Knockers 2
St Columba’s by the Castle, Edinburgh,
20th - 25th August 1979
CAST
Dave Edwards
Jane Evans
Robert Orchard
Robin Seavill
WRITTEN BY
Robin Seavill, Robert Orchard, David Edwards, Richard Warren
SON ET LUMIERE
Alan Marsden
STAGE MANAGER
Gill Readdy
PHOTOS AND PROPS
Dylan Jones
DIRECTED BY
Robert Orchard
RAS, Gill R, Alan M, Rob O, Dave E, Jane E
PS
They say never go back, and they could have said it of this show. Two years on from our first outing to the Edinburgh Fringe with Knockers, some of the survivors got together for another go. I think the material was just as good (however good that was) and we were even able to secure the same venue, St Columba’s by the Castle, but somehow, it seemed to me, the vibe was off. We were all out in the world after university, the novelty was gone, and it seemed to me there was a sense less of innocent adventure and more of wanting to prove a point, make a job of work of it, which obviously was going to dampen a lot of the spontaneity.
Speaking for myself, the main problem was that the previous autumn, straight out of university, I had started work in a London advertising agency, and it had quickly become apparent that I had made a serious misstep. I hated the work and the work hated me, constantly getting me into trouble because I couldn’t take it seriously enough. It was only advertising, who cared? I had been too timid to really follow my dream and try and get into publishing, but at the time when I was considering my future, the tradition in Oxford was that the brightest and best got snapped up by the BBC, the next tier went into publishing – so the competition for both those would have been far too hot for the paltry likes of me – and the next vaguely artistic or creative area I could think of after that was advertising. And a couple of my friends were going into it as well so I thought maybe we could all get together and have a laugh at some point?
Nope.
The department I had been accepted into, account management, was about as deskbound and pen-pushy as it was possible to get. Practically my entire wage went on rent for a ground-floor bedsit just off Clapham Common, I was eating badly and sleeping even worse – I fell asleep in a client meeting once and didn’t get away with it – and a lot of the middle management seemed to have a downer on us Oxbridge types because they thought we were all stuck-up. Stuck-up? Moi? F Scott Fitzgerald has someone say in The Last Tycoon, ‘It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.’ Still hurts you though when you don’t deserve it, and have nothing to defend yourself with since you’re so low down the pecking order. Either way, I’d got myself into a bad place and I arrived for rehearsals whey-faced and run-down, with a nasty stye on one eye. I needed the show to cheer me up, but instead all it did was remind me how far I’d fallen in two years. Nobody’s fault but my own, but I was too close to it at the time to take it philosophically.
The image on the programme deliberately harked back to the design of the original 1977 poster in an attempt to recapture that, er, magic.
Not that we didn’t have our ambitions. We’d even run to a little pre-Edinburgh tour, previewing the show first in Oxford, and then stopping off at the Theatr Clwyd in north Wales where I had a brief conversation with a rather nice professional actor called Peter Halliday who I recognised from TV and films. In John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), for instance – one of the first consciously grown-up films I had deliberately sought out while I was still technically underage – he had been cast (according to the modern IMDb listing) as ‘Rowing Husband’ in the party scene opposite the meltingly beautiful Caroline Blakiston (‘Rowing Wife’) who had always been one of my favourites.
(Frankly, I’ve always been a bit of a whore when it comes to meeting famous people. After one performance of the Dream at Oxford I’d had the pleasure of introducing my parents to the famous actress Yvonne Mitchell, whose daughter had helped me with my lion’s roaring. In the Fringe bar in 1977 I had been able to have a chat with Michael Green who was up there with a show based on his book The Art of Coarse Acting, which had become my favourite in his Coarse series the moment I’d read it and come to realise you don’t need to make anything up about amateur acting at all, you just write down what happens. And even in London my landlord had once walked into the kitchen with someone I instantly recognised. “This is Jeremy,” he said. “Yes, Jeremy Bulloch,” I replied, startling both of them, and Jeremy especially, I think, which made me like him even more. Of course I knew of him. I’d first seen him in some TV soap called The Newcomers in the 60s, and he’d been cropping up ever since, usually in Bond films as a stooge in Q’s laboratory, testing fake plaster cats filled with nitro-glycerine or something, and all this before he gained lasting fame as Boba Fett in the Star Wars franchise.)
Anyway, once in Edinburgh we went through our paces but for me the thing never seemed to catch fire. For a start, there were to be no more long afternoon walks along Portobello beach throwing Jane C to the sand lions. As for the audiences, I suspect they were smaller because the competition was getting fiercer all the time, and maybe we were just too timid, too staid, too stale. A symbol of the sadness that was this show is the fact that for once no recording exists. I still have a CD of the 1977 outing, but some tragic mix-up irrevocably wiped the only live version we obtained of the 1979 reboot, so now I can barely remember what sketches we used. The Plumbers song was in it, I remember, and a couple of the play spoofs like The Three Seagulls and Matchiavel of the Day, but the rest is hazy. The rehearsal shots include a still of Rob and I staring at each other, three feet apart, through binoculars, but why we should be doing something as bizarre as that, I no longer have any clue. Some kind of cricket commentary was it? Certainly not one of mine, at any rate.
One thing that does stick in my memory, if not my actual craw, is that in the opening moments of this one I got a heckle similar to the crushing comment that had once greeted my electric guitar solo in Allswellthatendsrock!. We were opening the show with the Starsky and Hutch parody and I had just burst out from between the curtains, adopting my best threatening pose. Levelling my gun at the audience, I barked the opening line, “Freeze! This is the heat!”, and to my right I heard a voice in the front row say quietly but distinctly, “Next.” Summed it up really.
“What, hangdog? Hast thou slain my sister? Then diest thou also, horny homunculus.” Matchiavel of the Day approaches its bloody climax. Dave E and RAS, with Jane E already well out of it on the floor at our feet. I have no idea how the dagger ended up in my left hand.