Knockers
Clockwise from top left: Michael Wills, Jane Cragg, RAS, Rob Orchard, Dave Edwards, Joanna Hill
St Columba’s by the Castle, Edinburgh
22nd August - 3rd September, 1977
CAST
Jane Cragg
Dave Edwards
Joanna Hill
Robert Orchard
Robin Seavill
Michael Wills
WRITTEN BY
The Cast
and John Albery, Louise Fletcher, Iain Moss, Charles Nixon, Guy Pilch, Mark Wood
SON ET LUMIERE
Andrew Burnham
PIANO
Bill Staden
DIRECTED BY
Robert Orchard
PS
The Edinburgh Fringe has always been associated with comedy. While these days it’s mainly a seed bed and forcing ground for the best of stand-up, in the late 70s it was company revues, rather than individuals, who formed the bulk of the entertainment on offer. Cambridge Footlights always sent a troupe. Beyond the Fringe had been conceived especially for the occasion. In 1977, it was our turn.
I’d just got back from a year’s teaching in Germany with my final year at Oxford still to come. Rob Orchard, an old mate who had given me my first roles in revue, asked if I’d be interested in joining the little group he was putting together for a two-week run. Flattered he still remembered me, I started writing immediately.
Outside the venue. Can’t remember this gentleman’s name now, but I think he was a critic from some national newspaper. That’s probably why we’re all pretending to listen so attentively.
l to r: Jane C, Mike W, Rob O, Joanna H, Bill S
The seven of us – six cast and one tech crew – stayed in Portobello, put up at the house of a generous teacher and his family. We played at St Columba’s by the Castle, a church hall in the shadow of the scaffolding holding up the seating for the annual Tattoo. We did two shows a day – at 1:10pm and 11:45pm – and spent the rest of the time enjoying the vibe, seeing other shows, and generally hanging out. The streets were packed and the weather was Scottish. One afternoon four of us set off to climb Arthur’s Seat, the brooding hill to the south, at the end of the Royal Mile behind Holyrood Palace. It was bracing, and the views were like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson. (Just recently we visited again as a family and tried to make the same ascent. It broke my heart that while the spirit was still willing and eager, the knees were no longer capable of making any such sustained effort. K and I left the kids to it and took ourselves off for a nice relaxing cake in the Palace café instead.)
I didn’t know until I went there that Portobello had a beach. Whenever the rain held off long enough, myself and a cast mate, Jane, started taking long walks on the sand. I’ve still got pictures of her from that time, standing on the shoreline, making the place look classy. I also used to enjoy building sand sculptures on holiday and my speciality was a lion. I made one on Portobello beach in the second week, and have a picture of Jane lying back in its paws, as if she was being eaten, laughing helplessly at how much it didn’t look like a lion…
It turned out I had actually been aware of Jane for some time without registering the fact. I first saw her on stage at the Playhouse in a brilliant production of Peter Barnes’s The Bewitched, where she got burnt at the stake as a sorceress. I could still remember the clean white line of her throat as her head fell back. Later that same term I was watching a Twelfth Night, I think it was, from the circle, and heard someone having hysterics downstairs in the stalls. It was only in Edinburgh that I found out this too had been Jane, unable to cope with the sight of a close friend, in sagging tights and a wispy beard, pretending to essay the part of a decrepit old man. (She had obviously not seen my trailblazing depiction of the ancient Reverend Gardner in Mrs Warren’s Profession the year before.) I had even auditioned for her once, when she was directing an evening of Noël Coward songs. All I could remember about that was the impression she’d left on me, this stunning, poised blonde in an elegant black dress. Far too sophisticated for me, I thought resignedly. But I consoled myself that women that gorgeous rarely needed to have developed any personality or character because the world had already blessed them enough, so I was quite prepared to manage my expectations.
She quickly confounded such defensive prejudices by turning out to be as down to earth as she was lovely. And practical too. In the first week of the run I broke a fingernail, which is not good news for a guitarist, even one as limited as myself. Between us we managed to bodge a repair with a bit of card and some red nail polish, which at least evened me up enough to make the playing sound not too amateurish. So for a while it was like Mrs Warren’s Profession all over again, where I would start the evening with my hand resting in the lap of a beautiful woman who was also sexy (they’re not the same).
Then one night we were walking back up the Royal Mile together to do the late show when a gang of local youths approached us from the opposite direction. They were drunk, and I had recently got into the habit of wearing a stupid khaki bucket hat. This fashion choice obviously offended one of these lads because as he passed me, he whipped it off my head and carried on walking. I turned back. He was holding it out to me teasingly – ‘Come and get it’ – and as I stretched out a tentative hand he punched me in the side of the head. It didn’t hurt at all but my glasses went flying into the gutter and as I bent – gratefully – to pick them up, I’d never felt more pathetic or vulnerable in my life. He could keep the hat, I decided, he’d already robbed me of everything else. But by the time I stood up again, Jane had placed herself between me and them and thank God I couldn’t see the expression on her face because one of the other boys said soberly, ‘Better give it back, Rory,’ and a moment later the hat was back on my head (needless to say, I never wore the bloody thing again) and the incident was over. We arrived at the hall laughing hysterically with our arms around each other.
If I hadn’t been in love with Jane before, I sure as hell was now. For her part, maybe having saved my life she felt, Petit Prince-style, that she was now responsible for me or something. Whatever, it was the start of a beautiful friendship… which may go some way towards explaining why, in that picture of her lying between the paws of that sand lion on Portobello beach, the jeans she was wearing were not hers, but mine.
