13
We did major productions at the Manchester Polytechnic. In the first year we put on a play that I’d never heard of, although that wasn’t saying much, titled The Dark of the Moon by William Berney and Howard Richardson. It was a strange piece set in the Appalachian Mountains and based on a European folk song, ‘The Ballad of Barbara Allen’. I suppose it was chosen because it had a huge cast of characters and although it wasn’t a musical members of the cast were required to sing. I played the dark witch and can remember little about the experience, except that we put it on in the studio theatre, which in fact was a derelict church with holes in the roof through which rain fell and pigeons shat on a regular basis. A mop often had to be employed before a class or a rehearsal could take place, and buckets placed here and there were a regular feature, as was the sound of raindrops drip-drip-dripping into them.
The studio was situated next to the art college at All Saints and was to all intents and purposes where we were based. We also had the use of a derelict shop on the corner opposite for voice classes and rehearsals, this later becoming the student union, whilst movement classes were held in the art college gymnasium. The ‘make-do’ nature of the old church and the filthy old shop premises, with its curling linoleum tiles and peeling walls, which had literally not been touched since the day the shop moved out, together with the scattered layout of the facilities, gave the course a feeling of having been shoved in as an unwanted afterthought, which did little to promote a sense of belonging to the wider faculty of Art and Design and even less for the collective student sense of self-esteem. In fact, in our second year a demonstration was organised by the third years to protest about the low level of health and safety measures, but I don’t recall many turning up or it making much of an impression. Although I attended the protest and agreed with it in principle, in reality I loved the School of Theatre as it was, with its makeshift, leaky, falling-down premises, and felt that something of importance was lost when, in 1973, the School of Theatre moved to the Capitol building in Didsbury, which was an old television studio with all the character and atmosphere of a civic toilet.
The second-year production, Summer Folk by Maxim Gorky, was staged in the University Theatre. The role I played was that of Varya, the female lead, and the moment I stepped out on to that stage for the technical rehearsal, I knew that I was home and that this was right. I felt for the first time in my life that I had a voice, and that this is how it would be heard, and this was how I would be seen and measured.
Our third-year production was The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge, in which I played Pegeen Mike. It was staged at the Library Theatre, which was the main repertory theatre situated underneath the huge, circular library in St Peter’s Square. This venue made it feel real and professional. To be able to inhabit an Irish accent, for the play was set in the West of Ireland, and to be able to use it to express a complex character instead of my usual comic caricature of my mother or grandmother, was a deep thrill.
It was here at the Library Theatre, in a cold scene dock (the first place where scenery is stored), that I did one of my very first auditions for a job: the Sylvia Plath poem ‘Daddy’, my beloved Lady M. and a piece from Juno and the Paycock. I was auditioning for the 1974 autumn season, and the woman who took the audition, whose name I have completely obliterated from my memory, was in a fairly grim mood, with a ‘just hurry up and get on with it’ air about her. Although we were in the scene dock, it was cold and draughty for the time of year, which was May, and she was wrapped up in a vast winter coat and swathed around the neck and mouth with a big, woolly scarf, so that I could barely hear a word that she said. The speed with which she got me in and out was, to put it kindly, insensitive or, to put it another way, bloody rude. I didn’t get in, unsurprisingly, and subsequently discovered that this woman had had all her teeth out on the morning of my audition. Nice of her to turn up, really.
Before sticking my head above the parapet with regard to getting a job, however, I applied to Granada Television and was awarded a bursary for a one-year postgraduate course in acting and stage production at the Stables Theatre, next door to the studios. The course was jointly run by the polytechnic and the university combined, and about fourteen students enrolled in the autumn of 1973. We functioned like a complete company, with student actors, student directors, student stage designers and student administrators.
After getting off to a wobbly start by staging a mutiny over the choice of our first play, The Hollow by Agatha Christie (the lecturer’s argument for it being that this was the kind of unexciting thing we could expect to be doing in rep), we went on to do ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: guess who I played? Then a little-known piece, written in 1915 by Leonid Andreyev, titled He Who Gets Slapped, set in a tatty French circus, in which I played Madame Zenida, a liontamer. Our final production was The Marriage of Figaro in which I took the part of the maid. It was during the preparation for this that I started to audition for work. After my disastrous audition at the Library Theatre, I heard that the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool needed a couple of actors for the summer, so I applied, securing an audition for the following week.
The Everyman was one of the most unique, innovative and exciting repertory theatres of the day. Alan Dossor was the director, but at this point he was taking time off and Jonathan Pryce, the actor, was directing while he was away. Therefore it was Jonathan who took my audition. One of my pieces was again Juno and the Paycock, which I had left till last, considering it my coup de grâce. I couldn’t wait to do it, but when I told Jonathan with some excitement what my final piece was to be, he announced that he had played it only recently and knew it very well. This would not normally present too much of a problem but I had decided to beef the piece up a little, adding a gag here and a gag there, generally rewriting it to suit myself, even adding a little song at one point in it. It never struck me once, even after my experience of auditioning for Edward Argent, that (a) perhaps I should play the script as written or (b) that anyone would even notice or care. And such was my arrogance, I was only slightly put out that Jonathan already knew the piece and that was because it might spoil any element of surprise. Nevertheless, I still launched into it, thinking my version a great improvement on Sean O’Casey’s. Luckily Jonathan found it funny, but looking back he was more likely to have been amused by my youthful conceit than my comic invention. He gave me the job and I started work on 14 June 1974.
From the minute I stepped down from the train at Lime Street station, I knew that I would love Liverpool. As I was struggling with a huge bag, a short, rotund woman who happened to be walking by at the time said, ‘Come ’ead, love, let me carry that for ya. No, come on! That’s heavy, you’ve got enough to carry!’ And she carried my biggest and heaviest bag to the taxi rank for me.
Then when I told the taxi driver that I wanted to go to the Everyman Theatre, he said, ‘It’s only up the road, you know, love?’
‘I know but it’s really steep and I’ve got too much to carry.’
He drove me there and refused any payment.
‘No! Go on, girl. You gerron that stage and knock ’em dead.’
The Everyman in those days was housed in an old cinema called Hope Hall. It had very little in the way of dressing rooms: possibly one for the boys, downstairs stage left, and two for the girls, downstairs stage right, both extremely cramped; and it was also dusty and rat infested. I remember an electrician being called in to look at the electrics, which required him to go beneath the stage. He took one look and said, ‘I’m not going under there. There’s hundreds of pairs of eyes looking at me!’
The theatre was, and still is, situated at the top of Hope Street. The Catholic cathedral, looking as if it was about to launch itself into outer space, which the locals referred to as Paddy’s Wigwam, stood at one end and the magnificent Protestant cathedral at the other. It had been arranged for me to stay in a bedsit at the top of a Georgian house in Canning Street, a five-minute walk from the theatre. Below me in another bedsit, and also working at the theatre, was Geoffrey Durham, who later became the magician, the Great Soprendo, and the husband of Victoria Wood.
He was a fantastic actor. One of my fondest acting memories is of Geoff making a splendid entrance in a superb production of Brecht’s Coriolanus at the Everyman. As we did not have enough actors, he was playing the whole of the Roman army. He walked on with a majestic presence but, unbeknownst to him, a wire coat-hanger had become attached to his bent elbow and was swinging from his sleeve like a handbag. I entered soon after, playing Coriolanus’s wife, I’m ashamed to say, crying with laughter, my face twitching with the effort of keeping it straight.
However, acting never really did it for Geoff and the embryo of the magician that he eventually became was already forming in that bedsit below mine. I would often pop down when at a loose end and watch him do mind-boggling stuff with a piece of rope, or hair-raising stuff with his fire-eating equipment, once seeing his whole beard catch alight. I sat there for a minute thinking that it was all part of the act and it was only when he began to slap his own face rather viciously that I realised it wasn’t.
Below Geoff, on the ground floor, lived an alcoholic recluse called Mikie. More often than not I would return late at night after a show and fall over Mikie’s prostrate body lying on the floor in the complete darkness of the hall, where the bulb had blown in 1952 and had never been replaced. Mostly, even though I would end up inadvertently treading all over him as I got to my feet, he didn’t wake up and by morning he was gone. On certain nights, when in a lighter stupor than normal, he would rear up, howling terrifyingly like a wounded ox, and on one such night he caught hold of my ankle as I scrambled for the stairs and would not let go. In a complete panic, I kicked out violently, not caring what my boot came into contact with, as long as I got away, which of course I did. A day or so later I saw Mikie in the street, diminutive and dishevelled as usual, and I expected his face to be black and blue from the encounter, but not at all; in fact he looked surprisingly chipper. Then as I got closer I noticed a bruise on his chin like part of the perfect imprint of a boot.
I had been taken on at the Everyman to replace a member of the cast of a pub show titled Flash Harry. This was performed by Van Load, the part of the company that went out to Liverpool schools, pubs, parks and sometimes the streets, though I think the last was abandoned when, during a performance of a show on the streets of Kirkby, the police had to escort the actors home after they were threatened by a group of twelve-year-olds wielding golf clubs.
The main company were leaving to go down to London because the show they were in was transferring to the West End. It was a musical about the Beatles, titled John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, whose book and music were both written by Willy Russell. Cast in it were Bernard Hill as John Lennon, Trevor Eve as Paul McCartney, Philip Joseph as George Harrison, Antony Sher as Ringo, George Costigan as Bert and a young Scottish folk-singer friend of Willy’s with the voice of an angel by the name of Barbara Dickson as a kind of musical narrator. It turned out to be a huge hit, transferring to the West End from the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in 1974 to rave reviews, and going on to similar success on Broadway.
Flash Harry, on the other hand, was a raucously funny show about a Liverpool flasher in which, amongst other things, I was to play his mother. My first spot in the show involved a monologue on the trials and tribulations of being the parent of a misunderstood flasher and I stood at the microphone, knitting a long woollen willy warmer as I spoke. I had to learn the Scouse accent, for which the legendary Winnie was drafted in to teach me. Winnie, the cleaner at the theatre, put many an actor through their paces when it came to learning the Liverpool lingo. A kind, witty and gentle woman was waiting for me in the middle bar downstairs, which was still littered with empty glasses from the night before, and stinking of stale beer and cigarettes.
‘So you want educatin’, do ya?’
And she took me through my speeches, writing them out phonetically.
The show was a bit of a free-for-all, hanging loosely around the central tale of the flasher and his escapades, and our contribution was pretty much left up to us. Geoff Durham, who was also in the show, did his own, brilliant version of the song, ‘The Laughing Policeman’. So when I told Roger Phillips (now a famous local character and radio host in Liverpool, but then our director) that I did a passing impersonation of Shirley Bassey, a sparkly dress, covered in green sequins, with huge holes cut into it around the waist, was fished out of wardrobe, a wig was bought from Woolworth’s and Birley Shassey was born. I absolutely loved doing it and felt that now I really had come home! The number I chose for the show was ‘Hey, Big Spender’ with my innuendo-filled version of ‘Goldfinger’ as an encore. Accompanied by Roger on the tinny old Everyman piano (with drawing pins stuck into the tips of the hammers inside to add a honky-tonk, harpsichord twang), I would wander down off the stage, sashaying around the tables and draping myself over dockers and the like, singing, ‘I don’t cock my pork for everyman I see!’ in some of the roughest pubs in the universe.
The audiences were - almost always - at least as funny as we were and every time we took a breath in, there was the possibility of a sharp one-liner being pinged at us from somewhere in the crowd. We rarely had any real trouble, which was quite something as the punters didn’t pay to see the show; we were generally booked by the landlord, just turned up in their pub and got started. ‘It’s the long ’airs from the Everymans’ is how I once heard us described.
The one really hairy occasion that I recall was when we were doing Alan Bleasdale’s Scully. This we adapted ourselves from his novel about the life of the eponymous Scully, an anarchic, Liverpool lad with a dysfunctional family. It also happened to be a popular Saturday morning local radio slot with Alan reading the serialisation of his book. We were appearing one rainy Wednesday night in a particularly heavy pub in Cantrell Farm, a suburb of Liverpool that for my mother would definitely have come under the banner of ‘bottom end’. Peter Postlethwaite played Scully and was supported, amongst others, by Bill Nighy, then a handsome blond mixture of James Dean and the lead singer of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. He had a brilliant, soulful singing voice and the ability to whip out his mouth organ at any given opportunity to play blues and rock riffs; nearly every girl in Liverpool was in love with him. Also in the cast was Matthew Kelly, who had been in the year above me at drama school, then a six-foot-five-inch stripling who, with his full lips and long hair, looked like Mick Jagger’s more handsome brother but with a warm, camp wit that audiences loved. There was also Kevin Lloyd, with his cheeky, dark, Bisto Kid looks, and myself as Scully’s gran.
Some way into the show, we had all clocked a scruffy, peevish-looking drunk sitting at a table in the corner of the room. Suddenly he shot up from his seat, during one of Pete’s monologues, and zigzagged his way to the front of the stage. At first we ignored him, as drunks often approached the stage; either they would get fed up with being shouted down by both actors and crowd and go back to their seats, or fellow members of the audience would coax or threaten them into retreating. However, this bloke was on a mission. He stood there, face flushed, spit flying hither and thither, finger jabbing the air, veins sticking out on his neck like cables, and berated Pete at the top of his voice. Eventually, after an unintelligible string of rants, he lunged at Pete, sending the microphone and a couple of people’s drinks on the front row flying. Two or three blokes pulled him off and the show came to a standstill. Sensing the lull in the proceedings, the man then grabbed his opportunity and, struggling free from these blokes, took the floor, swaying about like a drunk in a pantomime and looking down the barrel of his forefinger at Pete.
‘I ’ave ’ad enough of you! No! I ’ave! I’ve been driven mad by ya! I had to put up with you on the radio every Saturday morning for fourteen months while I was in Walton Gaol. I swore to me mates and I promised meself that if I ever came across that friggen’ Scully when I got out, I’d friggen’ well kill him. And ’ere yer are in me own friggen’ pub! I’ll friggen’ well rip yer friggen’ ’ead off!’
And he lunged again, this time held back by a jeering, laughing crowd. Eventually Bill and the others calmed him down by setting him up with another pint and explaining that Pete was just an actor and was not Scully at all, and that Scully, the young lad, was just a character in a book. He looked incredulous and a bit miffed by this explanation, the chance to beat Scully’s brains out having been snatched so cruelly away from him, but the promise of more beer as an alternative to being turfed out on to the street seemed to do the trick. The show was got through without further ado with him and Pete now such good friends that they were almost planning a holiday together.
Another instance of what you might call trouble was when, later on in the season during the run-up to Christmas, we did Dick Whittington and his Pussy. Matthew Kelly played Dick and I played his Pussy, in a manner of speaking. It was a show that we largely wrote ourselves and, as you might imagine, it was packed from start to finish with gags about genitalia. ‘Would you like to see my Pussy?’ or ‘Have you seen my Dick?’ Well, you get the picture.
After we’d been performing it to packed pubs for about two weeks, we got word from the landlord of our next venue that someone had reported us to the vice squad, so could we possibly tone the show down somewhat and also take out any swearing as the boys in blue would be paying us a visit that very night. We held an emergency meeting, in which we removed from the script the more salacious jokes and all the swearing. When we went to our gig and started the show, there wasn’t a policeman in sight but just as we were beginning to relax and go back to the old script, we spotted them coming in at the back, supposedly incognito but actually unmistakable: huge, with very short hair (remember it was 1974), navy-blue overcoats, pale-blue shirts and great big feet in great big policeman’s shoes. So back we went to the expurgated version. This did not please the audience, who stared silently and balefully at us, some turning their backs and talking amongst themselves. A show that was normally a riotous one and a quarter hours long, without the risqu’ jokes and the swearing ran for just a measly twenty minutes. But the coppers left happy enough, wondering what all the fuss was about.
My days with Van Load were invaluable, lessons in pure survival on stage. We simply had to entertain or go under, or, in some places, fear for our lives. I recall one occasion when, after the show, things got a little out of hand and as we were trying to pack things into the van, I looked up to see Matthew Kelly being carried off round the back of the car park by several very drunk blokes. Luckily there was little malice in it and a lot of drink. Alcohol played a large part in these pub shows. In fact, I don’t know how we functioned. A great deal of beer, in my case bottled Guinness, was swilled and I don’t think I ever did one of those shows properly sober. I can remember standing outside pubs as we were about to go in and taking in a particular establishment, knowing that it would probably be the last time that I would see it with any clarity. My slight, eight-stone frame probably absorbed a good three pints on most nights. First I had to keep up with the lads, and second the audience insisted on buying us drinks, so who was I to argue? I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, contemplate the thought of even one drink before a show nowadays.
My first production on the main stage of the Everyman was Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. It was directed by Jonathan Pryce with Kate Fahy as Kate and Del Henny as Petruchio, making a spectacular first entrance on a motorbike to Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’, the strains of which caused the old theatre to vibrate like a boom box. Anarchy was never very far below the surface of an Everyman production and irreverence was de rigueur. One night whilst making his entrance, Nicholas Le Provost tripped over an awkwardly placed stage weight and, careering on to the stage, let rip with, ‘Shit! . . . I’ faith!’
I played the part of Bianca, Kate’s sister, and hated every second of it. I thought the character a wimp and longed to play the Shrew. I loved the unfeminine, mouthy, angry nature of the part and felt that I understood her, whereas Bianca was the opposite. I had no time for her girly, spoilt, petulant nature and this was reflected in a series of night terrors that started in rehearsals and went on nightly, throughout the three-and-a-half-week run. I awoke to find myself ransacking the drawers of my dressing table, in search of the little pink cotton dress, decorated with white hearts, that I wore in the play. Not finding it there, I would turn my mattress on to the floor, thinking it might be underneath. Finally I would fall back down on to the mattress, feeling panicked, distressed and at a loss as to what to do. Then every night the same thing happened: the sliver of light between the top of the curtain and the window frame would catch my eye, and somehow it would draw me back down to reality so that I would realise I was dreaming. I never understood Bianca and I didn’t want to be her; she represented at that time the kind of woman that my generation felt they had left behind. I was constantly trying to find some means of making her palatable to me, looking for a way to make her mine. I guess the search for the dress was an echo of that search for the character.
In November 1974 we started rehearsals for the new Everyman Christmas extravaganza, The Cantrill Tales by Chris Bond, and a new actor was to join our ranks. He walked into rehearsal on the first morning, wearing an old, faded, window cleaner’s jacket and a pair of flared denim jeans, its large skirt-like flares, from knee to ankle, in pale-pink cotton giving the impression that he had been wading up to his knees in blancmange. I was in love! Or possibly, lust: it remained to be decided. Even with the slightly theatrical spotted neckerchief knotted cheekily around his neck, he would have looked more in keeping if he’d come to mend the boiler than to start rehearsals for a play, but his charisma was all too evident. He had extraordinary, mad, impish eyes either side of a big, battered nose and high wide cheekbones. Later in his career a critic described him as looking as if he had swallowed a pelvis.
It was Peter Postlethwaite, later losing the R and becoming a matey Pete; he moved into my little bedsit almost immediately and we slipped into a roller coaster of a relationship that lasted five years. He was the most daring, stunning and intelligent of actors, brought up a Catholic, with a rough, working-class edge that I understood and felt at home with. He took everything to the limit and I loved his startling unpredictability. His performance in Brecht’s Coriolanus is one of the most terrifyingly riveting performances I have ever seen. His mother came one night and during this particular performance a couple of girls started to giggle. They were seated in the circle and the stage itself was built up over the stalls. Pete, on hearing this giggling going on throughout an important and impassioned speech of his, leapt from the stage on to the edge of the circle, causing a collective gasp from the audience. He then jumped down in amongst them, all while remaining in character, and aimed a good portion of his monologue directly - and weirdly appropriately - at these poor girls, as if they were part of the crowd in the play. They screamed as he approached them and then sat there in petrified silence, unable to move, as did the rest of the audience, probably fearing that they might be next in line. Afterwards, his mother said, ‘Oh Peter! You’ll go round the bend if you carry on like that!’
One Friday night after the show, in the packed little bistro underneath the theatre, I was up at the bar, getting a drink, and had got chatting to a guy and his friends who were often in there in the evenings and who had befriended a lot of the actors. I was about to go back to my table when the guy grabbed hold of my hand.
‘How would you like to go on a magical mystery tour?’
He then handed me what looked like a tiny bit of lead from a propelling pencil, stuck between two pieces of Sellotape.
‘Here y’are, Queen. Want to come on an adventure?’
‘What is it?’
‘A tiny piece of heaven . . . It’s a tab of acid.’
‘What do you do with it?’
‘Just stick it in your mouth and swallow. It’s totally harmless, just a bit of fun; while the others are getting pissed, you’ll be having a party. Go on, what are you scared of?’
‘I don’t know. What will it do?’
‘Jesus! You are a scaredy cat, aren’t you? It’ll just make everything bright and fun for a couple of hours.’
I unstuck the two pieces of Sellotape and, dropping the little black speck into the palm of my hand, I stared at it.
‘Go on! You can come with us, we’re only going for a few drinks, it’s just a bit of Friday-night malarkey. I dare you to enjoy yourself!’
Before another thought could possibly have time to enter my head, I slapped my palm across my open mouth, propelling the thing to the back of my throat; one swallow and it was gone.
Some twenty minutes later, unaware of what I had done and unprepared for the consequences, I collected my coat and bag and joined the group as they bundled out of the theatre and into the street. We had walked no more than a few yards when I had to stop to do up my shoe. I had begun to suspect that this drug would have no effect on me but, as I bent my head, everywhere around me was flooded a bright crimson, staining the whole of my field of vision, like blood through water. When I stood upright again it disappeared, as if it was being sucked back up into my head; and so the trip began. We went into a darkly lit drinking den that I had never visited before, just a few doors along from the theatre, and I was plunged into something that looked like a Hogarth painting, its characters lolling around, toothless and scruffy, in what went from eighteenth-century to modern garb and back again with bewildering speed. I made my way to the lavatory and passed a woman who laughed directly into my face, a big, fag-stained laugh that stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked back at her and watched her laugh melt away, her face becoming plain and neutral, as if she were waiting for something, and then I got it.
‘You are just a figment of my imagination, I have just made you up!’
She laughed again but with less gusto. ‘Yeah, that’s right, love.’
We then went on what was probably, for the others, a normal night out down the Dock Road and into town, in and out of pubs, but for me was a succession of bizarre and alarming freak shows; the whole world was an out-of-control circus. It was as if parts of people’s make-up became exaggerated. One landlord, who was usually a jolly red-cheeked man, when viewed on acid became an impish Toby jug of a figure, his cheeks cartoon red, his eyes ablaze, his humour insanely heightened. At some point during the night - I had no sense of time by this point - I said goodbye to the others on the corner of Canning Street and headed back to my little bedsit where I began to wonder when the nightmare would end. I had become increasingly uncomfortable in the company of the people I was with, seeing in every glance and every half-heard sentence a sneer or a slight or something much more threatening, the nature of which I could not pin down. Once back in my room I tried to make tea in the little kitchen but became utterly distracted by a sweater that I had washed earlier and left scrunched up on the draining board; like a scene from a horror film, it appeared to be seething with worms, but I then realised that what I was experiencing was what I had heard the others refer to as a ‘retinal circus’, an hallucination, and that the worms were simply fibres sticking out of the wool.
I lay on my mattress on the floor, knowing somewhere that I was exhausted and desperate for sleep, but in my jangled state there was little chance of that. My whole body was vibrating with a ferocious, uncomfortable energy, my muscles jumping and restless, and I had the feeling that I could, and possibly needed to, run a couple of miles and then some.
My attention was suddenly grabbed by a poster of Marilyn Monroe that I had stuck up on the wall a few days previously; it was in colour and her face filled the frame, her big, scarlet lips kissing out at the camera, like the end of an elephant’s trunk. Abruptly, with an unpleasant, wet snap, her tongue whipped out of her mouth. It was long, black and forked, like a snake’s, slithering maniacally around her face, and just as abruptly it was sucked back in again. Although I knew that this wasn’t real, it was nevertheless very disturbing. I jumped up and ripped the poster from the wall, screwing it up and throwing it into the corner of the room. I stood over it and watched, my heart crashing against my ribs, as it began to slowly unfurl, and I screamed as the tongue exploded through the crushed folds of paper to lash again around Marilyn’s by now distorted face. I stamped on it repeatedly to no avail as the tongue still managed to emerge, unscathed and with vigour, from the now-flattened poster. Gingerly I picked it up, holding it by a corner between my thumb and forefinger, keeping it at arm’s length, lest the tongue lash out and entangle me in its vicious toils like some exotic lizard, drawing me back into the moist hungry mouth. I dropped it in the waste-paper bin and placed a dinner plate on top.
I lay back down on the bed. Desperate to occupy my fizzing mind, I stared up at the ceiling and began creating my own cartoons upon it, anything I wanted appearing instantly in beautiful Technicolor: clouds and forests, waterfalls, Tom and Jerry, Sylvester the cat, Sister Augustine as a seaside-postcard bathing belle: ‘Have you seen my little Fanny?’
Then crashing into my mind came the thought that my small bedsit was in fact the universe in its entirety and that there was nothing else beyond it. Outside the door there were no other bedsits, there was no staircase, no front door with Canning Street on the other side, no Geoff, no Mikie: all these things were superb creations of my own imagination, necessary for my emotional and mental survival. Outside was a void, a vacuum, and what we saw from the window was an illusion. I lay there frozen by this thought. I could see myself in the tiny little box of a room, lit by a dull yellow light, floating free in space, and all around me was a lifeless, black nothingness.
I jumped up from the bed; please, God, this could not be true! I had to get out to disprove it and so, sweating and shaking, I tentatively opened the door. Everything looked as it always did, except for a strange crackling, pink glow from the electric light bulb, suspended, shadeless, in the gloom. I tiptoed down the stairs, every creak underfoot threatening to burst my eardrums, and at the bottom, half lit by the morning sun flooding through the small window above the door, lay Mikie in his usual heap, but now he was a big snoring, throbbing walrus, complete with whiskers, and not frightening at all.
I began to laugh, the sort of laughter I long for in my life, doubled over, painful, liberating and cathartic, and off I went into a beautiful, bright Liverpool morning, a sharp wind coming up off the Mersey and blowing away the thought that the world stopped at my door, blowing it away into the ether. About eight hours after it began, the trip finally started to come to an end by my being drawn, heavy and drained, into the Catholic cathedral, where, in the great, echoing calm, my throat tightened and I felt I might cry. It was still early morning; I sat shivering in one of the back pews, the sun streaming down in bright, laser-like rays upon the altar, occasionally going in and coming out like a stage light being tested in a rehearsal. Then an altar boy, a young man, entered like an actor on a stage and walked about the altar, the sun making a halo of his hair, his rubber soles squeaking on the polished floor. He was laying out, with great delicacy, the props that were necessary for the celebration of the mass. Just a few short hours later I was laying out my own props, backstage at the Everyman, dressed in a full elephant costume, plus substantial headdress for the Saturday matin’e performance of Brian Patten’s children’s play, The Pig and the Junkle. I felt fuzzy and detached, whilst knowing with a cast-iron certainty that this would never happen again and noticing that every time I bent forward the world went ever so slightly pink.
I stayed at the Everyman Theatre for eighteen months, with a summer season in Aberystwyth in the middle, to which almost the entire company decamped and during which almost the entire company were banned from every pub in the vicinity. It was one day during that summer that Pete came home and produced a tiny black-and-white Jack Russell puppy from his pocket, like an unwanted child, claiming that, if he hadn’t taken her off the farmer there and then, the farmer would have shot her. My heart sank; what could I do? So she was christened Babs.
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.