I think that day was the first time they understood why I’d refused to follow them into the slavery of a normal job. Now that they’d glimpsed this world of fringe festivals and beer tents and circus arts, they couldn’t believe that this was my everyday life. Richard watched the girl disappear and then continued his eulogy to my existence.
‘You know how people become bone-marrow donors or kidney donors?’ he said. ‘Well, how about if you just donate your entire life to me? How about if we have a life transplant?’
And he took another gulp of beer but tipped the glass back too much so that it spilled all over his shirt and his offer looked even less attractive.
‘Last week …’ I confided, ‘I had a fling with a Marilyn Monroe lookalike.’
‘And did she kill herself afterwards?’ said Neal.
‘Funny you should say that, because she does top herself in this play she’s in. It alleges that the policeman who found her proceeded to have sex with her dead body. It’s called “Some Like it Cold”.’
They quizzed me about other actresses I’d met, and I told them about the life on the road, the festivals I’d played and the European capitals I’d visited and after a while they just stared silently into their pints. I hadn’t meant to depress them. Maybe the sentence ‘So what’s happening in Dorking?’ is always followed by a long silence. But they were impressed, amazed and jealous and I realized why I’d got them up there. I was engineering envy.
And yet they’d thought I was completely mad when I’d first told them what I was going to do when I left school.
‘Mime?’ they’d said. ‘That’s not a job.’
‘Mime?’ they kept repeating in sardonic disbelief. It was amazing how it was possible to pack so much contempt into one syllable. Everyone’s reaction had been the same. I’d grown up in Surrey, not famous for its theatrical traditions, although I did once take my nephew to see Adventures in Smurfland at the Epsom Playhouse. My home town of Dorking was, however, home to the national headquarters of Friends Provident Insurance. The job of my school careers adviser seemed to consist of getting sixth formers into his office, establishing in which particular department of Friends Provident they imagined themselves spending the rest of their lives and then setting up the job interview. I don’t know why he was called a ‘careers adviser’ because there was only ever the one option. In Manchester in the 1850s you went into the cotton mills. In Dorking in the 1970s you got a job at Friends Provident.
‘Well Guy …’ he said to me, ‘you’re in luck … we could be looking at quite a decent starting salary. For an eighteen-year-old trainee claims assessor at Friends Provident.’
It wasn’t until about halfway through the interview that I finally summoned up the courage to tell him: ‘I don’t want to work at Friends Provident …’ I said, ‘I want to be a mime artist.’
He paused and looked over his glasses at me. I got the feeling he was not inundated with eighteen-year-olds who wanted to go into the expressive arts. ‘Mime artist?’ he said, flicking though his index box. Management consultant … Marketing executive … there was no card for mime artist. So a conversation then ensued during which he suggested that a foothold in the world of pensions and life insurance might be the most sensible first step for an aspiring performer. I think he was trying to rack his brains for a department of Friends Provident where an interest in mime might be a bonus. ‘Sales and marketing? No … Personnel? No … The Pretending to be Stuck in a Glass Box Department maybe?’ If they’d had one of those I’m sure he would have mentioned it.
‘I know!’ he said, as if he’d just hit upon the perfect solution. ‘How about if you just do a couple of years at Friends Provident and then once you’ve got the basic qualifications under your belt you could keep up your interest in performing by specializing in theatrical insurance?’
‘Theatrical insurance?’ I said. ‘Is there any actual mime involved in that?’
‘Well …’ he said. ‘I’m sure one or two of the theatres that Friends Provident insure put on mime shows from time to time … But most of the time it would be more office work than actually miming things.’
I spent a couple of years living at home and signing on the dole wondering about how one broke into the closed world of corporeal theatre. There was nothing in the local paper. My parents worried about me and I was sullen and withdrawn. ‘The amount he talks …’ my dad said, ‘bloody mime’s the only thing he’d be any good for.’ Dad was not the intellectual type. I told him about the famous Jacques Lecoq school in Paris but he thought this through and then explained why this might not be the theatre school for me. ‘Jacques Lecoq?’ he said. ‘Well, he’s obviously a poof with a name like that.’ In the end it was my mother who secretly encouraged me to apply. ‘You get your interest in the theatre from me,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen everything Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ever done.’
I thought my audition piece was fantastic, though looking back there was probably quite a low risk of them thinking ‘There’s nothing left we can teach this young man’. It was copied directly from a Charlie Chaplin set-piece, and I suppose I was rather hoping that the French might not be aware of the world’s greatest ever film star. They said they liked my ‘interpretation of the Chaplin’ and to my astonished delight I was in. I bought the make-up and tights and Dad blamed himself for not having taken me to watch rugby more often. Paris was a revelation. They have a different attitude to artistic pursuits on the Continent. They don’t say: ‘Mime artist eh? Well, I suppose it saves having to learn all those lines!’ I studied pantomime, though not the sort that stars Frank Bruno as Widow Twanky. I learned how to use my posture to suggest different facial expressions while wearing a wooden mask.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to take off the mask?’ suggested Neal.
‘The art of mime …’ I told my friends ‘… is like learning to play your body as if it were a musical instrument.’
‘Well, I think I’d be a wind instrument,’ said Richard, ‘then I could just go on stage and fart for an hour.’
The three of us carried on drinking in this scruffy Edinburgh pub until we were told that if we wanted to stay there we’d have to pay to watch the comedy that was being put on at eight o’clock. Apparently the saloon bar had been converted into a comedy venue for the duration of the festival, by means of putting a piece of paper on the door saying Comedy Club – Entry £2. Richard and Neal were excited about seeing some stand-up; alternative comedy was quite a new concept back then, so we paid up and the bar gradually filled up around us. There was no PA, no stage, no lighting, just a space by the dartboard where the comic was supposed to perform. It was so intimate that all you could do was adopt a benign smile and hope for the best.
The comedian shuffled out in front of us. He was a bloke about our age who had taken it upon himself to adopt the stage name ‘Mussolini’s Mother-in-law’. It has to be said that as a stand-up comic he was only partially successful. The ‘standing up’ bit, he did excellently. He didn’t fall over once during his entire set, his balance was impeccable. But as for the description ‘comic’, well I hadn’t been so embarrassed since my parents danced to ‘Anarchy in the UK’ at my eighteenth birthday party.
He stood there for a moment clutching a hand-rolled cigarette which turned out to be far too small to hide behind. Then he hit us with the opening line of his comedy act.
‘Have you ever noticed how there are too many words for small oranges?’ he said. An awkward silence fell across the room, which was filled slightly too quickly with the next line. ‘I mean, there’s tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas – why can’t we just call them all small oranges?’ Neal, Richard and I were right at the front, only five feet away from him, we had to give some sort of reaction. A strangled noise came out of my throat which wasn’t so much a laugh, as a nervous grunt to punctuate the awkward silence. It was an attempt to communicate to him that although I wasn’t laughing, I was at least aware of the point at which the laughter was suppos
ed to come. I noticed that, like me, everyone had their legs and arms crossed as a sort of improvised ‘crap-comic barrier’.
‘Er, because I mean, the Eskimos have forty words for snow, right …’ he went on. ‘Because like snow is really important to Eskimos. So clearly Anglo-Saxon society totally revolved around small oranges.’ There was a pre-planned pause for laughter and I gave a brave smile because it was easier to fake than convulsive giggles. Even though I am a trained performer, I don’t think I could ever again recreate that combination of horror and pity in my eyes with the compassionate smile that was locked upon my mouth. In the Middle Ages when a heretic was being publicly disembowelled, at least the onlookers could acknowledge that the victim was not having a very nice time. They weren’t expected to sit there with an artificial cheerful grin that said ‘Well, this is all going very well for you!’ A chair scraped and a couple of people at the back slipped away. Comedy clubs are like plane crashes, you’re always safer sitting at the back.
‘He was rubbish,’ said Richard afterwards, ‘I can’t believe it cost the same to see him as it did you.’ I can’t deny I felt a smug sort of personal triumph. Our two genres were at completely opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. I used no words and so had to work much harder to communicate with my audience. I had to be an actor, a dancer and a gymnast – every second of my performance was carefully choreographed. Whereas ‘Mussolini’s Mother-in-law’ communicated in the easiest manner possible and thus the content became as lazy as the form. I explained this to Richard and he said ‘Well that, and the fact he was just a crap comic.’
The next day I was just waving them off at the station when the Marilyn Monroe lookalike came up and threw her arms around me. I can still see their faces pressed against the window as the train pulled away. I was a free man, while they were being transported back to the forced labour camps in Surrey. On the Monday I travelled to Prague and they returned to work at Friends Provident.
The following year, Richard and Neal came and saw me at the Glastonbury Festival and were really positive about the new show. I gave them a fantastic time. We’d never smoked dope at school – there were no drug dealers in Dorking as the careers adviser had not had a card for that job either. Cannabis was a sudden revelation to them and we got out of our heads lying in a field listening to Van Morrison, giggling and singing along to ‘And It Stoned Me’. It was one of those perfect moments that stay with you for ever after. I said to them as they left the next day that I think I’d put that sunny afternoon into my lifetime highlights video. This was an imaginary compilation that I was assembling in my head; all my happiest and proudest moments, cut together into a five-minute edited greatest hits of my life.
‘What would you have in your lifetime highlights video Neal?’ I asked him.
He thought for a while and said nervously, ‘Getting a B in my geography O’level.’
He looked hurt when I burst out laughing.
‘Oh come on …’ I said, ‘you’ve got to do better than that. You can’t have that on your tombstone – “Here lies Neal Evans. He got a B in his geography O’level.” What have you done that you really loved and will always remember? What are you really proud of ?’
He shrugged. ‘Getting off with Abigail Parsons?’
‘That was when you were fourteen,’ I laughed. ‘What about recently?’
Richard came to Neal’s defence. ‘Look, it’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘You’re a mime artist. You have lifetime highlights every week. We’re in an office all day and we go to night school in the evenings. We’ve got exams to get, promotion to work towards. We can’t all be bloody mime artists.’
We walked in silence up to the fields where all the cars were parked. They both had company cars by now, Neal had a Ford Sierra and Richard had a Vauxhall Cavalier, and they were neatly parked in between all the beaten-up VW vans and 2CVs. I watched them pull away and then I saw Richard stop at the top of the lane to get his suit out of the boot and hang it up in the back of the car.
I saw them both intermittently throughout the winter and persuaded them to come to Glastonbury the following year. I found the same spot in the field where we could lie and get stoned again, but Neal got cow dung on his trousers and then the end of the spliff fell out and burned Richard on his chest. They said they liked my show though. In fact I think it really bowled them over because it was like they were lost for words. I had that experience in Paris once – when I saw a really moving piece of mime – I just didn’t want to talk about it, I simply had to talk about something else. So they talked about their jobs. Richard had got a pay rise so he insisted on buying all the drinks. Neal wasn’t working at Friends Provident any more, he said he needed a new challenge. He’d got a job at Commercial Union.
I continued to tour around the country, although it became a little frustrating when one or two of the venues in which I had done really well still didn’t want me back the following year. ‘You’re the mime bloke aren’t you?’ said the man from North West Arts. ‘Are you still doing the same sort of thing?’
‘No, it’s a completely new show,’ I announced proudly.
‘But is it still no words and white make-up and all that?’ he said.
‘I’m still doing mime if that’s what you mean, yes,’ I said.
‘Well, we can’t have mime every year, can we? We’ve got acrobats this year. There’s lots of them but they’re Chinese so they actually work out cheaper.’
Then I secured a booking at the Pontefract Arts and Leisure Centre, but two days before the show the manager phoned me to cancel my performance.
‘Listen, we’ve not sold enough tickets,’ he said in his gruff Yorkshire accent. ‘There’s folk who want to use sports hall to play badminton. And if no one’s coming to see you, then how can I justify cancelling Sunday night badminton?’
I told him that he couldn’t pull the show now; that it had taken me ages to persuade my two best friends to come up and see it. And that he had a duty to put on pieces of original theatre – that it was an Arts and Leisure centre; that people could play badminton any day of the week, but they only had this one chance to see my performance.
‘My, you’ve got a lot to say for yourself – for a mime artist,’ he said. Then he proposed a compromise that would involve me reducing the stage size so that half the hall could still be used for badminton. Call me a precious old luvvie, but I did not feel that my powerful mimodrama about the genocide taking place in the Amazon rainforests would be made all the more poignant by having middle-aged couples lumbering around playing badminton on either side of me.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I said. ‘You can’t put on a piece of theatre with people playing badminton all around you.’
‘Why not?’ said the Yorkshireman.
It was hard to know where to start. ‘Well, what if a shuttlecock is mis-hit and lands on the stage?’
‘Well, a shuttlecock’s not going to hurt you is it?’ he said. ‘It’s not like a cricket ball.’
‘But they’ll grunt and talk and their plimsolls will squeak.’
‘Yes, but you do mime. They don’t have to listen to any words, do they?’
Did Shakespeare ever have to go through this I wondered? Negotiating with the manager of the Globe Theatre who wanted to cancel Hamlet because Thursday night was the Southwark Over-Sixties Music and Movement class? I was forced to agree to having three courts at the far end of the sports hall kept open for badminton and then he came out with it: ‘Now what about the rock climbers? Our concrete recreation of Scafell Pike is on the wall overhanging your stage and it’s very popular on Sunday nights.’
It was still a great show though. My most challenging to date in fact. A two-hour narrative mime tackling issues like the environment and the annihilation of the indigenous people of the Amazon basin by the multinational mining corporations.
‘Was it about Jack and the Beanstalk,’ said Richard afterwards.
‘Jack and the Beanstalk?’ I said. ‘What o
n earth are you talking about?’
‘Well, when you were doing all that chopping – I thought that might be Jack chopping down the beanstalk.’
‘That was the destruction of the rainforest,’ I said.
‘Oh. Yeah, well I thought it was probably something like that,’ he said.
Honestly! It did make we wonder if I was being over-ambitious dealing with serious social issues in my work. But I think I really conveyed the terrible suffering that was happening in Brazil. Because the audience looked quite depressed by the end of the evening.
The following Christmas Eve we went on a pub crawl through Dorking as we’d always done when Richard let slip that he and Neal had already booked to go to Club Mark Warner with their girlfriends at the end of June.
‘What about Glastonbury?’ I said, ‘I’ve got this new army surplus tent which I thought could sleep all five of us.’
‘It’s a bit of a clash actually,’ said Richard.
‘Well bring the girls up to Edinburgh instead. Or there’s the East Midlands mime festival in Leicester in September.’
‘Erm, to be honest Guy …’ he said, ‘I’m just a bit bored with all that farting about with white make-up on.’
What a strange thing to say, I thought. Richard was trying to tell me something and I was determined to find out what it was.
‘But you love my stuff,’ I said. ‘You said “Return to Hiroshima” was a very brave piece of theatre.’
‘Did I?’ he said. ‘Er, yeah, well it’s quite interesting to see someone do it once or twice. But you don’t sit down with your missus every night, turn on the telly and flick through the channels till you get to UK Mime do you?’
‘Is there really a mime channel?’ I said excitedly.
‘Of course there bloody isn’t. That’s the whole point,’ he said.
‘So you’re not going to see the new show at all?’ I asked him, straight out.
‘Probably not,’ he confessed. ‘Sally doesn’t like mime. She likes musicals.’