All The World's A Stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts.
These lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It seem apt to the business of what is referred to in literary circles as life writing. A memoir will have a cast of characters, some heroes and some villains, there will be some funny bits and some grim bits. As for the playing many parts, a significant motif in my own memoir, Shifting Classes, is the way in which you experience multiple identities as you transition between different social levels, and find yourself consciously playing out different roles. During the period covered by this family memoir, approximately the first six decades of the twentieth century, social relationships were strongly shaped by levels of class consciousness that would seem absurd to many people now, except that social differences are still strongly marked today and seriously determine life chances.
Early Dramas
In a following post I’ll discuss how this applies in the theatrical world, but for now I want to recall the various ways in which I was drawn into the world of make believe that is theatre. Readers of the memoir (Chapter Three: First Footsteps) will know that a tongue-tied performance at the age of five, induced by my first ever sight of a real audience, was received with such loud laughter and applause that I was hooked on the stage for life.
The next opportunity came at my northern grammar school, King James’s Grammar School, Knaresborough. Two wonderful drama teachers, Molly Sawdon and Paddy Wansbrough, produced some outstanding productions, and squeezed some remarkable performances from their stolid Yorkshire charges. But some of them were not so stolid either and would go on to professional careers in the theatre, including the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford, the Royal Court in London, and leading repertory companies in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Nottingham and Leeds. One of my school contemporaries, Desmond Gill, was also from a farming background. Participating in these school productions soon made him realise that acting was the only thing hereafter that he wanted to do. His finale at school was an astonishing Hamlet, which won an admiring notice from a knowledgeable critic, John Rathmell, a former pupil who was now a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and capable of quite trenchant judgements. (He had reviewed an earlier production of Christopher Fry’s free verse play, The Lady’s Not For Burning as ‘a mixture of good poetry and bad theatre’). He was swept away by Desmond’s performance: he wrote ‘This was his play, and his performance was unforgettable…the quality that made the performance memorable was a toughness beyond the range of the effete Drama School products that the Old Vic has recently presented us with’. He presciently declared that ‘if he so wished he would make his mark on the professional stage’. Desmond did so wish, and won a scholarship to RADA, graduating in 1961.
Another of Molly and Paddy’s protégés and friends was one Geoffrey Wilkinson, like Des, from a local farming family. I don’t have much information about his grammar school acting because he was at school at least a decade later than me. Subsequently, I would bump into him from time to time at the University of Kent in the late 1960s where I was lecturing, and where he not only studied English Literature, but would meet his future wife, later another leading actor, Diana Hardcastle. He would himself go on to an absolutely stellar acting career, and is best known now, of course, as Tom Wilkinson, rightly much celebrated on stage and screen.
To complete this story of one school’s exceptional theatrical connections, we might note that one Peter Dews would spend a short time in 1952 at Knaresborough Grammar School as a history supply teacher. Our resident critic had words of praise for ‘a howling success’ with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, owing much to the ‘brilliance of the producers, Miss Ellis and Mr Dews.’ This is no less than the Peter Dews who would become the innovative artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (1965-72), after producing the outstanding and award-winning BBC series of Shakespeare’s history plays, An Age of Kings in 1960 (and I suppose it’s possible that Des Gill may have acted under his direction at Birmingham).
Not a bad set of theatrical ‘old boys’ for a small, unpretentious Yorkshire grammar school!
The Stratford Connection
My theatre-mad schoolteacher mentors bought a house in the Cotswolds (to which they later retired) in order to be near to the Royal Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford. Visits to them would always include marvellous theatre treats, including (in 1969) a young Judi Dench as an unforgettable Viola. In the early 1980s Anthony Sher rented a cottage from them in Chipping Campden while playing Richard III. John Wood, already famous, was a nearby neighbour and friend, and would occasionally appear with his wife at the odd soiree in Molly and Paddy’s garden. Tom Wilkinson turned up at one of these; this might possibly have been in the 1980s when he played in several Shakespeare Company productions, both in Stratford and London.
The nostalgic photo above is of one such gathering at Molly and Paddy’s house which brought together the schoolboys who they had cleverly converted into fast and life-long friends, together with their wives and children. My sons Nick and Ben, the big boys on the front row, were taken to their first ever theatre performance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Other Place. We had front row seats; Ben, aged 9, hid behind me when Puck appeared with a snarling leap. Nick, aged 10, watched attentively but silently until the ‘rude mechanicals’ put on their play, then he began to giggle, then laugh uncontrollably, to the point where he had to lie on the floor clutching his sides. He too was hooked on the theatre after that.
Angry Young Men?
Des and I could not possibly be so described. But the early (swinging) Sixties brought us together again, for while I was beginning my diplomatic career in Whitehall, he was back in London (after a year at Birmingham Repertory Company), attached to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, where John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger about class discontents (and much more) was said by Alan Sillitoe not to have contributed to British theatre, but to have blown most of it up. Des appeared to be in the right place, at a theatre devoted to iconoclastic innovation; although it always seemed to me that Des was not really much of a rebel in this context, happier in the classical theatre modes in which he excelled.
We liked to meet when we could at the Stock Pot, an amiable little greasy spoon just behind Piccadilly Circus, or at an even greasier spoon called Jimmy’s in Soho. When we’d both left London we’d still find many occasions to keep in touch, not least through Molly and Paddy. I’m surprised when I look back to realise that I never once saw him act again after that career-defining school Hamlet, perhaps because I never had much opportunity to do so, as he’d be miles away in some far-flung repertory company. I remember hearing reports of a terrific Titus Andronicus (see photo above). I came across a lovely photograph of him acting with a handsome young Ian McKellen in Euripides’ The Bacchae at the Liverpool Playhouse: Des is regarding this great actor with the faintly amused, considering look so familiar to me. Perhaps he had some mystical inkling that McKellen would one day perform Hamlet in his eighties. This seems quite a preposterous conception, when I recall how perfectly suited to the part Desmond was as a brooding late teenager. But what do I know? My niece’s 12 years old daughter Eva last year played Lady Macbeth in her school production, apparently with a suitably murderous intensity and no little relish. Perhaps the play’s the thing…
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