Dead Now Of Course

Dead Now Of Course Phyllida Law ‘My future mother-in-law burst into tears when she heard her son was to marry an actress. There’s still something disturbing, I grant you, about the word “actress”. If an MP or some other outstanding person plays fast and loose with an actress the world is unsurprised. She is certainly no better than she should be, and probably French…’As well as being a mother (to the actresses Sophie and Emma Thompson) and a devoted carer to her own mother and mother-in-law, Phyllida Law is also a distinguished actress, and Dead Now Of Course is the tale of her early acting career.As a young member of a travelling company, Phyllida learned to cope with whatever was thrown at her, from making her own false eyelashes to battling flammable costumes and rogue cockroaches. We find her in Mrs Miller’s digs, which were shared with a boozy monkey bought from Harrods, an Afghan hound known as the ‘the flying duster’, several hens and various children.Filled with funny, charming anecdotes, Dead Now Of Course paints a fascinating picture of life in the theatre – and at the heart of the story is an enchanting account of Phyllida’s courtship with her future husband, the actor and writer Eric Thompson. COPYRIGHT (#uaa3d60e6-5722-5c1a-a9ac-7a08480ec4b9) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017 Text and illustrations copyright © Phyllida Law 2017 Phyllida Law asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008244743 Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008244750 Version: 2017-04-25 CONTENTS COVER (#u0ef07d43-ef44-5958-b643-484a0abbcae8) TITLE PAGE (#u205117dd-1300-5784-ba61-ed06c0ca7de7) COPYRIGHT DEDICATION (#ub8b51dea-0e25-5ad1-892e-e8e26c80a6e7) EPIGRAPH (#ud84f4c4a-32d5-546f-abf9-a6d84d7f6328) OVERTURE DIGS AND TOURS MILDEW STAGECRAFT GREASEPAINT FOOTLIGHTS RUDE BITS PROPS! OPEN-PLAN THEATRES WIGS AND WARDROBE CURTAIN CALLS AND ENTRANCES OFF NAME-DROPPING NORMAN POPHAM DRESSING ROOM NUMBER 10 DRESSING ROOM 11 TYRONE GUTHRIE DIRECTORS EXTRA JOBS THE RUSSIANS TOM THE WEDDING FINALE PHOTOGRAPHS AND PROGRAMMES ABOUT THE PUBLISHER For my grandchildren, Ernie, Walter, Gaia & Tindy ‘Here’s tae us Wha’s like us Damn few, And they’re a’ deid’ Old Scottish toast, Anon ‘Our revels now are ended. These are our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve; And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.’ Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1 OVERTURE (#uaa3d60e6-5722-5c1a-a9ac-7a08480ec4b9) One September, the grown-ups started talking of this thing called War. I was evacuated from Glasgow aged seven. No one liked evacuees. They were dirty, came from Glasgow and had fleas. I was lucky: the eldest daughter in my billet was a superb storyteller. She and I improvised a mystery called ‘The Red and Silver Purse’, which lasted for weeks. I spent a lot of time crouched in cupboards, or underneath the gate-legged table. I think her grasp of storyline was educational. I loved her stories, and played a lot of major characters. The War was a sideline. At my school, I was the only boarder, and I loved it. The classroom window-seat was heated and the walls were lined with books. I read all of George Eliot – he was my favourite writer, until I found a large medical dictionary. At thirteen, I had some very odd symptoms and I researched them in depth. Apparently I was to die young, so I decided to devote my life to the human race – a Scottish Mother Teresa, with a stethoscope. I always wanted a stethoscope. I gave up all the things I loved, like music, painting and drawing in order to pass the required exams for the medical school in Glasgow. I got them all, but the elderly professor, with pince-nez, said I was too young. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go away for a year.’ I didn’t have the time. In despair, I told my mother I was to die young. She disagreed. So did the doctor, who gave me iron pills. The lid blew off my life. I decided to be a set designer, without the slightest idea of how one could achieve that ambition. I simply applied to every drama school of which I had heard. The Bristol Old Vic replied, asking for two speeches to be learnt and delivered. I presented myself for the audition in a room above a cabbage wholesaler. I’d had the sense not to choose Juliet, and I included a Scottish speech, from David Lyndsay’s A Satire of the Three Estates. ‘Behold my paps of pulchrytude perfyte,’ I breathed. I think that was the clincher. They accepted me immediately. My indomitable granny thought theatre the ‘Gateway to Hell’. There was nothing in the family except medicine and the Church. She said she had a degree in Electricity and, of course, she knew Shakespeare. He lived on Sherbrook Avenue. No one ever asked me for my portfolio, but I understood that the first year was to be with the actors and the second year was backstage. I had such a good time. That first year was hilarious – I didn’t understand any of it. When asked to relax, I folded myself up and fell onto the floor in a heap. Each morning we did exercises in very little clothing to ‘The Skater’s Waltz’, and it was frightful. I did mine with Joe, the bridge of whose nose was rather flat because, having told his dad he wanted to be an actor, his dad thumped him. He eventually became a tax inspector. I was trained to kiss stage left or right of the opposing mouth, leaving the face of the star contender available for the audience. When this year’s young fling their clothes off and devour each other on screen, I have to leave and put the kettle on. I mean, how do they do that? What if they haven’t brushed their teeth? Romance did not flourish in Glasgow. My mother disapproved of people holding hands in the street. ‘Why can’t they wait till they get home?’ she’d say. And eating in the street was unthinkable, as bad as smoking in the street, or wearing curlers till teatime. George Bernard Shaw thought that pushing food into a hole in the middle of one’s face was revolting. He even considered that sexual activity was less offensive. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. You may have to Google it. Ken Tynan would certainly have preferred it. I remember catching him on TV, telling us with firm conviction that we would be seeing ‘the act’ on stage any day now. He was right. He actually used the word ‘F***’, the F word, and it was startling. My generation was pretty hopeless. We could smoulder a bit on stage, but we were sexually timid, and a bit lumpy. Or was that just me? My future mother-in-law burst into tears when she heard her son was to marry an actress. There’s still something disturbing, I grant you, about the word ‘actress’. If an MP or some other outstanding person plays fast and loose with an actress the world is unsurprised. She is certainly no better than she should be, and probably French. DIGS AND TOURS (#uaa3d60e6-5722-5c1a-a9ac-7a08480ec4b9) Having been accepted at the Bristol Old Vic, I was told I had to look for digs. Why digs? Why are theatrical board-and-lodgings called ‘digs’? It’s like some archaeological event. It says in my Chambers Dictionary, hiding in a huge paragraph, that it is ‘North American slang’. Really? It also means ‘to study hard’. Quite. I loved my first digs, when I was still a student. My landlady was tiny, gentle and profoundly deaf. She couldn’t hear thunder, but if there was lightning she covered all the mirrors in the house with towels and retired to a cupboard under the stairs. Then, on tour, there was the legendary superb cook, highly recommended by Tyrone Guthrie. Mrs Thomas was her name. She worked in a munitions factory and smuggled out sugar and scrubbing brushes. Everyone knew Mrs McKay in Daisy Avenue, Manchester. She had two houses, one for the girls, one for the boys. She liked the boys best, and preferred them to be well known. We all swapped over one night, changing houses. She was rather upset. We weren’t allowed ‘callers’ either. One actor smuggled his boyfriend in by carrying him upstairs in a piggyback. ‘Cripples now, Mr Cardew?’ Mrs M shouted from below stairs. We used to rehearse in the local cinema, starting at ten in the morning, when it was dim, dusty and deserted. Then we caught the bus after lunch – I don’t remember lunch. The bus was a cartoon. It had about ten seats in front and the back was jammed full of our gear. There were rails for costumes and barricaded sections for the set – the flats – and a large skip for the props. The boys put up the sets, the girls ironed and sorted the costumes – sometimes we got to do a bit of nailing and I was particularly brilliant with the French brace … Don’t ask. Our gear included rugs, cushions, drinks, wellies, books, embroidery, and some of us made rag rugs. This was popular and called bodging. Sometimes we ran our lines, but we were young – we knew them. We played everywhere possible, for miles around, even Dartmoor Prison, where I seem to remember I made my entrance ascending from a trapdoor. There were occasions when bits of the set weren’t used because the set was too big for the stage. I once made an exit which I couldn’t complete as the entrance was blocked by actors queuing to enter. I just had to reverse back onto the stage, trying to look intelligent and as if I were meant to be there. A door stuck once, irrevocably. They do, don’t they? The actor entered through the fireplace. That was tricky. We might have been in Sidmouth when nobody could get behind the set at all and had to exit, as one would, from the building itself. You would leave stage left, race round the library to stage right, and enter that way. If it had rained, as it often had, the effect was very comic. It might have been the following year when we went to the Edinburgh Festival with a play about Mary, Queen of Scots by an Italian. We previewed it in a church hall, halfway up Arthur’s Seat, or halfway down, depending on how you looked at it. One famous night, we were about to give Queen Mary the last rites, when there was an ear- splitting, numbing, extended crash, as if Edinburgh Castle had collapsed and was rolling downhill in our direction. Catherine Lacey, who played Queen Mary, didn’t blink. She went to her death, as ever, with great dignity. Apparently the ceiling had collapsed in our Revue Bar, and we assumed we might have a night off. Not a bit of it. Swept clean, the joists had large bunches of chickweed stuffed into any cracks and blackened old branches were nicked from local trees and fixed to all possible corners, then hung with boots and shoes. Brilliant. I couldn’t remember what it had looked like before. We even took the play to Linlithgow Palace, where I was very impressed by Mary, Queen of Scots’ loo. A hole in the battlements with a dizzying drop to the moat. I hope someone held onto her. I don’t think they do British Council Tours now like the one we did to South America. Our itinerary, gloriously, went like this: Brighton, Mexico City, Caracas, Quito, Santiago, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Athens and Rome. Sir Ralph Richardson, reasonably enough, wished to tour with people he liked, so he submitted a list of actors he favoured. They were all dead. We were in Ecuador, and Patsy Byrne and I were excited, beginners, costumed and ready on stage. The band played the national anthem. It was very merry and upbeat, and Patsy and I danced to it, swirling our huge skirts as we did a very energetic jive. The assistant stage manager crept on stage and whispered that we were causing a grave diplomatic incident. In the shadow of the wings we saw stern figures glaring at us accusingly. Fortunately for us, next up was ‘God Save the Queen’, so we had to dance to that too. It’s not easy. The best thing about Quito was they didn’t know the plot of The Merchant of Venice. Imagine Sir Ralph, sharpening his knife, looking vengeful and about to cut off his pound of flesh when Barbara Jefford, as Portia, says ‘Tarry a little, there is something else. This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.’ At the words ‘no jot of blood’, the audience stood up and cheered. Did they in Shakespeare’s day, I wonder? Oh, I hope so. When we stopped touring, I took up permanent residence in the icy attic of the local ballet school. I haven’t seen hoar frost on an interior window since. We used to slither downstairs to warm up, clinging to the brass bar of the Aga cooker in the kitchen. I learnt then to love dancers for their courage and insane trust in each other. They are always injured, but they still fly on stage and die in the wings. Boys used to carry their partners aloft by the crotch. A fork-lift, really – and no sniggering. I watched the girls darning the toes of their pointe shoes. I watched them binding their feet, covering their blisters, wiping blood from their damaged toes, and I sat at breakfast under a pulley full of jock straps and other intimate underwear. An education for a lumpen, guarded girl like me. As far as I was concerned, that kitchen was the centre of the universe. It was where the Touring Western Theatre Ballet Company was born and, besides, there were always warm leftovers in the bottom oven of the Aga. Something heavenly, like a sausage pie. And then, of course, there were usually two tin baths of shrouding – the cheapest material in the world – being dyed some glorious colour for costumes on the gas stove, yards of shrouding, furnishing fabric and old vests. Cutting and sewing occurred upstairs in the office by the telephone, where we kept a pile of coins to call the police from the local phone box when we had indecent phone calls. They were quite frequent. The doll we made for Copp?lia frequently sat at table with us. One of the boys used to dangle her on the end of a rope from his bedroom in the attic so that she arrived at the window and tapped for attention. We were monitored by a Collie dog that drank beer and a Siamese cat that could open the fridge. On one particular occasion, we forgot to apply for the right to use a particular piece of music. The new ballet was choreographed, complete and costumed, and we couldn’t use it. We ditched the original idea and composed our own music. It was known to us then as ‘Musique Concr?te’. First we ran the cold tap in the bath very fiercely and recorded it backwards. Then we interfered with the rhythm, adding a few plangent notes from an empty beer bottle. It went perfectly well. MILDEW (#uaa3d60e6-5722-5c1a-a9ac-7a08480ec4b9) The most notorious landlady in London was a Mrs Miller. For years I only knew her as a legend. She seemed always to be lunching with her bank manager – I never even had a cup of tea with mine. Norma Sheila Peta Miller was her name, NSPM – it sounded like a government department and she’s now known worldwide as ‘Mildew’. When I first heard of her she was landlady of a tall terraced house in Montague Street. The sort of residence Dickens would have walked past on his way to darker districts. Demolished now, of course. I remember passing the open door of a new kitchen as this glamorous woman put the largest joint of meat I had ever seen into her oven. It was a Wednesday. She always had an ‘Open Day’ on Wednesday. Sitting in a high chair was a tousle-haired boy waving a tablespoon, who favoured me with a dazzling smile. He was the youngest of three sons and called Adam. The middle son, Lee, was seriously disabled in every way. When he was a baby, Mil and her lodgers used to carry him upside-down by his feet to straighten his scoliosis. Against all medical predictions, he lived till he was seventeen and would have lived longer had he not been passionate about cars. One of his similarly afflicted friends was sitting in the driving seat of a parked car and Lee put his head through the window to look at the gear lever. His friend wound the window up. The eldest son, Nick, was twenty-five when he died. Cancer. He lived until his very last ounce of time on the sofa, and his best friend set up home on the windowsill. I think he’s still there. Somehow, she knew everyone, even the Kray brothers. She said they had the cleanest fingernails she’d ever seen. Odd. I’d always heard that they cemented their enemies into those huge pillars that hold up motorways. I don’t know how she knew them. I didn’t ask. She also knew assorted aristocrats. I asked about that. Her husband, Able Seaman Dusty Miller, was a prisoner of war, who had escaped so regularly they’d had to put him in the worst prison to be found, and that was Colditz. And everyone in Colditz had connections at the Court. Interesting people with terrifying voices and no money. Dusty didn’t have any either. By trade, he was a heating engineer and Norma Sheila Peta helped finance his workshop with her property deals. One never knew where she lived from one moment to the next, but there were always a couple of out-of-work actors living with her. The one I knew best used to do a bit of work for Dusty. When they were installing air-conditioning in a big hen-house, he dropped his spanner from a great height. The noise was so shattering that the hens fainted. Dusty didn’t bear a grudge. Her house had a shifting population, composed of actors in the attic, a couple of criminals, several dogs, an alcoholic monkey and a prostitute. They were all gay, except the prostitute, though I fancy monkeys bat both ways. I used to call in order to visit the actors on the top floor. If N.S.P. Miller wasn’t in, they threw the key down to me in an old sock. If she was in, and answered the door, she looked like Marlene Dietrich from the waist up and an unreliable charlady from the waist down, wearing socks and sordid pink mules. I was fascinated by the stories the boys used to tell me when I called. I wanted so much to meet the monkey, which N.S.P. Miller had bought from Harrods. There used to be a zoo in Harrods. You could, apparently, order a camel and get it delivered. Mildew bought Chico because he looked so utterly miserable and took him home via the vet, where he was diagnosed with ‘borderline pneumonia’. ‘Give me your hand,’ the vet said to Mil, and when he took it, he snipped a three-inch cuff off her cardigan and made two tiny holes at each side, thus creating a Chico-sized jumper. He survived on a regime of port and brandy. He even had his place in the local pub. In time, he became famous for his hangovers and his ability to escape to the roof. Mildew had a very close relationship with the local firemen. Chico lived in a huge cage in the bathroom with a tiny duvet, where he used to retire, red-eyed, from the pub. His favourite friend was a mild- mannered mongrel called Mick the Greek, on which he would ride round the house, side saddle, holding onto his collar with one hand, and waving at his fans with the other. Finn McCool, the Irish Wolfhound, was huge. He used to glare at people through the letterbox with his golden eyes. He was epileptic, and if he took a turn on the top landing, his descent was epic. I never met Bitos, the Afghan hound, now known as The Flying Duster. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/phyllida-law/dead-now-of-course/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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