The roar of the greasepaint
For as long back as I can remember I wanted to be a writer. This is quite different from wanting to write. I now enjoy being a writer and also want to write. Why it's turned out to be playwriting is a bit of a puzzle. When I was growing up, in Derbyshire, a visit to the theatre meant the Christmas panto in Sheffield. I remember the trips – train or bus – but little of the glitter or glamour. Maybe I was always a realist. The first proper play I saw was a school production of Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. A lad called Geoff Batty was the lead and, I remember, Bob Wilson (later of Arsenal and Scotland) was also rather good in it. The rule was that junior boys (as I was then) weren't eligible for the annual school play – and the following year, aged 13 and now qualifying, I auditioned hard. It mattered. Why? I don't know. I'd been quite a shy boy and was coming out of my shell? I sniffed the future? Anyway, I got and grabbed the part of Gamaliel, one of the High Priests deciding what to do about an upstart preacher called Jesus in that year's production of Caesar's Friend, smelt greasepaint for the first time and felt the adrenalin rush of pre-performance nerves. My dad had an operation in the hospital just down the road from Chesterfield Civic Theatre where - over three evenings - we performed Caesar's Friend. My mother didn't tell me how serious his operation was till the run of the play was over ('We didn't want to worry or spoil it for you') and I learnt that night the unimportance of theatrical glory. I learnt a few practical lessons too in the next few years – about how plays were constructed. I was playing leads from then on, mainly Shakespearian. You imbibe craft. Rehearsing and performing that brief lethal meeting where Beatrice tells Benedick to 'Kill Claudio,' or to stare, uncomprehending, across the stage at Lady Macbeth in the dead centre of the play – the oddly fugitive scene between the murderous couple that ends, 'Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood' - you learn a thing or two about play mechanics. Get into a scene late, get out early.. don't linger, go on. It's old advice that, the best part of a lifetime later, I put into the mouth of Shakespeare in a play, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, which can be obtained here.
Later, at Cambridge, I realised I didn't really want to be an actor – I wasn't quite hungry (or good) enough - and when listening to the performance of Antony Sher, perhaps the greatest Shakespearian actor of his age, in my play about the great man, I know I came to the right decision. Listen to the way he turns up the power in the (mid-point) scene between Will Shakespeare and his errant brother Edmund… So, not greasepaint and the smell of the crowd for me but the study, the keyboard – that's what my role turned out to be. Just occasionally, particularly when on heat with a play, a scene will write itself. You never – or barely - alter it. The last scene between father and daughter in Pattern of Painful Adventures was like that. It took fifteen minutes, after lunch. If it ever changed it was only by a word or so. They're not all as easy as that…
Later, at Cambridge, I realised I didn't really want to be an actor – I wasn't quite hungry (or good) enough - and when listening to the performance of Antony Sher, perhaps the greatest Shakespearian actor of his age, in my play about the great man, I know I came to the right decision. Listen to the way he turns up the power in the (mid-point) scene between Will Shakespeare and his errant brother Edmund… So, not greasepaint and the smell of the crowd for me but the study, the keyboard – that's what my role turned out to be. Just occasionally, particularly when on heat with a play, a scene will write itself. You never – or barely - alter it. The last scene between father and daughter in Pattern of Painful Adventures was like that. It took fifteen minutes, after lunch. If it ever changed it was only by a word or so. They're not all as easy as that…