by Sue Johnston
One of the groups being run at the Cockpit was headed up by Gordon Wiseman. I was very interested in the work he was doing: using theatre to teach children with special needs. He then went on to set up a Theatre in Education team for all schools. I would sit in the gallery watching as he worked and had lengthy discussions with him about his methods. I let slip that I was an actress and soon he was allowing me to join him in the discussions with the young people he was working with. Eventually there was a vacancy for a new member of the team so I auditioned and got the part. I’m sure that I’d gone on at the poor man so much that he felt he had to give it to me! Either way, it was the start of an exciting new chapter in my life.
Part of Gordon’s brief was to perform set texts that were on the school curriculum for fifth and sixth formers. The funding for this group came from the Local Education Authority, so he wasn’t allowed to develop any extra-curricular work, which was fine for a time, as the way in which he worked with these texts was fresh and innovative. Observing how he took the text apart and presented it to these young people in a way that they could understand it really appealed to me, and it was the beginning of my huge love affair with Theatre in Education, or TIE.
For anyone not familiar with TIE, put simply it is bringing theatre into schools to use as an educational tool. At a basic level, it is just another way of teaching children, but I think that when it is at its best it is capable of transforming lives. The response from students was phenomenal. Many children never go to the theatre as it is often seen as a solely middle-class pursuit, but from my experience I firmly believe that all children of all backgrounds respond positively to theatre when it is performed in an engaging and non-patronising way. And the fact that Theatre in Education groups are mostly peripatetic also helps. Young people always seemed to open up more to us as outsiders than they did with their teachers.
The first play I worked on was Romeo and Juliet. We performed it as a play within a play, so that the young people would come into it as the extras and I – I was playing the director – could manoeuvre them easily around the action. They were part of the scene at the ball where Romeo and Juliet meet, and they were all given either a Montague or a Capulet colour when they came in, so they had a ready-made allegiance. I remember that the music by Andrew Dixon was fantastic and there was such an element of fun about the whole performance that they would all be buzzing with excitement when we broke for lunch.
In the afternoon they would come back into the theatre, expecting more of the same upbeat fun, only to be presented with two coffins: Romeo’s and Juliet’s. They would then have to discuss why they had died and how they thought that it had been allowed to happen, using the text to back up their argument. The young people were always engrossed, because they had invested time in the characters and the play, rather than reading it at their desks. I spent two years at the Cockpit and I learned so much from both the people in the theatre company and the young people we worked with.
This time was a real hiatus. My friends from the Cockpit and I would go to a pub in Marylebone opposite the theatre. The locals were real Londoners and looked on with bemusement at us arty-farty types frequenting their pub. However, one evening this all changed. There was a power cut and huddling round candles brought out the Blitz spirit in all of us and soon we were chatting away like old friends. After that there was no division between the locals and the actors, we were all bar buddies.
Some of the men that we befriended were – to put it mildly – treading on the wrong side of the law. One evening, one of these guys approached me. ‘Here, Sue,’ he said, checking that no one was overhearing our conversation. ‘Fancy earning two hundred quid?’
Of course I did. Two hundred pounds was a lot of money then and I was skint.
‘Go on…’ I said, intrigued.
‘We need a posh bird to go up West.’
‘I’m not posh…’
‘You can do posh, though. Anyway,’ he leaned in, ‘alls you have to do is take this credit card, go into Harrods and buy as much gear as you can carry, then bring it back to me.’
He didn’t need to explain that the credit card was hooky. That night I couldn’t sleep. It was a very tempting offer as I was on baked beans for the fifth time that week but I just couldn’t do it. I was nervous going back into the pub the following night.
I approached my prospective partner-in-crime. ‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry.’
‘No problems, love. Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
I think that is as close to dealings with the underworld as I’ve ever come!
But then something was to happen that made my newly regained sunny outlook and love of London come tumbling down.
*
One night I was heading home on the tube. It was 7 November 1970. I was twenty-seven. I’ll always remember the date. I got off at Gunnersbury Park tube station with the usual crowd but had to stop to pick up a prescription. When I came out of the chemist’s, the place was deserted. I opened the gate to take me along the lane, under the bridge – the path I usually took. I felt vulnerable but I’d committed to taking this way home so I carried on.
I heard a noise behind me that made me turn around. A young man was leaning back against the fence and was doing something I couldn’t quite make out at first, then I realised he was masturbating. I stopped momentarily, shocked by what I was witnessing, then I began to run.
I heard him thundering along behind me and I was panic-stricken. I knew he was going to try to attack me. I threw down my bag, thinking that he might just want the contents of my purse and hoping that he’d take it and leave me alone, but he lunged for me, grabbing my throat. He punched me in the side as his fingers squeezed into my neck. Everything went into slow motion.
‘I’m going to die now,’ I thought.
I heard screaming, it seemed to be coming from far away and then it came nearer until I realised it was me. I was screaming for my life.
I suddenly began to fight back with every bit of strength in me. I was kicking and clawing at him. At that moment the fact that he might be about to rape me hadn’t crossed my mind: I was simply fighting for survival. He stopped and hovered over me, staring straight at me, spitting bile – as if sizing me up. I’m not sure if he heard something that disturbed him or was deterred by the fight I’d put up, but he ran off, leaving me scrabbling to pick myself up. It was all over.
I picked my bag up and ran. He had punched me everywhere but at that moment I didn’t feel any pain. I was too terrified he might be waiting around the corner. I had a good friend, Kathy, who lived on the estate next to the station so I ran to her house and hammered on the door.
‘Oh, Sue…’ she said pulling me in, shocked to see the state of me.
‘I’ve been attacked,’ I said and then burst into tears.
‘Come and sit down,’ Kathy said, guiding me gently over to the settee.
Kathy’s husband and brother-in-law came into the room. They took one look at me and knew that I’d been attacked. I couldn’t look at them.
‘What does he look like?’ Kathy’s husband asked.
I could only describe my attacker’s clothes. They shot off in the car to look for him. Kathy went in the kitchen to make me a cup of tea. I was sitting, numb, perched on the edge of the settee. I felt something trickling down the leather material and onto the floor. I looked down and realised I had wet myself.
Kathy came back in, and if she noticed, she didn’t say anything.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said kindly and took me upstairs. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’
She put me in the bath and I scrubbed myself clean and changed into some of Kathy’s clothes, which of course I shouldn’t have done as the police wanted to examine me when they arrived. Kathy’s husband had called them. They put me in the back of the panda car and drove me around to see if I could spot the man, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. They asked me to describe him, but even though I could see him in my mind I found it impossible to pin
down anything about him. I went home that night terrified.
After this I totally lost the plot. I couldn’t go into work. I began suffering from severe migraines and was prescribed Valium. I was still fearful of being attacked and had to walk down the middle of the road when I went out, obsessed with being visible to other people should I be attacked again. One day, I was walking through Waterloo Station when someone ran up behind me. They were running for a train but I crouched on the floor and went into hysterics. I was an absolute mess.
My friends tried to get me to talk about what had happened but their kind words had the reverse effect on me and I began to close down entirely. I was in desperate need of some help but didn’t know how to ask for it. I didn’t tell my parents what had happened as I really didn’t want to worry them. I knew that me being attacked in London was the sum of their fears. I wanted them to think that things were going well for me, even when I was at rock bottom.
*
Fortunately, my friend Jude, the secretary at the Cockpit, asked me if I’d like to move into a flat with her and her partner in Maida Vale. Living with Jude, I was able to start putting what had happened behind me, and living with her was one of the happiest and most peaceful times in my life. We lived in an apartment at the top floor of an old Georgian house. It was owned by a designer, so everything about it was well thought out and it was a pleasure to live there. I cycled to work each day and I felt like I was beginning to be able to breathe again, that the attack was behind me and my depression was lifting.
I look back at that period in my life, the attack and the subsequent trauma, and feel that it was one of my darkest times. But I came out of it, and things changed and improved for me when I was able to help myself again. I have learned that whenever things are really bad something good is always around the corner. It just might not be the first corner that you come to.
Chapter Seven
I WAS STILL very much in love with TIE but my love affair with London, for the time being, was over. I felt that I needed to move away from the city, and that the anonymity of the place wasn’t helping me. As a Theatre in Education team we would meet up with other TIE companies to find out what people were up to in other parts of the country and to share best practice. At one of these meetings the TIE group Coventry Belgrade put on a demonstration that had me transfixed.
Coventry Belgrade was at the forefront of TIE, performing their own original work and breaking new ground as they did so. They performed one of their programmes for infants called Pow Wow for us, and a section of a play about the Protectorate period or, as they termed it, the Civil War. I had never heard it called the Civil War before. Both pieces were thought-provoking, putting the events in a social framework and drawing parallels with the modern world, but allowed the children to reach their own conclusions.
The performance and energy of the company really inspired me. I left feeling that I would do whatever I needed to move up to Coventry and work with this fantastic theatre group. I wanted to still work with kids but I wanted it to be relevant; to take something historical and give it a new viewpoint was quite revolutionary at the time as history was still being taught in an Imperial context, placing an emphasis on the conqueror’s view of history. Also, Coventry Belgrade was aimed at children of all ages, not just secondary school kids, and they weren’t married to the curriculum texts as we were at the Cockpit. I was thrilled when I was offered a job there.
Having the opportunity to start again was a relief for me. A new place where I could establish new friendships and a new life. The actress Maggie Steed and I were friends and we both moved to Coventry at the same time, so we rented a house together. During the Second World War, Coventry had been hit hard by the Blitz and was still in the process of being rebuilt in the early seventies. There were amazing new buildings being erected, like Coventry Cathedral, but at the same time there were still streets with craters where the bombs had fallen during the war. I was very hippyish at this time. I wore my hair long, dressed in long flowing skirts and I never wore a bra or a pair of shoes, for that matter. We used to wander around barefoot in Coventry city centre. We weren’t given a second glance in London, but in Coventry I definitely drew a few stares.
There was a pub called the Town Wall in the city centre that had been left standing in what was now the car park at the back of the theatre. We became regulars there. I became very involved with the life of the theatre and loved my new group of friends. We were very politically active, we discussed politics, we discussed the world and we wanted this to be reflected in the work that we performed. The political ethos of the company was very much reflected in its day-to-day running. Everyone was paid the same wage, including the director, and it was a cooperative in the truest sense of the word. After a while a large group of us moved into a house together on the main road into the city. It was a large Victorian terrace and there were loads of us living there. It was like being a student again. The camaraderie, the mucking in together, the lack of heating! It was freezing and I would leap out of bed in the morning and charge to the bathroom as quickly as possible to try to avoid getting cold.
It was at this time that my friend Margot Leicester came into my life. Before we married, in my early twenties, Neil and I went to visit his friend in Exeter. Mitch’s girlfriend Margot was meant to be there but had gone home to visit her family. After that I heard a lot about this Margot, and from what I heard I would have liked to have met her but never got the chance.
Five years later, when Margot and I first got to know one another, we were out for Sunday lunch one day and it struck me to ask her, ‘You didn’t go to university in Exeter, did you, and had a boyfriend called Mitch?’
Margot’s mouth dropped open. ‘You’re that Sue?’
‘And you’re that Margot?’
What a coincidence! Margot and I became great friends, like the sisters that we never had. We are still incredibly close to this day.
I think that I was at my most politically active at this time. Ted Heath was the prime minister and we were heading towards the time of the three-day week. Looking back, things were very austere at that time. The country was gripped by uncertainty. Unemployment and inflation were high; strikes were weekly. There was a real feeling that the government had no idea what it was like for normal, working people to make ends meet. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But I think that there seemed to be even less hope for the future then than there is now. Demonstrations were commonplace and I would take part readily. I have always been a big believer in giving a voice to those who do not have one.
Throughout my time as an actress I have been a member of Equity but in the seventies and eighties I was very active in the movement. We would make the journey to the AGM every year in London and in the earlier years it was a family affair with a real air of chaos about it. People would bring their children and their animals. The playwright David Holman would bring his dog Billybags with him, who would trot across the seats and plonk himself down in the lap of the first person he took a shine to. These meetings were a time to catch up with old friends, to spot famous people and generally have a gossip. But as the years progressed, the divides within Equity became more and more pronounced and the meetings more passionate. We wanted change.
The situation at the time was a ridiculous catch-22 for new actors. In order to work as an actor you needed an Equity card, in order to gain an Equity card you needed to prove you had worked as an actor. So for anyone wanting to get into the business there were hoops to be jumped through that to me seemed so unnecessary. Young people had to go off and perform in pubs and clubs, anywhere, just to show they had done something and then they could begin the slow process to being deemed worthy of an Equity card.
I was very passionate about Equity, and still am. I feel that there has to be a union that will step in to represent actors if they are being unfairly treated at work and in pay. However, this wish for change had us labelled as ‘Reds under the bed’. Equity was a professional union – mor
e of an association that protected the current members’ interests – and most of the old guard wanted to keep it that way. I, and many of the younger actors coming through at the time, wanted Equity to change to form a branch and delegate structure. This would mean that more power would be given to people in the region where they lived and they would have a representative to whom they could go to air any grievances. Vanessa Redgrave often spoke on this issue and at one AGM she stood up to speak. A whisper travelled through the auditorium. Then, as she spoke passionately about the need for change, a chant began: ‘Red Queen, Red Queen, Red Queen…’ It became louder and louder, people were heckling her, but she remained composed and finished what she had to say. It was quite barbaric to witness, these socalled ‘professionals’ giving someone such a hard time for voicing her opinion.
Seated behind me on this occasion was a lady who was smartly dressed with a pillbox hat on. She had brought her knitting to keep her occupied. Her friend was sitting next to her, rummaging in a bag of boiled sweets. If you imagine Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough as Cissie and Ada then you wouldn’t be far wrong. The woman who was knitting leaned over, her needles still clacking together, and said to her friend, ‘They go on these package holidays to Russia and come back with their heads full of these ideas.’