Stages

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One day, aged fourteen, at school I spontaneously did a Chaplin-style routine, and someone said, ‘You’d be a good actor if you weren’t so shy.’ The others agreed, displaying an extraordinarily mature sympathy for adolescents. People often carry bad memories of school, but this was a good moment to take to heart. From there my confidence to perform developed, and I became the star actor of the school. I was gaining a certain amount of confidence off stage, and plenty on stage. I was never apprehensive in the wings.

But when someone asked if I intended to make it my career I replied, ‘The drama schools are full of people who did well in the school play.’ I displayed my own maturity, surprisingly so perhaps. I decided, yes, I was going to study Drama, rather than my first intention of Law, but to study without delusions that were sure to be shattered.

If I were to study Drama what was I going to do with it? I had led some classes at a children’s summer workshop, and had thoroughly enjoyed it. Teaching seemed a good idea, my parents thought. At that age you are guided by their suggestions. It was a sensible suggestion.

My father would have preferred I had opted for Sandhurst, but he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. His children opted for artistry, and his support was generous. Of course he liked theatre, but it was generally comedies and thrillers with West End stars. He knew little about the Classics, acknowledging however that there my interest lay.

The school I attended was very traditional and highly academic. Drama was extra-curricular. Theatre Studies was considered a soft option, not the sort of subject for serious minds. This pedantry threatened to blunt the sharp edges of my intellect. What was expected of me was a studious conformity. What I sought was creative inspiration.

I had been taken to live theatre from a very young age. My mother had inculcated the habit of theatre-going early in life, and passed it on. There were children’s shows in infancy. Then early in my teens I saw Oh What a Lovely War! and Beyond the Fringe (but not, alas, with the original cast). I saw everything, and loved all of it. Theatre was always there, musical so but theatre especially.

Local drama groups recruited me. Most rewarding was the work I did with a community school. I liked the people there who were friendly and relaxed, with no condescension and disdain in their voices. Not gifted academically perhaps, they began to develop in practical subjects, including Drama. Some found their way into further study through Drama. I considered them fortunate.

Fortune came my way when my first choice of college accepted me. It was a last minute decision to apply. Previously my choice had been elsewhere. But, no, the beauty of Bath attracted me. My parents had lived in Somerset, and they retained a lifelong love of the West Country. They were thinking of early retirement and resettlement. So, yes, Bath was a natural choice. Anywhere else would have been a poor second.

Accepted I began the second stage of my life in performance. It was nearly the last for I quickly came to feel that I did not want a career connected to performing arts. I liked the prospect of lecturing to mature minds, but to lecture in Literature and allied cultural areas. I wanted to read English rather than Drama.

Sadly, the English department was popular and therefore full. I did think of leaving. The written word was becoming central to my concerns. However another good fortune wasthat the Drama course was more academic than practical. The course included a number ofcomplementary options, I chose Aesthetics, Social Studies and Philosophy. At the latter itwas thought I excelled. Actually I found it challenging. I preferred creativity.

We did not spend much time pretending to be trees. We began with modern theatre,then concentrated on the Classics, with particular attention to Greek tragedy, especially to itsorigins in myth and sacred ritual. Peter Brook was high in our pantheon. Perhaps there wasno-one higher. His intellect matched his creativity. They were breathtaking. Forsaking thestudy of Drama would mean abandoning this most stimulating of inspirations.

I stayed the course persuaded by others who felt as I did that a creative life was notonly desirable but possible. We thought the world was at our feet. It was a very testingexperience to learn on graduation that the road to success was a long one. Eventually wecame through. I was so lucky to have studied with so much talent whose ambitions in time were realized in theatre, art, music and literature. It was not easy to make a living but we succeeded in making our mark. I used to think that had I gone elsewhere I would have met others like them. No, the talents I knew were exceptional, and I was privileged to be among them.

Writing came to the forefront of my mind, and not necessarily writing for performance. I spent a winter in Cornwall, then took to mentoring Writing students at my ever-expanding and changing alma mater. I began writing for a community paper, and even doing street theatre.

Then I met Neil Oram, a poet whose work I already knew. He was setting up a theatre company. It was, inevitably, avant-garde, a Dadaist-inspired spontaneity of performance. Not really for me, although I enjoyed it. I was ‘Classical’, as someone put it, not unsympathetically.

Neil and I remained in touch. He went to India, then to prominence as an innovative playwright. I helped found the short-lived arts centre in Glastonbury. We staged the arts festival which was in the town itself, and not the showbiz event it was to become. The irony was that I lived at Worthy Farm, a quiet place in those days. I led theatre and writing workshops at the arts centre, working with old college friends visiting with their companies.

I began publishing poetry and (rather unsatisfactory) book reviews. I began writing monologues for BBC local radio, with actors from the Bristol Old Vic. This led me to consider writing something more substantial. Radio is a very different medium from theatre. The best aural work doesn’t translate to visual theatre. Something is lost in the intimacy developed by the inner experience of listening.

I spent a decade with the BBC in both local and network radio. I reported on the arts for stations in the Midlands and then Cambridge. For network I did some work for the Today programme and the intervals at the Proms. I researched programmes, wrote monologues and features. A feature is a creative hybrid of forms, spanning documentary and drama in content and manner. The Features Department was one of the most regarded in the entire Corporation, producing celebrated work of which the most noted was Under Milk Wood. Features over the years had done much to sustain the BBC’s reputation as a serious cultural forum.

Prestige fades into a shadow if we do not play to our strengths. Little remained of the Features department by the time I arrived. I caught the last of the day before the sun set. I won public praise from Simon Callow and John Wain and others. I hoped for a future writing sound features.

Such an ambition, however, was not possible in an invidious climate. The straightforward dramatic scripts were rejected with long letters of explanation. Some pieces of course were apprentice works, derivative if not (unconsciously) parodic. I was testing the water. More substantial perhaps was a Copperfield-style piece based on a boy I’d known working those years before with the community school. (Direct personal testament holds little creative interest for me. It is preferable to observe at a distance than to reflect too closely.)

Curiously, I discovered BBC rejection letters were rarely as detailed as the ones I received. They recognized a talent but did not like it. I had a patron in John Drummond, but others were suspicious. ‘We don’t really know who you are,’ was the response, a rather strange one in any circumstance. I made my feelings known, and moved on.

If a diminishing BBC wanted no more of me others did. Initially I worked at an independent radio station, supervising a platform for local writers to read their work. Then the Arts Theatre in Cambridge took me on as a mentor of writing workshops. There I worked with some existing and future names to conjure with. There were also workshops at a new university, Anglia Ruskin, who appointed me an adjunct lecturer.

My career elsewhere was flourishing. There were many prestigious cultural places –Contemporary Review, Encounter, The London Magazine, The Tablet and The TLS. I wrote for them all, in two or three places many times. In Cambridge I felt enveloped by the spirits of those who had been where I was. Some I had known especially as inspirations. Others were names from a past I never knew but others did.

Literature is everything, with its traditionally leading role in culture. I cherish it, and fear for it. In society at large the deluge of essentially conservative populism began to overwhelm social discourse and cultural expression, including broadcasting. Dramas of high finance or low-life crime spread like floodwater, although these themes were unrelated to ordinary life. The themes of antiquity are much closer. Urban culture declares to the contrary. Stylized cynicism, however, is neither benign nor fruitful as a response to the crisis.

Fortunately for me I was some distance from metropolitan life, its crowds, its cacophony and its pressure to conform. In Cambridge it was possible to resist this counter-intuitive tide of reaction. I taught Writing on a circuit of venues, worked in bookshops, a café, and an office. I took charge of French manuscripts for an academic publisher. I undertook some formal study. There was regular reviewing work. I attempted fiction, eventually publishing a novel, a novella and many stories mainly with North American settings for the distance that gave me. I liked capturing the distinctive tone of American speech. British voices are so close and class-bound.

Writing is as much an escape as it is an exploration. Life is recreated with a narrative shape and an expressive style absent from real experience. At the end of a long romance I said, ‘This is the last chapter. What happens now? The book won’t tell you.’ I had to supply the ending myself. That, of course, is a new beginning.

I returned to poetry, an abandoned love that I discovered with more direction and maturity. Acceptances came, encouraging me further until a publisher contacted me and made an offer. No vanity project but the real thing. This never happens in reality. It happened to me. In life we have good and bad luck. Even the bad luck is often benevolence in disguise. This was another example of unmistakable good luck.

In the mean time I took up writing for performance. In January 2013 a show at the Savoy took some lyrics. A pretty good start, followed days later by a staged reading of a script in a London fringe theatre. Lampeter University published the first of many scripts to find their way into print. Duck Down Theatre Co, led by the excellent Kate Gilbert, took me on as associate writer. I was getting somewhere. Monologues and plays were staged or digitally broadcast on the London fringe, in Bath (inevitably). I did the Edinburgh free fringe, and also Stand Up Tragedy’s festival blog. There was the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. I’d presumed this to be a small scale event. It was huge even on-line as it was in the pandemic year of 2020.

There has been more than I could have expected, more than the modicum of the success a writer seeks. Of course I’m not as well-known as some. Applying (successfully) for an Arts Council bursary I was frank when I said I did not think I could ever be among the truly great, but in the right circumstance and with the right encouragement I might produce something of lasting value.

It is a fair comment that I seem more interested in the poetics of writing for theatre rather than considerations of performance. Print remains important to me. I prefer sitting at my desk than being in the theatre except as an anonymous member of the audience.

At fourteen I borrowed my grandparent’s copy of Pygmalion. Fabians, they loved Shaw. So did I. From the first few lines I knew that here was a masterpiece, like School for Scandal. Later came the exquisite alexandrines of Racine and the lyrical metres of Euripides. The mystery at the heart of Shakespeare was, like Stravinsky, there from pre-teens. Can I measure up to any of this? Well, I can continue writing, not scripts of one-liners, but texts with substance that are read if not performed.

A life goes through various stages, as I have sketched above. I share the general experiences of my generation. The global triumph of materialism has no purpose and therefore no future. There was much to gain from experiments in consciousness and a transformative social ethic. We act on our impulses and intuitions as well as our conscience and our sense of reason. The interweaving of these elements can with authorial command seek a higher articulation. I go on seeking.

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