The Fry Chronicles (15 page)

‘In any case,’ I was told, ‘it means you will be President of the May Ball committee in your third year, which will look really good on the CV. Excellent for getting a job in the City.’

Already we were moving towards a time when getting a job in the City, rather than being looked at as an embarrassing gateway to clerkly drudgery and dull worthiness, was beginning to be thought of as a glamorous, sexy and desirable destiny for the elite of the world.

The members of the May Ball Committee were, as you
might expect, public-school men. Many of them were also members of the Cherubs, Queens’ College’s exclusive dining and drinking club. I know I ought to have looked down on institutions like May Balls and dining clubs with amused scorn, lofty disdain and impatient wrath, but the moment I heard of the Cherubs’ existence I resolved that I would be elected. I once heard Alan Bennett say of snobbery that it was ‘a very amiable vice’, which I found surprising. ‘That is to say,’ he went on, ‘the kind of snobbery that looks up with admiration is amiable. Daft, but amiable. The kind that looks down with contempt is not amiable. Not amiable at all.’ I cannot deny that I am susceptible to a tinge of the amiable kind. I believe I have never looked down on anyone because they are ‘low born’ (whatever that might mean) but I cannot deny that I have been glamourized by those who are ‘high born’ (whatever
that
might mean). It is a preposterous weakness and I could easily pretend that I am immune to it, but the fact is that I am not, so I may as well fess up. I suppose it is, once more, all part of the feeling I have always had of being an outsider, always needing the proof of belonging that those who truly belong never need. Or something like that.

The Cambridge term is only eight weeks long. They call it Full Term, and you are expected to be in residence for all of it – in theory the permission of a Dean or Senior Tutor is needed for an ‘exeat’ if you want to biff off; you can make up your time away during the two weeks that bracket either end of Full Term. I kept Full Term so that I could go straight up to Cundall and teach there for the three weeks they had left of their, much longer, school term. After Christmas with my family in Norfolk it was
back to Cundall for a week and then to Cambridge for the Lent term.

The very fact of this being my second term seemed to release something in me, for I went to three auditions in the first week. I got the parts I wanted for all of them. I played Jeremiah Sant, an insane Ian Paisley-style Ulsterman, in Peter Luke’s dramatization of the Corvo novel
Hadrian the Seventh
, the distraught Jewish tailor who sees a ghost in Wolf Mankowitz’s
The Bespoke Overcoat
and someone or other in the Trinity Hall lunchtime production of a play about Scottish nationalism. This set the pattern for a term which saw me running from rehearsals to auditions to theatres and back to auditions and rehearsals and theatres again. Lunchtime, evening and late night were the three usual slots for performance: if someone had suggested a morning production I would have put myself up for that too. I think I was in twelve plays in that eight-week term. I managed one essay on Edmund Spenser and went to no lectures or seminars. Supervisions, the Cambridge word for tutorials, were the only more or less compulsory academic intrusion on my new theatrical life. You would go alone, or occasionally with one other, to a don’s rooms, read out the essay you had written, talk about it and then discuss some other writer, literary movement or phenomenon and leave promising an essay on that subject for the next week. I became adept at excuses:

‘I’m really sorry, Dr Holland, but I’m still trying to engage with the eschatology of
Paradise Lost
. I think I’ll take another week to come to terms with it.’ It is shameful and lowering to confess how I would mine dictionaries of literary and philosophical terms for words like eschatology, syncresis and syntagmatic.

‘Fine, fine. Take your time.’

Dr Holland wouldn’t be fooled for a second. Being used to undergraduates, he would be familiar with their tiresome long-word displays (you will already have winced at plenty of them in this book I dare say: the felid remains incapable of permuting his nevi) and he had probably been in the audience of at least two of the plays I had acted in that week and would know perfectly well that I was spending every hour on drama and none on academic work. Cambridge was very relaxed about that kind of thing. As long as they didn’t think you were going to fail your degree there was no danger of them playing the heavy. The chances of failing a degree were fabulously remote. It was perhaps a part of the institution’s arrogance that it believed anyone it selected for entrance was necessarily incapable of failure. For the rest the faculty and college very sensibly left it up to the individual. If you wanted to work hard for a first-class degree any amount of help was given; if you preferred to spend your time pulling an oar through the water or striding about in tights roaring pentameters, why then that was fine too. A relaxed atmosphere of trust pervaded the university.

That Lent term passed in a blizzard of acting. By the end of it I was an insider in the small world of Cambridge drama. The little microcosm reflected the esoteric coteries, cliques and factions (I only put the word ‘esoteric’ in front of ‘coteries’ because it is an anagram of it and that pleases me) of the wider world without. The bar of the ADC theatre was a-hum with talk of Artaud and Anouilh, Stanislavsky and Stein, Brecht and Blin. Many a strong-stomached aspiring sportsman, scientist or politico would have been unable to overhear our talk
without vomiting. We probably used the word ‘darling’ for each other. I certainly did. If not honeybottom, loveangel or nippleface. Sickening I know, but there you are. The derogatory epithet ‘lovie’ had yet to be ascribed to the theatrical profession, but that’s what –
avant la lettre
– we were, lovies all. History and precedent might be said to have encouraged us: Peter Hall, John Barton, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nick Hytner, James Mason, Michael Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen … the list of theatrical giants who had leaned up against the same bar and dreamed the same dreams was inspiringly great.

So how did I get to that position so fast? Was I really so talented? Or was everyone else really so talentless? I wish I knew. I can remember a great many images, occasions and solid experiences, but the emotional memory behind them is blurred and unresolved. Was I ambitious? Yes, I think in some secret way I was ambitious. Always far too proud to let it show, but hungry for Cambridge’s silly microcosmic equivalent of stardom. I suppose when the captain of the college rugger team sees some fresher take to the field and get his first opportunity to make a run and handle the ball he knows straight away that this person can, or cannot, play rugby. For all my shortcomings as an actor (physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion) I suppose at auditions I showed that I at least had that thing in me that allowed an audience in. Through the occlusions of the past I can make out a tall, thin, dignified, rumbly toned student who could look either seventeen or thirty-seven. He knows how to stand still and look another actor in the eye. He knows how to deliver a line at least in such a way as to convey its meaning and, if necessary, its majesty. He
can, as they say, ‘pull focus’ on to and off his own self. I am not so sure about his ability to inhabit a different personality, to live through the arc of his character’s journey on stage and all that mother jazz, but he is at least unlikely to be a blush-making embarrassment.

The moment I walked on stage for the first time I felt so absolutely and entirely at home that it was hard for me to remember that I had had almost no experience at all. I loved every single thing about acting. I loved the mockable sides of it, the instant camaraderie and deep affection one felt for everyone else involved, I loved the long conversations about motive, I loved read-throughs and rehearsals and tech runs, I loved trying on costumes and experimenting with make-up. I loved the tingle of nerves as I waited in the wings, I loved the almost mystical hyperaesthetic way in which one was aware of each microsecond on stage, of how one could detect precisely where an audience’s focus was at any one moment, I loved the thrill of knowing that I was carrying hundreds of people with me, that they were surfing on the ebb and flow of my voice.

Taking such pleasure in being on stage really isn’t about relishing love, attention and admiration. It is not about enjoying the power you (think you) have over an audience. It is simply a question of fulfilment. You feel perfectly alive and magnificently perfected by the knowledge that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.

Not so very long ago I accompanied some northern white rhinos on a journey to Kenya. They were being translocated from the zoo in the Czech Republic that was all they had ever known. It was immeasurably moving to watch these animals raise their top-heavy heads and take in the huge open skies of the savannah and the smells and
sounds of a habitat to which their genes had taken millions of years to adapt them. The quick, unbelieving grunts, the waving of their horns from side to side and the twitching in their great hides told you that somewhere inside they knew that they were where they were supposed to be. I will not claim that the stage is my savannah, but I did feel something of the surge of relief and joy at finally having come home that the rhinos seemed to express as they nosed the air of Africa for the first time.

It is only a pity that the professional grown-up theatre won’t allow you the same levels of fun and fulfilment. After three performances, or five at the most, student productions are over, and you move on to something else. Which I did. And again and again.

The Easter term is when Cambridge springs to life and becomes one of the most marvellous places on earth to be. As St John’s College alumnus William Wordsworth put it: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’ He was writing less about May Week and more about the French Revolution, but the thought holds better for the first, and I bet that in truth he was thinking more about garden parties than guillotines.

The Head of the River competition is held on the Cam twice a year, each college’s boat jostling to bump the one ahead and move a place up in the order. The river isn’t wide enough to allow a side-by-side regatta which is why these peculiar Lent and May Week Bumps evolved. Lining the river bank and cheering on my college is probably the most ‘normal’ Cambridgey thing I did in my three years.

Further upriver, the beauty of the Backs in late spring and early summer is enough to make the sternest puritan moan and shiver with delight. Sunlight on the stone of the bridges, willows leaning down to weep and kiss the water: young boys and girls, or boys and boys, or girls and girls, punting up to Grantchester Meadows, bottles of white wine tied with string trailing through the wake to cool, ‘No kissing in the punt’ – careful how you say that, hoho. Revising finalists under chestnut trees, books and notes spread out on the grass as they smoke, drink, chatter, flirt, kiss and read. Garden parties on every lawn in every college for the two weeks in June that are perversely designated May Week. Dining clubs and societies, dons, clubs and rich individuals serving punch and Pimm’s, beer and sangria, cocktails and champagne. Blazers and flannels, self-conscious little snobberies and affectations, flushed youth, pampered youth, privileged youth, happy youth. Don’t be too hard on them. Suppress the thought that they are all ghastly tosspots who don’t know they’re born, insufferable poseurs in need of a kick and a slap. Have some pity and understanding. They will get that kick and that slap soon enough. After all, look at them now. They are all in their fifties. Some of them on their third, fourth or fifth marriage. Their children despise them. They are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. Drug addicts or recovering drug addicts. Their wrinkled, grey, bald, furrowed and fallen faces look back every morning from the mirror, those folds of dying flesh bearing not a trace of the high, joyful and elastic smiles that once lit them. Their lives have been a ruin and a waste. All that bright promise never quite matured into anything that can be looked back on with pride or pleasure. They took that job in the City, that job with the merchant bank, stockbroker, law firm, accountancy firm, chemical company, drama company, publishing company, any company. The light and energy, the passion, fun and faith were soon snuffed out one by one. In the grind of the demanding world their foolish hopeful dreams evaporated like mist in the cruel glare of the morning sun. Sometimes the dreams return to them at night and they are so ashamed, angry and disappointed that they want to kill themselves. Once they laughed and seduced or laughed and were seduced, on ancient lawns, under ancient stones and now they hate the young and their music, they snort with contempt at everything strange and new and they have to catch their breath at the top of the stairs.

Goodness, Stephen, who rattled
your
cage? Not everyone’s life ends in misery, loneliness and failure.

Of course, I know that. You’re right. But many do. The entropy and decay of age is dreadfully apparent when set next to the lyrical dream of a Cambridge May Week, hackneyed, outdated, unjust and absurd as such an idyll may be. It is that scene that classical painters used to love: the golden lads and lasses sporting in Elysium, throwing garlands, drinking and embracing, all unaware of the tomb on which a skull rests and never noticing its carved inscription: ‘Et in arcadia ego.’ Why should they notice it? Its shadow will be on them soon enough and they in turn will be wagging fingers at their children and saying, ‘I too once lived in arcadia, you know …’ and their children will not listen either.