That's Another Story: The Autobiography (29 page)

When I finished in
Funny Peculiar
in the spring of 1977, I discovered to my surprise that I had lost three-quarters of a stone in weight, which took me down to just under eight stone. On the day that I left the Garrick, I looked at the poster-sized picture of me as Irene, the character that I played, at the front of house and wondered what had happened: the girl in the photograph had a rounded face and thicker legs and arms. This is a syndrome that has repeated itself throughout my career. Whenever I am engaged in a long run in the theatre, I gradually lose weight. Just recently in the sixteen weeks that I performed in
Acorn Antiques the Musical
I lost just over a stone and I wasn’t exactly overweight to begin with, but no matter what I ate I couldn’t seem to keep the weight on. It was suggested that it was due to the dancing, singing and general physicality of the part, which was true to a certain degree, but this weight loss occurred with any part that I played, regardless of the physical energy exerted, if it was played over a period of time. I believe it had more to do with the effort required for me to re-create the part every night, putting a huge pressure on myself to make the audience believe in and engage with it each second that I was on stage, and with the adrenalin rush that this produced.

Shortly after the run finished we tried to go down the same route with Willy Russell’s hilarious play,
Breezeblock Park
, as we had done with
Funny Peculiar
, starting off at the Mermaid, with Wendy Craig in the central role, played brilliantly at the Everyman by Eileen O’Brien, but after a mauling by the critics we took it valiantly into the Whitehall Theatre, with Prunella Scales instead. Playing the very dim, lovable and funny Vera, I had a ball. The show was adored by the audiences and although the cast, myself included, were well received, the play was trounced once again by the critics, despite the fact that several of them were seen to be convulsed with laughter on press night. It came off after a few weeks with audiences roaring their approval to the last.

The following year in the summer of 1978, after a stint at the Royal Court Theatre under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark in which I played a New York Jewish lesbian who was also a solo round-the-world yachtswoman in a completely unintelligible play by Snoo Wilson titled
The Glad Hand
, I took a job at the Bush Theatre, a tiny space above a pub of the same name on Shepherd’s Bush Green in West London. It was, and still is - despite almost having its grant taken away this year in a disgraceful and ludicrous proposal by the Arts Council of Great Britain - a major force in the championing of new talent, especially writers. The proposal was withdrawn after a welter of opposition from actors and writers who had launched successful careers from that tiny stage. Our production was to be an evening of playlets - we were instructed not to call them sketches - written by such luminaries as Snoo Wilson, Nigel Baldwin, Ken Campbell, Ron Hutchinson, Dusty Hughes, who also directed, and a young woman I’d never heard of before called Victoria Wood.

The evening was to be titled
In at the Death
and some would say that the audiences were, on most nights. Also in the cast were Godfrey Jackman, Clive Merrison, Alison Fiske and Phil Jackson, while Victoria, fresh out of BBC1’s topical
That’s Life
, was to provide musical interludes between each sketch - there, I’ve said it - one of which was the glorious ‘Guy the Gorilla’ (‘died of chocolate, not usually a killer’), as well as writing a sketch of her own.

The sketches were to be based on small snippets from newspapers connected in some way with death: not major articles, but those little pieces tucked away in the bottom corners of the inside pages, probably best found in local papers. Ken Campbell took his from the
Malaysian New Strait Times
; Nigel Baldwin took his inspiration from the
Holyhead and Anglesey Chronicle
; and Vic used the tabloids. Ron Hutchinson’s piece was set in Northern Ireland, based around a Ruby Murray lookalike contest. There was a brilliant sketch written by Dusty Hughes about ‘ghouls’, the people who turn up to gawp at road accidents, tube disasters and the like, but the hit of the evening was Victoria’s piece, which was entitled
Sex
and involved a young woman, worried that she was pregnant, played by me, finding out from this other character, played by Victoria, that she hadn’t even had sex. It brought the house down every night.

One line that I particularly remember as a rafter shaker was: ‘Well, where are you in the menstrual cycle?’

‘. . . Erm . . . Taurus.’

It was here at the Bush that our relationship was cemented, easily slipping into a friendship on the first day of rehearsals, when we discovered that we had Geoffrey Durham in common, he of the near facial hair-fire disaster, who had lived underneath me in Canning Street when I was at the Everyman. It turned out that he was Vic’s bloke and so here was our first bond. The second, which Victoria informed me of over liver, boil (sic) and onions at the Bush caf’ round the corner from the theatre, was that we had met before. It turns out that she had auditioned at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre when I was a first-year there. I had been drafted in to usher the auditionees into the theatre to do their pieces and had spent the entire time trying to entertain them with stories of my nursing days, previously recorded herein, and generally showing off from my privileged position of already having a place. At first I couldn’t remember her being there and then the image of this shy little girl, wearing glasses and throwing up in a bucket, flashed before me.

There was actually a third thing that bonded us. One evening early on, after rehearsal, Vic and I were going somewhere or other in her newly acquired Mini van. Wherever it was, we somehow got lost in the back streets of Shepherd’s Bush, God forbid. After about ten minutes we ended up in either a cul-de-sac or a ‘no through road’, so a three-point turn was necessary in order to get out. Victoria swung the car round with great aplomb and being a non-driver at this stage of my life I was hugely impressed by her skill and confidence. Then she backed up and I think we must have been talking because she reversed just a little too far. We heard a bit of a crunch and she pulled tentatively forward to reveal that she had knocked down an entire garden wall. Our escape from that street, apart from the paroxysms of laughter, that is, with the screeching of tyres and the smell of burning rubber, was worthy of a 1970s action thriller.

It was an interesting time, although I fear that we gave poor old Dusty Hughes rather a hard time, or at least I think I did. I just felt that I knew best. I had come from the great Everyman, a working-class hero; I ploughed my own furrow; and some London-based, middle-class, university-educated bloke was not going to direct me. In those days I still laboured under the misapprehension that certain types of direction were tantamount to slurs on my acting ability and had what you might call a wee chip on my already rounding shoulder. One day, frustrated by the lack of progress in rehearsals, Victoria and I hatched a devilish plan whilst down in the pub toilets. We rushed back upstairs.

‘Dusty! What sort of car have you got?’

He told us.

‘Where is it parked?’

‘Why?’

‘We think it’s being broken into, it looked as if someone was trying to get into it!’

And off he shot. Then we put the kettle on and decided on what we thought was the best way to play the particular sketch we had been rehearsing with Dusty.

Dusty was a talented playwright, going on, two years later in 1980, to win the London Theatre Critics Award for Most Promising Playwright, and he took our undermining, prank-playing and joke-cracking at his expense in very good heart.

As ever, I was in my element fooling around, which took me right back into class-jester mode. One lunchtime whilst for some reason we were hanging out of the office window upstairs, we spied Harold Pinter standing at the bus stop in the street below.

‘Harold! Hello, there! You write plays, don’t you?’ I called.

‘Pardon?’

‘You’re a writer! We could do with one of those up here!’

Then a week after we opened we wrote ‘H. Pinter (two tickets)’ on the bookings list just for a laugh and scared the cast half to death, laughing our heads off backstage as we watched the other actors nervously upping their performances to impress the very absent Mr Pinter.

Backstage at the Bush consisted of an area approximately six feet by six feet and a set of stone steps leading down to the street. These were also used as the fire escape and, once the audience were in, the dressing room. The only toilet facility was downstairs in the pub itself and so this is where we rushed at the interval of an early preview, only to hear, whilst sitting on the lav, a middle-class voice intone loudly, ‘Oh dear, could do better. Shall we bother with the second half?’ After that, it was pint glasses and frequent cries of ‘Don’t drink that!’ as thirsty actors reached for what they thought was their pint of Carlsberg in the dark. It was extremely cramped with six actors all trying to get changed in this space, and Vic and I had many a private joke about the slack nature of a certain actor’s underpants.

It was also hazardous, not the slackness of the underpants, you understand, but the backstage space. One night we were all on stage, apart, that is, from Victoria who didn’t appear until the last few minutes leading up to the interval. During the course of these we heard a dreadful crash, accompanied by the soft thud of flesh on stone repeated several times, from backstage. When we finally exited we found Victoria covered in blood halfway down the stairs, where she had accidentally slipped and fallen whilst hovering over a beer glass and cut her hand. In doing so she had also knocked over a number of other glasses, splattering the costumes with their contents, and they didn’t all contain drinks. What the second-half audience thought of the badly stained costumes one can only guess at and as for the smell as they dried under the stage lights in that tiny space, perhaps they thought that they were experiencing early Odorama.

The show did well, being well received on the whole, and it was on the final Saturday that David Leland walked in and asked to speak to Victoria. It turned out that he was running a young writers’ festival at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and he asked Victoria to write a play for it. She said she would write something for me. I thought this was very kind, but couldn’t ever imagine it happening, and went off to have a not particularly happy time at the Bristol Old Vic, where at my audition to play Phoebe in Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, Richard Cotterell, the director, said, ‘Come downstage, Julie, I want to see your f-f-f-f—’

‘Erm, is this what they call the casting couch?’

‘I want to see your f-f-f—’

‘Blimey, Richard, what sort of production is this?’

‘Your
face
!’

‘Oh . . . fair enough.’

I got the part but hated it, unable to get to its centre. Looking back, I think I was trying too hard and expecting too much from it. Perhaps I’d have done better if I had shown my f-f-f—

It was here at Bristol that I was told the tale of an actor being on that very stage, playing Macbeth during a matine’e. He had started the famous speech, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’, when an aged voice from the stalls was heard to say, ‘Oh, that’ll be Wednesday.’

And it was here that I read Victoria’s wonderful new play
Talent
, which she had, indeed, written for me. My character was called Julie and my character’s boyfriend was called Dave Walters. The play centred around a talent contest in a seedy Northern nightclub. Julie was entering the contest and Maureen, her best friend, played by Victoria, had come along for support. It fitted me like a glove, the extreme opposite of the experience I was having with Phoebe. I knew this girl exactly, what she would wear, how she would speak, how she would smoke, cry, laugh, and when she would breathe. And I wasn’t free! It had to go ahead without me and I was mortified. The part was played by Hazel Clyne, but the show was seen by Peter Eckersley, a Granada Television producer, who picked it up to be adapted for television. This meant I had a chance to audition for the part.

It was a play with songs, two of which I was required to sing, one of my own choosing (Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’) plus one of the numbers from the show. The latter was a gorgeous, sardonically nostalgic song titled ‘I Want to Be Fourteen Again’. When it came to my turn to sing, Victoria played it in my key, a privilege I’m not entirely sure the rest of the auditionees enjoyed. In fact at the end of the audition, just as I was leaving the room, she said, under her breath, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to play it in a really high key for everyone else!’ I took it as a joke, but I’m not certain to this day whether it was.

Anyway, as history will confirm I got the part and there began a working friendship where Victoria gave me brilliant gift after brilliant gift. We followed
Talent
with a sequel the following year titled
Nearly a Happy Ending
. This featured the same two characters, Julie and Maureen, who had appeared in
Talent
and involved Maureen’s attempts at losing her virginity at some awful sales conference in a dreary hotel. Again it was both hilarious and touching, and an amazingly generous vehicle for me. It was followed fairly quickly by another one-off comedy drama titled
Happy Since I Met You
, in which Victoria didn’t star, and I played opposite Duncan Preston, my character being a drama teacher and his a struggling actor. It was a gorgeously bitter-sweet comedy.