. The two groups put up a couple of their sketches. ‘The thing about you Footlights people,’ Richard Sparks told Jon Canter, ‘is that you ignore any pretension and just concentrate on the jokes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jon replied. ‘Unlike you Oxford people. You’re all pretension and no jokes.’

  But I was probably listening to Steven Pimlott, now a distinguished stage director, reciting M. R. James stories in a darkened room off Leith Parade. Only certain senior undergraduates had been invited from Leith Transport Hall, otherwise I might have encountered Mr Smith then. As it was, the day afterwards I was sitting in a gloomy pub on the south side of the hill that runs down from the Royal Mile to the Grassmarket, when Jon Canter nudged me.

  ‘That’s him, that’s that Mel Smith bloke from last night.’ Jon pointed at a pasty sort of bloke with a protruding jaw, hunched over an unnecessarily large selection of drinks. I was unimpressed. I had not gone to university to be impressed by anything, least of all by someone from Oxford. And when all was said and done, he looked rather like me.

  When Mr Smith’s tutors heard that he had been offered the opportunity to eat hamburgers in fake wood breakfast bars on the other side of the Atlantic, they counselled him not to go. I believe they told him that if he did go, he need not bother to return. They were anxious, after his undergraduate career igniting explosives on the Playhouse stage, that he should make an attempt to master a little of his chosen subject, Psychology. He stayed and was chucked out anyway I was not to concern myself unduly with old potato face for another five years.

  Smith’s part was taken by the dashing Geoffrey McGivern. Nobody would have considered Geoffrey especially dashing except possibly Geoffrey But at this stage of his life he did, and it was an advantage. Geoffrey played all the big roles at Cambridge. He was, and still is, an excellent, flamboyant actor, constantly in demand as ‘the other bloke’ in sketch shows.

  Like Charlotte, he had come to stay with me for Christmas 2004. It was the same time of year as the trip, and we were driving around the outskirts of Colchester, the same sort of place. With its Essex straightforwardness, its hoardings and semi-industrial hinterland, it reminded me of the States.

  ‘There was the very cool dude who drove the bus through the snow, and one of the girls wanted to be sick and asked him to stop, and he said, “Can’t do that, honey, you go right ahead and do it on the step there,” so she did. And did you go to that small woman with the big breasts’ house?’

  ‘I might have done,’ I said.

  ‘She had the embroidered gold piano.’

  I asked him whether he remembered the trip to the hunting lodge in northern Pennsylvania.

  ‘Oh my God! Yes.’

  What a thing, to open these memory banks. Geoffrey was smiling and rocking forward with delight. ‘Weren’t there girls there?’

  Oh, I see. He was hoping for nostalgie d’érotomanie. ‘No.’

  ‘But we must have gone all the way there, miles to get there, and then got back by first light to catch the bus …’

  I temporarily lost Geoffrey to the miserable business which afflicted whoever I reminisced with, of trying to put the events into a logical order.

  During the tour, Geoffrey’s involvement, like mine, finished early on in the drama, though I think it is fair to say that his performance had more impact. We shared a dressing room with an ex-Territorial Army historian with bad teeth and a manic laugh called Richard McKenna, who had been cast as ‘the apothecary’. Richard had over an hour to perfect his make-up before going on stage and liked to find ways of ‘improving’ his part. As he waited, his false nose grew ever huger. He spent his daytimes searching out stuffed birds and voodoo dolls to ha
ng on his costume. He started tottering on stage on miniature stilts. Geoffrey and the others helped him. One night, when Romeo hammered on a flat and shouted, ‘Apothecary, apothecary!’, six separate ghostly wise old men, clad in flowing robes, appeared from every dark corner of the stage, clutching lanterns, and chorused together, ‘Who calls so loud?’

  It was Christmas 1973. The Philadelphia Sound was just becoming fashionable, and we were in Philadelphia. Geoffrey and I were head-hunted in a disco by two charming women in their mid-twenties. They had greatly admired Geoffrey’s swagger and declamatory voice in the play, and I just happened to be with him. ‘Ooooh, ooh, oooh! Oooooh! Take me in your arms and rock me, baby.’ Eventually we went back to their place. My friend escorted me to her bed on the third floor of the dinky little terraced house, leaving Geoffrey and Dee to take the room below.

  We were woken at six in the morning. A man’s voice was shouting in the street outside. ‘I know you are in there with someone! You whore! You’re in there with some guy. How could you do this to me, you bitch? I’m going to kill you both.’

  If you had swung the front of the terrace open (like my sister’s doll’s house) you could have watched two men, one above the other, leaping out of bed.

  ‘Oh my God. It’s Frank!’ said my girl.

  Frank. Her Frank? Or Dee’s Frank? It was a significant distinction. I was wrestling with my fashionably skimpy hipster flares, which had pulled themselves inside out in excitement a few hours before. There was a furious hammering on the door. (‘Who calls so loud?’) One American fantasy was merging into another.

  ‘I’ll kill you, I swear it!’ The voice had become slightly hysterical.

  ‘It’s Dee’s old boyfriend. He gets mad. She’ll send him away.