Action Replay
Hope Centre, Bristol, 5th - 7th November 1982
Arts Centre Theatre presents
ACTION REPLAY
by Fay Weldon
CAST
Saul - Roger Tunstall
Helen - Louise Ellis
Shirley - Sue Roberts
Judy - Beverley Keech
Stephen - Robin Seavill
Jonathan - Steve Anstey
DIRECTED BY
Jill Truman
PS
In the 80s I started, for the first time, to gain a bit of political education. I found myself intermittently hanging out with the Playwrights Company who were all, it turned out, dedicatedly left wing, to the point where I thought the politics sometimes got in the way of their writing. There is, of course, a school of thought that holds all drama should be challenging and confrontational, and about something fundamental. It’s why Kenneth Tynan, for instance, was so relieved at the rude blast of rigour John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger brought to the Royal Court in 1956; at last, he opined, something where the crash of denunciation goes somewhat beyond the hitherto middle-class chirrups of “Nonsense, Mummy!” or “Stuff, Daddy!”. On the other hand, my view had always been – and persisted to be now, even with all these potentially dangerous revolutionary currents swirling around me – that the theatre, like any branch of art, is surely a broad enough church to admit all types and styles of engagement. Yes, you have a right to be as political as you like, just as I have a right to be as non-political as I like. In Brideshead Revisited, Brideshead’s view, in the face of Charles Ryder’s keen scepticism, is that everything is about God. Well, not if you don’t believe in God it isn’t. And if you don’t believe in God, then it leaves the way open for everything to be about something else entirely.
Be that as it may, Action Replay formed part of this belated instruction. I don’t think I’d ever been in a play written by a woman before, and it was interesting and salutary to find out how a woman wrote for the opposite sex. (I remember thinking, “So that’s how they think we think. Oh dear.”) Obviously from Fay Weldon’s point of view the men in this play were basically ciphers in the same way so many women characters must be in plays written by men who are so much more interested in and comfortable with the pressures and problems that beset their own sex, so they have their women say just what’s necessary for them to keep the plot ticking over without necessarily exploring any too deeply their individual lives or concerns. Ms Weldon wanted to tell the story (or rather, stories – the different potential outcomes to different decisions was half the point of the piece) from her women characters’ POVs, and we blokes could maybe learn something by shutting up and listening for a change.
Telling a bunch of women what’s what. My character Stephen seemed to do rather a lot of this before he shagged most of them. In this scene, I seem to remember, they’re managing to take the piss out of him without him realising it. I look like I’ve just been interrupted halfway through an audition for Riverdance. Note the fingers pointing towards the crotch in an instinctive form of primitive genital display.
l to r: Beverley K, Louise E, Sue R, RAS
Not that my character, the priapic Stephen, ever did (listen, I mean). I certainly had no qualms about playing a wrong’un for once. My character was your basic rake, a common or garden sexual predator, the love-’em-and-leave-’em standard bad boy. The sort, in short, I could never work out why women went for in the first place. I had known a couple at Oxford, and the fact that even intelligent women could fall for their flannel so easily suggested these bastards’ appeal had nothing at all to do with intellect. I’d always been brought up to believe the brain was the most important organ of all, even in matters of leurve. Apparently not. But then, as a disinterested spectator you keep finding yourself thinking, look, you know what he’s like, he’s not going to change for you, so don’t come crying to me when he breaks your heart. Still he does and they do, usually wailing between sobs, “Why can’t I fall in love with someone decent and ordinary and boring like you?” So you resign yourself to another hour’s nodding and passing the tissues and wishing they didn’t always look so beautiful when they were at their most vulnerable and…
Well…
Aaaaanyhoo…
Poor Louise (she is the person who is sitting on the left in this photograph), who I had to beat up every night for a week in a dusty church hall in November 1982. I still have those dark glasses, while I hope her bruises have long since faded. (Check out the jeans, by the way. Thirty-inch waist and I still barely touched the sides. Those were the days…)
This was also the first time I got to play a sex scene. I say sex scene. Physical contact with a female of the opposite, you know. We were meant to be on a beach in the south of France. The characters had been subtly colour coded, which meant in an ideal world I would have been wearing a pair of yellow swimming trunks, but such a monstrosity had not been obtainable anywhere for love nor money, thank Christ, so I had been allowed to keep my jeans on. (Luckily my torso was pale enough to pass for yellow.) But my poor fellow-actor Louise E was in nothing but a blue one-piece swimming costume – this was in the depths of winter in a draughty church hall – and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the script required me to smack her bottom so hard that she fell down on the ‘sand’. (No sand to break her fall, of course, just some ratty old car rug we were supposed to be having our picnic off of.)
Though I was meant to be playing the part of a cocky Lothario, my own experience of sexual horseplay had been fairly limited up to this point and looking back now, I suspect Louise might have appreciated my taking a firmer line, if only to help the authenticity of the moment. As it was, I could barely bear to lay a finger on her and so her subsequent theatrical sprawl on the floorboards looked just that – theatrical and melodramatic, like she was making more of it than it was – when the whole point of the scene was that I was using bullying and physical violence to demonstrate my male dominance. I would honestly have preferred it if the script said she got back up and smacked my face in retaliation, but this was a feminist play and women didn’t do that sort of thing in those; too much like adopting the brutish tactics of the patriarchy, I suppose. Instead, in the end I just got shipped off to Israel where I died in the Six Day War so, you know, at least I got my comeuppance in the end, albeit via the sharp end of an Arab rocket.
(I was lucky to avoid vengeance from another quarter too, now I think of it, because at one point my character also had to have a steamy clinch with one of the other actresses… whose real-life boyfriend was playing her boyfriend in the play. Big bloke. But he was incredibly decent about it in the circs. See, ladies? We’re not all emotional pygmies, some of us are capable of dignity and a modicum of self-respect you know, even when we have every right to be completely, yes, all right, I’ll stop now, just something I felt needed saying, that’s all…)
With Sue R, trying to ignore the fact her big boyfriend is standing about five yards away, in the dark, waiting to come on…