Just Biggins. Christopher Biggins
Smith. I rushed towards her with all the passion and idealism of youth. But I never ran away again when I saw the ugly truth. I loved her close up just as I had loved her from afar. I wasn’t going to let a little bit of reality get in my way. I never have. It was clear from day one at Salisbury that I was so much younger than everyone else in the company. But for me, of all people, that wasn’t a problem. I’d been around older people all my life. It suited me.
So did my role. As a student assistant stage manager, I was everyone’s general dogsbody. I helped research, track down and collect the props. I was on the book, ready to prompt at each performance. I swept floors, picked up rubbish, even cleaned the toilets in the auditorium. And I barely had time to think. We worked on a fast, tough regime, putting on new plays every second week. Cast, read through, rehearse, perform, repeat. It was relentless. It was intoxicating.
My parents came to most of the shows, especially when I had a role. And we had fun. It was like a little game to see how many items from around their home they would see on stage in each production.
And my magpie tendencies were only one part of my poor mother’s problems. If I wasn’t ‘borrowing’ things for my latest production, Dad was still selling them to make a quick buck and enjoy the fun of the deal. No wonder Mum always had to check before she sat down in her own front room. We’d both take the chair from underneath her given half a chance.
‘Excuse me, son. Do your parents know you’re out in the middle of the night?’
Being stopped by the local bobbies at 2am was another regular part of my new routine. At the end of each play’s short run, I got lumbered with much of the get-in and get-out process. I would start packing up the props and pulling the scenery apart in the wings while the actors were still on stage out front. Then I would put down the screwdrivers and join them for the curtain call before getting on with the job. Most times the clear-up took well into the early hours, hence my moonlit walks home.
What an innocent age that those walks should attract the attention of the police. How grown-up I felt when I told them about my job.
‘I work in the theatre,’ I would say. What a wonderful phrase. I wasn’t even 17 but I had already found my calling.
At the Rep I wasn’t just learning how to put on plays. I was getting a master class in the whole theatrical experience. I loved it. Lesson one came when our passionate stage manager, Jan Booth, told me off for the way I had addressed our star, the marvellous Stephanie Cole, who is a dear friend to this day.
‘Here’s your script, Stephanie,’ I had said as I bounded on to the stage.
‘It’s Miss Cole to you,’ Jan told me in a fierce whisper afterwards. And so it was – at least during working hours. I liked the hierarchy. I could see that luvviness only lasts so long. Being in rep taught me that theatre is a business and that, if something goes wrong, backstage or on stage, then someone has to be held accountable. Everyone needs to know what their roles and responsibilities are.
Unfortunately, I didn’t always get to grips with all of mine.
One of our early plays was a murder mystery set in deepest Devon. When the curtain rose, the first thing the audience heard was a carriage clock (from my parents’ house) strike midnight. The second thing they should have heard was the ringing of a phone. I was on props one night and was watching from the wings as the sole actor on stage listened to the clock and then froze. I froze with him. I had forgotten to put the phone on the table. And I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Once again Jan showed me the way.
She picked up the phone from the top of a pile of boxes backstage, walked to the back of the set and knocked on the door.
‘Who is it?’ our lead actor asked, with no idea what might be coming next.
‘I’m here to install your telephone,’ replied Jan.
‘Do come in.’
‘I’ll put it here.’ On stage, in her ordinary clothes, Jan walked to the table, placed the phone on top, tucked the wire under the carpet and turned to leave.
‘Goodnight, sir.’
‘Goodnight.’
Then the phone rang and the play began. What class.
Fortunately I wasn’t the only one to mess up occasionally. Dear Jane Quy, one of our assistant stage managers, was ‘on the book’ in my place one night. For us this meant raising and lowering the curtain as well as being ready to prompt. It’s not the most exciting job in the business, so you really need a hobby to help pass the time. Jane’s hobby was to knit. She was a champion knitter and would work away – fortunately in total silence – while the performance went on to her left. She never once missed her place in the script.
But it did all go wrong one night when she was finishing a stitch as the end of the first act approached. Her knitting, her needles and two balls of bright-green wool all got caught in the curtain’s pulley system. For some reason this short-circuited the whole contraption. The curtain itself barely moved. But Jane’s colourful knitting made a slow procession all the way around our makeshift proscenium arch and all the way back again.
It got us the biggest round of applause of the night.
I don’t think I could have stayed an actor for the next 50 years if I hadn’t had that grounding backstage in Salisbury. I don’t think my love affair with theatre would have survived if I hadn’t seen all its warts from the start. But at the time the props, the curtains and the book weren’t enough.
I wanted to learn how to act. And fortunately I was in very good company. Stephanie – sorry, Miss Cole – was an inspiration. I would watch her in rehearsal, and from the wings in a performance. She could grab an audience. She made bad writing sound good. And, oh God, did she make us all laugh.
She became a true pal, despite her lofty position at the top of the Salisbury tree. I think I first fell in love with her when she was in rehearsal for Mrs Hardcastle in that first production of She Stoops To Conquer when I was still a nervous little new boy in the company. She had to go down three steps while reciting three key lines. But that first rehearsal she tripped. ‘Oh, f**k, c**t, shit,’ she spluttered as she tried to regain her balance. I was such a little baby I barely knew what the words meant. I certainly didn’t know that a woman could use them.
But I think I realised that Stephanie would be great company in the years ahead. I was certainly right about that.
Stephanie wasn’t my only teacher, of course. Oliver Gordon, the Rep’s director, gave me some tough love lessons from the start. His message was pretty simple: ‘Don’t muck about. Go on stage left, say your lines, then piss off stage right.’ That was pretty much the way he saw it. In rep there was no faffing around, no rocket science and no method-acting silliness. Oliver’s message was that if you’re good you get re-hired. If not, try working in a shop. It was sink or swim. Oliver was a real Arthur Askey type and he was also a perfect pantomime dame. His Widow Twankey in Aladdin was a template of mine for years. And we were such a close, tight ship in Salisbury. Oliver’s brother wrote lots of our pantomimes, was married to Stephanie and was another big influence on me.
Everything we did in Salisbury was on a shoestring, but the audiences would never have known it. If she had been asked, I swear that our wardrobe mistress, Barbara Wilson, could quite literally have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. In fact, she could probably have made six. We pulled together and it all felt fantastic. For me, the lonely boy who had always felt just a little bit different, it was a revelation. I was in the world I had dreamed of. I was in my element.
For pretty much the only time in my life I also felt as if I was in the money. My £2 a week was pretty paltry. But I was living at home and in my second year at Salisbury my wage rose to £8 a week. After a few more months I hit £12 a week when I was made a full stage manager, while still living at home and paying next to nothing to my parents. Dad’s garages were all doing well and he