My Desert Island Discs

I’ve been drawn back to this BBC warhorse for many a year now. Most often, the eight records constitute benign interruptions within a rambling biography of the guest. So rare and precious are those occasions when the records seem to stand for constituent pieces of that human’s soul. On that basis, I’ve made choices that I hope would outshine any biographical ramblings. I’m not terribly interested in writing my biography; still less is the public in reading it. But combine all the pieces – with their bizarre voices, their baroque theatricality, their deep vein of harmless melancholy – and there you have me, in inchoate musical form. When the BBC finally invites me over, I will no doubt be venerable, grey-haired, and fixed on markedly different choices. But I like to think a few of the below would make it.

Anthony Newley’s ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ – Each us who loves Newley carries our own version of him. Here’s mine: a Newley of grandstanding showmanship and big-hearted schmaltz, forever prone to unsparing confessionals. In this song, Newley mixes some very disjointed showbiz images – circus, stand-up, vaudeville – as a channel for his abiding self-pity. I’m sure it’s unlistenable for some. But once you reach an accommodation with Newley, even his self-pity becomes rousingly cathartic, generously human. Key to navigating Newley is getting to know his unique voice, that caramel discharge of rumbling, reverberant emotion. The climaxes of ‘The Fool Who Dared to Dream’ (robust vibrato) and ‘I’ll Begin Again’ (a more aged, tremulous vibrato) are exemplars of where the Newley voice could go – and each is, for me, perfect in its imperfection. Newley’s vibrato has sometimes reduced me to tears. This time, Newley translates his talent for building to these devastating climaxes into a different form: a short story that runs down musical tracks. I’ve previously written on ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ at length: by all means have a look. The song is a balm for any and all disaffected entertainers; and should I ever acquire a singing voice, I damn well want it to be Newley’s.

James Bernard’s ‘The Victory of Love’ from Taste the Blood of Dracula – For its acolytes, Hammer Films represents a distinct world, one that might as well exist. There is its surface terrain of quaint inns, drawing rooms and churches in muted shades – which then explode with the high-coloured, galvanic demonism of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. It’s close to a surrogate religion – the imagined other world, the heaven-and-hell divide – which might be why this Bernard piece works on me so. It closes the film, just after Lee’s Dracula suffers his fourth ignoble destruction (he had three still to come). The strings build up, up, up – seemingly to the heavens – before their release in the love theme from the film’s beginning. And all within the confines of the village church. There’s a persuasive argument that the Gothic Revival was built on a superficial (and often camp) regard for high church trappings; thus the tricksy medievalism of The Castle of Otranto. Bernard accomplishes this for me in musical terms. His yearning strings reminds me how transporting the trappings of faith can be, if not the substance. I would make for a first-class lapsed Catholic. For me, Bernard’s other most evocative themes are the main titles for The Curse of Frankenstein and, especially, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (the film that inducted me to Hammer). All prove that so-called horror films can be breathtakingly beautiful.

Regina Spektor’s ‘Samson’ – This song is a melancholy prism. It speaks to me of people I love (it was recommended me by a close friend); it reminds of people I used to love (the line ‘your hair was long when we first met’ carries me right back to scenes at university); and it reminds me of people I’ve loved but lost (Samson’s long hair has fallen away; it is a song of cancer as much as myth). ‘My sweetest downfall’ is a brilliantly economical way of expressing how we’re at once destroyed and created in opening ourselves up to other people. Kindness and acceptance will leave us as quivering and vulnerable as any cruelty. Spektor has a wonderfully haunting voice. It’s a little tarnished, cracked, smokey; a fine crystal tumbler filled with clouded water. As with Newley, any quirks of sound production are less mannerism than idiosyncratic sincerity. The piano anyway gives that quirkiness a stabilising background.

Franz Waxman’s ‘The Creation’ from Bride of Frankenstein – I’m no longer sure that this is my favourite horror film. But it’s certainly one that I can’t do without. This piece is straightforwardly thrilling, scoring as it does the ‘birthing’ of the monster’s mate. The pulsing drum mimics her beating heart, which Frankenstein has in his laboratory. There’s a primal excitement to that; a womb-like imperative to gather life from the rhythm. But the keynote is anarchy. James Bernard’s scores are the Gothic distilled. Franz Waxman is happier to subvert, turning his ‘Creation’ into a melting pot of widespread cultural influences. There are dissonant flashes that remind me of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring; alarming creaks that put me in mind of that Looney Tunes stock piece ‘Powerhouse’; and a decadent, intoxicating glamour that reminds me that this heady perversity emanated from Golden Age Hollywood. The unforgettable theremin looks ahead to 1950s sci-fi, not to mention ‘Bali Hai’ from the musical South Pacific. It reminds me of the diverse reasons I fell in love with vintage horror films. And makes me question why I devote my time to anything else.

Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Giants in the Sky’ from Into the Woods – My favourite of all of Sondheim’s songs – although it has stiff competiton from ‘Move On’, ‘I’m Still Here’ and ‘Not a Day Goes By’. Funny, actually, how all of these titles have a spatial dimension. ‘Giants in the Sky’ harnesses space with innocence and awesomeness both: locating the imagination way, way up in the clouds. It transports me back to the fairytales of early childhood, when the likes of Disney’s (grippingly macabre) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs constituted my whole imaginative universe. I love the child-like boldness of expression: the heaping-on of adjectives in ‘big, tall, terrible’ is genius, as are the breathtaking exclamations of ‘not till the sky!’ and ‘after the sky!’. Throughout is a note of nagging yet gentle acceptance – something I’d argue as the most painful but necessary of emotional rites. I stumbled on this song just before leaving university, in the bittersweet twilight between last exams and graduation. These words in particular rang out: ‘And you’re back again only different than before’.   My Sondheimian runner-up would be ‘Loving You’ from Passion, which follows acceptance into the darker territory of emotional martyrdom.

Damien Rice’s ‘Dogs’ – A puzzle to be solved on each hearing. Thanks to its striking images, lightly (and ambiguously) worn, the song encourages a meditative state, a heightened concentration. Aside from that, it’s very pleasing to the ear. Playful lyrics, full always of circling, child-like motion; I’m particularly fond of ‘we drive around and she drives us wild’. The gentle tweakings of the acoustic guitar. Rice’s voice, soulful almost to androgyny. There’s also a structural reason to like it: on Rice’s album 9, ‘Dogs’ comes directly after ‘Rootless Tree’. Which is deadeningly bleak. It is therefore like the sun coming out – just as in Fantasia, where ‘Ave Maria’ follows ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’. A phoenix from the ashes. It’s given me hope in darker periods. This hope is so much more precious for being hard-won; equally precious are Rice’s other brighter spots, in the likes of ‘Older Chests’ and (more arguably) ‘Colour Me In’. Rice seems to average one fit of optimism per album. ‘Dogs’ is a modern transposition of the sun-dappled, life-giving finales of Dickens’ greatest novels. We know that despair and death are real, but we are content, for the present, to bask in the sun.

Tony Jay’s ‘Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame – It’s been ten years since Tony Jay left this planet. He took with him my all-time favourite voice. In many respects, it’s a peculiarly constrained voice: the thickened diction, the narrow range, a timbre alternately bone-dry and clammy as the tomb. But it carries with it an outsize, all-pervading Gothic atmosphere, ideally suited for Victor Hugo. ‘Hellfire’ puts Jay’s voice through its paces – composer Alan Menken was determined that Jay sing it just slightly beyond his comfortable vocal range. Jay’s voice is also a magnificent throwback: within it, I divine traces of George Zucco and Henry Daniell, to name but two. Underrated character actors, much like Jay himself. But all have found an immortality in the cinema. Tony Jay bears much responsibility for getting me interested in acting (I saw the Hunchback a good six or seven years before Lon Chaney sealed my fate). Quite apart from Jay’s contribution, the song is laudably audacious. Its central ‘hellfire’ refrain, amplified by the choir, transposes ‘The Bells of Notre Dame’ to a minor key. Thus, one can take the villain song as the film’s dark heart. It has always seemed so to me. I’ve written on ‘Hellfire’ in a wider context here.

John Du Prez’s ‘Finale’ from A Fish Called Wanda – This piece I find purely and ecstatically joyful. Precisely why is a bit elusive. I’ve a degree of affection for the film, particularly its depiction of a beautiful eighties London (it holds a certain romance for those of us lucky enough to not actually have been there). Yet I’ve never found it as funny as John Cleese’s other works. I do vibrate to the saxophone – the end of ‘Old and Wise’ by The Alan Parsons Project, for instance, and Lisa’s immortal ‘Jazz Man’ from The Simpsons. As with ‘Dogs’, there’s the beauty of the acoustic guitar. Perhaps all that’s enough. But let’s chalk it up to a choice intersection of music and moment. I recall being drawn to the film, aged thirteen or fourteen, because Stephen Fry has an incredibly brief cameo. Fry was a figure who gave me a certain hope about my (then dread-inducing) future as a gay man. The likes of Wilde, Williams, Crisp and Callow were to follow and eventually usurp him. It’s that long-ago spark which imbues it with hope for me. Along with Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (the third movement, specifically), it might be my gay anthem.

Familiar Old Ghosts

I was intending to write this last week. As so often, I got derailed. Now a sudden change has deepened and darkened my theme. So bear with me while I marshal my words as best I can. They do not come easily.

I originally meant to record a minor holiday, just before I returned to my time-honoured imprisonment at The York Dungeon. It was the Dungeon’s biblical flood – another time-honoured tradition – that granted me time and space for my own projects at the start of the year. It’s just what I needed after the manifold frustrations of 2015 – something I chronicled, via Anthony Newley, over here and here.

To briefly convert this time-based holiday into a land-based holiday – with trains and sight-seeing and people and such – seemed an excellent way to round things off. The result was a few snatched days of geographical interest: in Cambridge, then Leeds, then Blackpool. After recent events, I now realise that I was facing down some familiar old ghosts. Most of which transported me right back to York and far into that empty Dungeon.

Two weeks ago, I returned to Cambridge. My first time back in nearly four years. My absence from my old university town had evolved, little by little, into a point of principle. I was determined not to go back without a really good reason. In the end, I just settled for a reason. I went there to collect my honorary (read: falsified, worthless) MA, an arcane rite that extends to all Cantabrigian degree-holders. Essentially, this boiled down to some fantastical fancy dress and choreographed movement, with an audience in spitting distance – and all in Senate House, where sly old Henry Irving claimed his Doctor of Letters. Oh, yes. It represented my university experience very well.

Whence this dread of facing Cambridge again? I believe it was really the dread of facing myself – my ghost-self, as unstable and overwrought as I’d felt through university. Three exhausting years of slow metamorphosis. Never was I happier: creatively engaged on play after play, exposed to untold riches, making many of my very best friends. Never was I unhappier: feeling ever the outsider in acting and academia, awaking to quite how mediocre an intellect I possessed, experiencing some appallingly black moods.

All this found its most painful distillation in my second year, when I was deeply in love, and he was beautiful, and it was terrible, and it was wonderful, and – of course – it all went wrong. Old ground for me now, ancient history. I’ve written about the experience here; the fall-out from it, anyhow.

At this distance, I wonder if love was the only response to being so maniacally, so intensely alive. It required an equally strong force to balance me. That force was the Dungeon. Just before my second year, when all that feeling had opened me up, the Dungeon made me feel worthy of love. Armed me to go off and fight for it! And after my second year, the Dungeon gave me space to recover. It restored love to its proper place: from doom-laden soul-searching to simplicity, acceptance, warmth.

So as I knelt this time in Senate House, I thought on Henry Irving’s acceptance speech. Especially those words he cribbed from Polonius: ‘To thine own self be true.’ I stumbled on many bits of that self in Cambridge. But they were always tested and confirmed in York.

On with the holiday. I was next in Leeds, for a leisurely tea with my friend Simon. A man who has been crucial in my self-development, ever since I read his Shooting the Actor at age fifteen. He helped me to stoke my passion for acting, to make sense of my gayness, and to extend my interests in Dickens and Laughton and so many others among the Great Dead. Having done all this for me, it was perhaps inevitable that I would end up getting to know him personally. The Dungeon provided one of my earliest chances to test Simon’s exhilarating horizons for acting. I then saw transformation as absolutely central. How I strained to make my every character physically and vocally unique. To make them very unlike me.

Acting’s become more complicated in the years since. Most any craft is easier when primal. The sheer novelty of doing it convinces you that you’re better than you are. These days, acting is much more about accessing the soul. Which is difficult indeed; a lifelong journey. Just before I departed Leeds, Simon inscribed for me his latest book: an injunction to go on pursuing ‘the great and greatly flawed’. Eloquently put. For acting is rough-hewn hurly-burly: all mud and blood and fire and thunder. This essential roughness has been another of the Dungeon’s lessons. It’s not just okay that it’s not perfect. No, it’s an essential part of the deal. We must be flattered to be so flawed. It’s that which connects us to the human race.

The next day was the most emotional. I visited Blackpool to see my beloved friend Bryan. A long-standing colleague from – where else? – that Dungeon of York. Bryan embodies the murky essence of the place. This is a gift that reaches beyond acting, verging instead on the mystical. Bryan carries that atmosphere about with him; a natural emanation. He could indeed be a medieval monk or a viking king or a pagan war-god. More surely than anyone, he has converted the ghosts into friends.

Blackpool was also where I used to visit my grandparents, my mum’s mum and dad. I found their ghosts on the sea-front, mixed up with the spit and the pother, but even more in the Tower Ballroom. They had often danced there: probably to the same old standards, certainly to the same old organ. I sat there with my cup of tea for nearly an hour. I found myself almost ridiculously moved at the variety in the dancers: old men with old women, grandads with grandchildren, women with women, a mum with her daughter, another mum with her mum, men with men, two old widows. All those complicated chunks of humanity briefly thrown together and giving it all to the dance. This lent a certain resonance to when I met up with Bryan after his own dance, his devil-dance within The Blackpool Tower Dungeon. How wonderful to see him again in his proper context: restored to his full powers and exercising all the tools of his trade. How wonderful simply to embrace this man.

How I’d like to do that with another man now.

A few days ago, Mark – my manager at the Dungeon since 2008 – quietly passed away.

I am intruding on hallowed ground here. So many people knew Mark better than me, and longer than me. I know my loss is nothing compared to theirs. I cannot imagine their pain. I can only try to express mine, in flawed and dithering words. In this, I may light on some of what my colleagues are feeling.

What Mark represented to me was a whole comforting home. That warm and welcoming Dungeon home, which lives with me still, no matter where I travel. Over the years, I’ve had my gripes with the Dungeon; those periods of wishing I was anywhere else. I certainly don’t plan to stay there forever. In these respects, it’s like any home. Now a home that can never be the same again.

This idea of the Dungeon sustained me through the end of 2009, during my rocky first term at university. I had found the transition tougher than anything I’d expected, and was beginning to think I’d made a very big mistake. Here’s a little of what I wrote in my ever-uplifting diary:

Everyone here is better than me. They can talk to each other, communicate their wild and brilliant ideas without effort. I struggle so hard to form a coherent sentence, never mind the insurmountable difficulties in pretending to be happy.

I shrink with shame at that now. Knowing Mark’s great talent for happiness, for provoking it in others.

And yet he had provoked something in me. I went on, in this diary, to devise myself a back-up plan, where I would flee university and settle for a quiet and comforting life. And at the centre of all that? The Dungeon. I reduced it to a phrase:

The people there are wonderful.

I know that Mark was hovering at the centre of that sentiment – and therefore at the centre of all those testing years of finding myself out. It was the warmth and decency of Mark and his fellow Dungeoners that gave me the grit to stick university out. They would top me up when I saw them in the summer. And the thought of them gave me the strength, always, to keep on going. It’s a process that continues.

The darkest moment of that first term was when I found out that my grandad – that tireless romantic, that ballroom dancer – had also quietly passed away. I was by then too exhausted to entertain death. I sat at the same laptop I sit at now. Listened again and again to ‘Old and Wise’. Squirming, panting, smarting at this cruel new world, which seemed to be disintegrating beneath me. And still thinking to myself:

Don’t worry, don’t worry, the world is cold and dark now, the light is all but out… But I can still go to the Dungeon. I can still go home.

Now I do all of that all over again. All that time has passed, yet things are as they were.

As surely as Bryan is the Dungeon’s murky essence, so was Mark its living, beating heart. I feel thankful to him now in so many ways. It was Mark, along with Stuart, who gave me this first acting job in 2008. Mark helped to promote me from the shadows, encouraging some of my most purely happy assaults on acting. He inaugurated me as the Judge and as the Torturer. He gave me more pride in those outlandish creatures than I rightly deserved. That golden self-confidence that can comes only from someone you respect absolutely. With the result that he could pull me up short when I deserved it, make me feel utterly ashamed of myself. Such was the force of the man’s goodness. Only last Halloween, he bundled me swiftly home when I fell ill, defying all my croaking protestations. Then he laughed with me as I proceeded, croakily, to ring in sick.

He didn’t need to do any of that. How I’ll miss the absurd jokes and the infectious enthusiasm; the painful (usually accidental) ease with which you could make him jump out of his skin; the fact that he still addressed me as ‘Mr Swanton’ after eight years of friendship. By God! I’ll miss the joyousness! The sheer, luminous joyousness of the man. He lived to the hilt that which Dickens once wrote: ‘Brighten it, brighten it, brighten it!’ So often would he make me laugh till I cried. Now he makes me cry till I laugh.

His courage in facing down the end was little short of miraculous. I have never known a bravery like it. Never. I wish now, selfishly, that I’d seized the chance to tell him just how much I loved him. But that would have been to have Mark’s funeral while he was still alive. I don’t believe Mark ever seriously intended to leave the party. I still don’t think he has.

Besides. With a man like Mark, could love ever really, seriously be questioned? To him, it was the only thing. I am sure he knew we all loved him. Love was all he knew.

So thank you, Mark. You’ve shaped the course of my life, in ways that will probably always reach beyond my comprehension. You will forever be inseparable from the Dungeon. And it’s that Dungeon, that home of homes, that I carry with me, always – whether I am shouting within a dark building by (occasionally in) the River Ouse or somewhere else entirely. A home crammed with all those daft and delightful and lovable, loving people, with you at the very centre. Then. Now. And always.

Here’s the family in 2011. Mark is the bearded fellow at centre. I’m the grinning demon behind Mark; the distinguished greybeard to my left is, of course, Bryan. Also at centre, just below Mark, is Kayleigh – the love of his life, who he married last year. The best thing he did in a life crammed with the best.

The Funny Man is Me

These burblings are a continuation from last time. For their Newley-bound context, I direct you to the previous installment, ‘Drowning in Your Dream’. For a more primary view of my passion for Newley, read my essay ‘The Fool Must Die’. And rest assured, there is still more Anthony Newley to come – witness this magnificent portrait of his Ebenezer Scrooge (the work of Sacha Newley).

Yes, I fell in love again. I cannot write of the experience in positive terms. It used to be quite different: when I last let myself love – five, nearly six years ago – I was grateful for the feeling to the point of grovelling self-abasement. There’s a social expectation that heartbreak is mentioned only in terms of survivalist positivity. I think this practice abominable. All it does is contribute guilt to suffering – a panic that you’re not getting over things more quickly. But life cannot be reduced to a Gloria Gaynor song. Most responses to break-ups and the like strike me as an effort to not deal with things; to try and dodge all the pain. This, in my experience, is deadly. Pain must be faced down, always. Only then might happiness follow.

Besides, I’m almost certain that people never get over anything. I certainly don’t. All one can do is absorb the change into one’s person and keep on moving. Not move on exactly. Perhaps, at best, move past. ‘Love Has the Longest Memory’ harbours just such a lesson. The lyrics are confused – appropriately and inappropriately – but their musical setting delivers a hammer-blow. The song rounds off Quilp, Newley’s adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s faithful to Dickens’ unwittingly masochistic melancholy.

I know I held her hand in mine,
Though time has blurred her touch…
But when night robs my sight
I feel her much too much.

In my case, there was one especially decisive snag. There was not the least point in telling the object of all this loving agony. The man in question was not gay.

This is the baseline misery in gayness, irregardless of social acceptance: the vastly reduced chances of falling for someone who’ll be able to return your love. The body remains a fortress. This holds true even if you swallow the (discredited, surely?) statistic that one in ten people are gay. Still. There’s a bittersweet relief in having so much decided for you. And this before you’ve even begun.

As I wrote last time, my efforts to master my emotions are comical. This time, I wrote searching essays to myself, in a spidery hand – all of which seemed hysterically overblown when read the next morning. I cried very hard indeed – a cry that might as well be a laugh, so forcefully does it break out. I read a great deal too. Primarily about other men who chose silence. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (‘it’s a matter of love’), Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit (‘it will be set right’), and my old friend Kenneth Williams, the most self-important of the tragic clowns. This 1963 diary entry by Williams kept returning to me. It reflected my own morbid frustrations:

I wonder if anyone will ever know about the emptiness of my life. I wonder if anyone will ever stand in a room that I have lived in, and touch the things that were once a part of my life, and wonder about me, and ask themselves what manner of man I was. How to ever tell them? How to ever explain? How to say that I never found Love – how to say that it was all my own fault – that when presented with it, I was afraid & so I spurned it, or laughed at it, or was cruel, and killed it: and knew that in the process I was killing myself.

Newley, by contrast, gave full-throated expression to the void within. His proved the really purgative music. I most often returned to ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ This recording shows Newley at the peak of his powers. A grandstanding performance of love – you can see David Bowie emerging – mocking me for staying silent:

Why can’t I fall in love, till I don’t give a damn?

I was staggeringly right to give a damn. To tell the man in question would not have been kind or good. Not right; not under those circumstances. My primary impulse in love is to unburden myself. So many times I wanted to get the feeling out: to say the words, write a letter, do some unambiguous loving deed. My dawning awareness of my responsibilities felt a self-betrayal. Love may not happen very often for me – I’m averaging once every five years – but that’s no reason to inflict it on those at the receiving end. I unburdened myself to three or four good friends, then blundered on.

I can write now, a little, about what made him beautiful. I saw in him ease and simplicity. I saw in him danger and chaos and devil-laughter. I could see the flames of hell licking away at him. Such vulnerability is compelling: pleasure founded on pain, which is anyway essential to pleasure. I loved because he seemed so very unlike me, me, me, coiled-up in my self-reflecting neuroticism. Never could I get out of my own way. Nor could I do homage to him as I saw fit. Any revelation would have been mired in the clumsy, over-earnest flutterings of ‘My First Love Song’. Reading this paragraph, I realise that that still holds true.

Each endeavour
I may make to sing your praises
May not sound as it should do.
But I love you –
Please believe I love you…

There was also a pride in this passion. The sense that the man had a respect for my acting – for The Work, I should say – which had never been the case in my previous love-fallings. Quite the reverse: back then, I’d felt my every appearance on a stage was my saying: ‘How about this? Am I good enough yet? Am I – acceptable?’

This last point should have shown me where my passions truly lay. For whilst this feeling was roaring away, I had my busy, frenetic, jittery, maniacal work – Work – WORK. The last four months of my 2015 were comprehensively rammed. I was in at the Dungeon five, six, sometimes seven days a week. Halloween happened. Sickness happened. And trips to London for auditions and play-readings and meetings meant my very occasional days off were all but monopolised. There was a creative resurgence: a rehearsed reading of The Road with some inspiringly good actors; an overhaul of the Irving play, prior to sending it to colleagues and mentors; devising and writing and rehearsing Winter Gothic in York, thus satisfying my desire to get more plays out. It is staggering that I found time for even my pale ghost of a personal life.

How lost I’d have been without all this. I loved him, in truth, because we were so incompatible. I knew he was no fucking good for me – but he opened up a vision of an entirely different world. ‘Someone Nice Like You’ betokens just such an alternate existence. Below is the bit that breaks me; the most understatedly sad lyric I’ve encountered (find Newley’s version if you can):

And if we could live twice
I’d make life paradise
For someone really nice
Like you.

That hope of living more than once: the last refuge of the damned (recall Patricia Routledge as Alan Bennett’s Lady of Letters: ‘but this is it; this has been my go’). On this occasion, the world of love was all but obscured by my mountain of work. All of which carried me out into the real world, yet further into my fortress-self.

If there’s a running theme in the Newley song-book, it’s that pain might be salved through creative endeavours. I direct you to the galvanic three-fold climax of ‘The Fool Who Dared to Dream’ (as with much Newley, the execution leaves the lyric far behind) and the wistful sadness of ‘Pure Imagination’ (which is all about the lyric: ‘living there, you’ll be free – if you truly wish to be…’). By now, I am pleased to have said nothing. I shall go on saying nothing. Unless I feel I can do some good with the disclosure – a full disclosure. All or nothing again. But I don’t see what good it could do. So nothing it must remain.

How to sum up, then? 2015 seems a year of strange cruelties, of queer and dizzying pointlessness. Yet it was also a year of high comedy – his devil-laughter, yes, but taken over by Newley’s parade of sainted fools. A year of redemption, too – but only ever through The Work. I have no doubt that love is a very great gift. But it may not be a gift for me. Certainly not yet. Perhaps not ever – but should that ‘not ever’ come to pass, I’m hopeful I’ll be too busy working to care.

Let us finish with the strains of Newley’s ‘I’ll Begin Again’. It’s a song from Leslie Bricusse’s underrated Scrooge, which became Newley’s final role in the theatre. It’s a song that overturns the nihilism of Newley’s self-penned ‘I’m All I Need’ (which, believe me, was much with me last year). Through Newley’s performance, it opens out – and up:

I will start anew,
I will make amends,
And I’ll make quite certain
That the story ends
On a note of hope,
On a strong amen,
And I’ll live in praise
Of that moment when
I was able to begin again!

I shall have this song played at my funeral. Not that I plan on dying; I fully intend to live forever. But begin again? I have, and do, and will continue to do so.

Drowning in Your Dream

It was in 2015 that I discovered Anthony Newley. He was my patron saint that troublesome year. A man of the theatre, to which he brought new expressive possibilities. A man who did homage to Dickens, in musicals of The Old Curiosity Shop and A Christmas Carol. A man who yearned, unceasingly, to achieve love – and who always counted himself a failure. Pictured below is his wonderful ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ from The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. I’ll be drawing attention to other Newley songs. Many are masterpieces in miniature. So play along with me – do, do.

A conspicuous hole in my 2015 was just how little I wrote. There were two (necessary) redrafts of the Irving play, some light flourishes for Winter Gothic, a few other scripts that I was never at peace with – and four essays on this website. This last is the most inexcusable. At the very least, life-writing keeps a muscle honed. And at best, it is the most liberating self-help, something I was sorely in want of last year. But toiling under the delusion that blogs exist to be read – and what blog has ever been read, truly read? – I decided not to waste more of my time on one.

Essentially, my sense of humour ran out. Now I am more amused by my cosmic littleness: ever striving, self-important, to find order in my universe. By pretending to be other people. The last laugh of 2015 was when the Dungeon again flooded to levels inoperable. Three years ago, I felt a light tragedy (there I stand as the Reaper, dramatising). But this second time, I feel weariness, giving way to contained hysteria. A lingering ‘oh, really?’ followed by ‘is that the best you can do?’

Blogs are for writing, not for reading. So here I am again, bashing away at the keyboard, trying to make sense of 2015.

It began in recovery. I was rounding off an exhausting spell at Trafalgar Studios, where I’d been acting my one-man play Sikes & Nancy. One performance of ‘The Murder’ – as Dickens mortally demonstrated – is liable to cause a stroke. Well, I performed it thirty times in four weeks. I have my own word for this strange form, the theatrical nervous breakdown: ‘heartattacting’.

It therefore seemed right to take a month out. Make sure that I properly recharged my batteries. The one-person form can beget a stifling neuroticism. Instead of getting lost in another person on stage, you retreat ever further into yourself: your body, your face, your voice; above all, your mind. Increasingly, the play becomes an act of self-definition: you are the play; the play is you; and on and on and on you go, in ever-tightening circles. Strangulating. I had become my own fortress. It was vital I tried to escape.

During my long-drawn attempt, I came to Anthony Newley. This began with hearing – more accurate, beholding – his thrilling rendition of ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’. I still think it Newley’s keystone work. Flushed with first love, I wrote thoroughly of it at the time.

Anthony Newley typified that cosmic littleness which I was struggling to locate in myself. Newley’s constant metaphor is the fool versus the world: we are all silly little clowns and jesters and zanies, and our only refuge is in laughter, the laughter of the damned. Newley’s music is not without its flaws. But there is an irrepressible rightness about it, as with the best of Cole Porter. Both miraculously created new old folk songs; songs that transmute their surface littleness into an almost mythic vastness.

Cole Porter’s song-book stands alone. But Newley’s songs are best, by far, when completed by Newley. Once you get into an accommodation with him, even his flaws become assets. Newley’s sentiment can seem gushing, excessive – before his passion-performance will confirm its sincerity. His warbling vibrato becomes the sound of the soul erupting from the body – the more so when imperfect, when unachieved.

Newley made of his person a self-defining theatre, each emotional impulse externalised and heightened. This might be my deepest point of sympathy. Translate Sikes & Nancy into cabaret and you have ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’:

Look around you, Mister Clown
You’re drowning in your dream.
A sea of strangers, each one reaching out for you…

This idea of ‘drowning in your dream’ has haunted me. Sikes & Nancy had fulfilled quite a few of my acting dreams. I was acting on London’s West End – and in the title role (title roles, to be precise). I was serving Charles Dickens, that writer I love beyond all others. I was advancing myself as horror actor, pitching my performance between Henry Irving and the vintage horror film. My hero Simon Callow even gave the show his blessing – and, on the last day, his attendance.

Yet, as Wilde said: ‘When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ Such colossal good luck at age twenty-three is all but unprecedented. I would be a swine not to see it. I remain supremely grateful for Sikes & Nancy. I look forward to tackling it again. But what was I to do with my acting now?

The first half of 2015 passed in fitful cycles. I would work like a fiend to make more acting appear. I would then take an absolute break, because I couldn’t take the frustration. Yes, I was acting at the Dungeon – but that, to me, has long constituted ‘the work’ as opposed to ‘The Work’. But nothing is quite as exhausting as working to secure The Work: working and waiting, then working harder, then waiting much longer for something, for anything to turn up. ‘It Isn’t Enough’ exemplifies this unhappy Micawberism:

It isn’t enough to hope.
It isn’t enough to dream.
It isn’t enough to plot and plan and scheme.
It isn’t enough to stand here, saying that life is grand here,
Waiting for something good to turn up…

I eventually read my reviews for Sikes & Nancy. That was in May, I believe, almost a half-year after the show closed. On a base level, I needed to raid them for quotations, to press into letters and the like (thereby facilitating The Work). But I hoped also to best my old terror of criticism. Better the whole humbling truth, after all, than a fear-hewn fortress.

The experience proved shattering. I did them all in one go: digested nearly forty appraisals of me, me, me. At this distance, I see that the reviews were, on the whole, extremely good (you’re welcome to survey the good bits). But I hadn’t the benefit of distance. How could I? Not only was I the piece’s actor – its sole actor – but its deviser, its designer, its director. There was nothing to read that didn’t somehow impinge on me. Implicate me. Writers pointing out all that was ‘remarkable’ in my person, for good or for ill, all that was conspicuous enough to provoke some ‘remark’.

I am a monumental self-doubter. So it was no shock that I mainly absorbed that which was deemed clumsy, or jarring, or misjudged. But it was the bald fact of exposure which was really insufferable. I am a man who always avoided his school reports, all from fear of knowing what people think of me. In trying to connect with the outer world, in reading those sod-buggering reviews, I was only drawn further into my fortress-self.

Really, I needed to learn from Newley, and rejoice in my idiosyncrasies being noticed at all. ‘This Dream’ would often insinuate itself, in my trampings to and from the Dungeon:

I have this dream,
I have this wonderful dream where I win,
Where I win every battle I fight,
And I kill every dragon in sight!
Each night, I like awake and I wait for this dream.
What a world I create, when I dream I’m not lonely…

Ah, loneliness. Something that plunged me into an appallingly black mood in February, just before I resumed the Dungeon. For I am a man without a personal life – and I think people with a partner (or the meaningful possibility of such) find it easier to tread water.

I think much of this void is the consequence of not talking about being gay. It was in 2003 that I realised I was gay; it wasn’t until 2010 that I discussed it. And then with only with two or three people. That’s a long time in hiding. My first instinct in this had been not to make anyone else uncomfortable. Selfless. Seemingly. In actual fact, self-persecution. Clearly, it was me who was more uncomfortable than anyone at the idea of my intersecting with love. That dread of uncontrollable exposure – as with a stack of theatre reviews.

Silence can speak. Over the years, I’d worked myself to a point where practically everyone about me knew I was gay – without my ever having said a word on it. This no doubt gave the impression that I found the subject incendiary. Thus nobody mentioning it, least of all me. A cycle difficult to break.

Well, this year I got a good deal better at talking about being gay: freely, easily and, yes, even gaily. Why this change?  I’ve been blessed this year to be surrounded with people naturally more comfortable with themselves – who regard sexuality, quite rightly, as a non-issue (and, furthermore, a source of great fun). It’s been liberating, being so taken out of myself. It’s answering – albeit slowly – some deep-seated need in me.

Then again, I may have simply gotten bored. That constant rumble of low-level internal pressure. What had it all been for? ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ swims into my head. It comes from Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, a show that follows Newley’s Littlechap from birth to old age. This is the last he sings before death. It’s especially painful on Newley’s final studio album, blasted out across his frail, attenuated vocal cords:

What kind of clown am I? What do I know of life?
Why can’t I cast away this mask of play and live my life?
Why can’t I fall in love, till I don’t give a damn?
And maybe then I’ll know what kind of fool I am!

When shall I ever be able to answer these questions? For something in this idea of a long-drawn coming out – this lifetime of coming out, in fact – remains dreadful to me. To me, openness should really be total. Or else null. It’s this bloody-mindedness, I believe, which prevented me disclosing my sexuality on a more trivial basis. It had to be a full-blown, all-embracing romantic love. Or else nothing at all. A poet or a monk.

This ‘all or nothing’ principle is the only real danger I have in me. It has continually thwarted my love life. Yet I suspect it’s also been the foundation of anything worthwhile I’ve achieved, in stoking my single-minded devotion to work. A work in which I try to assume Newley’s ‘mask of play’ – that play I’ve found so hard-won in life.

Fortunately, I did have a long-awaited victory with my acting. In August, I managed to get Frankenstein’s Creature before an audience. I wrote on the build-up to it here. And now, in the retrospect, I regard it with untroubled joy.

Despite playing a monster, the king of monsters, I found myself being more human than I’ve ever been on any stage, ever. I credit Jack, my director, with that – for not letting me get away with anything. I credit also Quentin, my producer – for standing by Jack in not letting me get away with anything. Every choice was expertly interrogated. Don’t whine – don’t ask for pity – for God’s sake, stop elongating your vowels – stay playful with it – above all, keep thought alive. At last, I was liberated to deliver that which I’d sighted in Sikes & Nancy: lightness, quickness, ease. The ‘mask of play’ redeemed.

The Creature has displaced Quasimodo – in my mind, at least – as the best performance I’ve given. I shall do Frankenstein’s Creature again, and right gladly.

Best for me were the play’s final moments, where the Creature transcends all earthly things. In embracing his isolation, he locates in it the opposite, and joins with the impossible vastness of everything. So it can be with one-man theatre. The staging was patterned on Newley’s Expressionist pantomime in ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ (much more than I realised at the time, as the photo illustrates). Newley stands on his loneliness also:

With no star to guide me
And no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and after the day
The darkness will hide me.

That August, I shared the Creature’s ecstasy. By the end of the run, I too felt reborn.

Then, a few weeks later, an accident.

I went and fell in love.

More on that next time.

And maybe tomorrow, I’ll find what I’m after…

The Mystery of Christopher Lee

Most of my heroes in acting are long dead. Karloff, Wolfit, Irving – there’s no need for me to come to terms with their absence. I have known them always as completed by death: their narratives lying fully writ. So it was a considerable shock to me when Christopher Lee passed away. A full acceptance isn’t possible when you’ve gotten used to someone’s life and work developing before your eyes. Even now I feel cheated of closure. As I prepared to play Frankenstein’s Creature – Lee’s breakthrough role, back in 1957 – I started to meditate on the great man’s legacy.

Christopher Lee remains a mystery to me. For over half my life, family and friends have brought me his newspaper clippings; warned me of his television appearances; accompanied me to Tim Burton films, just to hear his two or three fateful utterances. And yet I can explain practically nothing about Lee – neither the actor, the man, nor the uncanny filmic hinterland where the two fused as one.

Lee’s life reads to me like an old mystery play: a profound and dazzling romance, founded throughout on the supernatural. And as with the mysteries, there is a return from the dead. Taken collectively, Lee’s performances as Dracula constitute a dark parody of the Christian Resurrection. His Stations of the Cross are frenziedly theological; particularly Christ-like are his impalements on a giant crucifix and, a century later, on a hawthorn hedge. A principal delight of the Hammer series was in witnessing how each successive film – with varying results – undid the death in its predecessor. Now death has come for real – but the romance is still hanging in the air.

For it has been a romance. Albeit one conducted mostly within my head, across many years of prizing up the holy relics. Such has also been my experience with Lee’s compatriots in terror cinema: with Lon Chaney; with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; with Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. Only Christopher Lee was very much alive and, until recently, very active. Primary contact is lost in the fog of early childhood, though it was probably his King Haggard in The Last Unicorn. My first really conscious inheritance was Lee’s Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring. Captive in the cinema, aged only ten, I awakened to the beauty of that smouldering voice:

Smoke rises from the Mountain of Doom. The hour grows late, and Gandalf the Grey rides to Isengard, seeking my counsel. For that is why you have come – is it not? My old friend…

Old friend indeed. For somehow, strangely, I had intimated that this was Christopher Lee whilst watching him. It was something in the long, angular hands, in the dark Italian skin and the noble features (albeit compressed by a false nose). A dormant memory, perhaps. I had previously been fascinated by a photo of Lee’s Dracula in the Osborne Book of the Haunted World: spattering blood over Melissa Stribling’s throat, a long hand hovering suggestively close. I put Dracula aside for a time, and applied myself to impersonating Saruman on the secondary school field. Striving (ever vainly) to channel Lee’s voice became one of my first experiments in acting.

I first came to Hammer with Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. A pan-and-scan viewing on grungy VHS, recorded by my dad in the early hours. Yet the film still bled its autumnal colours upon its heaps of Catholic iconography – the candlesticks, the prayer-books, the vestments, the crosses – with all heightened into ritual by James Bernard’s funereal score. At the centre was Lee’s majestic Count Dracula, backed by infernal red sunsets, never more picturesque. I soon saw Dracula: Prince of Darkness – courtesy of my grandma, another late-night VHS – in which Lee’s wordless vampire became a solely picturesque entity. Then, aged just twelve, I gained the unholy trinity. Lee’s founding Hammer monsters: in The Mummy, in the original Dracula – and in The Curse of Frankenstein, which for a while was my favourite of all of them.

Lee’s Creature is the jagged heart of this elegantly brutal film. It remains a spectacularly underrated performance – because, as ever, Lee operates by stealth. Not that his Creature lacks for visceral impact; The Curse of Frankenstein is a powerful reminder that, for a decade at least, Lee was regarded as the most frightening actor in the world. There is the scene of the Creature’s first unveiling. Lee is revealed standing in the laboratory, swathed entirely in dripping bandages. He then tears them away to reveal his horrendously scarred head, the camera barrelling in for an overwhelming screen-filling close-up. A dead eye, decayed teeth, that blotchy, corpse-like skin. In 1957, the effect must have been paralysing.

Lee’s Creature is cemented as destructive juggernaut when he encounters a blind man in the forest. This Creature struggles to comprehend, misinterprets, then brutally murders the man (and, we are led to believe, his grandson). It’s a pitiless rewriting of the most sentimental passage in Mary Shelley’s novel, not to mention Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein. Karloff’s Monster seemed always to be a gentle, soulful being: the Hollywood equivalent of the noble savage, an impression augmented by a clean, streamlined makeup. Lee’s Creature hasn’t a hope in hell. He’s an abortive, soulless automaton, with a cut-and-paste visage to match (as one critic put it: ‘a road accident’). To watch him is acutely painful, like watching a brain-damaged animal that must be put out of its misery.

Yet there’s much more at play in Lee’s Creature. Very few actors can make you believe in the supernatural as Lee did. Paul Scofield was one. When Scofield, as the Ghost in Hamlet, says ‘I am thy father’s spirit’, you believe him. When Lee plays Dracula – with deadly sincerity, in the direst of films – you believe him too. There are other connections with Scofield: the regal bearing, the resonant voice, the Italian appearance, that haughty demeanour punctuated by unexpected impishness. Nor was either actor particularly ostentatious, despite roles that offered countless opportunities for extravagance.

The significant difference is that Scofield was regarded as legitimate, by virtue of his work in the fashionable theatre. Lee was not. Like Henry Irving, his Gothic-knight precursor, Lee stood for the Gothic. But unlike Irving, Lee belonged to an age when the Gothic was afforded little respect. It is sad that Lee’s imaginative achievements have therefore been downgraded. Scofield could afford to refuse a knighthood (and so he did, several times). Lee owed it to the Gothic to accept.

As with Scofield, there remains something fundamentally unknowable about Lee. Neither man ever discussed acting in any depth. Lee’s memoirs, whilst detailed, contain scant clues about his process. When pressed, Lee might quote Ralph Richardson on acting as ‘dreaming to order’. But he seldom went further. It’s tempting to say that Lee couldn’t go further. Much like Richardson, Lee cultivated (perhaps unintentionally) an image as a cantankerous old dinosaur, all no-nonsense blustering and portentous secret-keeping. Such was the sustaining joy of his late-career interviews. And such a man is not to be asked his opinion on the artistic process.

In his approach to acting, then, Lee might well have been a mystic. It is perhaps the only way that such a man can be an actor. I think of the great mantra of Claude Rains, another of these invisible actors: ‘I learn the lines and pray to God’. It’s an excellent summation of a process that remains thoroughly mysterious. As far as Lee was concerned, there was nothing to be discussed.

These are thrilling grounds on which to engage with Lee’s performances: as dreams, quite unreadable. The earliest Gothic fictions were derived from dreams. So were the first Gothic films. This is confirmed by a glance at The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a film compounded of such stuff as dreams are made on. Here we find the template for Lee’s Creature: in Conrad Veidt, who was Lee’s great acting hero. Veidt’s Somnambulist shares much with Lee’s Creature: the juddering, puppet-like movements; the light-sucking black garments; the gawkily expressive hands. Above all, there is the fascinating spectacle of a beautiful man giving his all to remould himself as grotesque.

Lee can’t have been oblivious (or unreceptive) to these parallels with Veidt. Emulation is vital to an actor’s early development. But in later life, Lee seemed to become his own strange creation. Here the mystery only deepens. For we can study Lee’s transformation, preserved on film across his incredibly long-drawn career; a nearly seventy-year journey from clean-cut youth to bearded magus. Perhaps only Angela Lansbury affords a more sustained view of an actor’s development. Yet her transformation has been nothing compared to Lee’s.

The most intriguing physical specific is Lee’s toupée. To keep knowledge of it from the public, Lee gave it an inconsistent mythology. At times, he claimed to have shaved his head for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; at others, to have worn a bald-cap. When filming The Mummy, Lee apparently refused to remove his toupée, subjecting it instead to his heaviest makeup. There is also the matter of Lee’s changing voice. Robert Quarry avowed that the famous ‘Christopher Lee voice’ was a rank affectation, a put-on. Quarry was a weirdly hostile co-star; yet there’s also that celebrated outtake from The Fellowship of the Ring (‘I cannot get up these goddamn steps smoothly!’), where Lee, caught off guard, speaks in a higher register than his tightly-clamped bass. Although voices change with age, Lee seems to have cultivated his. It’s disarming how unlike himself Lee sounds in the 1958 Dracula. But ten years on, in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, the stentorian growl of Saruman is creeping in. With time, Lee became exactly what he pretended to be. A lesson for all actors.

In his recent tribute, Ian McKellen described Lee’s Saruman as possessing ‘the air of a stern yet benign Pope’ with hidden reserves of ‘cruelty and spite’. Perhaps Lee’s greatest gift was in revealing where the sacred and the profane came together. It’s naturally central to the Frankenstein myth: the sanctity of God-created life versus the blasphemy of the devilish Creature. Lee’s Jekyll-and-Hyde embodiment in I, Monster was also sensitive and engaging. But there are yet more daring examples. His Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man is a man who sacrifices with a disarming smile. His performance as Rasputin: The Mad Monk contains many potent moments, distilled in some mesmerising speeches:

During the time that I’ve been here, you’ve tried to teach me that confession of my sins is good for the soul. You also removed all temptation from among us so that there’s no chance of any sin here. I merely tried to put that right. When I go to confession, I don’t offer God small sins, petty squabbles, jealousies. I offer him sins worth forgiving.

Whenever Lee played the monster hunter – in The Gorgon, or The Devil Rides Out, or Horror Express – he cut a figure almost as forbidding as the monsters themselves. Ultimately, Saruman resides on the same continuum as Count Dracula: evil fused with a sense of religious ritual. Flowing, lustrous garments. Precise and commanding gestures. A terrain half-castle and half-church. And above all, that sense of authenticity – that belief which Lee brought to everything he played, whether Stoker’s gaslight melodrama or Tolkien’s Black Speech.

So formidably dour was Lee’s persona that it’s easy to overlook the raw humanity in his best performances. In 2011, the fabled Japanese reels for Dracula were found – and it was discovered that Lee’s Dracula cries human tears. Astonishingly brave, astonishingly unexpected (Lee’s constant creed in acting), and more effortlessly poignant than anything in Gary Oldman’s overblown opus. Lee held fast to his mystery, though, and kept the front up in public.

In this way, Lee stood apart from his terror contemporaries. Vincent Price was so amiably dedicated to promoting the arts that he seemed eminently approachable. Peter Cushing’s sorrow at his wife’s passing was deeply humanising, and a comfort to many. Lee, by comparison, came across as rather cold. It wasn’t so. Those who saw the mask drop at the BAFTAs knew it. The behind-the scenes footage from Flesh and Blood is also heart-warming, Lee swapping Looney Tunes gifts and voices with Peter Cushing. Lee’s reminiscences about the long-lost Cushing and Price were never less than moving. It’s certainly the highlight of his revised memoirs, this sense of Lee communing with absent friends. We horror fans live vicariously through the emotional lives of its stars. It’s a comfort to know that Dracula cries; that he might even cry for a friend. It places a beating heart within the Gothic skeleton. On receiving his knighthood in 2009, Lee privately remarked that the honour was meant for Cushing.

My years spent with Lee come back to me in a haze now. I was disheartened when he was cut from The Return of the King; I was thrilled when he was impersonated by Stephen Fry on QI (Fry was then another really formative influence). I looked forward to dissecting Lee’s bewildering Christmas Messages, those increasingly free-form capsules of mortality. I was even a patron of Lee’s widely reviled singing career. In my first year at Cambridge, I fell in love whilst listening to Lee’s intoxicating ‘Name Your Poison’ from The Return of Captain Invincible. A few weeks later, I found cassettes of Lee reading Peter and the Wolf and The Soldier’s Tale in a charity shop, thus rounding off a very heated term. I’m listening to them now.

It’s fitting that my last sighting of Lee was in the cinema where I’d seen The Fellowship of the Ring. Now, more than half a lifetime older, I bore witness to the credits of the final Middle Earth film. There again was Saruman – just as I’d seen him first – now an etching, fading to white, to the elegiac accompaniment of ‘The Last Goodbye’.

Only it isn’t goodbye. Closure isn’t necessary. Not just yet. As long as there are still films of his that I haven’t seen – and there are well over a hundred – then that last goodbye need not come. Christopher Lee was a part of my development, my self-creation. And I am certain his legacy, however mysterious, will continue to shape my life.

God preserve you, my hero. Have a ball with Peter and Vincent.

Creature Ascending

It gives me great pleasure to confirm that, next month, I will finally get round to being Frankenstein’s Creature. The show will play six performances at Theatre503 in Battersea, running from the 25th to the 29th of August (with a matinee on the 29th). The production is in the care of Dippermouth, the company behind the sumptuous mounting of Scrooge & Marley in 2013 (click for photo evidence). They’ve already crafted an excellent show blurb and press release, in addition to a beautifully gruesome publicity image. With a support network like this, I need only learn the odd line and stand under a big light.

The show’s been a long time coming. I wrote the bulk of Frankenstein’s Creature almost three years ago, when Sikes & Nancy was in its infancy. I’d then performed Sikes a mere six times, and felt pretty sure I’d gotten the fullest use from it (well, that feeling’s long gone). Frankenstein’s Creature represents a development from Dickens: as well as embodying a universe on the stage, I am now that universe’s author. I’ve somewhat tempered my hubris by keeping to the framework of Mary Shelley’s novel. I don’t care for reckless invention when there’s unplumbed richness in the original. I prefer for new details to introduce themselves. Happily enough, they did. Although the script is faithful to Shelley’s spirit – or so I believe – there’s not a single sentence from her novel there. By now, the script feels like it was written by someone else again. This should prove healthy in rehearsal.

Frankenstein’s Creature is informed by my early relationship with Sikes & Nancy in another way. It’s full of unbridled confidence – a confidence I don’t have in the same pure form now. This is clearest in the relish which this new play embraces transformation: incarnating that otherworldly character for over an hour. In the past, transformation has been my ideal in acting. Thus the frantic monopolyloguing; the commitment to grotesquerie; the not infrequent gender-swapping – and Sikes & Nancy included all of these. Yet I’ve started to question transformation in recent years. Paradoxically, this comes from having given Sikes & Nancy so very much. I’m coming to terms with the physical and vocal toll this sort of acting takes. In my case, transformative acting leads to endless paranoid questionings – questionings which reductively carry me back into myself. Am I vocally incompetent? I am prone to losing various bits of my voice (or convincing myself I have, which comes to the same) – but then, I attempt very ambitious things with my voice. I’ve never considered it terribly expressive, so I’ve tried to wrench more from it than is healthy. Am I physically overdeveloped? I don’t always have a sure grip on how my face is moving these days – the muscles have, if anything, grown too responsive. This is worrisome given that my physical presence is one of natural exaggeration. As Peter Ustinov said of Charles Laughton: ‘When Laughton was sitting quietly in a chair, not speaking, he was doing too much.’

All this is underlined by the dawning recognition that I am, after all, physically and vocally limited – because I’m so distinctive. A transformative actor must start with a blanker slate. Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman are transformative actors; Judi Dench and Christopher Lee (God rest him) are not. Distinctiveness needn’t cripple me: it’s what my great hero, Henry Irving, had going for him in spades. So perhaps these worries stem from a more fundamental discomfort with self. The late Roger Rees – what a loss – had this to say on self-consciousness in acting, back in 1983:

I am embracing a fear. When I was a boy I found it hard to throw myself wholeheartedly into things because I was even then an observer. I watched. And I find now that if I have to do anything extremely physical or frightening on the stage, I am able to stand completely outside myself, really look at myself, almost see myself from the back of the auditorium. And I hate it. It makes me feel po-faced and unadventurous; and that’s why sometimes I do physical things which are quite wrong, quite embarrassing; but I have to do them just for my sake. It’s me fighting against myself, and I think that’s what acting is about.

It’s true of a lot of actors layer their work from a fear of being boring. My person is naturally distinctive, expansive, requiring little embellishment to become overwhelming. And yet I do assume I’m boring an audience most of the time. A knotty problem. So: rather than waste my energies in ‘fighting against myself’ (in my case, beating myself up), it makes sense to gravitate towards outsize characters, for which I don’t have to squash down these embarrassing bits of myself. The Creature is therefore a gift. I am feeling my way to a greater simplicity. But I’m sure that the journey will last a lifetime. I only hope Roger Rees departed at a point when he felt satisfied.

In certain respects, the Creature is a character that demands transformation. On a base physical level, certainly: a cheat to do it without some elaborate makeup. But psychologically and emotionally, I’m discovering (rediscovering?) that my script is concerned more with enmeshment. Our desire to become one with other people; the terror of it. As is abundantly clear, this sets off unnerving vibrations for me as an actor. But it’s also the most purely human experience: that difficulty in giving ourselves over to other human beings (‘The Rose’ by Amanda McBroom: ‘It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give’). In life, the best answer lies in becoming more comfortable with oneself. It’s not easy. It takes time. I’m not quite there yet (who is?), though I’m as close as I’ve ever been. This should be an acting transformation tempered with simplicity then; even a lightness.

For this Creature is all lightness, a total divergence from filmic stereotypes. (By no means the same thing as filmic reality: Karloff’s Monster is towering in its simplicity.) This Creature is a hypersensitive, even narcissistic being: like some blithering Romantic poet, his tragedy may be that of someone who feels everything too acutely. There should be a tapered, wispy elegance about him; a Creature composed from air. I am not, by nature, a light actor. ‘Lightness, quickness, ease’ became my mantra in playing Sikes & Nancy at Trafalgar Studios. I did the best I could, but I still felt hampered by my natural equipment: bass voice, slack diction, a body wiry and bony, a tendency to elongation. I was born for the heavy. All the more reason to chase lightness then: it could prove a most helpful tension for the Creature.

Yet despite its airy aspiration, Frankenstein’s Creature remains a chance to revel in the mud and the muck. The script pushes forth a character who is, in most respects, sickening: a life story in which iniquity and perversity are persistently framed as beauty. Or is it the other way around? We read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis with compassion nowadays; if anything, with too much compassion. Yet had the letter fallen into the hands of Wilde’s persecutors, it would have been regarded like a tract from Jimmy Savile.

Wilde and Savile both had the gift of insinuating themselves into society. Not so the Creature. He is the ultimate outsider. Is this a figure who can understand or meaningfully want humanity? We so often want to complete the Beast with a Beauty. But, as I learned when playing Quasimodo, this may go no further than a fairytale. The Beast stands alone. And perhaps he goes further still, embracing his ugliness as superior. The undesirable parading their most undesirable characteristic as radiant – this is the purest definition of the grotesque I know. Wilde represented boy-love as a superior love, founded on the Greeks. In our own time, a number of pedophiles have attempted a similar defence. I don’t see how pedophilia could ever be legitimised (‘consent’ being the watchword); nevertheless, more effort should be made to understand the impulse. The Creature should encourage people to look away. But we must feel compelled to probe his mystery.

In short, I feel ready for Frankenstein’s Creature. As ready as I ever will: the man and the moment are converging. The result should, at any rate, be interesting. Not that a fixed result is the aim here: I very much hope the show will have a life beyond this initial showing. And perhaps, in creating my Creature, I’ll go some way towards recreating myself as an actor. But to hell with overworked metaphors: book your tickets at once for Theatre503. There are 100 tickets at £10 for those under twenty-six. Capitalise on your youth and beauty; the Creature would have it no other way.

Island Dreaming

To ensure these dreams are worth the telling, I must rescue the word ‘dream’. Above all, from the wishful completism of ‘come true’. Dreams do not come true. A dream come true is instantly converted back into a dream. ‘It’s my dream to climb Everest.’ So go forth and climb it. You’re left with the memory: another kind of dream. ‘It’s my dream to wed the one I love.’ So go forth. Be wed. Two collapse into one; the situation is transformed. The dream has not been vanquished, but it has been changed, absolutely.

Dream-territory is not fixed or solid or palpable. It is amorphous, ever-shifting. And so, with one seeming exception, my dreams are not specific. Moreover, dream-territory is a visionary realm – reaching deep down into the self, before opening out into the wider world. The mystics knew this. It might well be that I’ve reached the theatrical equivalent of a dark night of the soul. With Sikes & Nancy all wrapped up (for now, at least), my time has been quiet indeed. Where to go next? What story to tell? I’ve felt somewhat marooned. Not that it’s been unpleasant, this island dreaming, but I’ll be restless until I work out how to gain the land.

To one day play Richard III. Richard is central to my dream to finally do justice to Shakespeare. Yet Richard is also a figure who exists outside of Shakespeare. His bunch-backed silhouette is shaped by so much else in this world: by a still-unfolding English history (the scoliosis-bound skeleton unearthed in Leicester), by former players of the part (the silk-draped buffalo-hunch of Antony Sher) and by wider cultural forces (from Basil Rathbone in Universal’s Tower of London – a near-imperceptible humping – to Anthony Newley in his aborted musical, ‘an envious mountain’ on his back). My struggles with Shakespeare have come from the long-drawn realisation that I, like Richard, am a bit of a satellite. Rather than serving as conduit for the poetry, my idiosyncrasies tend to overwhelm it. But with Richard, my peculiarities are strangely entitling. My curved spine, which denies me a centred physique and a resilient voice, may make me the first actor in history to embody the part without artifice. Richard could even move me towards finding how to serve Shakespeare properly: Antony Sher has been candid in enumerating his eccentric classical path, graduating from Richard to Shylock, Leontes, Macbeth and – next year – Lear.

It’s curious that so many of my dream roles have lost their lustre with time. But then, how can you be drawn to anything other than the surface until you’ve played the part? I’ve often fancied playing the Devil, for instance – but in what context would I be a worthy Devil? Marlowe? Goethe? Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale? Irving’s pantomimical Lyceum Faust? Richard might end in disillusionment. I’ve never found the play entirely gripping when I’ve seen it acted. I find it sags badly in the mid-section, a marsh of confusing court politics. Perhaps a streamlined script will be the order of the day, from an up-to-the-minute Colley Cibber. No matter. I’ll be damned if I don’t have more than one go at Richard.

To become the island. Better by far than being marooned! There’s a song called ‘Face of a Stranger’, which Stephen Schwartz wrote for the great Philip Quast. Within are these memorable lines:

They tell you no man is an island
But to me that’s not how it seems
I think every man is an island
Of secrets and longings and dreams.

To really feel ownership of my island-like qualities – that would be superb. How glorious to reach a point where all my tasks are self-created, or at least self-determined. Rather like the great Terry Jones, whose career has consisted of little else. I suspect that other young actors long for this. We suppress this longing, though, the better to collaborate. A wise instinct. That’s the best way to learn. But I fear that too much collaboration is of the wrong sort: a mere craving for approval, legitimacy, the safety of joining the establishment. This can deteriorate into the need for approval of any sort, from any source. We take on work that we never wanted in the first place. We lose our self-respect. And so dreams are badly compromised.

Funnily enough, I didn’t need that reassurance when I took my first steps towards acting. I marvel now at my primary arrogance: at age thirteen, I would read of Olivier and inwardly scoff – of course I could do better than that! But then, for centuries and centuries, the vagabond actor-rogue craved no sanction. Henry Irving has much to answer for here, in creating the modern theatrical knight. An honour once reserved for England’s most defiantly particular actor has become sadly generalised. For how much modern theatrical dabbling is a scrabbling for riches and glories? We must learn humility, we must learn we can indeed learn – but we mustn’t lose in courage. So why not collaborate in order to create our own work? My one-man plays have been steering me towards this, but better is collaboration with others alongside you. Bridging the gap between islands. As Quast goes on:

An invisible ocean surrounds us
Those who love us reach just the shores…

To honour the classic horror film. Much of my growing up came through the Gothic, as I’ve written at length before. In my imaginative universe, the greatest flowering of the Gothic was the classic horror film. That which shapes us as human beings retains a primary hold. Even when I’m at my lowest ebb, these films will yet move me. In the scrap above, I’ve touched on the actor’s cravings for approval. This, I think, should be overcome. As much as is possible. We should instead our work to serve something greater than ourselves. I would consider my purpose more than served if I could illuminate the horror film as art. In my recent experience, this has meant treading the paths of the great macabre actors. I’ve played Quasimodo to honour Chaney and Laughton, and will soon enough play Frankenstein’s Creature to honour Karloff and Lee. By transferring these spirits from film to theatre, I hope it would also become possible to restore their imaginative scope to world drama. Shakespeare needed no such encouragement. Nor did the Greeks. They knew the power of ghosts, witches, demons.

All this becomes part of my broader campaign to win respect for the underdog. My recent obsession with Anthony Newley derives, in part, from the fact that he never seemed to have much luck. I want respect for much-maligned scribblers (Ainsworth and Bulwer Lytton spring to mind), for gay people (Tchaikovsky, who I respect as much for his private struggles as his music), for those who loved unwisely and paid dearly for it (Oscar Wilde: whose scribbling and gayness both were torn apart in life; whose death cheated him of their eventual celebration). I suspect love is at the bottom of most of it. It’s also a neat resolution to the problem of self-love. There’s an ever-present danger that acting will come to naught but egotism. We succeed, then, if we relegate the self to these reflecting shards of the wider world. We can safely vent our demons, and perhaps convert them into angels.

To establish my own theatre company. This will happen. Someday. I’ve yet to find a focus for it. Or willing collaborators. The two will define each other. It will have something to do with all of the above. The chance to play a part or parts like Richard III. The self-sufficiency of blissful collaboration. And the twilight world of the Gothic… Dim ideas as yet. Some new version of Faust. A revised script for Bulwer Lytton’s Richelieu. A rendition of Eugene Aram. Something from Victor Hugo. A fairytale. A love story. Something entirely new. And then there’s Frankenstein…

I’ll be on my island for the present, working out how to tie these scraps together. I might even make a raft of them.

The Fool Must Die

Just lately, I’ve become fascinated (and mildly obsessed) with the song ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ – Anthony Newley’s stab at the ‘tragic clown’ subgenre. My favourite version is the studio recording from The Singer and His Songs, Newley’s 1978 LP. Newley possessed a uniquely eccentric instrument, and it’s here given full rein – whether crackling on the cusp of an elongated vowel, or gargling through a bolt of forced vibrato. It’s a voice that reminds me of Algie’s discourse on the piano in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘I don’t play accurately – anyone can play accurately – but I play with wonderful expression.’ Sometimes you need an Ethel Merman; for all her warbling extremity (and deafness of tone), no one else can touch ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ (a sunnier take on ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’). Sometimes you need a Newley too.

Sadly, this recording has never been issued on CD. But better than the LP, there exists an old tape from the Parkinson show. This provides the bonus of Newley’s physical performance. And it is performance, undeniably: an Expressionistic pantomime for the song’s every line. It’s oddly charismatic. Unexpected too, coming from a man with those heavy eyebrows and thick-set, potato-headed features – unchanged from his adolescent breakthrough, as the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist. This ruggedness sit at odds with a decidedly fey quality. It finds its best expression in Newley’s hands: sometimes propitiating, sometimes flapping uncontrollably, but always in nervy motion, never for one moment still. Newley’s physical dexterity fleshes out the song’s unfailingly bold lyrics – the kind of thing I’d be too cowardly to set to paper. The words are rough-hewn, but always daring, risking the banal to become breathtakingly poetic. So whilst there are images that don’t quite fly (‘the custard pie that life just loves to throw’), others are perfect, and perfectly surreal (‘the monster with the thousand eyes is shouting to be fed’). The exemplar of this poetic type might be the Newley-Bricusse ‘Pure Imagination’, which conducts Roald Dahl to Elysium: ‘If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it…’

Newley’s lyrics capture so many of the masochistic pitfalls of performance: slaving for Norma Desmond’s ‘people in the dark’, the cycles of addiction, even the bloody reviews (a particular insight: even the glowing verdict ‘the laughter machine’ reveals itself as harmful). But more than detail, there is staggering embarrassment. Voice and movement and lyric scrape against each other like tectonic plates. It’s a performance seedy, degraded, fawning, frantic, spasmodic, mincing; painful and pitiable and, beyond all, chilling. The feeling of embarrassment only increased in aftertimes, when Newley often seemed intoxicated on stage. The song is so cunningly engineered that this added new force.

‘Entertainer’ is as close to a target as I can find for the song. For Newley rather strangely conflates the stand-up comic (‘my home is any microphone that’s free’) with the circus clown (‘prepare your painted face’). But by the time Newley’s staring at his reflection in the dressing-room mirror, he is all of we dispossessed performers: ‘I ask my own reflection and I see – the funny man is me!‘ Funny men, the lot of us. Newley deserves to be recognised alongside his fellow tortured entertainers. It’s a battlefield that stretches far beyond Archie Rice. I think of ‘He’ in Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped, perhaps the most iconic tragic clown. Lon Chaney played him in 1924, in the first ever production from the fledgling MGM – a studio no doubt responsible for a score of dispossessed entertainers. Britain has yielded two great Shakespearean actors: Edward Lionheart in Theatre of Blood and the Wolfitian ‘Sir’ in The Dresser. The former kills the critics who scoffed at his Lear; the latter kills himself by playing Lear. My personal favourite is Gwynplaine in Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs (sublimely incarnated by Conrad Veidt in the silent film). The fellow with the permanent smile – a rictus grin – irreparably carved into his head. Gwynplaine’s only hope of survival is the carnival.

I rail against the commonplace of the tortured entertainer. It’s become such a stereotype that it requires great originality and even greater style to warrant attention. In writing my play about Henry Irving – optimistically scheduled for performance in early 2058 – I did everything I could to avoid the stereotype (not easy with Irving, whose emotional life was peculiarly barren). Stereotypes are often so for being founded in truth. Yet the truth is rarely pure and never simple (thanks again, Earnest). A lesson of ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ is that we performers need a measure of self-indulgence. We crave it. Thrive on it. A bitch and a moan and a grumble. Arguable, I suppose, that this is an anodyne to the frustration and privation of pursuing any career as an entertainer. But I suspect the sort of strange individual (and we are all of us strange) who makes a living standing in front of other people would anyway want an outlet for that self-indulgence. The fool must die, but he’ll make sure it’s by his own hand. He’s going on his own terms: ‘Look at ME! Look at ME! I’m the FUNNY MAN!’

All of which makes me think of Stephen Fry. Few entertainers have been more determined to indulge on their own terms. I’ve just finished More Fool Me, Fry’s latest volume of autobiography. His first, Moab is my Washpot, was a formative experience for me. I encountered it when I was about fourteen. A revelatory explosion of unrequited love, wrecky homosexuality, feeling unable to ‘join in’ and generalised unhealthiness. Here was a life I understood very well. But in a sort of ‘word made flesh’ way: never had I imagined that an inner life could emerge so perfectly phrased. The second volume, The Fry Chronicles, whilst critically acclaimed, left me cold. Inevitable, in retrospect: how on earth could it follow the first one? But I was now noticing a certain pattern. Fry’s prose style knits together a chain of ghastly self-descriptions, embellished with superficial admonishments to the reader. To paraphrase:

I’m a foul, fat and ugly waste of skin, and I know you’re telling me off that, dear reader, for which you are utterly, utterly right, for writing hatefully of oneself is a dreadful habit, which only proves me a foul, fat and ugly waste of skin, and you mustn’t pity me for thinking that, for I know my foulness and fatness and ugliness to be the truth of me – to descriptive depths quite beyond your imagination…

It’s impossible to locate a crack in Fry’s armour. There’s simply no way to attack him. He’s in there first, doing it all on his own terms, just like Newley’s grandstanding entertainer. Self-revelation may be no more than a desperate self-protection.

Fry’s third memoir, More Fool Me, was critically roasted (not least in this weaselly, if insightful, piece) – but so much so that I found it surprisingly good (though still not up to Moab). This time, I was prepared for Fry’s style. No transparency now. It has hardened, callous-like. And it has become the whole show. A performance about performance, rather like ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ – the showbiz biog Fry once claimed he’d never stoop to write. A slightly ugly spectacle, but it’s hard to look away.

At this juncture, I should add that I don’t view self-indulgence as being the worst of all activities. It has to be carefully regulated, lest it prove self-destructive. But, to my way of thinking, it’s a fairly basic human need. Perhaps self-indulgence isn’t exactly the right phrase. Narcissism, maybe? Fry’s accused of narcissism quite often now. His fin de siècle career renaissance – the films, the books, the BAFTAs, QI above all – has rendered him ubiquitous, triggering the tediously predictable backlash. I think it’s unfair to accuse Fry of straightforward narcissism. It strikes me that one of the defining features of narcissism is that it doesn’t like hard work. Staring at one’s reflection in a pool is passive, not active. And Fry is a furiously hard worker; were it possible to earn a right to narcissistic self-regard, he’d have done so many times. But can any entertainer be free of narcissism? For someone, anyone, to stand on a stage they have to think, however deeply: ‘I AM EXTRAORDINARY!’ Even if he’s extraordinary for being such a waste of skin. Perhaps when narcissism turns active, it manifests as the necessary self-indulgence of the entertainer.

As it happens, ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ was not Newley’s first stab at the tragic clown. Much more famous is ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ from Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. It’s been covered by just about everyone (tortured entertainers all), but the Newley version proves most expressive. In this clip from Hollywood Palace, there again are those mesmeric, freewheeling, tell-all hands. And the full-face clown makeup suggested in ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’. The lyrics are a fog of narcissistic revelation: ‘It seems that I’m the only one that I have been thinking of…’ – ‘What kind of man is this? An empty shell!’ – ‘Why can’t I fall in love – like any other man?’ The last is particularly telling. Fry-like: affirming distinction. Shit, but extraordinary in it.

Newley’s self-revelations – more accurately self-protections – show where the entertainer’s self-indulgence truly lies. It’s out in the uncharted hinterland between narcissism and masochism. For the performer knows he will suffer, must suffer. We all know what we’ve signed on for – how could the prevalence of the tragic clown leave us in doubt? Unless we assume that we’ll be the first ones to crack it and locate unforced happiness in making entertainment. Which is purely narcissistic. Feeling hard done to is, bizarrely enough, a not unattractive part of the deal – especially for these performers, like Newley, who perform performance. Newley’s desire to suffer is redeemed by his compulsive need to tell everyone about that suffering. It’s the transformative effect of performance. Shit is converted into art; death into life. So if we must self-indulge, far better we do it on the stage. It drains the poison from our systems in a way that enriches.

The transformation also reveals that the suffering was never abject. It’s all a part of the show – a part without which the show really couldn’t go on. How Merman would scoff. Thus do Newley and Fry go arm-in-arm into their showbiz sunset. A flapping, sinuous flipper, hooked in the tendril of that bin-liner full of yoghurt.

Last Lessons

Coming so laggingly after the tour, it’s not surprising that this diary feels more like housekeeping. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of frenzied overwork – though it’s a whirlwind on which Sikes & Nancy has happily thrived. I’ve had a photoshoot at St Paul’s Cathedral, dashing up and down the cold stone steps, as well as at 48 Doughty Street, where Dickens wrote all of Oliver Twist. The latter took in Linda Marlowe, in full Miss Havisham regalia, the both of us leering and posturing behind the iron bars of the Marshalsea. The children did right to stare. I’ve spent day after day in the theatre during the Preview phase, twisting the show into its best-ever shape under the first-ever guidance of outside eyes. I’ve even survived the long-dreaded Press Night, thanks to the support of some wonderful friends, and have managed to avoid every last review. Aside from those extracts posted up outside the theatre, which is hardly likely to print ‘SHAMBLES’ or ‘EXCREMENT’ in bold type. And the voice has not only survived but strengthened. I’ve actually started to enjoy myself again. I must be careful.

Currently, I’m drifting between Trafalgar Studios and whatever vacant beds crop up around Southfields, Wimbledon, Palmers Green and Highgate. No doubt I’ll be writing through the whole experience at some point in the New Year. For now, though, I’ll devote my fractured energies to the last three dates of the tour. There’s a definite arc there, almost a narrative, which gives me the solemn duty of shortening the separate entries. Of trying, anyhow. Lucky you. But lucky me.

First, however, here are my previous Sikes & Nancy diaries: ‘Meeting the Villain-Hero’, ‘Dreaming to Order’, ‘Forcing the Soul’, ‘The Hertfordshire Horror’ and ‘Into the Black Lagoon’.

THE ATKINSON, SOUTHPORT (13TH NOVEMBER). I’m still reeling from the throat infection that surfaced in Guildford, though somewhat buoyed up by David Leonard’s kind words about my performance. At least I’ve had four days to recover. I pass the morning on juddering trains of grey and brown, arriving after midday to discover The Atkinson. It’s an all-purpose cultural emporium: museum, art gallery, library and theatre, fronted by some natty Victorian columns. The studio here is a gaping auditorium with prodigiously raked seating. Not what I was expecting. It’s as intimidating (and vertical) as the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House. There’s even a piano on the stage, which has to be wheeled from the catchment area of my prodigious gore. None of this does anything for my nerves, which steadily rise throughout an unfocused warm-up. It’s dragged-out, yes; staggered, and for that reason takes nearly three hours.

The show itself goes alright. Just. My vocal range is still coarsened, open vowels emerging with a ragged edge. Dismayed, I overcompensate with excessive energy, and tire before the midpoint. Joy of joys: the most wearying dramatics of Sikes & Nancy commence after the midpoint. I end frustrated (and moist, but mostly frustrated). I feel my brain is dull and unresponsive in the Q&A – still steaming, I imagine, with disappointment at not quite managing the predetermined noises. I overcompensate again, speaking some twenty minutes beyond the allotted time. No good for my ailing larynx, but I hope I efface all memory of the session’s first ten minutes: a madness came over the audience, where I would be interrupted with the next question after giving two or three words of reply. This was surprisingly difficult to break. Evening over, I collapse into my Travelodge bed. Such exhaustion is an urgent reminder: illness or not, there must be a better way to do this. The lesson is frustrated, though, as I still haven’t found the key to holding back. I resolve, at any rate, to defend Idina Menzel on the next occasion her voice doesn’t quite work properly. What it must be to sing – to sing, I ask you! – that particular Frankenstein Monster, knowing each time it’ll be watched by millions and pulled apart by demons. I’m lucky I’m only thwarted, unrecorded, in a studio in Southport. All the same. Could do with Menzel’s salary.

CRAMPHORN THEATRE, CHELMSFORD (14TH NOVEMBER). A hellish day. Traffic jams mean I’m clapped in the tour van for over seven hours before we reach Chelmsford. Such is the cruelty of the touring lifestyle: you reach the point of exhaustion, and then alone do you begin your day’s work. My trailing long legs and trailing long spine take some time to recover. My vocal anxieties have become chronic by now, though this particular venue is thankfully much smaller. Performance-wise, I don’t feel that Chelmsford is any great advance on Southport. It’s underpowered then overpowered; imprecise then too precise, pedantically so; slower than a dying slug, but more uncontrollable than a runaway train. Hissing. Spurting. Ever skirting about the target. And never once hitting it. An unexpectedly dim lighting state means that I play a good twenty minutes without any particular conviction that I can be seen. I very nearly pause to wrench the necessary chairs into the nearest splash of light. All that prevents me is a sense of how absurd it would look: the chairs are standing in for the monumental stone steps of London Bridge. The energies are fatally unbalanced tonight, and I emerge possibly more tired than at Southport.

The Q&A yields a surprise, however. One woman in the audience has been devastated by the play. She tells me that it took her right back to her time with her abusive and controlling ex. Particularly the look in Bill’s eyes come the Murder. (A friend has since told me the same in the London run.) I am quietly terrified. With no first-hand insight into what such relationships must be, I’ve chipped away at Nancy’s desperate lot from the outside. And, in my opinion, not particularly well that night. So this came as a valuable lesson. I mustn’t sabotage myself by trying to be my own audience. I am the vehicle at best. The play can yet mean something to those people in the dark. My self-persecuting intellect does not win out. Not necessarily.

THE OLD FIRE STATION, OXFORD (15TH NOVEMBER). An advance on yesterday, with a scanty four and a half hours in the van. There’s also the inspiriting thought that this is the last of the tour, and I’ll have a good few weeks to revive before entering the West End. I’ve never visited Oxford before, my Oxbridge experience being founded solely on the ‘-bridge’ suffix. But tramping about the town, looking balefully up at castellated walls and gates and towers, I’m reminded of my time at that other university. It was there that I first performed Sikes & Nancy – and gave it so fecklessly, so joyfully, that the event has been deified in my memory. I was so permanently stressed at university, that the theatre was the best and most consistent release for me (when the theatre wasn’t contributing to the stress, of course – which it often did). When I was most unhappily in love, I disappeared into Romeo and Juliet – and when my heart was utterly broken, I was transformed into Quasimodo, into The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A deep conviction that I was somehow unsightly, dysfunctional, peeping in at life from the margins, led to a vast sweep of small grotesque roles (my principal body of work at Cambridge – non-academic, obviously). And my frustration at how small these grotesque roles were led to Pickwick & Nickleby, the first of my one-man plays. No wonder I grew frustrated. Abidingly, the release was in the sheer physical ecstasy of doing the thing. All that nervous energy had to go somewhere. It’s ever been the case that I gain my best ease through discomfort. I became decided then. For the very first time on tour, I don’t bother to write any pre-performance notes. I decide to go forth and enjoy myself. The result is one of the best performances of the tour. I’m helped along by the venue: a dank and shadowy cubicle, every audience member within whispering distance. Still, there’s another lesson there…

… The lesson of Oxford has deepened at Trafalgar. Lightness. Quickness. Ease. Night after night, this has been my pre-state catechism. I consider the smallest (and therefore correct) amount of energy I need to deliver the performance. I shuffle slightly on the chair, locating my sitting bones to correct my breathing. Rearrange the catarrh in my neck. Then the houselights dim and I’m away. It now feels like someone else is doing it. A happy state, almost reverie, though probably sanctioned by the aggravation of various bits of the tour. Self-consciousness has flown for now. Lightness. Quickness. Ease.

I’ve now started thinking on the future of this production diary. It’s become a bit ploddingly dutiful over the last year. The most profound lesson of Sikes & Nancy has been to analyse what I do that bit less and simply get on with it. Everything benefits. I want to avoid the Kenneth Williams trap of ‘living off body fat’ (his words, describing his chatshow afterlife) – boring myself with the same stories and observations, delivered in the same hectoring voice. I’m going to speculate about more effective ways of furthering my acting.

January is to be a month of dreaming. I’ve already set it aside: a refreshingly blank slate. I’ll give myself over, fully and freely, to films, novels, biographies, plays. I’ll go on long walks. Listen to music. Dine on the forbidden cheese and chocolate. And I’ll recharge the batteries. Reassess. There shall be no writing. Not then. But when I do write again, I’ll see to it that it’s worthwhile. Not something I can only bring myself to read through my fingers. Something that breeds ease.

Meeting the Villain-Hero

Apologies for the delay, my tens (perhaps twenties) of unflaggingly devoted readers! The preparations for the West End run have been absorbing all my time of late: letter-writing, email-sending, voice-prepping, stamina-building, and, in time-honoured fashion, low-level show-worrying. The urge to get Sikes & Nancy out of my head and back on its feet is enormous by now. It’s also inevitable, I think, that there’s been less to comment on in the latter half of the tour. Too many unexpected abnormalities, by this stage in the run, would be worrisome. (Expected abnormalities – these I’ve duly chronicled.) But do stay put for an appearance from my villain-hero. And let me make amends with Sikes & Nancy diaries of times gone by: ‘Dreaming to Order’, ‘Forcing the Soul’, ‘The Hertfordshire Horror’ and ‘Into the Black Lagoon’.

OLD LIBRARY THEATRE, MANSFIELD (30TH OCTOBER). A close, wood-panelled chamber, carpeted in green; a game of Cluedo pressed into life. Well-suited to the murder-happy Sikes & Nancy! Our show’s been programmed as part of a scheme to build an audience for touring theatre in Mansfield, which apparently struggles here. I note with envy that Gervase Phinn’s one-man show – ‘An Evening with…’ rather than theatre – has completely sold out. We do well enough in the end, with some of the youth theatre exposed to the murderous rampage.

The show’s a shock to the system after the three-and-a-half week break. The volume I sweat is my constant barometer. I emerge nothing short of moist this evening. Physically, it’s all rather draining, but I’m pleased to find the show locked into my muscle memory. I’ve always been more confident in using my body than my voice – and vocally, the break makes the piece very challenging. There are constant discoveries, though, which are building into progress. Tonight I realise that I’m doing myself no favours with Fagin, whose glottal stops are instantly rupturing my vocal cords. This is easily remedied by appending a silent ‘h’ to the start of vowels: ‘you can talk as [h-]eat, can’t you?’, ‘not to do [h-]anything…’ and so forth.

There’s no voice training in the world that teaches you to produce a Fagin or a Sikes. It can at best give you the foundation. The only way to get their measure is to keep chasing them. Dickens lost his voice with pretty well every Reading. To combat this, he devised a vocal constitutional for his American tour:

At seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of cream, and two tablespoonfuls of rum. At twelve, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts, the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past ten, soup, and anything to drink that I can fancy. I don’t eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole twenty-four hours, if so much.

A diet compounded of dairy products, alcohol, and piping-hot Bovril. It was the worst thing he could have done. But Dickens’s willpower – his indomitable sense of rightness – was not be trifled with. For we actors who produce character voices, there’s also an unhelpful element of end-gaining. Our grotesque minds exaggerate our memories of our creations. Matt Lucas has observed that his voices inevitably get higher as time goes by. I find my pitching works in reverse: by now, I instinctively attempt Sikes in a voice so low that it’s almost painful. The answer is a little self-awareness – my voice is naturally quite deep – and sturdy pragmatism. It’s simply not possible to sustain so low a voice when you’ve having to shift to so many others. I am not Olivier (how well I know it) and I am not playing Othello.

CONNAUGHT STUDIO, WORTHING (31ST OCTOBER). A sense of occasion: acting on Halloween night before an unusually large audience. I often think of Sikes & Nancy as a spooky Halloween poem. Certain passages seem the overture to a Danse Macabre: ‘That time which, in the autumn of the year, may be truly called the dead of night…’. The witches’ sabbath has sounded at the back of my mind throughout this show. I listened compulsively to ‘When the Night Wind Howls’ during rehearsals in September; tonight, I conduct my pre-show stompings to ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ on a very windy seafront. I first got to know the witches’ sabbath through the cinema (my old essay on devilry takes in some of those permutations), so what a delight to find that the Connaught Studio is a converted picture palace, an old-fashioned relic from the silent era. Pete Walker’s The Flesh and Blood Show captures this seductive (to me) mingling of palatial grandeur and end-of-the-pier seediness. Denis Gifford writes movingly on the cinema’s power to raise the dead in his Pictorial History of Horror Movies. A heartfelt insight in a pun-laden book:

Of the Old Monsters, only Chaney remains. [If only. Chaney died in 1973.] The elder Chaney, Karloff, Lugosi… Laughton and Lorre and Veidt… Rathbone and Rains… Whale and Laemmle and Browning… The Scroll of Thoth runs from Atwill to Zucco. Yet they will be back, at the flicker of a projector, the touch of a TV switch, through their own medium – the only medium truly to revive the dead. The cinema.

This so-called studio felt like an arena from the stage. There was a vexing early period when we were scheduled for the massive Edwardian theatre next door, roughly three times the size. One develops a certain awe for how Dickens performed for thousands as a matter of course. We have a review – five stars – which I put off reading until the end of the tour. More fun was the immediate feedback of an audience heckle, when I announced that I was going backstage to remove the blood: ‘But you look good with it on!’ I may have escaped the Dungeon this Halloween. But certain things never change.

GUILDHALL THEATRE, DERBY (4TH-5TH NOVEMBER). I start the week somewhat apprehensive, knowing there are seven Murders to do. I’ve never committed more than four in a row, and that only once. It’s like entering a tunnel: no way to the light but straight ahead. First the darkness. Within my next twenty-six hours in Derby, I’ll have murdered Nancy three times over and led three question-and-answer sessions. Which is getting on for seven hours of non-stop speaking. I’m also suspicious about the dangers facing the voice in these question-and-answer sessions. Despite seeming laid-back, impromptu speaking can severely test the breath (and this on top of post-show breathlessness). Plus the lingering numbness (and breathlessness!) induced by the show make it tricky to monitor vocal damage. It’s for the best that these sessions are being retired after the tour.

I can well imagine Dickens reading in the Guildhall: a lectern wouldn’t look out of place here. Seating just shy of 250 – but feeling much more intimate – I feel this is about the sensible upper limit for Sikes & Nancy. Looking back, admittedly at some distance (and with the deranged bias of the actor), I feel that these were the best of the non-studio performances. A feeling of balance. In command of the piece’s dramatic and technical demands in the most equal measure yet; never feeling too exhausted or run-down (partly, I imagine, because of the knowledge of how many performances were to be done). I’m dimly aware, via Twitter, that someone else’s (re)view of Derby has popped up – very late, a few days shy of December. I’m determinedly not reading it, a policy I’m applying to all my press throughout the Trafalgar run. I wish this resolution stemmed from indifference or defiance or contempt. But I fear it’s primarily ego. A bad review is that most terrible of things, pain without meaning: you’re stung, yes, but for reasons that deserve no credit, bound up as they are in self-regard. And a good review can also wreak havoc with a performance, sullying the purity of the original conception. Unfortunately, though, reviews retain some capital for an unestablished actor. Particularly when you’re the one man in a one-man play. There isn’t much else to discuss… Why on earth do I get myself into these situations?

MILL STUDIO, YVONNE ARNAUD THEATRE, GUILDFORD (6TH-8TH NOVEMBER). Retire to bed, post-Derby, with an ominous swelling about the soft palate. Awake the next day to a full-blown throat infection. Infuriating: I wanted seven performances in a row, relatively unsullied, as preparation for Trafalgar. Though perhaps vocalising through illness is the ultimate preparation. The antidote is a whole lot of steam to coax away the low-level raspiness, and even more vocal rest (fighting the sound of the engine and motorway in our tour vehicle – this is appalling for the voice). It’s a blessing that we’ve decamped to a studio for the next four performances. I can whisper more, make eye contact with the audience, go for precision before volume. There’s also a psychological boost to the claustophobia of the venue, a converted old mill with a stream roaring beneath. Against the mill’s textured brickwork I cast Nosferatu-like shapes – thrillingly black – which I catch sight of mid-performance. It’s a fine stand-in for my invisible self, which I’m never able to see. No matter how many conversations I hold with myself – and that accounts for roughly half of Sikes & Nancy – I never turn quickly enough to catch sight of my other character. I am acting with Peter Pan’s shadow.

The audience members I run into are exceptionally lovely, more than compensating for my feelings of inadequacy with the infection. One man touched on my Irving obsession: ‘I’ve been going to theatre for forty years, and that was excellent. You must do The Bells next!’ Someone else quotes, at length, Ralph Richardson’s ‘dreaming to order’ at me – which either means he’s read my blog (truly miraculous) or that we’re on the same wavelength (still better than I deserve). Some of the question-and-answer sessions are very intimate – mostly due to torrential evening rains, hounding audiences back to their cars. One session is extremely brief, as only one person stays behind. One question, one answer, intimate two-minute chat. I give another session for two students at the Guildford School of Acting. Which is pleasant, but makes me feel a fraud: we’re roughly the same age, and they are at least in training. There is, however, some interesting discussion about word-painting. I increasingly believe this is key to why the piece works at all: provoked by the same stimuli, we create radically different images within our heads. I was also reunited with the prodigal Lucy-May – another Dungeon escapee, now making a great success of drama school.

My last day in Guildford brings one of the greatest delights of the tour. I finally meet David Leonard. I invited him to Sikes & Nancy over two years ago, when I was giving it a solitary go at the Tristan Bates – a stone’s throw from the Cambridge Theatre, where David was playing Miss Trunchbull (brilliantly) in Matilda: The Musical. It’s testament to the man’s thoughtfulness that, unprompted, he turned out to see me on tour. And sent me a text to say he’d quite like to say hello! David’s performances have wrought an untold influence on me. His pantomime villains were the first performances I saw that made me want to disappear into theatre. A voice that was Donald Sinden spiked with George Sanders; a graceful, silvery command of movement; eyes like possessed pinballs; and all the flamboyant devilry that excited me most. And his Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, which I saw in sixth form, remains one of the best dramatic performances I’ve seen in any theatre at any time. Partly great writing. But all David Leonard.

It was that Sikes & Nancy at the Tristan Bates that found me an agent-producer in Jimmy Jewell, as well as sowing the seed for Trafalgar Studios. It was also the one that Simon Callow saw. But David is an even older theatrical hero, so it was wonderful that I’d had chance to see him the day previous. I met up with David in the foyer before the Saturday matinee. A debonair gentleman, looking over the papers; and, like Callow, armed with a glass of red. Very nervous, I introduce myself. Instantly, he leaps up: ‘James, how wonderful to see you!’ He couldn’t have been more delightful. He was very encouraging about the show too. He said it reminded him of Peter Ackroyd’s London, with its descriptions of the poor crushed down by the weight of the city. I plan to make a study of Henry Mayhew’s character sketches whilst at Trafalgar.

David’s back in the York Theatre Royal pantomime this year, after two years away. I can’t wait to see it in January. The family is reunited.