The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  Early on in the rehearsal process Leslie Ash had not responded well to her dance and vocal lessons and by mutual agreement she had dropped out of the cast. I sat in Richard's office one afternoon as he rubbed his chin anxiously. Who on earth could we cast as Sally?

  'What about Emma?' I said. 'She sings wonderfully and, while she may not have done any tap dancing, she's surely the kind of person who can do anything she turns her mind to.'

  Richard's personality once more split before my eyes. 'Of course. Brilliant. I want her,' he said, before riposting, 'Well, if you do, you'll damned well have to pay through the nose for her. Oh now, come on, be reasonable. She has no experience, no real name. That's as maybe, she is one of the greatest talents of her generation and, as such, she'll cost you.'

  I left Richard to wrestle the matter. I understood that he fell short of actually beating himself up and managed before too long to end his tense negotiations by shaking his hand on a deal satisfactory to both of him.

  Emma duly joined the cast. She knew Robert Lindsay well, having worked at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where Robert had presented his excellently received Hamlet. In fact I believe I am right in saying that Emma and Robert had known each other very well back then. Really jolly well indeed. Oh yes.

  Me and My Girl. Emma's dressing-room on the first night.

  Forty Years On had to undergo one or two cast changes for its West End run. John Fortune and Annette Crosbie were unavailable for the transfer, and their roles went to David Horovitch and Emma's mother, Phyllida Law. The boys were recast too: the local Chichester lads who had thrown themselves into their roles with such aplomb and good spirits were now replaced by London stage-school professionals, who were just as sparky and cheerful and a great deal more streetwise and experienced.

  The day before the opening, during the interval between the technical run and the evening dress rehearsal, I walked out of the Queen's Theatre stage door with David Horovitch and a group of these boys, heading for a pasta restaurant that they with their Soho savvy had recommended. Alan Bennett was out in the street, attaching bicycle clips to his trousers.

  'Are you going to join us for spaghetti?' I asked him.

  'Yes, do!' said the boys.

  'Oh no,' said Alan, in slightly shocked tones, as if we were inviting him to a naked orgy in an opium den. 'I shall cycle home and have a poached egg.' Alan Bennett is always excellent at being as much like Alan Bennett as you could reasonably hope. A keen mind, a powerful artistic sensibility, a fierce political and social conscience - but a man of bicycle clips and poached eggs. Is it any wonder that he is so loved?

  My name was now up in neon on Shaftesbury Avenue. I was too embarrassed to take a picture, which now, of course, I regret. I do have a photograph of the first-night party. I should imagine I was very happy. I had every reason to be.

  Paul Eddington was happy too, enjoying a ripe and fruity time in his career. He had just been elected to the Garrick Club, which gave him enormous pleasure, and he and Nigel Hawthorne had been paid a large sum of money for a TV commercial, which pleased him almost as much.

  'A very large sum,' he said happily. 'It's to advertise a new Cadbury's chocolate bar called Wispa. Nigel whispers in my ear in his Sir Humphrey character - half a day's work for the most extraordinary fee.'

  'Gosh,' I said, 'and do Tony Jay and Jonathan Lynn get a good wedge too?'

  'Ah!' Paul winced slightly at my mention of the names of the writers and creators of Yes, Minister, a mention I had not made mischievously but out of genuine curiosity as to how these things worked. 'Yes. Nigel and I had a twinge of guilt about that, so we're sending them each a case of claret. Jolly good claret.'

  There is a chasm between writers and performers: for each, life often looks better across the divide, and while I am sure Tony and Jonathan were pleased to receive their case of jolly good claret, I cannot doubt that they may have preferred the kind of remuneration Paul and Nigel were enjoying. As I was to discover, however, writing has its rewards too.

  One night, as the curtain came down, Paul whispered in my ear with delighted triumph, 'I can tell you now. It's official. I'm Prime Minister.'

  That night the final episode of Yes, Minister had been broadcast. It ended with Jim Hacker succeeding to the leadership of his party and the country. Keeping the secret, Paul told me, had been the hardest job he had ever had.

  I settled into the run of the play. There were six evening performances a week with matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I would be saying the same lines to the same people, wearing the same clothes and handling the same props eight times a week for the next six months. Next door in the Globe Theatre (now called the Gielgud) a show set in a girls' school called Daisy Pulls it Off was running, and the cast of schoolgirls and schoolboys in each got on very well together, as you might imagine. Each Wednesday afternoon in the interval between matinee and evening performance there would be a backstage school feast, the boys hosting in the Queen's one week, the girls in the Globe the next. Further along the street stood the Lyric Theatre, where Leonard Rossiter was playing Truscott in a revival of Joe Orton's Loot. One evening we were stunned to hear that he had collapsed and died of a heart attack just before going on. Only a few months earlier both Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe had also died on stage. A small selfish and shameful part of me regretted the certainty that I would now never meet or work with those three geniuses at least as much as I mourned their passing or felt for the desolation such sudden deaths must have brought their families.

  November came, and it was time for me to go up to Leicester for the opening of Me and My Girl. The plan was to arrive on Thursday for the dress rehearsal, stay on Friday for the first night and be back in London in time for the Saturday matinee and evening shows of Forty Years On. Who meanwhile would be taking my place as Tempest? I was horrified to discover that it would be Alan Bennett himself, reprising his original performance from 1968. Horrified, because I would, naturally, miss the chance to see him.

  He came into the dressing-room I shared with David Horovitch on the Monday evening of that week.

  'Oh, Stephen, I've got a funny request. I don't know if you'll want to accede, but I'll put it to you anyway.'

  'Yes?'

  'I know you aren't going till Thursday, but would you mind if I went on as Tempest on the Wednesday matinee and evening as well?'

  'Oh goodness, not at all. Not at all.' The dear fellow was obviously a little nervous and wanted to dip his toes in the water and feel his way back into the role with a smaller matinee audience. The wonderful part of it all was that I could now be in that audience and watch him. For two performances. It is not often that an actor gets to see a production he is in, and while many prefer not to watch someone else playing their own part, especially if it is a master like Bennett, I was too much the fan to care if the comparison cast me in the shade. Which I knew it would. After all, he wrote Tempest for himself and he was Alan, for heaven's sake, Bennett.

  I watched him both times and went round to the dressing-room.

  'Oh, Alan, you were astounding. Astounding.'

  'Ooh, do you think so, really?'

  'I'm so pleased you were on today, but you know,' I said, 'you absolutely didn't need to ease yourself in with a matinee performance, you were perfect from the start.'

  'Oh, that isn't why I asked if I could go on today.'

  'It isn't?'

  'To be honest, no.'

  'Well, then why?'

  'Well, you know I've got this film?'

  Indeed I did know. Alan had written the screenplay for a film called A Private Function, which starred Maggie Smith, Michael Palin and Denholm Elliott. I was planning to catch it over the weekend.

  'You see,' he said, 'it's the Royal Command premiere this evening, and I wanted a solid excuse not to have to go ...'

  It is a very Bennetty kind of shyness that sees per-forming on stage in front of hundreds of strangers as less stressful than attending a party.

  L
eicester passed in a blur. The dress rehearsal of Me and My Girl seemed fine, but without an audience it was impossible to tell whether any of the slapstick and big comic routines would really work. Robert and Emma were wonderful together. Robert's comedy business with his cloak, with his bowler hat, with cigarettes, cushions and any other props that came his way was masterly. I hadn't seen physical comedy this good outside silent pictures.

  Me and My Girl. Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson.

  I went round the dressing-rooms with good-luck bottles of champagne, cards, bunches of roses and expressions of faith, hope and gratitude.

  'Well, we are waiting for the final director now ...' said Frank Thornton, adding in his most lugubrious manner the answer to my unspoken question, '... the audience!'

  'Ah!' I nodded at this wise actorly thought.

  In the end the final director jerked up their thumbs with a loud 'Lambeth Walk' 'Oi!'. They stood and cheered at the end for what seemed like half an hour. It was a most wonderful triumph, and everybody hugged each other and sobbed with joy just as they do in the best Hollywood backstage musicals. Mike Ockrent's magical and comically detailed direction, Gillian Gregory's choreography, Mike Walker's arrangements and a chorus and cast that threw themselves body and soul into every second of the two hours' running time ensured as happy an evening as I can remember in the theatre.

  I would not want to be misunderstood. Musicals are still not quite my thing, and I am sure there are plenty of you who will wince at the thought of pearly kings and queens and larky high kicks accompanying a 1930s rum-ti-tum-ti score. Nonetheless I was pleased to be involved with something so alien to my usual tastes and which bubbled and bounced with such unaffected lightness of touch and warm silliness and unapologetic high spirits. We bucked the trend for self-regarding, high-toned, through-sung operatic melodramas. Not just bucked, buck-and-winged. I liked the fact that we were presenting an evening that paid homage to the origins of the word 'musical' as an adjective not a noun. From its beginnings the genre was Musical Comedy, and we had all hoped that there was still a demand for that kind of theatre. At the party I leant forward to a beaming Richard Armitage.

  'Do you think,' I yelled in his ear, flaunting my theatrical jargon, 'that we will transfer?'

  'Sure of it,' said Richard. 'Thank you, m'dear. My father is looking down and winking.'

  I turned away, a tear in my eye. I knew how important it is for men to feel that they have finally earned the approval of their fathers.

  Conspicuous Consumption

  Country Cottages, Cheques, Credit Cards and Classic Cars

  Back in London, the run of Forty Years On continued through Christmas and the New Year. I had started to cross off the days on a chart in the dressing-room like a prisoner scratching on the wall of his cell. There is something quite dreadful about what enforced repetition of action and speech does to the brain. Experienced stage actors all know how common it is to suffer a kind of out-of-body experience on stage where you look down and helplessly watch yourself from above. The moment comes to speak your lines and you will either freeze and dry up or say the same speech three or four times in a row without noticing. Only a pinch or a kick from a fellow actor can save you.

  There was one scene in Forty Years On in which I had to tick a boy off for something or other. I would strike the corner of a desk hard with my index finger in time to the rhythms of my reprimand. One half-empty matinee I looked down and saw that the varnish on the desk had been worn away by the striking of my finger. For some reason this upset me greatly, and I resolved that evening to strike another part of the desk. When the moment came I raised my hand, aimed a good six inches to the left of the scuff mark and brought my finger down with a bang on exactly the usual place. For the next few days I tried again and again, but some form of extreme and insane muscle-memory insisted that my finger had always to hit the same spot. This disturbed me deeply, and I began to look upon the two or three weeks remaining as a hideous incarceration from which I would never escape. I didn't share this sense of suffocating torment with David, Phyllida or Paul, as they seemed, with their greater experience, serene and at ease.

  Doris Hare, who was eighty by this time, had more energy than the rest of us put together. She was the only principal in the cast who didn't go straight home as soon as the show ended. She and I would go most nights to Joe Allen's. Doris had a way of entering the restaurant that made one convinced that it was not a woollen shawl about her neck, but a fox fur fastened with an emerald clasp, and that her companion was not a gawky and self-conscious young actor but a sleek compound of Noel Coward, Ivor Novello and Binkie Beaumont.

  'The secret, dear,' she would tell me, 'is to enjoy yourself. Why would we be in the theatre if we didn't love every minute of it? Casting, rehearsals, matinees, touring ... it's all marvellous.' And she meant it.

  Joe Allen's, an American diner-style restaurant, is a popular hangout for actors, dancers, agents, producers and playwrights. The famously rude waiters and waitresses are often drawn from the ranks of showbusiness themselves. An American producer is notorious for once having got impatient at the slow service. He clicked his fingers for a waiter, calling out, 'Actor! Oh, Actor!'

  I sat there in Joe Allen's one evening with Russell Harty, Alan Bennett and Alan Bates. All eyes were upon our table until suddenly heads swung towards the door. Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman walked in. Our table no longer existed.

  'Well, that's us told,' said Russell.

  Olivier walked past, beaming at everyone in a general way.

  'Why don't you go and say hello to him?' Alan Bennett said to Russell. 'You know him well.'

  'I couldn't do that. Everyone would say, "Look there goes that odious Russell Harty sucking up to Larry Olivier."'

  Harty and Bennett were very good friends. They each had a house in North Yorkshire. Alan would drive them up in his car at weekends. On one such journey, so the story goes, Alan said, 'Why don't we play a game of some kind to beguile the hours?'

  'What about Botticelli?' said Russell.

  'Ooh no! That's too competitive.'

  They thought for a while, then Alan piped up, 'I know. We each have to think of the person whose underpants we would least like to have to wear on our head.'

  'Colin Welland,' said Russell without a moment's hesitation.

  'Ooh, that's not fair,' said Alan, 'you've won already.'

  On another occasion, as they were driving through Leeds, Russell wound down the window and called out to a morose-looking woman waiting for a bus in the pelting rain, 'Hello, love! All right?'

  As she looked up in bewilderment he wound the window back up, leant back and said with great satisfaction, 'The privilege of being able to cast a golden ray of sunshine into an otherwise dull and unremarkable existence.'

  As soon as I was free from the fetters of Forty Years On my life seemed to triple in speed and intensity. I moved out of the Bloomsbury flat and into a large furnished house in Southgate Road on the fringes of the de Beauvoir Estate between Islington and the Balls Pond Road. Nick Symons, Hugh, Katie and I shared this excellently eccentric house for the better part of a year. It looked, to Hugh's approving eye, like the kind of house the Rolling Stones might have rented in 1968. It was crammed to every corner with Benares brass trays, alabaster lamps, buhl cabinets, stuffed birds and waxed flowers in glass domes, lacquer screens, papier-mache bowls, mahogany chiffoniers, oil paintings of varying quality in chipped gilt plaster frames, indecipherable objects of sinister Dutch treen, impossible silvered wallpaper and madly tarnished mirrors. Our landlord, who dropped by only occasionally, was a spongey-nosed individual by the name of Stanley. He seemed very relaxed and unconcerned about a group of what were little more than students living their disordered lives amongst his antique bibelots and whatnots.

  The second series of Alfresco had been aired nationally by this time, making not the slightest dent upon the public consciousness. I was busy enough with the Listener, radio, tweaks for Me and M
y Girl's West End transfer and my first proper film role. Directed by Mike Newell, the picture was called The Good Father, adapted from a Peter Prince novel by Christopher Hampton.

  At the read-through I glanced nervously around and tried to look as if I belonged at the table. There was Simon Callow, whose controversial new book Being An Actor had served as the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of tyrannical stage directors; next to him sat one of my favourite actresses, Harriet Walter; next to her, Joanne Whalley, who was just about to make a name and earn enduring teenage-fantasy status for herself bringing Michael Gambon off in The Singing Detective; and next to her sat one half of the National Theatre of Brent, Jim Broadbent. And finally there was the film's star, Anthony Hopkins, a man from whom charisma, power and virility radiated with a force that was frankly frightening. I had been faintly obsessed with him ever since his blue eyes burnt out of the screen at me in Richard Attenborough's Young Winston.

  Too late for the preliminary introductions, Miriam Margolyes had burst in like a beaming pinball just in time for the start of the read. When it was over she approached me.

  'How do you do? I'm Mir ...' She stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger, '... Miriam Margolyes. Sorry about that, I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I've still got some cunt hairs in my mouth.' Miriam is perhaps the kindest, most loyal and incorruptibly decent person on the whole Equity roll, but she is certainly not someone to take out to tea with the archdeacon.

  In the film I played a man called Creighton, divorced and beaten down by the crushing weight of life, children and alimony. I had only one scene, but since it was with Hopkins himself it was in my mind as good a role as Michael Corleone and Rhett Butler combined. The plot required me to have been at school with Simon Callow, which wounded me a little, as I knew he was a good eight years older than me. To someone in their twenties, eight years is a lifetime. I knew that I was not the type ever to be asked to play lissom youths or handsome lovers, but it did seem a little hard to be plunged into middle age for my first-ever film role.