Chapter 5
Theatres and Thespians
At the Cottage Homes there is a large dining hall built by the Americans to aid the war effort. Dot says:
'No pocket money unless you take part in the Homes' musical presentation.'
So I agree to take part and sing and act. I have to be the evil, cruel Professor. A part George has played very well since.
Glyn Hughes, the school musician, Trevor Lewis, the sign writer, and Bernard Goss, the Maths tutor all help on a voluntary basis. Glyn tinkles all the keys and makes lovely music, Trevor paints up the scenery in bright coloured hues and Bernard helps with the drama presentation. Perry looks after everything at the home.
I strut and do my stuff. I have a black, frock coat with tails, a shiny top hat and a huge beard. My solo goes down well. And I find myself enjoying my first theatrical experience. We do three nights and a matinee and George is hooked on acting.
At university, I join the DramSoc and am recruited for the forthcoming production of 'The Taming of the Shrew'. This is a sequence that I've envied to play ever since. Without success. I'm selected by Mr Jarrett for the part of Tranio. In the meantime, I'm dating Sinead O'Flaherty. And we make a fine couple as Tranio and Bianca in our Elizabethan costumes - starched tunic and stockings, broad sleeved shirts with ruffs for George, and tight bodices, full length skirts, ruffs, wigs and pearls for her. I learn the lines quickly, whilst attempting to pursue my studies of English, History and Economics. I look in the mirror and repeat the lines to myself over and over in my student digs. We walk along the seafront to our rehearsals and we ‘kick bar’, an old tradition now lost since the reconstruction of the Esplanade at Aberystwyth.
TRANIO
'And I am one that love Bianca more
Than words can witness, or your thoughts can guess.'
These lines are expressed on stage with more conviction than is required. I look out for talent scouts from the BBC in the audience and hope that Hugh Weldon, one of our visitors, will engage me soon as a TV personality.
We take the play on tour to St David’s College, Lampeter. Dot and Perry come up in the Morris Minor. Perry says:
‘You’re too much yourself in it. You’re not acting, George. It’s too matter of fact’ (like this book, according to Jane Marie.) Little did he know...
My next production is John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. I only have one line this time, played in a heavy northern accent:
‘And there’s more un us an' all…’
And it’s offstage!
During the threatened coal strike, Serjeant Musgrave and his four soldiers attempt to quell the strike that is on the point of descending into violence. And the sergeant promises the town officials that by addressing the miners who are on strike and starting a recruitment campaign, he will remove the troublemakers. By pointing a machine gun at the crowd, threatening to kill the dignitaries and by showing them the corpse of their former mate hanging from the Market Cross, he means to bring home to them the frightful meaning of insurrection. And what can happen to the perpetrators.
Tim Caldecott directs and with help from his girlfriend, Margaret, he makes a good fist at a student production.
Our next presentation is Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ ( ‘Der Aufhaltsame Aufsteigdes Arturo Ui‘) which chronicles the rise of Hitler. It is in mock-heroic blank verse. It takes the form of a parody of a Chicago gangster. The characterisation of the tyrannical hero is based on that of Richard III. The murder of Roehm shadows the plight of Buckingham. The Hitler character sleeps with the widow of his victim. In a very long play with seventeen interminable short scenes, Tim begs us not to act in the classical theatrical way with projection of voice and character. But to be just there as normal human beingscaught in their moment. And to portray the characters as we are ourselves existentially, not as an actor’s representation.
‘There is no need to ‘act’’ he says.
I find this very difficult after some years of showing off on stage. I am preoccupied with my honours degree exams and cannot concentrate on the lines. Tim relegates me to some minor scenes in which I basically just stand there doing very little.
We put on the play in the Town Hall with its larger stage and huge auditorium. ‘Arturo Ui’ tries to transfer the biography of Hitler from his early days to the occupation of Austria, into the milieu of gangsterdom in Chicago. It is not a very successful play, with its obvious derivation in Richard III. The parallels between Hitler’s manipulations of German industrialists and moneymen and Chicago businessmen do not work. The connections between the Chicago capitalists (vegetable sellers) and gangsters are unsuccessful. The original characters are too different from the gangsters he mirrors them with.
Back in the UK after my year in France, I join a local dramatics troupe in Gravesend, Kent. They are putting on ’The Sound of Murder’ by William Fairchild, a murder mystery in three Acts. I audition for the role of the handsome hero, but am allocated to the part of the police Inspector Davidson. ‘The Kent Messenger’ reports that George was ‘wooden’ in his representation of the detective. But I had thought that to play a policeman you needed to be uninteresting, bland and unimaginative. I played him as a downtrodden, unhappy and untidy fellow rather in the style taken up later by Peter Falk the American TV actor who portrayed the scruffy detective Sgt Columbo.
‘When the curtain rises Davidson is alone in the room, speaking on the telephone. The body and the gun have been removed. The window curtains up L. are open.’
DAVIDSON. Into the telephone. ‘Yes. Yes. Now listen. I want the report on the fingerprints as soon as possible… Yes. They’re on their way now. And phone me here as soon as you get that other information – it’s very important…Right.’
I act as deadpan as I can.
A brief synopsis of the play is that Charles, a writer of children's stories is popular in his field, but not at home. He is a calculating sadist at home. Anne, his wife takes up with another man for affection. And eventually the two of them make a fool-proof plan to eliminate the husband. Unfortunately, however, the writer's frustrated secretary learns of it by listening to a Dictaphone tape he has made. She uses her information to trap the other man into marriage, after he has killed the husband. They go away together and Davidson is led to believe that the husband drowned chasing a prowler.
But some weeks later there is a surprise in store when the husband turns up as sound as a bell – having been warned in time by his secretary. True to form, he takes a cruel delight in tormenting his wife, and later goes upstairs for a bath. Meanwhile, the secretary could not go through with the wedding, and the lover returns. The husband is still in the way. Or is he? According to the law he had died three weeks before.The play is ‘intriguing, diverting and rewarding’, according to ‘The Sunday Times’.
However, I’m too busy dating Halinka in South Kensington to spend too much time on the development of the character of the intrepid inspector. I prefer the train journey on the North Kent line to Charing Cross. The walk down Villiers Street to the Embankment.And the District to South Ken, on the other evenings when I’m not a thespian. At Halinka’s boss Karl Mayer of the ‘Washington Post’’s soirees I talk to Amis Pere about Swansea pubs and our shared girlfriend, Margaret Vakeal. She is a few years older than me. At the Rock and Fountain, Newton, Mumbles over a few drinks, after ‘last orders!’ she invites me to sleep with her. George turns down the invitation.
‘I have to get back home. Mum and Dad are expecting me’ I excuse myself.
Why am I always escaping from the sexual advances of women? I ask myself. Is it because I’m afraid of them? My son, Theo Pusczkarczyck, is reputed also to have declined an invitation from an Argentinian general’s wife in South America, claiming pressing business, despite her continued attempts the following morning to bed him.(see Harry Thompson:
‘Penguins Stopped Play’ ) What is it about women who make the running? Does it offend our sense of chivalry? Or is it a challenge to our defences that we put up and do not like to have removed? Basically, I think I am in awe of women. And my fear of them has fuelled this life long campaign to defeat them in battle.
Talking about battles, at the Raytheon compound in Riyadh we put on ‘Oh!What aLovely War’. My first reaction was of horror and disgust that a so desperately murderous, pointless, generationally genocidal and vainglorious campaign should become the subject of theatre comedy. But by making the subject of the play WWI in a comic way, the take on war becomes applicable to any war in any generation. Then, like the Brechtian play, in this case it too is anti-war.
My character of the Master of Ceremonies is very prominent at the beginning and in certain scenes. Things like the Plant Pot could have been taken by the M.C. Although at other times in the play, I am not involved. I’m not sure if I had wanted to be on stage somewhere all the time. If so, I needed to take decisions for every scene. Could I not have occasionally taken part, watching from the wings. I’m not sure what sort of a link I should be. Should I be the outsider always? Should I guide the audience as to how to respond? By facial expressions or mannerisms and hand gestures or such? I suspect the Master of Ceremonies has different roles in different parts of the play. But it’s fine line he has to tread.
In Dharan, Saudi Arabia with British Aerospace, we produce Shakespeare’s ‘Henry the Fourth Part 2’. On bachelor status, I’m finding it frustrating sexually to live alone again. Zeena is alone, too, in Muswell Hill. For compensation, I dive into amateur theatricals again. As a Yawoo Welshman, I’m allocated the part of Gower:
Cue and enter (dressed in tights again) :
GOWER
‘The King, my lord, and Harry Prince of Wales
Are near at hand:the rest the paper tells.’
This time, with plenty of spare hours away from teaching English to Saudi pilots, I manage to learn the lines. God help Henry, whose lines are egregiously long.
My second line:
‘At Basingstoke, my lord.’
Sometime later, I say:
‘No, fifteen hundred foot, five hundred horse Are march’d up to my Lord of Lancaster Against Northumberland and the Archbishop.’
And finally:
‘I must wait upon my good lord here. I thank you good John.’
I then exit to dine with Falstaff. And back to the compound and my lonely single bed.
A consoling drink of locally made Siddiki. A fetid concoction distilled by the Americans (in dry Saudi!) from sugar. It has to be cut twice with water. It can burn with a blue-like flame. The hangover is a million times worse than from drinking beer. The potion finally sends me to a much desired sleep until my five o’clock morning call. My first class takes place at six a.m. Zeena comes out on a visit and we are allocated a Company house ostensibly to cat sit. For the owner who is on leave. The cat disappears the following morning. And I am left to explain to the owners where their dear moggy has gone.
George becomes famous on the compound for my possession of sugar. Ever the entrepreneur, I buy a twenty pound sack of sugar in the market and dole it out into smaller consignments for use by the engineers, teachers and pilots on the project. It dates from my days in Dumbarton House School. With sweets still on ration, I buy black market coupons and sell Trebor chews at a 200% mark-up. I don’t become rich. And after a further few months in the desert return to London.
Back home and Zeena and I are invited to ‘high tea’ at May’s. She is now in advanced age and obviously finding things difficult, slowing up and forgetful. She puts on alone, John has long ago passed on, a wonderful display of tinned salmon, and cucumber sandwiches, dainty little cup cakes with an icing topping, jelly, custard andhomemadejam. We talk of the old days about Elizabeth, gone too, and our salad days in Stockham’s Corner. This was to be the last time we ever saw May. God rest her soul.
Back in Saudi Arabia working for Saudi Arabian Television Channel 2. In those days it was not a question of ordering a dozen of anything. But a hundred. The stuff was pouring in from Japan. Sony – as much as you wanted. Toshiba – as many as you liked. MitsubishiElectricals – no limits. The TV studios were entirely French built, with the Betamax system. It favoured the colour blue over VHS. They had even built and mothballed an entire studio complete with all cameras and control rooms and waiting for further expansion. Roads were built out into the desert going nowhere. Just to use up the money they were receiving from oil exports to the west. Their only use for model airplane and helicopter enthusiasts with their radio controlled units. Or for males learning how to drive.
The studio executives would place a camera in front of you. You would do your piece recorded. It was never live, in case you were tempted to denounce a corrupt, effete and sybariticregime whose hold on power was total. On one radio programme I was going out live.But there was a ’minder’ in the studio to cut you off. If you said something considered as controversial. The camera operator would focus on one shot leaving the camera and going off to drink tea in those tiny glass cups so ubiquitous in Arabia. One afternoon I had bathed and shampooed ready for recording. I had the effrontery to appear on camera without a tie in a shirt buttoned up to the throat. I was told by the Saudi officials that this was unacceptable and had to rush back to my apartment in the Centre of Riyadh to change in to a tie.
I recorded out on location on many occasions. Mainly at the football stadiums and the horse racing track. Once, filming outdoors for a natural history programme, I saw this delightful little black and white kitten. I picked him up and petted him on camera.
‘At last I’m getting to be Sir David Attenborough’, I thought.
The footage was never used. Recording times were frenetic. We were allocated only so much time in the control room to edit and cut the film. It was mostly 35mm but digital was already coming into use.
In ‘Schools of Literature’ on Radio Riyadh George writes (err, copies) produces, and records a hundred programmes over a few years. There were programmes on Proust, Balzac, Gide, my ancestor Count Leo Tolstoy, (DNArecords available on request) Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, and Brecht. As I mentioned, pronouncing his name Brescht and not Brecht. There were Sartre, Camus, deBeavoir for the Existentialist School. There were Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger for their German originators.
George features the Anglo-Welsh School of poets, of course, and we did a fine adaptation of ‘Under Milk Wood’. Some expatriate friends, a banker, a computer specialist and a scrummy housewife voiced the lovely cadences of LLaregub (bugger all spelled backwards) describing Swansea’s ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.' Dylan Thomas’smasterful ‘play for voices’ was all about ‘besoming’,carousing, singing, womanising, making music, drinking, laughing,sleeping and enjoying the beauty of life, despite the threats of the Atomic Bomb at the time.
In a superb piece of free,highly descriptive writing, Dylan Thomas evokes the sleepy, dreamy town where beneath the respectable surface there exist many liaisons, affairs and carryings- on:
‘Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinolinenightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced andscoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, ahouse for paying guests, at the top of the town, MrsOgmore-Pritchard widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream, and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on either side…’
Mrs Ogmore Pritchard recites:
Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs Ogmore Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room floor;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.
Then we feature Mrs Pugh with her acid, tart comments about her husband, Mr Pugh: (articulated with precision and cold, hard feeling by the scrummy mummy :)
‘Persons with manners do not read at table’,
FIRST VOICE
‘says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as
a horse-pill, washing it down with clouded pea soup water.’
In my most favourite lines it’s:
‘Organ Morgan, you haven't been listening to a word I said.
It's organ organ all the time with you…’
Follow that! In another programme on the American Realist School, George directs and plays John Steinbeck with the aid of an American expatriate,whose name I now forget. He has a fine, rich, deep, drawling accent.We do the letters from John Steinbeck to Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the American President:
New York
August 20, 1964
Dear Mrs Kennedy,
Forgive, please, my apparent slowness in answering your two letters. The delay arises from a kind of remorseful rethinking. I had no intention of joining the cackling folk who are pulling and pushing and nibbling at you.
You see it was never any plan of mine to rush in while the wound is fresh and while eager memories feed on themselves… A great and brave man belongs to all of us because he activates the little greatness and bravery that sleeps in us. And unfortunately an evilman finds his signals in us also… And you are quite right when you say a book is only a book and he was a man and he is dead…
I wish I could help you although I know not anyone can. I’ve thought that after all of the required puppetry and titanic control that has been asked of you and given – it might be good and desirable if, like those bereft squaws I spoke of, you could go to a hill and howl out your rage and pain…
When Mrs Jackie Kennedy Onassis finally turned over copies of her letters from Steinbeck she had replied:
Dear Mrs Steinbeck,
I have found the letters of your husband.
I can never express what they meant to me at the time- they helped me face what was unacceptable to me.
You will never know what it meant to me to talk with your husband in those days – I read his letters now- and I am moved as I was then- All his wisdom and compassion, his far seeing view of things- I can’t remember the sort of book we were discussing then – but I am glad it wasn’t written. His letters say more than a whole book could – I will treasure them all my life.
Yours sincerely
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
There must have been a great deal of consolation for Jackie Kennedy in those letters from Steinbeck. When one has suffered a great loss at the top there must be a massive loneliness due to the isolation and remoteness of public life in the affairs of State. But the one certain thing about Steinbeck’s writings is that ‘the creative forces of the human spirit willprevail.’
After a life time of travelling and teaching, it is perhaps the time to sum up George’s achievements. What have I learned? There is one certain thing about nations in that you cannot generalise. There were good Frenchmen and some bad Frenchmen – good Saudis and bad Saudis and so on. When I commenced teaching in 1963, we just walked into the classroom and taught – seven lessons a day for 40 minutes each. Now the school day has been reduced to a miserable nine o’clock to three thirty. The amount of paperwork that teachers are expected to do is sapping of their morale and energy to teach in the classroom. Agencies such as OFSTED and QAA expect ridiculous compliance to effete and time consuming quality issues that have no actual relevance to teaching learners. In one recent report we were told that ‘The College has enhanced its progression data monitoring tools ahead of new student entry with a new format, making it possible to report on the progression of individualstudents and cohorts.’ Gobbledegook!
Figure3 The author after a ‘gunging' in Riyadh.