Tales from the wings
Michael Vestey
There was a time in my childhood when I thought I might like to become an actor. Wisely. I decided against it. Perhaps it was my experience in a school house play competition that decided it for me. It was really one of those playlets written for amateur companies and the plot hinged on my being poisoned and expiring on a sofa.
I was to arrive at a country house and, for reasons I cannot remember, be given coffee by a butler and then die. I noticed the coffee arriving on a tray but to my horror the fool playing the butler immediately walked off with it again, thus removing the crucial prop. Had I the makings of a proper actor I would have followed him saying smoothly, 'This way, I think, Jenkins. Thank you so much.' Instead a kind of paralysis enveloped me. Finally, in desperation I picked up the nearest receptacle, an ashtray, and drank from it with the words, `Ah, very good coffee', before falling gratefully on to a sofa in feigned agony. We did not win the competition.
Real actors know how to improvise when such hideous embarrassments strike as I discovered from Ned Sherrin's Theatrical Anecdotes, on Radio Four each day in the week before Christmas, recorded at the Komedia Theatre in Brighton. Acknowledging it might be apocryphal, as so many are, or an embellishment, he told a story about Sir Donald Wolfit. He's supposed to have said to an actor when a gun didn't go off, 'Kick me!' And as the man kicked him he turned to the audience and collapsing cried, 'The boot was poisoned.'
Wolfit and his wife Rosalind Iden toured the country with Shakespeare. At the end of each performance he would address the audience, and one evening announced, 'Next week, we shall play the Scottish play. I shall play the Thane and my lady wife —.. 'Your wife's an old bag,' a voice from the audience shouted. 'Nevertheless, she will play . . . '
No doubt every walk of life has its amusing anecdotes but the acting world has more than most and they usually involve
well-known and colourful people. As a result many of Sherrin's stories were familiar but as he delivered them well, having known personally a number of the protagonists, they were still funny. He ran through his alphabet of anecdotes starting with one about the late Robert Atkins, who suffered a heart attack at 80. Recovering in hospital he decided to keep his voice in shape by loudly reciting passages of Shakespeare. An old man in a nearby screened-off bed complained. The matron told Atkins that the other patient was extremely ill and unlikely to survive. Atkins appeared at his bedside and told him, 'I hear you don't like Shakespeare. I also hear that you are about to meet him.'
Some of these stories, even when true, have been attributed to the wrong people. Sherrin cited John Barrymore, a light comedian and later matinee idol who turned to playing Hamlet so successfully that he was asked to lecture on Shakespeare when he brought the production to London. To one student's inquiry, 'Did Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?', he replied, 'Well, he certainly did in the Chicago company.' Sherrin reminded us of the British version which goes. On tour always, in the West End never.'
Sir Henry Irving, the first actor to be knighted, was giving his Hamlet and was flattered to see a woman in the audience crying. He summoned her backstage afterwards and said how moved he was that she had been moved. 'Indeed I was,' she said. 'I have a young son myself play-acting somewhere in the north and it broke me up to think that he might be no better at it than you.'
Sherrin spoke of his old friend, the late Coral Browne, who went to Russia with a Royal Shakespeare Company King Lear. She asked the management if there was a role for her husband, Philip Pearman. She was told that there was nothing suitable. She demanded a script and running through it she found the page she was looking for. 'There you are,' she said, 'the perfect part. A camp near Dover.' Betsy Drake. the American actress once married to Cary Grant, was staying on an Onassis yacht when she was told that the bar stool on which she sat was covered with the skin of a whale's scrotum. 'Oh my God, I'm sitting on Moby's dick.'
Then there was the actress Sylvia Miles who was walking through New York with Tennessee Williams. The playwright saw a very thin woman across the street. 'Sylvia, look at that woman. She's so thin.' 'Well, yes, Tennessee, that's anorexia nervosa.' 'Sylvia, my dear, you know everybody.' I suppose we hope these anecdotes are true because we like to think they were uttered by such amusing people. Interestingly, there were few stories about younger actors of today. Perhaps anecdotes about them have yet to emerge and a Ned Sherrin of the future will be their chronicler. Either that, or they take themselves rather seriously.
Previous page
