by Stephen Fry
'Gentlemen! As you know, this body voted two years ago for women to be ...'
'I didn't!'
'Nor I!'
'Er, yes, thank you Doctor Bantrey, Professor Threlfall. A majority of Fellows voted for the admission of women. Next term, as you know, will see our first intake ...'
'Will they eat with the rest of us?'
'Well, of course they will eat with us, Dr Kemp, why on earth shouldn't they?'
'Well I thought they ate ... differently.'
'Differently?'
'They pick up their food with their mouths, don't they? Or am I thinking of cats?'
'Dr Kemp, have you actually ever met a woman?'
'Er ... well, not that you'd ... my mother was a woman. Was introduced when I was seven. Used to see her at mealtimes occasionally. Does that count?'
'And did she eat normally?'
'Let me think ... now you come to mention it, yes, she did, yes. Quite normally.'
'Well, there you are then. There is, however, the issue of cloacal arrangements. Women do of course have hygienic requirements that are ... somewhat sui generis.'
'Oh yes? In what way?'
'Ah ... well, to be honest I'm not actually sure on this one myself. But I believe every now and again they are required to shout and to slap a man and then burst into tears and ... er ... then they have to blow their nose or something. And do their hair. Something along those lines. This happens regularly once a month, I am told. So we will need specially designed rooms set aside for the purpose.'
'I knew no good would come of this.'
'Hear fucking hear.'
'Gentlemen, please! If we can just ...'
'And where are they going to hang their breasts at night? Answer me that.'
'Excuse me?'
'Women have extra mounds of flesh that they attach with wire suspenders and silk peggings to the front of their chests. I know that much at least. The question is, where are they going to hang them at night? Hm? You see? You just haven't thought this thing through, have you?'
And so on ... until the meeting broke up in disarray.
With the exception of the startling lavatories the arrival of The Women turned out to be the most natural thing in the world. It seemed impossible to believe that they had never been here before. Whether they took to the more honkingly earthy college institutions like the Kangaroos, the college's sporting club, or indeed to the Cherubs, of which I was now leader or Senior Member, I cannot quite say. Since, by definition, all the women in college were first-years (how they must have tired of the terms 'freshettes' and 'undergraduettes') there were none quartered in Old Court, hence none to use the gleaming Ladies at the foot of A staircase. It became, therefore, our private poo-palace. Which is how I know the towel-bag legend off by heart: 'Lil-lets expand widthways to mould themselves gently to your shape. If you have any questions write to Sister Marion ...'
Kim and I were lovers by this time, and it was a happy state to be in. He played chess, read Thucydides, Aristotle and Cicero and boomed Wagner over Old Court, sweetening it with gigantic moments from Verdi and Puccini. I learnt my lines, typed the occasional essay on my Hermes typewriter, read, smoked and chattered. Friends came up the stairs and stayed for long afternoons of toast, coffee and then wine. We were closest with Rob Wyke, a graduate from St Catharine's who taught in college and worked on his thesis. He had played Gonzago in The Tempest. He, Paul Hartell, another PhD student at Cat's, and a third wild and wonderful graduate called Nigel Huckstep formed a triumvirate in whose company Kim and I loved to be. Their range of reference was enormous, but they wore their learning lightly. On free evenings we would 'draaj' (which Nigel, who picked up languages as easily as infants pick up infections, claimed was an Afrikaans word for saunter) past King's, down Trinity Street and to the Baron of Beef pub in Bridge Street, where the dirt was dished on all of Cambridge.
Committees
As a third-year now I found myself on innumerable committees. Aside from being the President of the May Ball, Senior Member of Cherubs ('I've seen ya member, Senior Member!' being the obvious chant) and President of BATS, I was on the committees of the ADC, Mummers and several other drama clubs. This meant that, at the opening of term, I found myself bouncing from meeting to meeting, listening to directors 'pitching', as we would now say.
It went like this. Let us say you are a director, or want to be one. You choose a play - new or classic - you decide how you mount it, prepare a speech about your 'concept', draw up a sensible budget and get yourself on the list to be heard by each of the larger drama societies. All this would now be done with presentation and spreadsheet software I suppose, but back then it was bits of paper and speechifying.
At a meeting of the ADC a first-year brimful of confidence arrived. He had the pained, coat-muffled-up look of a sensitive socialist who finds everything around him violent and faintly oppressive.
'I am very very interested in the work of Grotowski and Brook,' he told us. 'My production of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance will utilize their theories, combined with elements of Brechtian Epic. I will dress the cast only in white and red. The set will be scaffolding.'
Gosh. Well. Absolutely. We consulted amongst ourselves after he left. Jolly bright fellow. Serjeant Musgrave. Hadn't been done for fifteen years so far as we could tell. Interesting ideas. Cheap too. Definitely worth considering.
We see a few more candidates, and I rush off to Trinity Hall, where we hold a similar meeting for the Mummers. The third candidate to come into the room to pitch is that same intense first-year who had appeared before the ADC committee. He sits down.
'I am very very interested in the work of Grotowski and Brook,' he announces. 'My production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore will utilize their theories, combined with elements of Brechtian Epic ...' He breaks off and gives me a look of uncertainty. Has he seen me before somewhere? He shakes his head and continues. 'I will dress the cast only in white and red. The set will be scaffolding.'
A few more candidates, and I'm off to Queens' for a BATS meeting. Sure enough, there is that first-year again. He really is covering all the bases.
'I am very interested in the work of Grotowski and Brook. My production of The Importance of Being Earnest will utilize their theories ...'
'Combined with elements of Brechtian Epic?' I ask. 'Possibly dressed in white and red? Scaffolding?'
'Er ...'
That first-year is now a successful homme de theatre and an artistic director of distinction. I do not know how many of his current productions are dressed in white and red, but his scaffold-clad My Fair Lady, utilizing the theories of Grotowski and Brook (combined, I am told, with elements of Brechtian Epic Theatre), wowed them in Margate last summer. No, but shush.
I loathed committee meetings then and I loathe them now. My whole life has been a fight to avoid them as much as possible. A losing fight. I would so much rather do things than talk about doing them. Those who sit in committee rooms rule the world, of course, which is lovely if that is what you want to do, but those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.
It was a relief then to be cast as Volpone in a production at the ADC. A second-year from Caius called Simon Beale played Sir Politic Would-Be and all but ate up the stage with the most astonishing comic physicality and outrageous upstaging. At one point in the second act he stood talking to me, his back to the audience. I was always rather mystified why my excellent speech to him got so many laughs. It's unsettling when you don't know where laughs come from. I discovered that Simon Beale was scratching his arse throughout the whole scene. Had it been from an actor less accomplished or a person less adorable I suppose I might have been miffed. He also sang beautifully and was possessed of perfect pitch. There was a market scene that required singing - not from me, of course, but from the rest of the cast. Simon would stand in the wings, everyone huddled around him, and give out the note. After the performance, as a treat, he would sing 'Dalla sua pace' or 'Un'a
ura amorosa' for me, and I would melt into a puddle. One night the venerable Shakespearean scholar and Emeritus Professor of English L. C. Knight, affectionately known as Elsie, was in the audience. He left a note for me at the stage door telling me that in his opinion my Volpone was superior to Paul Scofield's. 'Better shaped, better spoken and more believable. The finest I have ever seen.' How like me to remember that word for word. The old boy was almost eighty, of course, and almost certainly deaf and demented, but I was, nevertheless, wildly proud. Too proud to show the note to anyone other than Kim and the director, for my pride in refusing to allow myself to appear boastful or pleased with myself was even more intense than any pride I might have had in my achievements. There was sometimes a fight between these two species of pride, but usually the first type won and was mistakenly called modesty.
Early one evening during the weeklong run of Volpone I arrived backstage at the ADC theatre and tripped on a pile of boxes in the corridor. They were programmes for the following week's ADC production, dumped on the floor by the delivery man from the printers. The play was Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, the Grotowski-Brook obsessive having been duly awarded his slot. I read through his programme notes.
Work. Discipline. Comradeship. Work and discipline and comradeship.
Only with these three can we create a true socialist theatre.
I took the boxes to my dressing-room and hunted for a pen. An hour later the programmes had been returned to their boxes. The director's notes now read:
Work. Discipline. Comradeship. Work and discipline and comradeship.
Only with these three can we create a true national socialist theatre.
I saw him later that evening looking white and furious and felt that I had been a hideous beast. But really. I mean. Did Shakespeare call actors 'workers' or 'players'?
Cycle
The next week Kim surprised me with plans for an exeat from Cambridge. He had bought tickets for Gotz Friedrich's Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House in London. Monday Das Rheingold, Tuesday Die Walkure, Wednesday off, Thursday Siegfried, Friday off and Saturday Gotterdammerung. A week of Valkyries and Niebelungs and Gods and Heroes and Norns and Giants. It was my first visit to Covent Garden and my first experience of live Wagner. Not my last. Indeed, today, as I type this, is a Tuesday. I was at a Gotterdammerung just three nights ago. It gets into your blood. Well, my blood. Probably not yours. All Wagnerians know the film that descends over the eyes of those to whom they talk about their obsession, so I will say no more save to point out what is perhaps obvious, that it was a shattering experience and a life-changingly important week for me.
Comedy Colleague, Collaborator and Comrade
A far more life-changingly important moment and a yet more shattering experience was heaving to on the horizon.
Amongst the friends that came to visit A2 was Emma Thompson. Having taken a year off from the Footlights, she was back in the club as Vice-President for her final year. She arrived one early evening and plonked herself on our excellent sofa.
'You remember Hugh Laurie?'
'Er ... remind me.'
She flung an impatient cushion at my head. 'You know perfectly well who I mean. He was in Nightcap.'
'Oh, the tall chap with the flushed cheeks and the big blue eyes?'
'Exactly. Well he's the President of Footlights this year.'
'Coo.'
'Yes, and he needs someone to write sketches with. He wants me to bring you over to his rooms at Selwyn.'
'Me? But I don't know him ... how ... what?'
'Yes you do!' She flung two cushions in succession. 'I introduced you at Edinburgh.'
'You did?'
There were no cushions left so she flung me a speaking glance instead. Possibly the speakingest glance that had been flung in Cambridge that year. 'For someone with such a good memory,' she said, 'you have a terrible memory.'
Kim, Emma and I walked up Sidgwick Avenue towards Selwyn College. It was a cold November night, and the air held a smell of gunpowder from a Bonfire Night party being held somewhere near the Fen Causeway. We came to a Victorian building on the rugby-ground side of Grange Road, not far from Cambridge's newest college, Robinson.
Emma led us through the open street door and up some stairs. She knocked on a door at the end of the corridor. A voice grunted for us to enter.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, a guitar on his knee. At the other side of the room was his girlfriend, Katie Kelly, whom I knew slightly. Like Emma, she read English at Newnham. She was very pretty and had long blonde hair and a ravishing smile.
He stood awkwardly, the red flags of his cheeks more pronounced than ever. 'Hullo,' he said.
'Hullo,' I said.
We were both people who said 'hullo' rather than 'hello'.
'Red wine or white?' said Katie.
'I've been writing a song,' he said and started to strum on his guitar. The song was a kind of ballad sung in the character of an American IRA supporter.
Give money to an IRA bomber?
Why, yessir, I'd consider it an honour,
Everybody must have a cause.
The accent was flawless and the singing superb. It seemed to me a perfect song.
'Woolworths,' he said as he laid the instrument down. 'I borrow guitars that cost ten times as much, but they just don't do it for me.'
Katie approached with the wine. 'Well, are you going to tell him?'
'Ah. Yes. Well, thing is. Footlights. I'm the President, you see.'
'I saw you in Nightcap you were magnificent it was brilliant,' I said in a rush.
'Oh. Gosh. Well. No. Really? Well, er ... Latin! Top. Absolutely top.'
'Nonsense, oh shush.'
'Completely.'
The excruciating horror of mutual admiration out of the way, we both paused, unsure of how to continue.
'Well, go on,' said Emma.
'Yes. So. There are two Smokers left this term, but most importantly there's the panto.'
'The panto?'
'Yup. The Footlights pantomime. Two years ago we did Aladdin.'
'Hugh was the Emperor of China,' Katie said.
'I missed that, I'm afraid,' I said.
'Quite right. I would have too. If I hadn't been in it. Anyway, this year we're doing The Snow Queen.'
'Hans Christian Andersen?'
'Yup. Katie and I have been writing it. We've got this ...' he showed me some script.
Five minutes later Hugh and I were writing a scene together as if we had been doing it all our lives.
You read about people falling suddenly in love, about romantic thunderbolts that go with clashing cymbals, high quivering strings and resounding chords and you read about eyes that meet across the room to the thudding twang of Cupid's bow, but it is less often that you read about collaborative love at first sight, about people who instantly discover that they were born to work together or born to be natural and perfect friends.
The moment Hugh Laurie and I started to exchange ideas it was starkly and most wonderfully clear that we shared absolutely the same sense of what was funny and the same scruples, tastes and sensitivities as to what we found derivative, cheap, obvious or stylistically unacceptable. Which is not to say that we were similar. If the world is full of plugs looking for sockets and sockets looking for plugs, as - roughly speaking - the Platonic allegory of love suggests, then there is no doubt we did seem each to possess precisely the qualities and deficiencies the other most lacked. Hugh had music where I had none. He had an ability to be likeably daft and clownish. He moved, tumbled and leapt like an athlete. He had authority, presence and dignity. I had ... hang on, what did I have? Patter and fluency, I suppose. Verbal dexterity. Learning. Hugh always said that I also added what he called gravitas to the proceedings. Although he had great authority himself on stage I suppose I had the edge on playing older authority figures. I wrote too. I mean I actually physically wrote lines down with pen and paper or typewriter. Hugh kept the phrases and shapes of the monologues a
nd songs he was working on in his head and only wrote them down or dictated them when a script was needed for stage-management or administrative purposes.
Hugh was determined that the Footlights should look grown-up but never pleased with itself or, God forbid, cool. We both shared a horror of cool. To wear sunglasses when it wasn't sunny, to look pained and troubled and emotionally raw, to pull that sneery snorty 'Er?!! What?!' face at things that you didn't understand or from which you thought it stylish to distance yourself. Any such arid, self-regarding stylistic narcissism we detested. Better to look a naive simpleton than jaded, tired or world-weary, we felt. 'We're students, for fuck's sake,' was our credo. 'We have people making our beds and tidying our rooms for us. We live in panelled medieval rooms. We have theatres, printing presses, first-class cricket pitches, a river, boats, libraries and all the time in the world for contentment, pleasure and fun. What right have we got to moan and moon and mooch about the place looking tortured?'
We were fortunate that the age of young people doing stand-up comedy hadn't yet arrived. The idea, and I am afraid it has since become a reality, of pained emo students leaning listless and misunderstood on a mike-stand railing against the burden of life would be more than either of us would have been able to bear. We were exceptionally attuned to pretension, aesthetic discord and hypocrisy. The young are so priggish. I hope we are much more tolerant now.
Almost no one we ever worked with either at Cambridge or afterwards quite seemed to share or even understand our aesthetic, if I can dignify it with such a word. It is probable that our fear of being unoriginal, of looking cocky, of being obvious or of being seen ever to have chosen the line of least resistance caused us difficulty in our comedy careers. The same fears might also have pushed us to some of our best endeavours too, so there is no real reason to regret the sensitivity and fastidiousness that only we appeared to share. We soon became familiar with the expressions of bewilderment that might flicker over the faces of those who suggested something that inadvertently trespassed against our instinctive sense of what could or could not be funny, right or fit. I don't think we were ever aggressive or unkind, certainly not deliberately, but when two people are absolutely in harness with regard to matters of principle and outlook it must be very alienating to outsiders, and I expect two tall public-school figures like us must have seemed forbidding and aloof. Inside, of course, we felt anything but. I would not want to paint a picture of us as earnest, dogmatic ideologues, the Frank and Queenie Leavis of Comedy. We spent most of our time laughing. The smallest things would set us off like teenagers, which of course we had only just stopped being.