“Who are you with?”
When actors ask one another “Who are you with?”, they may mean partners or banks or energy suppliers, like anyone else would, but you can usually assume that they mean “Who’s your agent?” (And, perhaps, “Are they better than mine?”) Agents are unavoidable, and certainly have their uses.
Early in my acting career, I got a summons to the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith (a different theatre from the one that there is now). Frank Dunlop, quite a big name, was directing Spike Milligan in “Oblomov”. I was a possible afterthought choice for some small bit. I met both Dunlop and Milligan. It was a lot nearer to Milligan’s fame as one of the Goons, he was very amusing. The job was offered. Trouble was, I was rehearsing already. I had no agent yet to sort out shows that clash or overlap. Latterly, I’ve been in productions that actors who have got something better have dropped out of without a second thought. “I’d have to do the commercial if it came up” a girl told me when I was casting. But I was young and foolish, as the song goes.
In the event, Spike Milligan turned “Oblomov” into something different. As “Son of Oblomov” it went to the West End and had a good run, without me.
Agents are for “representing” (sometimes lying for) their clients. I’ve done it. I did a spell with an actors’ co-operative, where the performers collectively represent themselves. I had my coat on to leave at six o’clock one day when the phone rang and a young woman announced herself as the casting department of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was so on the dot of six that I suspected a leg-pull, but it wasn’t. They wanted our agency to offer for audition at ten the next morning candidates for a new production of “The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe”. To audition for different animal characters, with a performance worked out. Naturally the coat came off and the phone got busy. It was in the days before so much was done online, and at nine o’clock that night I was at the stage door of the Barbican Theatre, where the RSC was then based, handing in chunky envelopes of members’ CVs and photographs, for the morning. The production was a huge success. Congratulations, Casting Department.
To make up for my early clashes of commitments, other things have later dovetailed most satisfactorily. Agents have come and gone, and it has always been me who moved on — except for the one who went to Wales to specialise in Welsh speaking clients. I moved back with a previous agent, and unprecedentedly got two offers on the same day. This time my new/old agent neatly extricated me from the clash to do the more profitable tour. But because I didn’t do the other job, I still haven’t been to the Isle of Man.
