The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  It is rather perfect to think of the pair of them playing American characters as students on the stage of the ADC. We would have called you mad if you had suggested that one day Hugh would go on to win Golden Globes for playing an American in a television series and that Tilda would win an Oscar for playing an American in a feature film.

  Cooke

  The previous term Jo Wade, who was Secretary of the Mummers, had drawn my attention to the fact that the Lent term would see the fiftieth anniversary of the club, which had been founded in 1931 by a young Alistair Cooke.

  'We should have a party,' said Jo. 'And we should invite him.'

  Alistair Cooke was known for his thirteen-part documentary and book, A Personal History of the United States, and his long-running and greatly loved radio series, Letter From America. We wrote to him care of the BBC, New York City, USA, wondering if he had any plans to be in Britain in the next few months and if so whether he might be amenable to being persuaded to be our guest of honour at a dinner for the semi-centennial celebrations of the drama club he may remember founding. A drama club, we added, that was stronger and healthier than ever, having picked up more Fringe Firsts in Edinburgh than any other university drama society in the land.

  He wrote back with the news that he had no plans to be in Britain. 'However, plans can be changed. Your letter has so delighted me that I shall fly myself over to be with you.'

  In the dining hall of Trinity Hall he sat between me and Jo and talked wonderfully of his time at Jesus College in the late twenties and early thirties. He spoke of Jacob Bronowski, who had the rooms above him: 'He invited me to a game of chess and as we sat down asked me, "Do you play classical chess or hypermodern?"' He spoke of his friendship with Michael Redgrave, who succeeded Cooke as editor of Granta, Cambridge's most intelligent student publication. As he spoke, he noted down a few words on his napkin. When it was time to propose the toast to Mummers and its next fifty years, he rose to his feet and, on the basis of those three or four scribbled words, delivered a thirty-five-minute speech in perfect Letter From America style.

  Michael Redgrave and I were most annoyed that women were not allowed to act in plays in Cambridge. We were tired of those pretty Etonians from King's playing Ophelia. We thought the time had come to change all that. I went to the Mistresses of Girton and Newnham and proposed the formation of a serious new drama club in which women might be allowed to take on women's roles. The Mistress of Girton was P. G. Wodehouse's aunt, or cousin or something, I seem to remember, and she was terrifying but kind. Once she and the Newnham Mistress had satisfied themselves that our motives were pure, aesthetic and honourable, which of course they only partly were, they consented to allow their undergraduates to appear in drama, and that is how the Mummers came about. Once the word got out that there was a new club which allowed women to act, hundreds of male undergraduates besieged me, begging to be cast in our first production. I remember holding auditions. One undergraduate from Peterhouse came to see me and recited a speech from Julius Caesar. 'Tell me,' I said to him as kindly as I could, 'what subject are you reading?' 'Architecture,' he replied. 'Well, you carry on with that,' I said, 'I'm sure you'll be an excellent architect.' He did indeed get a First in Architecture, but whenever I see James Mason now he says to me, 'Damn. I should have taken your advice and stayed with architecture.'

  The fluency, charm and ease with which Cooke spoke held the entire hall completely spellbound. He was one of those people who seemed to have been born to bear witness. Famously he had been in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968, only yards from Robert F. Kennedy when he was shot down and killed. He told us a story of another brush with political destiny that had taken place during the long vac that followed his setting up of the Mummers.

  I went with a friend on a walking tour of Germany. It was the kind of thing one did then. Books strapped up in an arrangement of leather belts and slung over the shoulder as one tramped the meadows of Franconia, stopping off at taverns and guesthouses. We arrived in a small Bavarian valley late one morning and found a perfect beer garden, overlooked by a pretty old inn which tumbled with geraniums and lobelias. As we sat sipping our Steins of lager, chairs were being arranged in rows in the garden. It seemed that some sort of concert was in the offing. By and by two ambulances drew up. The drivers and stretcher-bearers got out, yawned, lit cigarettes and stood by the open tailgates of their vehicles as if it were the most normal thing in the world. People began to arrive, and soon every chair in the beer garden was taken and the dozens who couldn't get a seat stood at the back or sat cross-legged on the grass in front of the small temporary stage. We simply could not imagine what was going to happen. An enthusiastic crowd, but no musicians and, most strangely of all, those ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers. At last a pair of huge open-topped Mercedes tourers arrived, crammed like a Keystone Kop car with more uniformed figures than they could comfortably hold. They all leapt out, and one of them, a short man in a long leather coat, marched to the stage and began to speak. Not speaking German at all well, I could not understand much of what he said, but I could make out the repeated phrase "Funf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Funf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Five minutes to midnight! Five minutes to midnight!" It was all most strange. Before long, women in the crowd would swoon and faint, and the stretcher-bearers would start forward to collect them. What kind of speaker was it who could be so guaranteed to cause people to faint with his words that ambulances came along beforehand? When the man had finished speaking he strode up the aisle, and his elbow barged against my shoulder as I leant out to see him go, and he backed into me, turned away as he was to take the ovation of the crowd. He immediately grabbed my shoulder to stop me from falling, 'Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr!' he said. 'Excuse me, sir!' For some years afterwards, whenever he came on in the cinema newsreels as his fame spread, I would say to the girl next to me. 'Hitler once apologized to me and called me sir.'

  When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, 'This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.'

  'Wow!' I said, duly impressed.

  'No, no,' said Cooke. 'It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell's aunt danced with Napoleon. That's how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.'

  As he left he tucked an envelope in my pocket. It was a cheque for PS2,000 made out to the Cambridge Mummers. On a compliment slip with it he had written, 'A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot.'

  Chariots 2

  One morning in February Hugh came into A2, waving a letter.

  'You were in that film they made here, weren't you?' he said to me and Kim.

  'Chariots of Fire, you mean?'

  'Well they've got some sort of premiere at the end of March and a party at the Dorchester Hotel and they want the Footlights to be the entertainment. What do you think?'

  'It would make sense if we could actually see the film first. So we could do a sketch about it, or at least make some kind of reference?'

  Hugh consulted the letter. 'They're suggesting we go to London on the morning of the thirtieth, go to the screening for film critics that's taking place in the afternoon, rehearse in the hotel ballroom and then we'll be put on after the dinner.'

  The day before taking the train to London I called my mother to tell her what we were up to.

  'Oh, the Dorchester,' she said. 'I haven't been to the Dorchester for years. In fact, I remember the last time clearly. Your father and I went to a ball and it broke up early because the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination came through, and nobody felt like carrying on.'

  On the appointed day the core Footlights team settled down in an empty cinema for the screening of the film, quite expecting to be depressed by a low-budget British embarrassment. As we came out, I brushed a tear from my cheek and said, 'Either I'm in a really odd mood or that was rather fantastic.'

&nbs
p; Everybody else seemed to be in agreement.

  We hastily put together an opening sketch in which we ran on to the stage in slow motion. Steve Edis, whose ear was every bit as good as Hugh's, had absorbed Vangelis's distinctive musical theme and reproduced it on the piano.

  After hanging about for hours in a small dining area set aside for toast masters in red mess jackets and what used to be called the upper servants, we were at last on.

  'My lords, ladies and gentlemen,' said the MC into his microphone, 'they twinkled in the twenties and now they're entertaining in the eighties. It's the Cambridge University Footlights!'

  Our slo-mo running on stage to Steve's lusty rendition of the film score went extremely well, and from the opening explosions of laughter and applause we settled confidently into our material. At some stage however it became apparent that we were losing the audience. There was rustling, murmuring, chair scraping and whispering. Dinner-jacketed men and evening-gowned women were scampering towards the back of the ballroom and ... well, quite frankly ... leaving.

  Surely we weren't that bad? We had not only performed this in Cambridge but we had done evenings at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. I was prepared to believe that we might not be to everyone's taste, but such a mass walk-out seemed like a studied insult. I caught Hugh's eye, which held the wild, rolling look of a gazelle being pulled to earth by a leopard. I dare say my expression was much the same.

  As we lumbered sweatily off stage, with Paul going forward for his monologue with the brave tread of an aristocrat approaching the guillotine, Emma whispered to us, 'Someone's shot Ronald Reagan!'

  'What?'

  'All the Twentieth Century Fox executives have left and gone to the phones ...'

  I rang my mother that night.

  'Well that's settled then, darling,' she said. 'No member of this family ever goes to an event at the Dorchester again. It's not fair on America.'

  Corpsing Chorus

  Back in Cambridge, Brigid Larmour was directing the Marlowe Society production that term, Love's Labour's Lost. This was the straight drama equivalent of the Footlights May Week Revue, a big-budget (by any standards) production mounted in the Arts Theatre, a splendid professional theatre with an alarming audience capacity of exactly 666. A combination of my persuasive rhetoric and Brigid's natural charm succeeded in securing Hugh for his first Shakespearean role, that of the King of Navarre. I played the character with perhaps the best description in all of Shakespeare's dramatis personae: 'Don Adriano de Armado, a fantastical Spaniard'. Only I wasn't a fantastical Spaniard. For some reason, whenever I attempt Spanish it comes out as Russian or Italian, or a bastard hybrid of the two. I can manage a Mexican accent acceptably, so my Armado was an inexplicably fantastical Mexican. The major role of Berowne was played by a fine second-year actor called Paul Schlesinger, nephew of the great film director John Schlesinger.

  The play opens with a long speech from the King in which he announces that he and the leading members of his court shall forswear the company of women for three years, dedicating themselves to art and scholarship. Hugh and Paul had one of those uncontrollable laughing problems. They only had to catch each other's eye on stage and they would be unable to breathe or speak. For the first few rehearsals this was fine, but after a while I could see Brigid beginning to worry. By the time it came to the dress rehearsal it was apparent that Hugh would simply not be able to get out the words of the opening address unless either Paul was off stage, which made a nonsense of the plot, or some imaginative solution to the problem could be found. Threats and imprecations had proved useless.

  'I'm sorry,' each said. 'We're trying not to laugh, it's a chemical thing. Like an allergy.'

  Brigid hit upon the happy notion of making everyone on stage in that scene, the King, Berowne, Dumain, Longaville and general court attendants, speak the opening lines together as a kind of chorus. Somehow this worked, and the giggling stopped.

  At the first-night party I heard a senior academic and distinguished Shakespeare scholar congratulate Brigid on her idea of presenting the introductory speech as a kind of communal oath. 'A superb concept. It made the whole scene come alive. Really quite brilliant.'

  'Thank you, Professor,' said Brigid without a blush, 'it seemed right.'

  She caught my eye and beamed.

  Cellar Tapes and Celebration

  The last term arrived. Another May Ball. Finals of the English tripos. The May Week Revue itself. Graduation. Farewell, Cambridge, hullo, world.

  For the last Footlights Smoker before we began work on the show itself I recruited my old friend Tony Slattery, who fitted in with the greatest ease. He tore up the audience with guitar songs and extraordinary monologues of his own devising; one girl, according to the fatalistic janitor figure who looked after the premises, actually wet herself.

  'There's such a thing,' he said as he shook a canister of Vim over the damp cushion, 'as too funny.'

  I attempted to persuade Simon Beale to join us too, but he had enough singing and drama to fill his diary. I think he felt that comedy shows somehow weren't quite him. With the addition of Penny Dwyer, with whom I had worked in Mummer productions and who could sing, dance, be funny and do just about anything, we had a cast to join me, Hugh, Emma and Paul Shearer for the big one, the May Week Revue that would go on to Oxford and then Edinburgh.

  I wrote a monologue for myself based on Bram Stoker's Dracula and a two-handed parody of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, in which Emma played Elizabeth, a bed-bound invalid, and I played Robert, her ardent suitor. Hugh and I had both seen and found hilarious John Barton's Shakespeare Masterclasses on television, in which he had painfully slowly taken Ian McKellen and David Suchet through the text of a single speech. We put together a sketch in which I did the same with Hugh. So detailed was the textual analysis that we never got further than the opening word, 'Time'.

  Hugh asked the previous year's President, Jan Ravens, to direct us, and we began rehearsals in the clubroom. We put together a closing ensemble sketch, in which a ghastly kind of Alan Ayckbourn family playing after-dinner charades breaks down in animosity, revelation and disarray.

  Performing the 'Shakespeare Masterclass' sketch with Hugh.

  At some point we must have sat Finals and at another point I must have completed two dissertations, one on Byron's Don Juan, another on aspects of E. M. Forster. I can remember neither, having knocked them both up in two frantic evenings: 15,000 words of drivel typed out at high speed.

  When the news came that the English results were published I walked to the Senate House, against the walls of which huge notice-boards in wooden frames had been attached. I strained through the crowd of hysterical studentry and found my name in the Upper Second list. I had scored a dull, worthy and unexciting 2:1.

  Peter Holland, a don from Trinity Hall who had supervised me for practical criticism and seventeenth-century literature, offered consolation.

  'They reread you for a First twice,' he said. 'You came very close. You got good Firsts in all your papers, top in Shakespeare again. But a 2:2 in the Forster dissertation and a Third in the Byron. That's why they just couldn't do it. Hard luck.'

  The hurt was more to my pride than to my plans. To be honest, Cambridge was right, I had shown I could fly through written exams against the clock, but the serious work of a dissertation, which required the kind of originality, scholarship and diligence that I either didn't possess or simply couldn't be arsed to produce, exposed me for the plausible rogue that I was.

  With Kim outside the Cambridge Senate House, celebrating our Tripos results. I was insanely in love with that Cerruti tie.

  Hugh read Archaeology and Anthropology and got a far more amusing and likeable class of degree. He had been to one lecture, which gave him the material for a quite brilliant monologue about a Bantu hut, but otherwise had not disturbed his professors, written an essay or entered the faculty library. I think he would be the first to admit that you know more about Archaeology and Anthropology tha
n he does.

  The first night of our May Week Revue came. The show was called The Cellar Tapes, as much a reference to the underground Footlights clubroom in which it was born as to Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes or any pun on Sellotape.

  Hugh came on stage for the opening. 'Ah, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the May Week Revue. We have an evening of entertainment, of - I got a Third by the way - sketch comedy, music and ...'

  We were under way. The Arts Theatre has one of the best auditoriums for comedy I know. Sitting in a spotlight with a leather book on my lap delivering the Dracula monologue, standing on stage with Hugh for the Shakespeare Masterclass, kneeling at the stricken Emma's bedside, pouring tea for Paul Shearer in the MI5 recruitment sketch - all these moments were more pleasurable and thrilling in this theatre, on this occasion, before such an enthusiastic audience, than anything I had ever done before.

  Hugh and I looked at each other after the curtain fell. We knew that, come what might, we had not disgraced the name of Footlights.

  The Cellar Tapes closing song. I fear we may have been guilty of embarrassing and sanctimonious 'satire' at this point. Hence the joyless expressions.

  One night of the two-week run the word went round backstage that Rowan Atkinson had been spotted in the audience. I broke the habit of my (short) lifetime and peeped through at the house. There he was, there could be no mistake. Not the least distinctive set of features on the planet. We all performed with an extra intensity that may have made the show better or may, just as easily, have given it rather a hysterical edge - I for one was too excited to be able to tell. The great Rowan Atkinson watching us perform. Only a year and a half ago I had all but vomited with laughter at his show in Edinburgh. Since then Not the Nine O'Clock News had propelled him to major television stardom.