Striving towards normality
Well, the restrictions are easing, and we are getting back to ‘normal’. Perhaps. Who knows? I haven’t just twiddled my thumbs for a year, but I do feel an element of suspended animation being eased. There are so many things I have put off, some on the simplest level, like sorting my correspondence tray. I haven’t put on weight, surprisingly, and I haven’t been drinking too much — unsurprisingly, because I don’t drink alcohol at all any more. It makes me too tired.
I have started to take more interest in the general news. Even in the world of the tabloids! What odd things they write. Something about — I seemed to come in on the middle of a continuing story — why Anthony Hopkins had not kept in touch with Emma Thompson despite having filmed with her. Well, could this be because they were colleagues rather than pals? Surely if Sir Anthony regularly contacted everyone he’d worked with in a long career he would be fully occupied indeed. Though there is a sense in which I am still acquainted with everyone I’ve been in a play with this century — after the first rehearsal, Friend Requests fill the inbox. If you later try to circulate them all, of course, perhaps to publicise something, lots of the old ones bounce back.
The press are very odd about performers. I have always been surprised how little they seem to understand, when there are various parallels with journalism. Often working freelance or on short contracts, for instance. But the ‘media’ so often make no distinction between employment and engagement — they talk about a broadcaster being sacked and it may (if it’s a presenter, for instance) mean the dismissal of an employee or it may mean a contract not being renewed when it ends. Different situations, not clarified.
On the whole they are only aware of performers with famous names, and mainly of American ones at that, ‘soap’s excepted. I read in online showbiz gossip a piece which revealed that Sir David Jason had a brother who was a ‘secret actor’. I loved ‘secret actor’. It reminded me of the paradox “The meek shall inherit the earth (if that’s all right with everyone else?)” Arthur White was an actor first, and I think there was simply another David White in Equity, which wouldn’t be terribly surprising, when his younger brother also became one. When I met them in my first “Under Milk Wood”, I knew Arthur’s work already from radio and TV.
Of course theatre people can be as oblivious of the wider world as it is of them. If I misquote anyone in what follows, I apologise, they are remembered anecdotes I have no way of sourcing.
In the darkest hour of the Second World War someone said to the great Sir John Gielgud “Isn’t the news terrible?” “I know” he empathised,“Gladys Cooper opening to such dreadful notices!”
Julian Holloway, actor son of the famous comedy performer Stanley Holloway is said to have asked his elderly father “Dad — is there anything you really regret?” After turning his life over in his mind, the old trouper thought of something. “Yes — I was really put out when James Hayter got the Mr Kipling Makes Exceedingly Good Cakes voiceover rather than me.”
And far more recently a delightful actress who is in a very popular TV programme set in the mid-twentieth century was quoted in a magazine feature about the show: “I remember thinking the scripts were brilliant, but felt more like something from Victorian times than the 1950s [when she was born]. It never occurred to me that .. CONTINUED ON PAGE 6”. While turning the two pages, I imagined her continuing with a rueful comment about not having been aware of deprivation that had been outside her own youthful experience. On page six I discovered that what had not occurred to her was that the show would be so successful and that it would go on and on.
Yes, we all live in our own particular worlds. I’m sure the three theatre people I have quoted above are or were no more self-regarding than the rest of the human race, certainly including myself.
When I was young a very experienced professional, Ted Valentine, said to me that actors have little in common with people outside the business. It was a surprising comment from a performer with a friendly and man-in-the-streetish personality. I have often thought about it. I slightly protested about the generalisation at the time, and since then I have pondered “Should we not be more like everyone else?”
