I also knew men were meant to be angry and brusque, in particular when they come home from work hungry. I wasn’t a little poet with my head in the clouds. In those days, it was totally legitimate to be a patriarchal Victorian figure. I wasn’t expecting Dad to walk through the door and be full of hugs. That wasn’t the way. It was never going to be the way. I’d grown up surrounded by and embedded among the anger of the working classes, not just my father, but in general. Anger was not a rarity in lives like mine; it had a constant existence.
I understand now that his rage wasn’t about me, it was about his relationship with himself. Here was a perfectionist, obsessive about punctuality and working hard. Each night he was carrying a metaphorical briefcase full of mental baggage – frustration, irritation, anger, despair – and coming home to a sensitive 11-year-old boy who thought the sun shone out of his behind. I hero-worshipped him, the way lads do. More than anything, when my dad came home, I wanted him to smile. What I got was the opposite – a shout, a snarl. I now comprehend that process in his head, that doubtless there were deeper-seated and longer-rooted issues at work here too. On his side, the twins had reached eight years of age when I came along. They had each other so he felt he still had Elsie to himself. With me, Elsie was experiencing maternity as most women do, one on one, potentially with a baby that was never planned in the first place. There is potential there for jealousy, a triangle rarely pleasant when it features two alpha males. On my side, when I got older, and denied a close sibling of my own, I was unarguably needy. My mum said Dad was wonderful with me when I was a toddler but when I got to the more demanding period, when I really wanted to do things with him, like go to football matches, it was more difficult. At that point, he was tired from the situation at work, wrestling with his own personality. My hope that he’d invest time in me turned to anger when he wouldn’t. Even if we went to games, I could often tell he didn’t really enjoy taking me. He just wanted to sit at home in his chair. He worked bloody hard and he was knackered.
Equally, though, while I can make these logical deductions, his rage scared me, and that hasn’t always been easy to reconcile. It created a period of intense uncertainty about him in me. Yes, there was a background picture to his discontent, but essentially he was putting his own feelings before mine and everyone else’s, and we all normalised that change in atmosphere when he came in because it was simply how things were. He was the man of the house. Whatever day or time, it was his right to dictate the mood. If you went in and he said, ‘You all right, cock?’, you’d think Oh good, sorted. If you went in and he said, ‘Where’ve you been?’, you knew you had to tread lightly. Ironically, that need to react quickly to unpredictability would help me enormously as an actor. At the Central School of Speech and Drama, where I ended up, there was a brilliant dialect teacher, Julia Wilson-Dickson, who said I was good with accents, which indicated that sound had been very important to me from early on in terms of taking the emotional temperature of a room. That certainly resonated with me, in terms of the temperature around my dad.
My mum has said to me throughout my life, ‘You were a latchkey boy.’ I wasn’t. What she means is that, when she wasn’t there, I ran full pelt into the brunt of my dad’s anger and frustration. She feels complicit because she worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when it was at its worst. She should never feel that because, if she hadn’t worked, we couldn’t have lived in that house. Dad’s rage was itself seeded in the fact that he’d never had the chance to develop himself or go to university, instead put through a social experiment, Whiteacre, in a public school environment, which affirmed what was good about him and then stuck him back in a Victorian education in Salford complete with Snuffy Johnson and the rest. My mum also knew that only she was able to throw a fire blanket on the intensity of Dad’s rage. Dad’s anger would frighten me, but not my mum. Like many working-class women, she was tough and brave. Mum could quell the anger in Ronnie that a little boy couldn’t.
When I was older, I showed Mum and Dad the film Distant Voices, Still Lives, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the playwright and director Terence Davies’ father in 1940s Liverpool. It’s very arty and slightly abstract and for a while I could see they were a little dismissive. Then they couldn’t take their eyes off it. As the best films do, it had made the jump from screen to real life, highly evocative of my mum and dad’s period. Postlethwaite’s character in the film is much more intense than my dad and yet that performance is the epitome of working-class inner turmoil, a quality my dad carried by the barrowful, heavy and all-encompassing, which is exactly how I experienced it at a formative age. The psychological and emotional impact on me of the passion of that anger was very, very considerable. My dad wasn’t an abusive monster, but he was a very, very powerful presence. People tell me I’ve got presence when all I’m doing is standing in a room. When I was a kid, all my dad had to do was sit in a chair. I think presence, in those terms, is internal activity. There’s something going on inside, like a pressure cooker. With Dad, that pressure would be released in short bursts around the house.
Mum told me once, ‘I had to have a word with your dad. I had to tell him “You’re frightening Chris.” ’ At the time, I wondered if maybe as a kid I’d made his anger a bigger demon than it was. Now I’ve got children of my own, I see it differently. Until that happens, I don’t think you’re aware of your power as a parent. Children’s inhibitors and filters are out so they experience us on a level that we as adults can’t understand. As a child, you can’t defend yourself physically, so your intuition is much more foregrounded, your psyche very impressionable. You remain highly sensitive to unpredictability, movement, noise. I wasn’t scared of Alan, I wasn’t scared of Keith, I wasn’t scared of Mum, but I was scared of Dad. He never wanted to take it out on me – he loved me – he just never realised quite how powerful he was. I think of that so much now with my own children, and I want to make it a better experience for them than I had. As a parent, with children around you, no matter how bad your day is, that isn’t their day – and you’re taller and you’re bigger.
Thankfully, as a counter to Dad, I had someone who was deeply, deeply fair. My mum was, and is, gentle, kind and emotionally intelligent. Alan and Keith were also gentle and loving. But they could all look after themselves. They were negotiating that house in a different way. They will also remind me that I’m the one who’s the most similar to Dad. Conflict can often arise when two people have very similar personalities. Many great dramas are based in that very scenario.
Again, we are talking about the complexities that arise in families weighted down by non-communication. When Dad had me up against that wall, there was part of me thinking, Prove you don’t love me. Fill me in, and another part telling him, ‘I really need you – I don’t want to always get the vulnerability and the tenderness from my mum. I don’t want to always have to run to my mum, because I’m not female, I’m male, and I want to find it in you.’ As a male, it’s great to find that in your dad. It also helps women because then they don’t become mothers to partners. But this was the 1970s.
I’m sure Dad knew, like me, there was a complexity to our big bust-up that went way beyond a simple confrontation. I’m sure he knew, like me, that life would be a lot easier if only we could just be honest with one another. And I’m sure he knew, like me, that none of that could ever be vocalised because we were working-class males and we didn’t do that sort of thing. Why vocalise an issue when it can be left to fester and churn?
Dad’s flame, the one with the power to scorch all around it, would eventually fade, rarely to flicker again. I’ve a feeling, however, that it may still shine in me. I’m not invisible to the words, justified or not, often applied to me – intense, angry, confrontational. More than that, I’m convinced the complexity and ferocity of my dad’s personality and how I learned to coexist with it pushed me to want to be creative, to play characters who are at the same time good and bad. Thomas Hardy describes Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd as a ‘ma
n of salt and pepper mixture’. On a good day he was a good man, and on a bad day he was a bad man. We were taught that book in sixth form and as a 17-year-old I was very attracted to what Hardy was doing there – presenting a man warts and all. That’s exactly how I experienced my dad. I would like to have talked to him about that period when I was frightened of him. But I would have liked that to have come organically, not in an interrogative or forced manner. Maybe, had dementia not struck, that’s what would have happened. He’d have seen me interacting with Albert or Esme and it would have sparked a discussion. It was certainly not beyond my dad, had he not gone down the dementia route, to have reached seventy and said, ‘I’m sorry about that. I got that wrong.’
The anger and intensity I saw in my dad has, subconsciously or otherwise, dictated my career choices much more than any characteristics of my mum. Frustration, unhappiness, personal limitation – I’ve played them all. For certain, when I have to be angry as an actor, I don’t have to go anywhere else but to my dad’s rages.
Early in my career, I was in an episode of Boon, playing a bad lad, stealing cars – a terrible performance. The story sees me get caught by Michael Elphick (Boon) and locked in a room until the coppers arrive. I rattle the door, can’t get out, and so smash the room up entirely. Fantastic. At that age, you’re thinking, Great, I’m going to do my De Niro here. Look how aggressive I can be. Typical self-conscious young actor. We only had one take – Central TV budget – and I smashed the room up as requested. A few weeks later, I was up in Little Hulton staying with my mum and dad.
‘I saw that episode of Boon you were in,’ he said.
‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘Did you like it?’
‘It was good, yeah.’ He paused. ‘Where did you get that temper from?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you smashed that room up. Where did you get that temper from?’
‘Where do you think?’ I replied.
‘I’m not bloody like that!’
But he was, and as an actor, I have since concluded, I was thinking, You scared the shit out of me and I’m going to use your anger right here, right now.
The same happened in a film called Heart where I had to batter a door down with an axe. We did a take and afterwards I went up to the director Charles McDougall – ‘Was that all right or was it a bit camp?’
‘No, no – that was fine.’ I think I gave it what he wanted.
Another occasion, this time as Willy Houlihan in Accused, I had to smash some bathrooms up on a building site. Again, not a problem.
It’s a common theme. I’ve been cast as someone who carries anger a lot. The fact is I genuinely cannot fight my way out of a paper bag.
But I look like I can – and I knew a man who could.
6
FALL AND RISE
It’s 2018, the third preview night of Macbeth at the RSC in Stratford and I’ve just fallen off the stage. My crown has come off and I’m lying on my back looking straight into an audience member’s eyes. He doesn’t need to speak. Those eyes say it all – ‘That wasn’t meant to happen, was it?’
Despite the desperation of my predicament, a thought occurs to me – how glad I am that this particular man is sat where he is. Here I am, in pretty much the worst spot a stage actor can be. I could be living this soul-destroying moment in front of someone whose natural reaction is to become uptight, panicky and embarrassed. Instead I have got a bloke looking at me as if to say, ‘Mate, I’m really sorry that’s happened.’
If ever we meet again, pal, I think, I’ll shake your hand.
The crown is lying to one side. He glances at it. His eyes speak again – ‘You need that crown, don’t you?’
In this conversation with no words, my own eyes instantly respond. ‘Yes, I do need that crown,’ they inform him. ‘But I’m making a decision.’ Thing is a third party is now chipping in too. He’s got a front-row seat in my head. ‘Get on with it,’ my dad’s telling me, ‘you’re doing a show.’
I turn around and, as if getting out of a swimming pool, haul myself on to the stage. I run across the boards, grab my sword, and go straight into the fight. I make a slashing move – and as I do so it feels like my back has ripped open.
It would be easy to surmise that, denied his own opportunities, Dad lived his life through me. I’ve never thought that. The more accurate version of events is that I have lived my life through him.
In the aftermath of the plunge in Macbeth, there was, as you’d expect, something of an inquest. I’d stepped into nothing and, had I not been fit and agile and managed to turn as I was falling, shifting the bulk of the impact on to my shoulder, I could quite feasibly have broken my back. As it was, I had still suffered considerable damage, a physiotherapist confirming that my body had first been concertinaed by the fall and then brutally and violently opened up by the subsequent fight. Flicking from one state to the other had been a huge physical strain, tearing my intercostal muscles and rotator cuff. I was on painkillers for the next thirty performances.
The reason for the incident was clear. The production had been reblocked and I couldn’t see where I was going in the dark. Blocking is the process whereby the director decides the position of the actor on stage. I was moving from one area to another in a blackout and the blocking had changed so many times I quite simply didn’t know where I was going. The fall did nothing for my confidence. Even afterwards, though, as I considered what had happened, my dad’s voice came into my head.
‘Chris!’ he was saying to me, his voice a mix of exasperation and amusement. ‘You fell off the stage. I don’t mind you getting bad reviews, but the least you can do is stay on the stage. Bloody hell, Chris . . . ’ It was like him driving a stacker truck into a wall.
I wasn’t lying. It was humiliating – and yet because I was seeing it through my dad’s eyes, it was undeniably funny too. It would seem that amusement at my expense is intergenerational. For the rest of the run, every time I told the kids, ‘I’m playing Macbeth tonight,’ they’d immediately reply, ‘OK, Daddy. Don’t fall off the stage.’
There was a lovely circuitous nature to Dad’s voice appearing in my head. Almost four decades previously, Macbeth was the very first conversation I had with him about acting.
‘What are you doing at the moment?’ he asked one evening, ensconced on his throne.
‘I’m doing Macbeth, Dad,’ I told him.
I was seventeen and, through Salford Tech, in a production with a company called Theatre Beyond the Stage.
‘What part are you playing?’
‘Macduff.’
He roared – because ‘duff’ means hopeless in Salford. ‘Lay on Macduff!’ he laughed. ‘Who’s playing Macbeth?’
‘A guy called Ayub Khan Din.’
‘What, from Din’s chippy? When me and your mum were courting, there was a chippy on Ordsall Lane, and the bloke who owned it was Pakistani. Me and your mum were always going in there.’
Next day, I went straight to Ayub. ‘Did your mum and dad have a chippy in Salford?’
‘Yeah.’
‘My mum and dad used to go in there.’
Ayub Khan Din went on to write the comedy drama East is East, which won a BAFTA for Best British Film. When I look back at him and me at Salford Tech, I still think that’s quite something.
Theatre Beyond the Stage toured Macbeth around the north, rehearsals beginning the day the Falklands War broke out. When we took the show out on the road, I watched Ayub and listened to the whole play night after night. The character of Macbeth was incredible, tragic, but by no means a hero, and Ayub was brilliant in the part.
Ayub had natural ability on his side. The catalyst for my step into acting was one of the drama teachers, Steven Keating. After seeing me play Macduff and the Bloody Sergeant at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, he told me, ‘I didn’t realise until tonight that you can really do this.’ Steven had been teaching me for two years at that point so he definitely wasn’t one for throwing prais
e around wildly. He’d given me some good parts and encouraged me to believe I had some talent, but for him to actually say those words was massive. In two years, he hadn’t seen any discernible sign that I really, truly had what it takes, and then, bang, that night it was there right in front of him. It didn’t end there. I got a mention for being strong and powerful in a review by Natalie Anglesey in the Manchester Evening News. I couldn’t believe I’d been picked out because the Bloody Sergeant and Macduff were such small parts. Getting a mention in the Evening News was a big deal, and that was the moment I began to think I could possibly achieve my dream.
Off stage, I was equally regularly adopting another persona – an amalgamation of George Best and Rod Stewart. In search of the rock star footballer look, I started putting blond streaks in my hair, wearing wild shoes, and inhabiting this personality mash-up I had in my head. On occasion, I would put shaving foam in my hair in an attempt to recreate the fringed bouffant of Ian McCulloch, lead singer of Echo & the Bunnymen (it was a bit Rod too – I was hedging my bets), a look topped off with my dad’s long coat and scarf. He wasn’t hugely impressed. ‘You’ve got my coat on, my scarf on, and your hair like that?’ he’d splutter. ‘You look like a bloody coconut.’ I actually think he quite liked that I was wearing his stuff, but for him to go with the hair was asking a little too much.
While in my head I was delivering a bespoke look the envy of the north-west, to the outside world I’d actually developed into a precursor to Paul Calf. Added into the mix was a touch of Arthur Seaton, Albert Finney’s character in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the man who me and my best mate Mark Sapple aspired to be. To round off the whole magnificent creation was the typical alpha male I’d become on the sports field.
The Rod Stewart obsession had been a thing for a while. Posters adorned the walls of Keith and Alan’s old room, which I’d bagged when they moved out. While punk should have safety-pinned itself to my bosom, aligning perfectly with my childhood as it did, I didn’t want to look scruffy. I didn’t want to be Vyvyan from The Young Ones; I wanted to be a mod or a casual, to be a bit arty. The Rod I liked was not the parodic macho man he became; it was the more androgynous character he had inhabited while in The Faces, one who dressed and moved in a very feminine manner. David Bowie had a similar appeal. It wasn’t just me. Androgyny spoke to many young men at that time, an androgyny that our fathers would never entertain, which was all part of the appeal.
I Love the Bones of You Page 7