Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Derek Jacobi - Страница 20

My first, entirely chaste passion was for a French penpal from the Vendée; we did an exchange when he came to stay with us in Essex Road. His name was Joël Pauvereau and from the moment I set eyes on him I was bowled over.

He was extraordinarily handsome and wore eau de cologne – something that to me seemed so foreign and exotic. At this time scent on a man was unknown, and the fragrance, that perfume which emanated from him, was my idea of heaven. But naturally, in spite of my crush on him, nothing happened between us, and I am sure he had no inkling of how I felt. He did not stay long and in the end became a school teacher.

With the success of this visit, Mum arranged through the school an exchange with a German boy, Fritz. The Western Allies still occupied West Germany militarily and Leyton School fixed up these Anglo-German exchanges on the basis of ‘Now is the time to be friendly with the Boche,’ so off I set to Frankfurt for a week to stay with Fritz and his family. But they didn’t take to me at all and were very cold, very distant. For my part I hated them, and had such a rotten time that the other half of the exchange didn’t happen.

As a result of the Spanish Conquistador de Soto, my acting prospects suddenly caught fire when Michael Croft, an English teacher at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, visited Leytonstone and auditioned me. For a year or two Croft, sailor, boxer and author of the semi-autobiographical novel Spare the Rod, had been enterprisingly directing plays with local public school boys for what he grandiosely called ‘The Youth Theatre’. He was now looking for a boy to play the part of Prince Hal for his second production, that of Henry IV Part II.

Mainly he took his casts from Alleyn’s, and some from Dulwich College. Richard Hampton, who was later head of OUDS (the Oxford University Dramatic Society), had been playing Prince Hal, but had to drop out for National Service. John Stride, another possibility at his school for Hal, was unavailable. Croft had to cast his net wider, which is how he came to our patch. As I wanted to be an actor I auditioned and got the part, a step up the ladder for me, but one which caused great unease as I surveyed those around me from a new and different vantage point.

Right from the start I was definitely not a Croft favourite. He thought I was a bit namby-pamby, for he had a footballer image of actors as ‘the lads of life’, into which category John Stride fitted, but I didn’t.

My fellow lads of life were Ken Farrington as Poins, Paul Hill as Doll Tearsheet and David Weston as Falstaff. David was the son of parents who ran a fish shop in the Brixton Market, and he had a gutsy approach to Falstaff, with turned-up nose and a way of saying, ‘I was a Cockney kid at thirteen,’ as if he were confessing an addiction. All four of us were destined to be professionals, and later David acted with me when I ran the Chichester Festival Theatre, where he was my understudy as Tattle in Love for Love, and much later even understudy to Ian McKellen’s Lear, about which he wrote a book.

The other three called me ‘Strawberry bloke’, for reasons unknown except perhaps the straw hair and pink complexion. Besides the three I was with now, a lot of people started on the lowest rung of the theatrical ladder with Michael Croft, such as John Stride, Julian Glover, David Suchet, Martin Jarvis and Ian McShane.

The company had a very strong, all-male exclusiveness and ethos. This came to a head when they were going to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director of this production, Paul Hill, came to Croft because they could not find the right two boys to play Helena and Hermia. But they did have two volunteer girls who were scrubbing floors and helping in the wardrobe: the menial stuff. Their names were Helen Mirren and Diana Quick.

‘With your permission I’ve found two girls to play Helena and Hermia,’ Hill told Croft.

‘Then on your head be it!’ grumbled Croft, who wasn’t exactly enamoured of young ladies in his company, and was the robust, bachelor type. Later Helen played Cleopatra which the Youth Theatre put on at the Old Vic, but she would decline to speak of Croft beyond saying ‘that silly old fart’ – I don’t think she liked him much!

To rehearse Prince Hal I had to come all the way from Leytonstone to Dulwich. It was a marathon bus journey from one side of London to the other, involving six buses and twenty-seven stops. Those Sunday rehearsals in Lordship Lane didn’t exactly inspire me, and I don’t remember them with any fondness. Everybody was very jokey, very camp, giggling all over the place, and I was very much an outsider. The others all knew each other, had worked together before, communicated in that kind of shorthand camaraderie that long-time friends acquire. I never felt comfortable.

At first, when I saw Paul Hill cuddling up to Croft on the sofa, I very much had the feeling that Michael was a bit like a suspect scoutmaster. After read-throughs and when we moved on to rehearse properly – strangely enough, in a scout hut near Herne Hill – he could also be quite a martinet.

Yet Michael helped me greatly with my acting and made me aware of how much I had to learn, especially with my voice, which, although it had just broken, had come very easily to me so I took a lot for granted. Everything in the rehearsals seemed so professional, while activity had been much gentler at Leytonstone with Bobby Brown. I felt as if I had two left feet and was very young, extremely untalented, rather unworldly and quite out of my depth.

On the other hand I enjoyed it and learned a lot, and was glad I was doing it, although I never really felt part of the clique, the main core. And I felt confused at the rehearsals because I didn’t quite know what or who the other boys were. The Alleyn’s boys were such a close, well-knit lot. They all had a past with Michael, while I had no former life with him; I was a bit frightened of them all, and was made very much aware that I had taken over Richard Hampton’s part.

While there was nothing ostensibly of a sexual nature going on in the all-male set-up, they would lark about and joke quite crudely, sit on one another’s laps, and embrace and hug each other familiarly. Meanwhile I was feeling disorientated and unresolved in my own identity. It was strange because all, probably without exception, liked girls, yet I thought they must be homosexuals; while I, who knew I was gay, was a complete innocent, unable to join in and unhappily feeling a complete outsider. This was yet another example, I confess, of my overriding desire to be loved and accepted.

Richard’s mother came in during our run to help with the hairstyling and she would curl my hair every night with hot irons into a Henry V-cum-Shirley Temple fringe. Again, I wasn’t easy with this. I’m sure she twisted my hair harder than she did Richard’s out of some kind of annoyance that Richard wasn’t there, probably thinking: ‘Why should I be doing this for Derek?’

I only really became friendly with Barry Boys, who played Henry IV, and he was an outsider like me because he came from Dulwich College. We had that great scene together when Prince Hal tries to convince his father that he is responsible and is growing up to carry his royal responsibilities. No one can ever play that scene over and over again and not be seriously affected by it as a lesson in responsibility (and I was only seventeen).

Henry IV played four times in Toynbee Hall and won a glowing accolade in Plays and Players, where, in my first-ever professional notice, the critic wrote that I, like all the nobles, conveyed a real impression of aristocracy ‘subject to the same weaknesses as other mortal men, yet endowed with a mettle to subdue them’. The same critic adversely pointed out that I did, in some of my emotional scenes, indulge my emotions instead of communicating them, which wasn’t a bad comment to receive and work on.

‘You see, what I want is not “the actor type”,’ Michael said. He had amazing fortune with his casts, and drew leading critics to the performances. He would have been a bigger influence on me if I had done more for him, but after I began to make a name for myself in the business in work like I, Claudius, I became a little surprised to see how my name rather oddly appeared in a lot of National Youth Theatre publicity, while other actors, who had done far more for the Youth Theatre, were ignored.

I had only ever acted four times for them at Toynbee Hall, and the Hamlet I did as a schoolboy was not theirs but a Leyton School production. I don’t know whether that came from Michael or the journalists, but I didn’t like it.

Michael and I eventually became friends and saw each other, but not that often. We were never close, for I was always the outsider with Michael. I had no idea who or what I was then. I was on the cusp of being timid, but at the same time quite other-worldly, and not at all bothered about whether I was gay or heterosexual. There were much more important things to worry about.

But I never managed to become one of Michael’s ‘lads of life’!