She was lonely and in need of some comfort. She'd ended up spending a night away from her little boy, performing sexual athletics with some eighteen year old idiot with tight jeans and a winning smile.
My place at the Central School of Speech and Drama was already reserved for me. I had started auditioning for drama schools in September. It was required that you prepared two speeches to perform for the various panels you'd get to meet. Unlike today, where the auditioning process with all its inherent drama of elation and rejection has been cheapened by its use as a form of entertainment on a Saturday night, back then, it still felt fairly exclusive and an unusual thing to do. Unlike the cattle-calls of the TV programmes today, the people who auditioned had to pay for the priviledge, so that tended to weed out the chancers and the ones just having a laugh.
The auditioning panel too weren't there to be entertaining, they were looking for a company they could work with for the following three years so they treated their prospective students with respect. Despite this, there were still some choice examples of young men and ladies who should've spent their money on something else. I felt I had a bit of an advantage being a little 'theatrical' if you get my drift. You had to perform a 'Shakespeare' and a 'Modern'. The Shakespeare was fairly fool-proof, but the Modern could open up a can of worms. While in my second year at Central, I attended the auditions of that year's hopefuls. My job was to go in with them and prompt them if they forgot their lines. The classic was this very quiet, retiring young man wearing a short sleeved shirt and Clarkes Attackers. He'd gone in and performed his Shakespeare in a fairly non-descript fashion. He then tentatively announced that, for his Modern, he would be performing a speech he'd written himself. The panel nudged themselves, looked genuinely impressed and settled themselves down to watch this quiet young man's work. I was given no script to prompt from, so I too could give my undivided attention. He stood for a few seconds, head bowed, calming himself and then let rip. Out of his pocket, he produced a crucifix and, for the next three minutes, screamed a list obscenities about his mother, all the while pretending to stab himself with the afore-mentioned cross. I looked over to the panel who were obviously finding it very hard to keep a straight face. The boy finished and they struggled to compose themselves enough to thank him for coming and say good-bye. I ushered him out. Part of the system was that I was to look back at the panel as I let the auditionee go before me out of the door and they would either shake their head, or nod, in which case I would stop lucky boy or girl from leaving and bring them back in for an interview. In this case, there was no looking back required. They say acting is a form of therapy. This boy was going to have to lie on the couch and pay his forty quid an hour like everyone else...
For my Central audition the year before, I chose to perform a 'Modern' speech from a play about two Liverpudlian blokes who spent a day on the beach with their girlfriends. The quieter one of the two men comes out with this story of how, as a decorator, he had had to go in to the local night-club a while back and repaint the ladies toilets. Having never been in there before, being male, it comes as a bit of a shock to him. He descibes the graphic graffiti on the walls and the nauseating smell "of c**t and scent", and his disgust. I gave the end of the speech a slightly sinister slant and made him retreat into himself a little as he explains how he covered it all in bright orange paint.
So I don't need the therapy, then...
I must have been extraordinarily convincing because my particular chaperone that day pulled me back in for an interview and I was told to stay behind. At the end of the day, the school secretary came into the waiting room and told everyone except myself and this impossibly glamourous rock-chick in a beaver-skin jacket with jet black hair that jutted out in all directions, to leave. We were both escorted back into the audition room and told that we were to be offered a place on the course that September. I was thrilled, not least because, if this was the sort of girl they were offering places to, I was going to have a ball! Her name was Amanda Donohoe...
But before then, I had nine months to kill and a month and a half of that was going to be taken up at Liverpool Playhouse where I was to replace the injured, star-in-embryo of Brookside, Brian Regan. I was to play the part of the waiter in Pinter's "Betrayal" and also be general dogs-body back-stage. During the rehearsal period, the actors would swan off for a set or two of tennis in the park, and I had to stay in the theatre painting things and carrying other things around. I soon realised where I wanted my bread to be buttered. Back-stage work was definitely not for me. Luckily, I'd had a lot of practice skiving effectively back in the toilets of the Stratford Workshops so I managed to slope off many times during the day and avoid a lot of the graft.
The house where all the actors stayed while working up there in Liverpool was in Huskisson Street, slap bang in the middle of the red light district. Despite the many horrific stories of violence on the streets around there, told by Dave Bartlett, the stage manager, I never saw anything untoward and had a great time in the place. Other companies visiting the city would use the house too, and a particular highlight, I remember, was when the Fiona Richmond show rolled into town! Half the house became full of young dancers. Nice in itself, but they had the additional allure of being in a show known for being a bit racey and for a boy of eighteen I was rendered speechless most of the time in their presence. One night, I found myself in the huge communal kitchen chatting to a rather attractive young lady from this show. We were talking away, she in her tartan dressing gown, me in what I hoped were fashionably tight jeans and jumper. It was about two in the morning and the house was fairly quiet. As we chatted, an actor from another theatre wandered in for a cup of tea and I couldn't help noticing how she quickly closed what had been fast becoming her slightly open dressing gown. She had obviously been letting it loosen on purpose! Oh, what joy for a young boy! Anyway, the actor wouldn't go away - can't blame him really - and I went off to bed thwarted and annoyed at my innocence. They were only there for a week so I'd well and truly blown it.
Not to worry though. There were many more parties over the following four or five weeks and after one of them, I managed to persuade someone to sleep with me. As she got up the following morning to get home before her young son woke up, I kept my eyes closed in self-disgust and shame. She was lonely and in need of some comfort. She'd ended up spending a night away from her little boy, performing sexual athletics with some eighteen year old idiot with tight jeans and a winning smile. She closed the door after her and I tried to get back to sleep and hopefully wake up liking myself again. When I opened my eyes a few hours later, the news was on the TV and the Space Shuttle was lifting off for the first time. History was made twice that day: the first shuttle flight, and my first one-night stand. Unlike the scientists responsible for the shuttle, I decided there and then not to repeat the exercise, a decision I've stuck to with varying degrees of success over the years...
While I was working at the theatre there, I met a guy who was working as a 'casual'. He had long hair and multi-coloured braces. He confided in me that he hoped to become an actor himself and was going to try to get into drama school that year. As I'd already got in to one, I was something of an expert to him. We would chat for hours about actors and acting. I decided to try an experiment. We were in my dressing-room one evening, talking about how to choose speeches for auditions and I tried to seamlessly begin the ladies' toilet speech I'd learned for my audition, without him realising. I began it. "I painted a lav one time. A lavo in a club in Slater Street. You must know the place?" He nodded! I'd never seen Slater Street! I continued. "Anyway, I went in there one time. Went in the place to paint the lavo." and so on. I was sure my eyes were giving me away, that he could see the blankness in them as I acted out the script line by line, praying he wouldn't interrupt my flow. "... I covered it all in bright orange paint." I stopped. He sat there waiting, totally engrossed in my story. After a beat, I raised my hands and said, "That was it! That was my speech!" He was dumbfounded. I tell you, I was pretty bloody impressed with myself as well! Sometimes, when I'm jumping around like an idiot at one of the many commercial castings I go to nowadays, I think back to that moment and remember why I decided to do this acting lark in the first place. He auditioned for Central after I'd left Liverpool and we spent the following three years together on the same course at the same school. Funnily enough, he too is currently living in Brookside Close and has been for quite a while now!
The show itself went pretty well. My main task each evening was to open a bottle of Corvo Bianco with a little tool called the "Waiter's Friend", basically a pen-knife with a corkscrew at one end. You have to open it up to cut the seal, pull out the cork-screw and get it in the cork, hinge it down to fix the strut that hooks onto the neck, and pull both it and the cork up and out of the bottle. It's fairly simple really, but doing it on a stage with the entire audience watching and nothing else happening, it has nightmarish possibilities. In three and a half weeks, I must have done it twenty-eight times and it only buggered up once when the cork broke in half in the bottle. It needed a cool head, an improvisational "Scusi" and a trip into the wings to get the spare one. It gave the waiter an extraordinarly innappropriate amount of attention considering the size of the part.
I took a little bit of Liverpool home with me. On the wall of the Everyman bar was a poster advertising the appearance of The Spinners at the Liverpool Philharmonic. It was a huge photograph of them standing, two-up two-down, smiling at something just to the right of the camera. They were wearing these yellow, smock-type affairs as was their wont. Some wag had got out his marker and drew a black band around their collars, an upside-down 'V' logo on their chests, pointed the black one's ears slightly and put a speech bubble on the lead singer, "Beam me up Scotty!" and a "Aye, aye, Captain" on the one with the very Scotty-like, grey hair. I had to have it. It was on my wall for years...