A Midsummer Night’s Dream
St John’s College Gardens, Oxford,
28th June - 3rd July 1976
CAST
Vicky Bott, Bill Buffery, Nigel Bryant, Carolyn Colquhoun, David Etherington, Kate Flint, Alan Halliday, Jim Hayward, Monica Kendall, Richard Longworth, Doug Lucie, Cynthia Millar, Lynne Mortimer, George Peck, Stephen Pickles, Robin Seavill, Emma Sergeant, Harriet Sergeant, Sue Taylor, Michael Waldman, Richard Warren, Andrew Wilkie
DIRECTED BY
Alan Halliday
James Hayward
PS
It was probably the best summer of my life.
Over the previous few months I’d managed to copy just enough relevant facts into my essays to persuade my tutors to keep me on, I’d performed in a well-received revue at the Playhouse, after that gone straight into Mrs Warren’s Profession (as it were), and now termtime was over and our company, staying up into the long vac, had the run of the beautiful college gardens at St John’s to put on a classy production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was the height of the heatwave that was the summer of 1976. My new room at the top of the new Thomas White building (3/13) had its own balcony to lie out on, and so I had nothing to do but read and sunbathe and rehearse in my swimming trunks. I’d never been lazier or browner.
A few years before, I’d even been lucky enough to see Peter Brook’s famously ground-breaking 1970 production of the Dream on tour at the Bristol Hippodrome – lucky because if I hadn’t, I’d have spent a lot of time later feeling annoyed at having missed it. I was only about fifteen or sixteen so didn’t really have a clue what was going on, but the night left me with two clear impressions – one was the dazzling beauty of those colourful bright costumes against that famously stark white set, shimmering in sync with the humming tubes the fairies all played (even if I’m wrong about that last bit, it’s the sort of thing they would have done); and the other was the inexplicable feeling of pure euphoria as I walked home afterwards. Something Had Happened, and it took me a while to work out what it probably was – I had simply experienced, for the first time, the power of live theatre at its very best. And if that’s what it could do to the closed mind of a self-satisfied, parochial little schoolboy like me, then bring it on, give me excess of it.
It only became apparent to me later that practically everyone in the cast was not only well known then but would become even better known through TV and film as the decade went on. Alan (Theseus/Oberon) Howard, for instance, I would see a few years later, again at the Hippodrome, as Henry V. (In his sadly underrated autobiography, actor Nicholas Craig tells us Terry Hands once memorably accredited Howard with ‘A larynx like leather, able to do three big kings in a week’.*) Frances (Helena) de la Tour would play Miss Jones in Rising Damp and then go on to grace a number of Alan Bennett plays. Ben (Demetrius) Kingsley would return to the Old Vic in Bristol opposite Paul Scofield with Warren Clarke and the incomparable Elizabeth Spriggs in Volpone before winning an Oscar for Gandhi. David (Bottom) Waller I saw in Alan Bennett’s early TV play A Day Out. I knew a neighbour who fancied Norman (Snout) Rodway. It turned out my wife, in her ballet dancing years, had once nearly been presented with an award by Christopher (Lysander) Gable. And Terrence (Starveling) Hardiman would keep cropping up as a suave Nazi in various BBC TV series throughout the 1970s. On the night, however, the only actor I immediately recognised was Philip (Quince) Locke as the Blofeld baddie who James Bond skewers to a tree with a harpoon in Thunderball (1965).
My part, Snug the Joiner, was played by Barry Stanton. It’s embarrassing to admit it now, but when I got the part of this particular rude mechanical in this, my very first Shakespeare, not only did I not actually know what a joiner did, I was far too blasé and complacent to find out. I think the props person at one point tried to hand me a hammer and a block of wood and I said, “What’s this for?”
It didn’t really matter. I was mainly there for the lion’s roaring in the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence, and they even supplied a voice mistress to help me with that. And in the shenanigans at the end of the ‘play within the play’ I was even able to walk a few yards on my hands, which won me a round of applause. Or maybe the audience were just admiring the way the hem of my naff little tabard fell down over my ears exposing my M&S underpants. The class system of Athenian society was reflected in the amount spent on the characters’ costumes, and by the time they got round to us gutter scrapings, there wasn’t much cloth left in the communal skip.
That poster by now-professional artist Alan Halliday was a bit of a pose of course, all those names, but the intention had been to do a kind of Murder on the Orient Express number, pack the cast out with all the prominent actors of that generation, and I can still put a face to most of them. Many went on to act professionally, like Bill Buffery, Carolyn Colquhoun and Sue Taylor (aka Susan Kyd). Michael Waldman became a producer and director. Doug Lucie is a playwright. Other names I have seen since include Stephen Pickles, who went into publishing and who was probably one of the most frighteningly clever men I’ve ever met; Harriet Sergeant, a crusading journalist; and Harriet’s younger sister, Emma, who became a painter.
Hampered as I was by not knowing what my character was meant to do for a living, and doubtless cowed by the glamour of the talents around me, it’s hardly surprising I made a twat of myself at the readthrough. We sat in a big democratic circle in the bar at St John’s, like the Knights of the Round Table. Even our directors were there among us. One of the big actresses had turned up without a script, and I, ever the eager amateur, had arrived with two, so I lent her one in the hope that afterwards I might invite her out to the cinema or something. Everything went swimmingly until there was a sudden hiatus during one of the rude mechanicals’ scenes. Bottom looked at me reproachfully. It was my cue, but for some reason in my copy of the script it was Snout the tinker who was meant to be saying that line.
Even I knew what a tinker did, but it didn’t save me from the crippling embarrassment of the moment. I mean, how can that have happened? I know there can sometimes be variations in scripts as to what characters say, but surely they’ve all become standardised as to who actually bloody says it? (My wife, by the way, disputes this could have happened and suggests it is simply another false memory, probably covering up some gaffe even more dire.) But I certainly blotted my copy book somehow that afternoon, because the shame of the moment has stayed with me as a lifelong brand. The actress I lent my script to certainly never looked at me again. Come to think of it, I don’t think she ever gave me back the book… (Was she the same one who had to hunker in the bushes for a piss during the Saturday matinee and then had to go on with a wet stain down the front of her gown? I honestly can’t remember now, but I think it might have been her… Yes, pretty sure, come to think… Grey dress. You really couldn’t miss it…)
At least I thought I would be safe within my Bristolian brogue. After all, horny-handed sons of the soil always spoke Mummerset on stage, didn’t they, so since that was my natural accent, the job was a good ’un. But then came the rehearsal wherein I was supposed to come belting out of the boscage bringing the following news to my brethren: “Masters, the Duke is coming from the temple.” I had a long run-up and they told me to draw out the ‘Masters’ for as long as it took me to cover the distance. “Maaastuuurrrrs!” I yodelled, arriving eventually, exhausted, on trembling legs.
They said they couldn’t understand what I was saying. This struck me as odd because they’d read the same script I had, and even my bastard version had this line right. Try and draw out the A a bit more, they said.
“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaastuuurrrs!” I stood before them again, swaying in the heat.
No, still not getting it. Tell you what, could you try saying ‘Maaahhhstuuuhhhs’ instead? Soften that vowel. Bit more received pronunciation on the R. And, action.
“Maaaaaaaaahhhstuuuuuuuuuhhhs!”
Yes, they said finally, leaning over me as I lay having convulsions on the tawny lawn. That’s much better. Do it like that would you?
Well, they were the director so I did what I was told, but I never felt good about it. I still didn’t know what a joiner did, but whatever it was, I bet he was the only one ever to sound like he’d learnt how to do it at Eton.
*Nicholas Craig is the name of a fictional thespian created by Christopher Douglas and Nigel Planer for the spoof autobiography, I, an Actor, one of the most deliciously scurrilous and unapologetic satires I have ever read. If you love theatre and enjoy a good laugh, I highly recommend it.
The view from my balcony. The college gardens are in the distance. Note the parched yellow grass…
…and the reverse shot. The posters on the wall include that term’s earlier successes, Mrs Warren’s Profession and After Eights.