That's Another Story: The Autobiography (27 page)

I felt blessed that I had got into the Everyman. I had no idea at the time that theatre could be like that. Previously I had believed it to be the preserve of the middle classes, but here at the Everyman the audiences were a complete mixture; it felt as if we were reaching out to the entire community and that we were on the front line of some kind of revolution. During those eighteen months, two productions stick out for me:
Funny Peculiar
by Mike Stott and
Breezeblock Park
by Willy Russell. These were new plays that had never been performed before and were directed by the redoubtable Alan Dossor, who ran the theatre at that time. He was a fearlessly inventive and clever director, handsome and moody, and I was terrified of him.

In
Funny Peculiar
I played a homely, ordinary housewife and mother of a young baby who is constantly pressurised by her husband to be more sexually liberated and is eventually driven almost to breaking point. There is a cracking scene, which comes directly after a scene of high slapstick comedy, in which Irene, my character, breaks down and tries to express her own pain and bewilderment. I had no idea how to tackle it; it was inarticulate, raw and outside the realms of my own life experience. Alan, immediately recognising my problem after the read-through, took me aside.

‘Don’t worry about that scene. We’ll deal with it without the others present. Don’t learn it.’

I was dreading it, this rehearsal with just the two of us; it felt as if I was going to have to recite a not yet invented times table for Sister Ignatius, with a wasp stuck under her wimple. In fact it was the best acting lesson I’ve ever had. The lines of the speech concerned were disjointed half-sentences and odd, disconnected, isolated words held together with a series of dots. We talked about Irene, who she was and what exactly the feeling was that propelled these words from her mouth. Again he said, ‘I don’t want you to learn it or to try to act it. I just want you to feel it.’

And once I got that feeling, it was deep and powerful, something that I have hankered after in numerous performances ever since. He led me respectfully and sensitively through the rehearsal and the lesson I learnt - that emotional honesty is what draws an audience to you; that it is not something that you demonstrate on the outside but something that first comes from your core; and that this is true of every single part - has stayed with me and it is something I have tried to adhere to throughout my career.

The combination of my breakthrough with Alan Dossor and the terrifyingly challenging work with Van Load created an amazing grounding for me, and it was in fact
Funny Peculiar
that took me down to London and into the West End after a short season at the Mermaid Theatre in Puddle Dock. It transferred, in the spring of 1976, to the Garrick Theatre in Charing Cross Road, where Richard Beckinsale played Trevor, my husband, and Pete Postlethwaite replaced Kevin Lloyd as Desmond the baker in one of the funniest scenes ever to be staged: the aforementioned slapstick scene. Suffice it to say that a lot of real cream buns were involved and the two characters, after having words, embark literally on a bunfight, ending up with them both covered in cream. I have rarely heard laughter like it in a theatre since.

Funny Peculiar
at the Garrick marked the first time that my mother came to see me in a play. She had rung up not long after we opened and both the show and I had been declared a hit by the critics. She said she wanted to come and see it, adding, ‘I don’t mind how you live,’ meaning that she had guessed that I was living with Pete and she was giving her stamp of approval.

He and I had been living in a legalised squat in Whitechapel for a couple of months but had been thrown out because the dog had not only chewed through the wiring to the stereo system but had also left one too many little messages on the shag pile. To add insult to injury, the girl whose squat it was came home unexpectedly one weekend to find Pete and me in her bed. Worst of all, the dog had, unbeknownst to us, ripped the crotch out of her best knickers, a habit Babs never quite grew out of. Well, we had thought she wouldn’t be home that weekend and it was a much better bed than ours.

So we found ourselves a new flat in Greek Street, Soho, with Babs, of course, in tow. It cost £25 per week and was on the second floor, with an office underneath us, an Italian restaurant on the ground floor and, in the tiny flat above us, a pair of over-friendly, slightly suspect girls, visited by a long succession of men traipsing up and down the stairs, throughout the evening and on into the small hours. Our flat consisted of one huge, L-shaped room with a large bathroom at the back, and the whole place was carpeted in deep purple, which also carried on into the bathroom and up the side of the bath. Its three tall windows looked down on to Greek Street. The first thing my mother saw when she walked in and went over to the window was the sex shop opposite with a neon sign that flashed ‘The Soho Sex Centre’. She said nothing but laughed a little nervously. This just heightened my anxiety about her seeing the play, as it involved references to, amongst other things, oral sex and fellatio in particular, whilst the final scene of the play involved Trevor lying in a hospital bed with a cage over his legs and my character, Irene, putting her head down under the cage, to his obvious enjoyment. I was dreading seeing my mother afterwards, not knowing what on earth she would make of it. To my amazement she said, ‘Oh, Julie, that
was
funny! You would keep looking under the sheets, wouldn’t you?’

In this last scene, I would sit on one side of the bed and Trevor’s ‘mistress’, played by Susan Cameron, would sit on the other, eating chocolates; she would put her head under the sheets after popping a chocolate into her mouth and come up again to say something, the chocolate having been eaten. Therefore specific chocolates were chosen, that is, ones with soft centres, so that she could eat one quite quickly in time to come back up and say her line. One night the wrong chocolate was put in the box, a hard caramel, and although she did her best to eat it, it was impossible so she had to spit it out on to the sheet. However, when Richard got out of bed for the curtain call it looked as if he’d had a terrible accident. His pyjamas were covered in melted chocolate from the discarded caramel, which was smeared all around his nether regions, and he, poor thing, had no idea, while the rest of us could barely bow for laughing.

I stayed in the play at the Garrick for a year, during which Pete, Babs and I settled into our version of domesticity in the flat at number 6 Greek Street. Life in Soho was peculiarly suited to life in the theatre, in that, like us, the place came alive at night. The street had two nightclubs, Le Kilt and the Beat Route, which only got going at about ten o’clock at night, so the flat had a constant thump, vibrating its floor and walls until about three in the morning. Spookily, and unbeknownst to me, on the door of the Beat Route at that time was a tall, dark, handsome doorman whom I was to marry some twenty years later. Grant must have seen me walk past on numerous occasions and I’m sure I must have clocked him.

Once the clubs closed in the small hours, it was the turn of the dustcart. Its engine alone created a huge amount of noise, plus there were all the mechanics at its rear end. Crate upon crate of assorted bottles from these clubs as well as the numerous restaurants, not to mention the one directly beneath us, would be hauled, smashing and clanging, into the back of the cart, an extremely loud and lengthy process lasting at least an hour, with the dustmen shouting to each other above the clamour. Throughout the night there would be various fracas, as people, the worse for wear, would turn out of the clubs and restaurants, and groups of drunks would descend on the many strip joints and brothels. Even when there was no fracas, they would rarely talk, preferring to shriek at the tops of their voices. So it was not until around three or four o’clock that any sort of peace would descend and we could go to bed. By day, which started for us in the early afternoon, the flat became a drop-in centre for any actor who happened to be in town for a voiceover or an interview, and we were continually running out of tea, coffee and other provisions. I longed for a bit of space of my own and frequently went to the theatre early to spend the afternoon down in my dressing room, reading, with a cup of tea and a chopped-liver sandwich, something I wouldn’t dream of eating now, from the little caf’ up the street. The dressing room was my home away from home. It was here in this one-room flat that I discovered a need for time and space alone, which I still have today and which I crave if I don’t get enough.

Greek Street was not an ideal place to keep a dog and taking her out for a wee last thing at night on the streets of Soho was not a walk in the park, if you get my drift. Pete always did that whilst I took her out during the day and, even then, I was frequently pointed at by tourists and smirked at by office workers, who quite obviously thought that I was a prostitute. I suppose that walking through the streets of Soho, with no bag and a small dog, given my penchant for lots of eye make-up, could have given the wrong impression. More than once I heard someone say, ‘Look! There’s one.’ Or on one occasion, ‘How much do you charge, love? Is the dog thrown in for free?’

On several days during the week and on a Sunday, I would take Babs on the tube to Hyde Park. This was a massive risk as although Babs was intelligent she was pretty much a free spirit. One Sunday morning during that boiling summer of 1976, I had taken her to the park and decided on a bit of a sunbathe in a deckchair before it got too hot. At first Babs settled down underneath the chair but after a short time, and as more people began to arrive in the park, she staked out an area around the deckchair. Anyone who had the audacity to cross over her boundary was seen off with a barrage of yapping and a baring of teeth. Eventually she palled up with a Border collie type belonging to a man who was sunbathing just outside her designated protection zone. I watched, the proud mother, enjoying the sight of the two of them nipping one another playfully and bounding around with great joyous leaps into the air.

The game then seemed to heighten in intensity, culminating in the two of them chasing one another round and round this man’s deckchair, each circuit getting faster and faster, and then just as they were becoming a blur they both stopped dead and peed with shivering excitement, one after the other, on the man’s clothing, which lay in a pile next to his chair. I leapt up in a panic, got my things together and tried to catch Babs without waking the man. This resulted in my chasing her and the collie in circuits around his deckchair until, with a flattening rugby tackle, I pinned her to the ground. Just as I thought I’d escaped the man woke up.

‘Oh hi ! . . . I’m just catching up my dog. Time to go home now.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, smiling sleepily at Babs. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Babs . . . What’s yours called?’

‘Oh, I haven’t got a dog.’ The stench of dog pee was already rising off his clothes in the summer heat. The collie was nowhere to be seen.

‘Oh . . . ah . . . OK. See ya.’

Along with her free spirit, Babs also had, paradoxically, a rather strait-laced, disapproving side to her. She simply took against anyone who was different in any way and would randomly berate people for wearing, say, yellow socks or a panama hat, and on one occasion in a desperately embarrassing incident she started a horrible, almost howling attack on a black man, whilst I was at the pick-and-mix in Woolworth’s. Everyone stopped and stared, first at her and then at me, with ill-disguised contempt for what they interpreted as my rampant racism, something that had clearly rubbed off on my dog and had possibly even been trained into her.

Once whilst I was taking her for a walk along Oxford Street, a girl dressed as a punk, with bright-pink hair glued high into a spiky Mohican and wearing very tight red jeans, minced her way past us in the crowd. Babs, without warning and employing a brilliant vertical take-off, leapt up and bit her on the arse. The girl screamed and rounded on me with a string of expletives, kicking out at the dog, which, straining at the leash, continued in a fit of frenzy to bark and growl at her. I think I probably didn’t help matters by trying to explain that Babs didn’t really approve of what the girl was wearing, because this seemed only to crank her fury up a notch, at which the expletives became totally unintelligible and froth started to ooze at the corners of her mouth. At last she teetered off on high-heeled boots, looking back red-faced at the dog and rubbing her buttock angrily as she went.

We always took Babs with us when performing in the theatre, once foolishly taking her on stage at the Mermaid Theatre for the curtain call, where the sight of hundreds of people clapping, a sign that we used to indicate that she was doing something we disliked, caused her to evacuate her bowls there and then, in front of a rather bemused audience. Once in the theatre she would make the dressing room her home and then woe betide anyone with the temerity to enter. She had bitten more stage-doorkeepers than I care to think about, even cornering one poor dresser in my dressing room for the whole of the first act of
Funny Peculiar
. I came off at the interval to find her cowering up against the wall with Babs snapping at her feet, having lost her voice, the dog, that is, after an hour and a half of persistent barking.