- 20 -
‘Basically, I’m a three bottles of wine bisexual,’ said Ellis, taking a slurp from his pint of Kronenbourg. I secretly hoped he wouldn’t have another. He drew heavily on his cigarette and then did an elaborate French inhale which involved an almost musical popping sound followed by smoke pouring upwards like a liquid across his top lip and into his nose. I began to worry that I’d chosen the wrong person to teach me to smoke. I wanted it to look natural.
We were rehearsing a production of Death of a Salesman. Ellis, who was only nineteen (like me) despite being a second-year, had been cast in the role of Willy Loman. It’s the sort of part that great actors wait a lifetime to play – they bring to it decades of experience, not just of acting, but of life. The weariness and defeat that only the triumph, disaster, boredom, excitement, worry and disappointment of years lived to the full can etch on your face and lend to your bearing is deployed, as they attempt to personify the American dream laid low. Ellis had a bash in his teens by putting on a gravelly voice and walking stiffly. It was basically fine.
I needed the smoking lesson so that I could appear more cool and mature. That was what the director told me. I was playing Bernard, the snotty kid next door who grows up to be a lawyer – barely at university and already typecast. Will (the director) wanted something for the scene in later life where I’m a big shot professional, to differentiate me from the kid in shorts with the whining voice. The shorts could be replaced but obviously we were stuck with the voice. Maybe if I was smoking, Will thought, I’d seem older, cooler and in control.
I was incensed. As a fervent anti-smoker – someone who at this point genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone smoked (and what an admission of a lack of imagination that statement always is) – I didn’t want to have anything to do with portraying nicotine in a good light (in this case a Zippo), let alone an environment where that was the unthinking assumption. Also, I’d never smoked in my life and I was scared.
After a lot of persuasion that it would really help the scene and that virtually everyone smoked in the 1940s (when the play was written and is set), I agreed to have a go. Will wasn’t much of a smoker but Ellis very much was and he gave me my first lesson with one of his Marlboro Reds. The only instruction I got, when handed the small papery burning object, was to ‘inhale’.
‘Go on, inhale!’
‘Why aren’t you inhaling!’
‘Are you scared of cancer – is that why you won’t inhale?’
He thought I was an idiot, and I was perplexed because I was inhaling with all my might – I was positively hyper-ventilating, filling my lungs with oxygen but somehow unable to ingest any more than trace quantities of smoke.
The verb that hadn’t been used – and this isn’t something I can say about every aspect of my theatrical career – was ‘suck’. To smoke a cigarette, you may or may not know, you have first to suck. Then inhale. I didn’t realise you sucked, just like on a straw. I thought you put it in your mouth and then sort of breathed through it. If you do that, it will not look as if you are smoking – in my case, it merely intensified the incongruity that having a cigarette in my mouth at the age of nineteen already projected. I was very young-looking. But for the fact that I’d already attained my full height, I could probably have passed for thirteen. With a cigarette in my mouth, oddly breathing round it, I didn’t project the image of sophisticated American maturity, more of slightly humorous, slightly sinister innocence inexpertly attempting to lose itself – like Iggle-Piggle trying to shoot up.
I got the hang of it eventually and moved on to stage two of smoking technique: how to light a cigarette. The look of lawyerish savoir-faire wasn’t going to be improved by my holding the light a foot away from my face and tentatively moving it closer. Worse still, Will insisted I use a Zippo – much more appropriate to New York in the 1940s than the bright plastic lighters you get at the newsagents’, but much trickier to ignite and much more like a small, smelly can of petrol that you’re trying to set fire to in your hand. Drinking lager, I couldn’t help thinking, was much easier than this.
Ellis was on both stimulants in the Pickerel pub on Magdalene Street, when he brought up the subject of how drunk he’d have to be to fuck me. A dangerous place to be when he’s in that frame of mind, you might think. Or a good place to be. I haven’t made it clear whether or not I wanted to fuck him, have I?
I did not. He is a very good friend of mine but that is not something there is enough wine in the world to make me do. And to be fair on Ellis, he was talking in general terms about an alcohol-induced sexuality flip. It wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to make him stoop to me. Maybe three bottles of wine was for Brad Pitt.
Ellis Wolfe Sareen is an unusual man with an unusual name, although the two things aren’t directly connected. The name’s a family thing – someone once every two generations gets called that, apparently, which I suppose saves on decision-making time. Now you’ll assume he’s American when, in fact, he’s from Manchester. He was a slightly controversial figure in the Cambridge drama scene when I arrived. He had a lot of friends but had also managed to annoy quite a few other thesps, possibly because of his enthusiasm for getting drunk and making passes at people (almost exclusively women, even when he’d drunk three bottles of wine, which was often); but more likely because of his disarming refusal to take himself or other people seriously.
Ellis’s ruthless jollity was coupled with a deep, and largely justified, confidence in his own skills. He is blessed with great intellectual and practical abilities and there are few things that he absolutely can’t do – hit a tennis ball without weirdly opening his mouth as if he’s trying to swallow it is one. But that’s not to say his confidence doesn’t sometimes go too far, as you’ll know if you were unlucky enough to see his production of The Recruiting Officer in November 1994.
I’m now walking west along Wigmore Street, passing the Cock and Lion pub on my right, which reminds me of the Pickerel in Cambridge. Both have low and dark ground floors where, like punters in a casino, the drinkers won’t be disturbed by natural light.
The Pickerel enjoys the twin blessings of an authentic wooden-beamed building – medieval in places – and a riverside location. Unfortunately, they rather cancel each other out. Medieval builders are notoriously complacent about natural beauty – think of all those castles in lovely countryside where you can only see the view through an arrow slit. I suppose, in a world where there are hardly any buildings, and all of them olde-worlde, the sheer availability of rustic views inevitably suppresses people’s sense of their value. There’s no doubt that, had the architect of the older parts of the Pickerel been around today, he’d laugh at people’s obsession with the river but be transfixed by the fruit machine. So, you can’t see the river when you’re in the Pickerel, a picture window being beyond the builders’ ken, but it has the pleasing atmosphere of a place where people have been getting unglamorously pissed for centuries.
That was an activity that Ellis encouraged and, in me, he found a keen student. Of drinking, that is. Less so of smoking. And I was very much not a keen student in the conventional sense because I was very enthusiastic about going to the pub all the time. I mean, we didn’t drink at breakfast, or particularly long into the night, Cambridge being a place where you couldn’t buy a drink after 11 o’clock except at the ADC Theatre bar; and having alcohol in our rooms took a level of organisation that was usually beyond us. But by the end of my first term, I’d slipped very easily into a lifestyle of getting up late, pottering along to the ADC via a sandwich shop for an afternoon rehearsal or a meeting about a show, going to another rehearsal in the evening and then settling into the Maypole pub or the ADC bar until it closed. On Saturday nights there was usually a party and I’d get properly pissed. It would not be fair to say that I was consequently sick more often than not on such occasions, but it wasn’t as less often than not as I’d have liked.
When the ADC Theatre bar was shut, the Maypole was our regular haunt. The Maypole is not picturesque: in a city of beautiful buildings and views, it looks out on a multi-storey car park. It’s an unremarkable if inoffensive building with an insensitive 1970s flat-roofed extension at the front. It’s possibly my favourite pub in the world and, I’ve just realised, it’s virtually an FRP. But what it lacked in architectural merit, it made up for in the attitude of its management. It was, and still is, owned and run by an Italian family who brought to this unremarkable British pub the unfamiliar, alien notion that it should be a pleasant and hospitable place to spend time. They did all the normal pub things but also served food they’d be happy to eat themselves and had a menu of fancy cocktails. More than anything else, they were friendly and welcoming. They learned your name and made shy, spotty students feel like they were beloved old regulars with a tankard behind the bar. This strikes me as both canny and kind, and I’m very grateful to the Castigliones for making me feel so welcome and so grown-up. Their attitude made the Maypole the pub of choice for actors from the ADC, sportspeople from the nearby Hawks Club, and anyone in the university who fancied a pina colada.
Getting quite drunk very often, and very drunk quite often, was a revelation to me. From being something that I’d only realised a couple of years earlier I had the ability to do, it quickly grew at Cambridge into a major hobby – not as major as acting or writing sketches, but one that seemed to complement those activities perfectly. This was expensive and unhealthy but, as I had very few other costs, I was able to clear a substantial budget for it and I didn’t give my health a second thought. I was occasionally hungover, although not in the way I get hangovers now, but seldom ill. And the upsides were massive: it made you feel great, it made endless conversations endlessly interesting, it brought together nervous, shy, repressed, swotty teenagers by making them feel comfortable with each other. Boozing was an imprudence that I felt safe with – a recklessness that didn’t make me stressed.
This isn’t heading towards a confession of alcoholism, by the way – not of the whisky on cornflakes type anyway. These days I drink more than doctors would recommend, but not that much more. I still get drunk occasionally, but not very often. I wouldn’t deny a certain sort of social dependence on it, but I think it’s a dependence I share with most of our culture. This society doesn’t work without booze – our parties aren’t good enough, our conversations aren’t sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It’s everywhere, lubricating everything. My mother has never drunk alcohol and consequently finds most parties or meetings of friends in pubs to be inexplicable and tedious encounters. ‘How can people stand for hours in rooms just chatting?’ she asks. ‘I can take it for half an hour but then my feet hurt, I’m bored of making chit-chat and I’m desperate to leave.’ The answer is that if you drink a bit, it becomes fun. Just as people say some dance music is only worth listening to if you take Ecstasy, so the vast majority of our socialising is only viable if you take the edge off your nerves/perceptions/inhibitions/foot-ache with booze.
I find this an unsettling thought. I don’t like to think of myself as dependent on a chemical – I can potter around working, watching TV, going to the cinema, etc., perfectly happily without either drinking or getting the shakes – but there’s no way I’m ever getting through a wedding without several glasses of wine. Only that will sustain me through chit-chat with someone’s humourless Canadian cousin, or them through chit-chat with me. The link between drinking and being able to confidently socialise, feeling ready and in the mood for chatting, is hard-wired in me and I think those particular cerebral electrics were installed at Cambridge with friends like Ellis when I learned to love the pub.
And it gave me great joy. At Cambridge, I became a happier, more relaxed, more jolly person. I didn’t manage to stay like that forever, but neither have I quite returned to the levels of angst I felt before university. When I think of my first year there, I am tremendously warmed by remembering my sense of relief – things felt like they were going to be all right. It was okay, suddenly, to be slapdash, to screw things up, to get up late, to fail to write essays, to be imperfect and fun-loving.
Love of theatre, comedy and acting was part of what lightened my mood, but the fun of talking shit and drinking too much was a big part of it as well. Booze is a complicated issue in our society and in lots of people’s lives. There are many occasions on which I’ve drunk more than I should and I wish I could live some of them again and behave differently. But I don’t regret being a boozy student: it didn’t stop me doing other things, it was fun, and I befriended people I still love going to the pub with today.
Besides, when I got to Cambridge, I’d had a stressful few years. I needed a drink.