Most of my professional life has been spent as a theatre actor and most of my roles have been in Shakespeare’s plays. We are lucky to have him in this country. He keeps lots of actors gainfully employed. The earliest photos I have are of performances at school where we had a brilliant director, the headmaster’s wife. She was formidable and I reckoned I learnt most of what I needed in the profession from her..

My passion for the stage pursued me to Oxford University where I featured in a famous production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Nevill Coghill. He was the famous professor who created the wonderful modern English translation of “The Canterbury Tales”. It was a swash-buckling version where the final words of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ read -

“And Nicholas is branded on the bum,

And God save all of us to Kingdom Come”.

We performed the show in Worcester College Gardens, the most beautiful in Oxford, including its famous lake. I played Puck. They built duckboards just under the surface of the water so that when I went to collect the magic purple-hearted bloom I was able (apparently) to run across the water. There was a communal gasp from the audience at this brilliant coup de theatre. (5, 6 & 7). The great actor John Gielgud came to see it and was mightily impressed.

My professional career in the theatre didn’t start till I was twenty-five. I got lucky and signed up with Britain’s first Off/Off Broadway venue The Mercury in Notting-Hill Gate (8 & 9). It was a weird piece called “And These Is Not All” which defied all the laws of logic, gravity and thermodynamics. It was huge fun.

Whilst there I encountered the brilliant ‘Freehold’ company directed by the amazing Nancy Meckler. I was mesmerised and begged to join this mould-breaking troupe. They were inspired by the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski who had developed a whole new theatre genre which depended on great physical flexibility, strength and skill, absolute focus and a determination to capture the emotional heart of a performance, often transcending speech. It was like entering a different level of reality rooted in our ancient instincts. The experience was a total challenge for me and I will admit now that I was constantly trying to catch up with its demands. The doors of perception kept flying open and I was forever projected out of my comfort zone. I learnt a lot but was confronted by how little I knew.  Each morning we honed our bodies with exercise and physical improvisation. A key element of this was ‘The Cat’, a series of moves including yoga headstands, flying tumbles, head-over-heals and cartwheels. I got really fit. I was with Freehold from 1967 to 1969, a tremendous time where change was in the air, not just in theatre but the arts in general, in society and politics. At that time we were rehearsing at The Oval House Theatre which had become a hotbed of theatre ferment. We shared the space with The People Show, The Pip Simmons Group and Monstrous Regiment. It was a magnificent, sweaty existence, surviving on almost no money.

Freehold performed ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles at The Edinburgh Festival and were a palpable hit. We got snapped up by some European producers and supported by The Brtish Council we found ourselves suddenly at The Venice Biennale, The Akademie der Kunst in Berlin and The Mikery near Amsterdam. They were some of my best days. (Sadly, I only have one photo of Freehold from that time - 10).

My next venture was to form a group of actor/musicans called “Telltale”. We had great success on a TV series called “Rainbow”. We did the music, performing a song each episode. I am really proud of what we did. Three of us co-wrote the theme-song and I sang the lead. It has become something of a classic and we still get royalties for it fifty years later. I was gutted when the band broke up because, for a short period of time I had achieved my dream to make music in a communal situation, free of the strictures of the professional music business and all in the (relative) countryside. To recover I returned to Jesus College Oxford to complete a post-graduate diploma in Social Anthropology, an abiding passion.

Refreshed, I returned to theatre and spent three years between 1979 and 1982 with The Young Vic, principally playing Rosencrantz in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” which toured to, among other places, Hong Kong. The theatre is now refurbished and in very good nick. In those days it was a super place to work but it had a leaky roof. There were times when I was giving a deathless performance and straining every fibre of my being to entertain my audience when it became clear that they were mesmerised by drops of water dripping rhythmically from the ceiling and splashing centre-stage. On some occasions I could be seen floundering around on the roof in full costume and make-up re-arranging the plastic sheeting covering the holes. It was acting at the coal-face (11 & 12).

This was followed by a long period working consistently in such productions as New Perspectives in Nottinghamshire playing Dickens in ”Penny Dreadful” , portraying Chaucer in “The Canterbury Tales” with the Cleveland Theatre Company, giving my Doolittle on a massive tour of “My Fair Lady” in Europe, “My Cousin Rachel” in a tour of rep theatres such as Derby Playhouse and The Cheltenham Everyman plus two seasons in Williamson Park for The Lancaster Duke’s Playhouse. This entailed promenade performances of “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Jungle Book” where the audience moves to different locations to experience contrasting scenes. It was pure delight and very popular.

After a short stint with the RSC in “The Cherry Orchard” (31) I made acquaintance with “Illyria’, a marvelous outdoor theatre company run by the mega-talented Oliver Gray. His template is to always use just five actors who play a variety of roles, often making lighting costume changes. His productions always have bags of pace and are never dull. I worked with them over a number of years, always performing in their Shakespeare productions. It was a vintage time for me. We worked incredibly hard doing everything, the driving, the setting up, the performing and the get-outs. We criss-crossed the entire nation usually playing National Trust-type properties. I can safely say that I have worked at a majority of the most beautiful places from Cornwall to the north of Scotland. On a few notable occasions we ventured further afield. One summer we played our usual castles and great houses in the UK but also toured to Vancouver and Orlando. The Canadians and Americans loved us. They had never seen Shakespeare done with such brio, irreverence, skill and love.

I’ll mention a couple more acting jobs which remain close to my heart. I had the great good fortune to be employed by the Liverpool Everyman, a theatre with a wonderful theatrical history. Twice I performed in their famous Rock’n’Roll Pantos. Put a Scouse audience together with a wild show and you have a recipe for dynamite. The first winter I appeared in “Alice In Boogie Wonderland”, the second in “Treasure Island” a rather louche telling of the classic story of pirates and buried treasure. Somehow the writer managed to bring in a Dame character who was Jim Hawkin’s mum. Whatever, it was a chance for me to do some classic ham, camp acting. I was the only southerner in the company and the director gently took me aside at the commencement of rehearsals to ask if I would mind trying to do a Scouse accent. He needn’t have bothered. I am the best actor of accents in the world (according to me). On cue I delivered the thickest Merseyside argot ever recorded. My signature utterance was “Where’s me locket?” (apparently I had just lost it.) The third syllable lends itself to a particular adenoidal, Scouse sound. As the performance unfolded that sound became more and more pronounced and guttural. It was greeted with increasing hysterical laughter

((I was born and raised in Wiltshire and will give you a monologue in a fierce West Country dialect if asked).

And, talking of the West Country and strong accents I will now reminisce about a show at The Tobacco Factory theatre in Bristol. There I appeared in a lovely production of “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. It is set firmly in the state of Missouri. The director was determined that we should master that particular Mid-West accent. Say no more. I played “The King”, a con-man who claimed to be the exiled monarch of France. Luckily, someone at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School specialised in teaching accents and we all engaged ourselves in mastering the particular flat delivery, the rolling rhotoid “r”sound that distinguishes the Missouri pattern of speech. Blow me down, but a number of people from the US came to see the show and could not believe that we were’nt rednecks from that very part of the world but simple Brits. Memories are made of this.