Out of work?
I have just read that the (very famous) chain of stores for which our son worked until last year has gone out of business, all branches closing. In the first Lockdown, he was on furlough for many months, and with the pandemic raging it was hard to know which was less desirable — that he should find he wasn’t going back, or that he was going back, to two spells on the London Underground every day, and a workplace that was open to everyone. As so often in life — and goodness knows current and recent events prove it — the ‘only possible outcomes’ were not in the least what happened. Unsure that his employers would be taking everyone back, he applied for other jobs — and got one. With slightly better pay, considerably more relevance to his own musical interests, and a shorter local journey, by bus. Result! — as they say.
Oh, and of course it was the very job that he was certain, after the interview (conducted ‘remotely’) that he had not got. Again, expect the unexpected.
I just read, too, on Facebook someone (friend of a friend) who spoke up at a job interview and dashed her chances. It was about female staff being required to wear skirts, so it’s not an area I’ve encountered, or can speak on. But I remember some unwise things I’ve said to potential employers.
That fine actor John Woodvine (whom I hope I am quoting correctly) wanted to go into theatre, but after leaving school took a ‘sensible’ job. The firm went out of business, and he reckoned “I can’t be any more unemployed, so …”
Similarly, when I left school I went for, or was pointed towards, some sensible jobs. I remember being interviewed for a position with the Gas Board. I think he was asking all those questions about yourself to which you can’t accurately give a yea or a nay, and the exact answers could only be a pedantic “In effect, yes” or “In essence, no.” A later generation of youngsters fixed on “basically” to cover this one. Unfortunately I settled on “vaguely”. The interviewer snapped “Everything’s a bit vague with you, isn’t it?” I replied with teenage dignity “Not in the least. I’m simply a nervous interviewee. Ask further questions and I will clarify.”
No, I didn’t. I’m a liar. I’ve no idea how I answered the rude blighter, but it wouldn’t have been that.
Am I a liar, though? What about later, when I was an actor, and was “seen” for jobs. They say that actors lie at auditions, don’t they — say ‘yes’ to everything. A frequent colleague recalled how one of her co-stars in a TV production had claimed he could ride a horse. She ran across him decades afterwards and he was still suffering from injuries incurred on that shoot. Another colleague told me how a sometime boyfriend of hers had said yes to knowing a Chekhov play when interviewed by the great director John Dexter. “Yes. I played the doctor in it.” Well, Chekhov was a doctor and there’s always a medical character. Finally, at the door, Dexter murmured “By the way — have another look at that play.” There wasn’t a doctor.
Now I think that like Hamlet I am “indifferent honest”. I have a slight itch of conscience that I wrote in an earlier blog post that no agent had ever dropped me. This sounded as though I had always dropped them and moved on, and it occurred to me afterwards that in one case the agency simply went out of business. For the record. Just in case I misled.
But as a young actor I did get a bee in my bonnet that I was doing one — or two — plays in provincial theatres, but not rebooked for longer. (If this ever indicated any more than the typical vagaries of freelancing, it has been almost comically redressed. Over the last ten years, I have worked for the same companies so repeatedly that I have suspected my CV of looking “cliquey”.)
I was once cast in a repertory “Romeo”, and when that ended the director said he would have us back in a particular future month when again the production required larger numbers. This was not what happened. Memories can be short.
Subsequently, at an audition at “Spotlight”s offices in London, I was asked about that rep booking, in which this latest director seemed interested - and on the spur of the moment I added the second, promised, show to my verbal portfolio.
“But you can’t have been in that. I was in that one myself.”
I quickly claimed I was mixing up the reps I’d been at. But George Washington became my man.
