In the Sixties most of us were onlookers, participants by proxy to s.omething happening in London, California and, in a joyless burst of French principle, Paris. Tucked up behind the Protestant work ethic north of the border, in a town where a slide rule was a status symbol and Daks jackets and Hush Puppies as hip as it got, we dreamed of cheap love, far less free, and roamed the desperate, virginal wastelands of a Scots border town Saturday night for any trace of it. But it remained fixed fast somewhere in England and the Big Sur. Occasional outriders of the experience washed up at the Drill Hall for gigs: Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, the Four Pennies, the Animals - "Hi Dumfries!! " "Hi Brian! " - we were not the gold star tour date. A trip to Carlisle was hitting Manhattan; I saw the Searchers sing &'Needles and Pins' at Carlisle Market Hall, earlier pathfinders saw the mythic Cliff Richards before Christ and our mothers claimed him. All in all, the Sixties washed past us, a sea rhythmically slapping a private, hidden beach, at most touching us tangentially. In the loo of the only half decent hotel in town, my meditation of the parabolas of reconstituted McEwan's heavy against the porcelain was interrupted by some long hairs slotting into the remaining urinals. I looked up and found I was pissing with the Hollies, breathing the same air that was "all that I need". Gasoline alley, not quite, but I felt a tremor of the cultural upheaval. Say something! Say something, I screamed mutely to the disorder in my head but remained silent, didn't stare - one didn't stare at men in bogs then, there was a Wee Free church in the same street. I was scared, but gratified they washed their hands before adjusting the barnets and leaving me alone again in a provincial urinal in a Burton suit and Hush Puppies with another barren Saturday stretching out to the last barren Saturday. But I had a story: social validity was bestowed on me in that lavatory - I became known as the one who had pissed with the Hollies.
The Hollies were not a seminal experience; that came a little later. I was never hardcore rock; by the time the Beatles split I had long finished with pop music apart from one Seventies experience as a young actor in Leeds, when Pink Floyds' 'Dark Side of the Moon' and marijuana took me hostage. This glittering Roman candle of musical creativity - and the dope - projected me every night from a Leeds two-up-and-two-down, into an open car eating two lane blacktop above the Big Sur, banners of blonde hair streaming from the California babe by my side with Pink Floyd melting the stereo. More than 20 years later that fantasy became reality, a little late but better late than etc... My second wife is Californian and there we were, albeit in the early après midi of our glory, her blonde highlights streaming from her Black Fly sunspecs, 'Dark Side of the Moon' hammering the hills of the Big Sur; the dreams of Leeds come true. Socrates' examined life is a process of disillusion. At 22 and stoned out of your head, 'Dark Side of the Moon' is unmatchable. At 49 and stone-cold sober, it's dross. Pink Floyd were ejected and replaced by Beethoven Bagatelles. Time passes.
By then I was a permanently unemployed actor who had stopped describing himself as a thesp, with no idea what I was, apart from desperate. The launch of that drooping arc of ambition was in the testosterone-boosted anything-is-possible message of the Sixties; the compulsion to break away from my own provincialism, to erase and re-create myself as someone I wanted to be seemed reasonable back then. Impossible of course, but worth wasting three or four decades trying. The seminal moment that fired me off came - not long after the pee-in with the Hollies - via the clichéd innocent 'phone call, inviting me to a private screening at our local Georgian Theatre of an un-named film exclusively for members of the Local AmaDram Society. To be given by someone special. No further explanation.
So we gathered in the green room and had tea and Wagon Wheels, and John Laurie burned in, a fedora lidding his manic stare, with two cans of film in his arms. He was wearing a belted raincoat and had a high, wired-up energy. Known to the couch culturati as Private Fraser in 'Dad's Army', Laurie had a formidable classical CV alongside the long list of roles in many a fine British film before 'Dad's Army' bestowed on him and a gallery of elderly character actors an unexpected September song to careers they thought over. He was from our town and we'd all seen him on our Pye or Ecko black and white tellies or at the pictures betraying Robert Donat or bringing a whiff of shortbread to Powell and Pressburger's classy films. Whenever he appeared my mother would tell me for the umpteenth time he was from our town, then complain that he never got the leading roles - obviously letting the town down. I first saw him in the flesh when I was a 10-year-old ballboy for Queen of the South, in the days when Queens were a decent team in the old Scottish First Division and the terraces were thick with bonnets and Bovril. Emblematically in his fedora and belted raincoat, Laurie was being hosted by the club director who was about three feet shorter than he, and the clarity of Laurie's voice and enunciation brought out in high relief the heather-bog level of my own 10-year-old prole crudeness. But I noticed he had nicotine stains on his fingers. Jack Hawkins would never have nicotine-stained fingers. (Actually Jack Hawkins did.)
Later this relationship with the dramatic arts continued when my school blazer was bought in his sister's outfitters shop. Miss Laurie had a square of the original cloth with the original dye from the original Academy blazer; this conferred great social cachet on her as crême de la crême blazer retailer; she was an academic by association and a family with serious ambitions for a child at the Academy would never purchase a blazer from Binns or the Co-op with their variable dyes; a Laurie blazer was de rigeur, whatever that meant. So the Lauries were an oddity, she with the flannel and felt traditions of a school founded in the 10th century by the dumb friars who had given the town its name and the citizens their disposition, and her brother, an artistic emigré blazing with Scots technicolour intensity by the side of Colonel Blimp, and it was this fire that burned into us that Friday night, and combusted in me to blow my horizons way beyond Carlisle Market Hall.
The film cans contained the Russian 'Hamlet', directed by Grigori Kosintzev with the luminous actor Innokenti Smotunovsky eclipsing everything Shakespearian I had watched, been lectured with, bored by, conned by rote, swotted and answered in my Laurie blazer over a hot Bic and ruled feint examination papers. It drove a scale and depth of drama into me that triggered a little epiphany in my Burton's breast, one I could never admit to my friends down the Drillie. Some awful, seductive door opened in my head and in the darkness when the last Cyrillic credits faded, I was left with the thought that that was what the fucking fuss was about. The Hollies burst like soap bubbles and Shakespeare and the theatre got me.
Capt Mainwaring: Worried about Fraser, Wilson.
Sergeant Wilson: Really, sir?
Capt Mainwaring: All this Shakespeare.
Sergeant Wilson: Shakespeare? Rather splendid, don't you think?
Capt Mainwaring: Bit arty for me Wilson. What concerns me is that I saw a pair of tights on Fraser's line last washing day.
There were tights in Laurie's closet alongside army issue and porridge as Scots Various in innumerable British films. The Second World War - in which he actually had been a member of the Home Guard - cut off a driving classical career at the Old Vic. Years later I came across a photo of his Arabic Scots Othello, tucked up against Chamberlain's Polish ultimatum, big eyes burning under winged eyebrows and layers of body black, his hair swept up in a flyaway tangle only dared by artists or pansies, the skinny frame hugged by white silk, terrifyingly like my Aunt Meg with PMT.
Years later Laurie travelled to Moscow with the RSC to perform at the Mahat - the Moscow Arts - to actors of the pre-soap generation, the mecca of modern acting and first great theatre of the 20th century. These were years of the Cuban missile crisis. The RSC trip was a diplomatic ice-breaker in the Cold War, but Soviet paranoia confined the company to the hotel, the theatre and official trips to Museums of the Revolution and Party tables with scattered borsch and vodka. However, along the way, Laurie saw the film, got his hands on it and what he brought to us in Scotland that Friday was Shakespeare unmatched by anything at Stratford or The Cut.
Fast-forward 20-odd years, to when Gorby and Raisa were burning across the Soviet sky and there was a frenzy at the manna that was about to fall from the capitalist heaven. I am now a pro treading those same boards that had squeaked under Stanislavsky, Chekov and Private Fraser. Disappointment stripped the gilt from the arc of my own career, the warm glow first lit that night in Scotland under a Russian Elsinore had turned to frozen sludge. I was poisoned by the bitterness endemic in a profession increasingly unconcerned with merit and laden with self mythology and spin, that promotes idealism in others then stands back to watch them founder on the rocks of reality, nepotism and celebrity. I was a set of rotting ribs on a sand bar - excess to any serious needs. Prior to curtain up on our 'historic' first night in Moscow, a tall, blond man walked on stage and spoke to the audience, got them laughing - for which we were grateful; there wasn't much to laugh about in our productions - we were boring for England, though the Russians were far too gracious ever to admit that to us (with one exception to whom I will come later). The man doing the warm up was Innokenti Smotunovsky, whom I had last seen expiring existentially on the cliffs of Elsinore under John Laurie's hot admiration.
At the party afterwards, he sat on a table in a corner with an American woman, keeping to himself, completely ignored by the Manchester United of British Theatre tearing into the Georgian champagne, caviar and blinis. After much hesitation, fortified by wine that could only be drunk by developing dypsos or white shark, I introduced myself. I was the only member of our august theatre company to speak to him. I told him the Laurie story and how his performance had prodded me towards the cattle farm of acting. He was astonished that people knew him a continent and a political world away, that a piece of the Soviet had travelled to a tiny town buried in quiet, foreign borders, and knocked out the clanspeople. Art shrinks time and distance, cultures and colour. He was a big, powerful, handsome man in youthful 60s, his face gleamed with humour and bashfulness as he pumped my hand ad infinitum with the grip of a wrestler. His gratitude and admiration for our circus vaulted over each other; he kept lying that the Shakespeare we had performed was the "bist, bist, bist Shakespeare in Russia EVER!" and I became slightly uneasy; it was all too over the top. I never found who the American companion was or how a Hero of the Soviet was hanging out an American - the Berlin Wall was still well and truly vertical then - she made no effort to explain herself, but at one point said "See?" to him in a way which made me recognise instantly what was driving the flash flood of flattery. The eternal doubt of the gifted actor. He had no belief in himself. Years of Oscars, knighthoods and Orders of Lenin cannot banish the doubt; it lurks on stages, in rehearsal rooms, locations and studios waiting for its prey and always gets him; the bigger the better. Years after we worked together, Tony Hopkins confided that when he was standing onstage being admired by his fellow actors, audience, the world and his wife, he was telling himself he was a fat, balding Welsh actor with hairy legs who couldn't act and everyone knew it.
Smotunovsky remembered the RSC trip. Kosintsev had met them. He asked where I trained and pumped my hand again when I told him RADA; he had visited and spoken to the students. At this point a little comedy played out behind us. An actor with the Devil and a pint of Georgian wine in him had asked an old professor from Moscow University what he thought of our production. The Prof promised an answer after three glasses of wine. In those last days of Communism the Russian theatre and academic worlds were still close - acting was a serious vocation, not a layabout's alternative to proper work and academics were respected not derided as they - correctly in my opinion - are over here. The three glasses of Georgian champagne had gone down and he demanded quiet and declared "I watch your production and eetsa flap!" Smotunovsky was embarrassed by this open display of ill manners, but many of us brimming with resentments down in the lower decks of this ship of vanity, were pleased that someone had seen through us and had the balls to say so.
He was often around, haunting the theatre, his greatness a harmonic to our polished mediocrity, and whenever he saw me there was a smile or a nod or that vice handshake. He witnessed a wonderful clash of cultures one afternoon when we were technically rehearsing the third play in our repertoire. Our director was in absentia again, down the Heineken Bar at the Hotel National, lagering it up with his latest wife-to-be and his assistant was left to sort out the technical and logistical problems. The assistant was a Glaswegian nicknamed Fur-Fuck's-Sake and Smotunovsky lounged in the aisle with a Russian film actor who turned up after the wall collapsed in a Channel Four series called 'The Knock'. They were riveted by the incomprehensible Glaswegian son of Shakespeare taking Sergei - the Mahat's pimply, stage director whose hair grease-smeared his fake Levi's - through the entrances and exits.
"So Sergei, when ra scene is ended ra boys exit through that stage left pass door intae ra auditorium where they huv a very quick change to come back oan doon the central aisle through the audience fur the rustic dance. Got me?"
"You can't use that stage left pass door."
"Fur fuck's sake! Whudye mean ye cannae use the stage left pass door??"
"We don't own that door."
"Fur fuck's sake, whudye mean ye dinnae own the door??"
"That door is owned by the KGB."
"Oh fur fuck's sake!"
"It leads to Gorbachev and Raisa's box and there is a KGB guard on duty all the time..."
"Fur fuck's sake fuckin' KGB! I don't believe this!"
"..I can open it for you but if your actors go through he will shoot them."
"Fur f... Anything wrang wi' the stage right door?"
Standing by one of the boxes, Smotunovsky and the other actors wondered why we were on our backs at this exchange of bon mots.
A choreographer from the Bolshoi and a tall, goatee'd tenor with a high voice, thin, endless legs and a pot belly, hooked up with a bunch of us and showed us Moscow and in the wandering, half-understood conversations informed us that Smotunovsky had spent time in a mental hospital. I was offended; my personal story was being tarnished. Our western reflex assumed he was a dissident; they disagreed, he had "troubles with his mentals..." They also told us his daughter was a great actress (true) and that his son was a heroin addict. In a secret society, rumour is the ordinary person's dissidence. About his daughter they were right, but a Russian former Mahat actress who became a neighbour of mine in London in the 90s denied that Smotunovsky had troubles with his mentals and had heard nothing about heroin in the family.
I saw Smotunovsy again when the Mahat brought 'Uncle Vanya' to the National and he gave us the eponymous hero. I was out of work and the kind of actor who disappeared when the job ended: work was life, unemployment death. I should have gone backstage to see him, shared a cup of coffee and warned him about the health risks in the National canteen, I should have been courteous enough to say hello. But I couldn't. I watched a matinée and rationalised that he wouldn't want to be disturbed. He had told everyone at RADA just before I became a student that he prepared for a performance with half an hour's free mime followed by half an hour's specific mime. Most British actors prepare with a large brandy. I rationalised if I visited I would disturb his preparation, but the truth was that I was ashamed of the ordinariness of my threadbare career, so lurked in the darkness of the auditorium and left. He wouldn't have given a damn, of course; he would have been glad to say hello. The next thing I came across about him was his obituary.
I met John Laurie again, just after drama school, hanging about in a police uniform for my one line in a late episode of 'Softly Softly' in a BBC studio assembly area. The cast of 'Dad's Army' wandered out of their studio for a tea-break. Arthur Lowe kept pacing somewhere below chest height, ticking over his concentration; John le Mesurier trailed his hangdog distraction after a drift of cigarette smoke. I was at the automatic drinks dispenser when I heard a broad Border accent. "S'cuse me son, could ye git fourpence oot of mah hand? I havnae got mah glesses and I need fowerpence for mah tea but ah cannae see." I turned and saw Laurie's hand extended up to me with a mound of pennies, halfpennies, shillings, tanners. He didn't recognise me; he probably couldn't see me. That clear, urbane voice I first heard in my ballboy shorts seemed coarse after my years at Rada and my Jekyll re-creation of myself. I took four coppers and got him his tea then told him I was from his town. The eyebrows knitted. "What's your faither's name?" My father was a well known amateur musician and church organist. Laurie kept muttering his name over and over to himself then announced that his sister would know him, as she played the fiddle. I told him I got my blazer from his sister. "So you're an Academy boy? " I told him I had trained at RADA. "A Royal Academy boy. " I started to tell him about that Friday night in the Theatre Royal when John Le Mesurier had barked at him and Laurie had to leave for the studio. The last thing he said was "Good luck wi' the acting", then he was gone, like the Hollies, back to Warmington-on-Sea, the last line against Hitler, before the world turned lax and sour. Laurie lasted quite a few more years, but I never saw him again, was never able to thank him, or blame him and the giant Russian.
When Laurie breezed Shakespeare into my life we were still at Cold War with Russia. He and Smotunovsky ignored that, and although we British actors then were seduced by Brando and the other Strasberg mannerists, we knew the real stuff was Russian. I was privileged to work with George C Scott and idling through the long hours of inactivity on a film set mentioned Smotunovsky and Kosintsev's Hamlet. He was appalled. "You watch Russian films?" Yessir, General Patton, sir, we do, and if it wasn't for them Ruskies and Private Fraser, you'd be talking German and I'd be selling agricultural insurance in the Scottish Borders.
