PERFORMANCES

When I first arrived at university, I was so self-conscious that I could barely walk down the street without worrying what people thought as they looked at me. By the time I came to leave, four years later, I was seriously regretting not having got into acting sooner because I loved putting my wonderful self out there so much.

It started with the weekly college folk club. Academic life had come as a shock to the system – I’d never worked so hard in my life, there was so much to read and take in, and you were always having to look ahead to the next essay. I was sinking, and realised I needed something else, something of my own to relieve the pressure. Women were obviously out of the question because, to coin a phrase, I was not the kind of guy the kind of girl I liked, liked. So somewhere around the end of sixth or seventh week I turned up at my college folk club with my trusty old jumbo, shaking with nerves, and asked if I could go on. I’d only been playing for a year, and if things had gone disastrously wrong, I doubt I would ever have found the courage to try again, assuming the life of the troubadour was obviously not for me. Luckily, I’d learnt just enough chords and just enough funny songs to get the audience on my side. Then I got into performing songs in comedy revues, which led to walk-ons in sketches, and then eventually my first proper acting roles in the summer of 1976, in Mrs Warren’s Profession and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Straight after university I had to break off performing for a while because there were fewer opportunities in London – at least none I was in any mood to seek out as this time life got the better of me – so when I came to take it up again a few years later, with a number of amateur companies back home in Bristol, I was able to remake myself in traditional existentialist manner: I could choose to be the nuanced, fascinating performer I aspired to be, and throughout the eighties I was more homme de théâtre than anything else. I wrote, acted, directed, designed posters, composed, and even got my phizog on the gogglebox a couple of times. Whereas once upon a time I had been paranoid about people judging me, from then on and ever since I suspect they have been judging me all too accurately and these days mostly wish I would just shut the hell up…

Any public performance by its nature is evanescent. There may be photographs or recordings, but mostly the experience lives only in the memories of those present. Here are some of mine.