Young Winstone (15 page)

It was actually good for me to have to find a way of fitting into a community of people from different backgrounds, either socially or in other ways, because small-mindedness was only going to hold me back in anything I wanted to do in the future. It’s fear that makes you react like that. You’re feeling a bit like a fish out of water, anyway, and you try to hide your anxiety about what people might say or think about you by being aggressive or abrupt or a bit of a rebel.

From that point onwards I learnt very quickly that there was no reason for me to be threatened by other people’s sexuality. Anything that they wanted to get up to was their own business, and the more of them that were gay, the more girls that left me to choose from. Besides, once I got to know these kids, I found that I actually liked them – even the really posh ones, who I might have considered to be the enemy before. OK, they didn’t come from where I came from, but that didn’t have to be a bad thing. And if they were willing to tolerate how different my outlook on life was to theirs, then why shouldn’t I extend the same courtesy to them?

That’s not to say I went along with everything I was asked to do at Corona, because some of it was a bit ridiculous, but I enjoyed going there because every day was a party. And my role in the class I was in was to be the token rebellious working-class kid, so the least I could do was to act up to it.

Ballet was one of the big problem areas. I know this will come as a big surprise to all those expecting me to have a natural gift for the
old
pas de deux,
but I lasted about two minutes. I dance like a boxer, anyway, and my insistence that I was going to wear Dr Marten’s boots with all the ballet gear probably didn’t help. I could be really fucking stubborn – and probably a major pain in the arse – when I wanted to be at that age. (Don’t ask my Elaine how much I’ve changed since.) So everybody else probably breathed a sigh of relief when I decided to skip the ballet lessons and go to the cinema instead. I probably learnt more from the ABC just down the road from Ravenscourt Park, anyway.

Fencing classes didn’t go too smoothly either. It wasn’t the shouting things in French that I had a problem with – I was fine with all that ‘en
garde’, ‘prêt’
and
‘allez’
stuff – it was just a few of the finer points of the etiquette that I struggled to grasp. They had a little demonstration and I thought, ‘OK, I can do that.’ At first I shaped up like a fighter, but the sword is in the other hand, so you’ve got to go southpaw because that’s the more natural way to go. Next thing I knew, there was a kid coming up to me giving it all that with the swish, swish, swish.

We squared up to each other and then instinct took over. Even years later I still can’t believe I did this, but I stepped to one side and clumped him with the cup of the sword handle. At that point he’s gone on the penny and while he’s down on the ground I’ve stabbed him a couple of times just to be sure. Obviously I’ve not really stabbed him because the end of the blade is covered and he’s got the wire mask on, but I thought that was what sword-fighting was all about. All the other kids are laughing and the instructor’s going, ‘No, no, no, that’s not how you do it.’

The first few times you get given scripts that you have to learn is even more nerve-racking. Everyone has to work out their own way of doing it. At first I just used to read them over and over, but
that wasn’t really doing the job, so then I started to write them out. I would read the line and then write it out again for myself – no punctuation, just how I thought the character would say it – and that way I’d find I could really take the words in. I don’t have to do that all the time now, but I still will if I’ve got something really heavy to learn. Generally, the better the script is, the easier it is to get the hang of it. If it’s shit you’ll just find yourself looking at the page thinking, ‘I’ve got to do something to try and make this better.’

The first play I was in at drama school was called
The Trojan Women.
I’m not sure who it was by – I couldn’t even pronounce the name – but I had to wear a little skinny loincloth with nothing covering my chest, and this Greek helmet with all these feathers in it. I’ve got the spear, the sword, everything – its almost like ‘they’re taking the piss, now’. As soon as I opened my mouth in that outfit everything I said sounded ridiculously London-y. It turned the whole thing into a comedy, but not necessarily in a good way – it’s not a good feeling when you can see everyone laughing but you’re not sure if they’re laughing with you or at you.

It wasn’t the most sympathetic piece of casting – I felt like a total dick. I suppose they just threw me in there thinking they’d test me, and I failed the test miserably. The next play we did was some jolly-hockey-sticks Agatha Christie thing, where I was meant to come through some French doors but one of my mates had tied them together, so I tried to squeeze in through the French windows instead and got stuck. Even though no one was taking the whole thing very seriously, once I finally got onstage it actually felt OK. I couldn’t be getting any worse because the only way to go from
The Trojan Women
was up, and at least I wasn’t wearing a loincloth.

The third part was the breakthrough. It was in Edward Albee’s
The Zoo Story,
which I actually managed to learn properly because
it was good and I wanted to do it. The play’s about a couple of guys who meet on a bench in Central Park, and Mr Morris directed me and a guy called David Morris (no relation to Vernon) in it. That was where I really started to learn, partly because it was a two-hander and I like small company, and partly because I played the weaker character. I didn’t have to be the nutter. I got to play the guy who was scared and had an emotional crisis. This was the first time I’d ever done anything like that, and I was surprised at how comfortable it felt – almost like freeing myself.

I enjoyed the intensity of just having two people in a scene and what happened when they met shaping the direction of the story. David Morris was a terrific actor, far in front of where I or probably anyone else was at that school at the time. With him leading the way I was improving from rehearsal to rehearsal. And by the time we finally put the play on, the audience were quite shocked by how good it was (especially given what a disaster my earlier appearances onstage had been). I could feel myself holding their attention, and when you do that it’s like finding your timing as a boxer – you feint and you pull them in, then you jab and get ’em off balance. That was when I started to think, ‘Maybe I can do this after all.’ It wasn’t just that I was taking it seriously, I was really enjoying it.

Needless to say, not every assignment at Corona went so smoothly. Shakespeare was something I thought I’d never be able to do, because it was too wordy for me and I didn’t have the necessary command of the English language. As it turned out, not having that received pronunciation they teach you gave me quite a natural way of reading Shakespeare.

I did the thing I normally do, anyway, which is leave all the punctuation out. People stop in the middle of sentences all the time when they’re talking, so why shouldn’t characters in his plays do that too?
This technique stood me in good stead, and even though I might not have known what all the individual words meant, I seemed to be able to get across the overall meaning pretty well.

We’d have lessons on it where they’d tell us precisely what everything was supposed to mean according to the experts, but my attitude to the Shakespeare scholars was that they could fuck off. It’s the same with a play as it is with a book – fair enough, the authors’ intentions were important to them at the time, but it’s how the whole thing comes alive in your imagination that matters to you.

Sadly, the examiners of my London Academy of Dramatic Arts exam didn’t feel the same way. I’m not sure how much use those exams are – they certainly aren’t going to get you a job – and they’re normally incredibly boring because everyone has to do the same fucking speech. In my case it was the ‘Wherefore rejoice what conquest brings’ bit from
Julius Caesar,
which I probably know better now than I did then. I decided to make my version a little bit different to liven things up, so I set it in a pub. This was before Steven Berkoff and all that, so it was still quite an original idea (or at least I thought I was).

To me, the way the speech read was that this was a geezer praising the new guy coming in and mugging the old one off – the gangster who used to run that plot has been topped and all his mates are saying, ‘Hold up, better get in with Tiberius.’ So that’s how I did it. I got zero for acting ability, which I can’t argue with because it’s an opinion. But the one that really got me was zero for imagination. I thought, ‘Everyone else has done it exactly the same way except me, so surely I brought something to the table that no one else did?’ I wasn’t thinking I should’ve automatically got ten, but I should’ve certainly got something.

The good thing was that instead of discouraging me the way that it might have, the unfairness of this was actually a bit of a turning point for me. It brought my stubbornness into play by making me think, ‘You’re having a pop here, and I think I’m right, so I’m going to show you.’ I wish I thought someone who wanted the best for me came up with this idea as a deliberate plan to motivate me, but I don’t.

One of my first professional engagements was at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. It was a revival of the Alan Klein musical
What a Crazy World We’re Living In,
which Joe Brown had done as a film years before. By the time I got there in the mid-seventies Joan Littlewood (whose name was always associated with that theatre) wasn’t so involved with the place any more. Her partner Gerry Raffles, who still ran it, was about to die of diabetes. He’d stood in front of the bulldozers when the Stratford shopping centre redevelopment threatened the theatre building with demolition, but he’d taken his eye off the ball a bit afterwards. I’d never have got cast in a role that required singing and dancing otherwise. It wasn’t a very good part, and I wasn’t very good in it. ‘Dad’s gone down the dog track/Mother’s playing bingo’ is one of the only lines I can remember.

I went to Stratford East with very little idea about the technique of being onstage and all that palaver, but what I learnt there about the reality of life in a professional theatre had much more impact on me than any acting tips I picked up. It turned out that my idea of it was much cleaner and more glamorous than the way things actually went down.

I’d expected almost regimental discipline and a dedication to the craft worthy of Sir Laurence Olivier. Instead, I found a load of fucking hippies smoking fags and drinking beer. I hated all the mess
backstage and the whole thing felt a bit studenty for my tastes – it crushed a lot of my illusions about how the acting game was run. Maybe that was no bad thing in the long term, but when you see some actor you know off the telly and they’re just like some scunger, you end up thinking, ‘I don’t wanna be that.’ It destroys the fantasy.

As if getting paid £30 a week and a bowl of rice wasn’t bad enough, you had to put up with Vanessa Redgrave coming down to tell you how you should give half your wages to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Now I respect anybody else’s opinion, but I’ve never been into all that commie lark. My thing was always ‘you’ve got to look after your own’, which I suppose is kind of what communism is in a way, or at least how it usually seems to turn out when people try to put it into practice. Either way, I ain’t giving you £15 a week of my money. ‘Sell your house, darlin’ ’, that was how I looked at it.

I didn’t say that while Vanessa Redgrave was giving her talk, of course. That would’ve been rude. I sat and listened to her for a while and then got up quietly to make my exit. She saw me and called out, ‘Where are you going?’ When I politely called back, ‘Thank you, but I’m leaving. I’ve heard enough’, she seemed pretty pissed off, because she shouted, ‘But you won’t learn anything unless you listen’, so I said, ‘Well, I won’t fucking learn anything from you’, and off I went.

I’ve never met her again since. She’s a fantastic actress and she’s probably a nice woman as well. I’m sure she did her bit for the party, and good luck to her, but from what I can gather it came out later on that some of the people running her organisation weren’t exactly whiter than white in how they conducted themselves. A lot of that kind of sleazy shit was going on in those days, and not just in the
Top of the Pops
dressing room.

There’s a Pizza Express alongside the theatre now, where we played football in the builders’ sand. Another shopping centre’s gone
up since – the much flashier Westfield, which was opened just in time for the Olympics – but the Theatre Royal looks pretty much the same as it did forty years ago. I’m not sure it’s even had a coat of paint since then. It’s still there in all its horrible purple glory.

I guess we’re still living in a crazy world too, so no change there either. I’ll never forget the opening night of that musical. My parents came down to Stratford to watch it. My dad was all suited up with a silk hankie in his jacket pocket and he had a gin and tonic in his hand. I came off stage and I’d been terrible – danced the wrong way, told jokes no one laughed at, the lot – and he just shook his head and said, ‘Give it up while you’re in front, son.’

CHAPTER 14

YORK HALL

I’ve got to tell you about the boxing match I had in Canterbury when the Repton and Fitzroy Lodge clubs went down there together. I’d been out Kent way a couple of times before as a young kid – to the hop farms. Going ‘hopping’ used to be a bit of a working holiday for East End families who wouldn’t have had too many chances to get out of London otherwise, but that particular boxing match was more a gypsy coach-crash than a busman’s holiday.

My dad’s mate Terry Spinks, who’d won the Olympic gold medal, was there. I’m on the scales weighing in ready to fight. I’ve got the velvet shorts on, the green-and-gold top – to be honest with you I look a million dollars (if I don’t say this, no one else is going to). Then the kid I’m fighting gets up there. He’s got a pair of old pumps, baggy shorts, no front teeth and a broken hooter. So straight away I’m thinking, ‘He’s been hit a few times, this is gonna be easy.’