At Manchester University Drama Department creativity is a completely different proposition to anything I’ve previously encountered. The structured course itself is rather slight, it’s like English, but with play texts, and the commitment is not too onerous: you have to attend two lectures and a tutorial each week, and . . . that’s about it.
But they also have the Stephen Joseph Studio – an old German chapel converted into a shabby performance space and a few rehearsal rooms. And it is ours. We are allowed, nay encouraged, to do anything we bloody like in it. This is not part of the curriculum, there’s no right or wrong, nothing will get marked or count towards anything. It’s just a place to create stuff for the sake of creating it. Every Monday is Studio Night when the whole department (about a hundred people) will gather to watch each other’s creations.
It is bliss. There is no maths, no French, no Latin, no games, no cadet force, no bulled boots, no cane – we just make theatre all the time, and when we’re not making it some very clever people are telling us about it. I will never know freedom like this ever again.
Years later my daughter Beattie comes to the same university to study the same course, we even share a tutor, but the studio is no more. The Stephen Joseph has been divided into a series of drab seminar rooms for another faculty. The drama students now have more lectures, they have to ‘book’ rehearsal rooms, and ‘rent’ theatre space. I suppose there’s no metric for measuring how valuable the old Stevie Joe was, and, as is the way these days, if it can’t be measured, it’s deemed a waste of money.
And yet, there is something wrong with all this bliss and I think it’s . . . me.
I spend my first term doing a lot of acting. There’s a mature student in our year, Peter Fieldson, who’s already written a lot of plays. Not only has he written them, he’s had them produced on BBC Radio 4. He has already made money out of drama. This makes him incredibly glamorous. He seems impossibly old to me, but he’s probably only about twenty-three. I’m very impressed during freshers’ week when he asks me to help him buy a writing chair.
When he says ‘help him buy’ he really means ‘carry it home for him’.
He’s in university accommodation and says the chairs are rubbish and he can’t sit and write all day without proper lumbar support. He buys what is basically a posh office chair, which is on wheels, and I trundle it back to his shared flat and hoick it up the stairs. Peter rewrites all his radio plays for the stage, and perhaps because I’m in awe of him and hang on his every word, or perhaps because I carried his chair, he casts me in all of them, and I get a reputation as an ‘actor’.
The department is quite small, thirty people in each year, but it quickly becomes very cliquey. Trouble is, I don’t get into a clique. I stumble along in Peter’s virtual repertory company, but I’m not really in his social group. I think he likes me more as a raw performer than as a friend.
By raw I don’t mean skilled, I mean unafraid to be embarrassed. I’ll throw myself out there, I’ll over-emote. You can give me notes and bring me back, but generally if you give me a character to hide behind I’ll give it 150 per cent while most people are only on about 35 per cent. It’s the berserker approach to acting.
If you’re a playwright with concerns about your work not having enough ‘vitality’, and you want someone to give your words some energy and attack, I’m your man.
But I’m a bit of a lonely berserker. I’m emotionally feral – which isn’t an attractive character trait. I wonder if the actual Viking berserkers had trouble making friends? They probably did when you think about it. Off their heads, biting their shields – how do you start a conversation?
I don’t manage to get into a hall of residence – an easy place to develop friendships – and a lot of the boys in our year, Rik included, end up at Owens Park, where they form a strong group of their own.
I find myself out on a limb in a bedsit in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. ‘Chorlton-cum-Hardy,’ I hear you cry. ‘That sounds very posh.’ Well my bit of it isn’t. No matter how much money I pump into the meter I can only get two inches of lukewarm water into the filthy bath. I share a dingy mouse-infested kitchen with two PhD students; one is studying the chemistry of soap but doesn’t appear to use any, and I don’t know what the other is studying because he never says a single word to me. Perhaps he’s got issues of his own. At length I discover that our landlady is stealing things from my room. I haven’t got much to steal, but any spare change, the odd cigarette, even a new tube of toothpaste goes missing.
I think I’m mostly lonely. I feel I don’t really fit in. By the second term I feel so unattached that I tell my tutor I’m going to leave and try to get a job at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford. I say I don’t think university is for me, that I want to move straight into proper work, and that I’m happy to start at the bottom, just sweeping the stage, anything. I’m not exactly Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms – ‘Let’s do the show right here in the barn’ – but I have a romantic and possibly overly dramatic view of myself and my ‘arc’.
It turns out these are signs of a rather fragile mind, but my tutor probes a bit – this is the kind of pastoral care that was never evident at school – and suggests it might just be the bedsit that’s making me unhappy. Some questions are asked around the department, and one of the girls in my year, Caroline Cooke, says there’s a space in the large student house she’s living in.
Tyntesfield House is more than a large house, it’s an actual mansion set in its own grounds. It was built by a rich Victorian banker but now belongs to the university. It’s gently decaying and has been badly divided into twenty high-ceilinged, if rather shabby, bedrooms with an enormous communal kitchen. It gets knocked down a few years later.
I share a room on the top floor with Markus, a Norwegian student. I ask him if he knows any of the Edmondsons over in Norway. He says he doesn’t. I immediately doubt whether he actually is Norwegian. Though he has some supporting evidence in the form of his Norwegian Army dog tags. They still have conscription over there and he says he’s just come out of the army. This could be true, he’s very well built – he looks like Action Man – and he’s financially very well-off, especially in student terms. But he’s more playboy than berserker. He owns a Triumph TR4, talks about ‘dolly birds’ in the accent of the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show, and is rarely home. So I get the room to myself mostly.
There’s a reason why they still have some accommodation available – it’s in Timperley.
Is that part of Manchester?
No, it isn’t. It’s in Timperley, midway between Sale and Altrincham. It’s a full seven miles from the university, an hour’s bus journey away.
I like Caroline and discover she’s about as fucked-up as me, only her fucked-upness is rooted in bog-standard Catholic guilt. She’s also London Irish which means if I give her the money I can get my pint of mild without waiting for everyone else to get served first.
What?
Let me explain.
The pub out behind the Drama Department is called the Ducie Arms, but is known more simply as ‘The Ducie’. It’s an old Victorian pub marooned in the middle of a car park; 1970s Manchester has been subject to a lot of slum clearance and the land behind the university has been more or less wiped clean of its previous use except for The Ducie and another pub half a mile away standing on its own in the middle of nowhere, obviously preserved as a ‘community asset’, though at this time it has no surrounding community.
I’m not the only thing waiting to be developed.
The Ducie has a built-in community because it’s an Irish pub. It’s a traditional boozer, cramped and convivial. The main room is long and thin with a bench seat going all the way down both sides and across one end. There’s no piped music and it smells of tobacco, beer and mutton stew, even though no food is served. They collect for the blind, but only in 2p pieces – there’s a stack of interleaved 2p coins standing like a medieval turret on the bar. This bar is guarded by Marion, the publican, a short woman with tight curly hair and a drinker’s complexion, who is so brusque and offhand that people come from far and wide to see the legendary misanthrope in action. No matter what time of day it is, Marion’s husband Michael is always completely pissed, and it is he who eventually knocks over the stack of 2p coins.
There’s an air of Republican sympathy to the place, indeed many think the collection for ‘the blind’ is actually for the IRA, and English accents are viewed with suspicion. It’s one of the ‘session’ pubs where traditional musicians are welcome. Out of nowhere, fiddles, whistles and a bodhrán will appear and play a set of Irish jigs and reels. It’s my first exposure to this kind of music and I find it intoxicating; it sounds like the feeling of running pell-mell downhill – in the way you feel exhilarated but simultaneously out of control. It has the same energy and vitality as the punk music that is developing all around us. Little do I know it but one of the underage fiddlers who turns up occasionally is Andy Dinan, who will join my band The Bad Shepherds about thirty years later.
The Ducie is possibly considered the general hang-out of the Drama Department not just because it’s the closest pub, but because we have such a large Irish contingent on our course. The English among us can stand at the bar for twenty minutes waiting to be served, but if Marion spies one of the Irish set come in the door behind us she’ll shout over the throng: ‘What’ll you have, Síobhra?’ or ‘What’ll you have, Paul?’ Or indeed ‘What’ll you have, Caroline?’ Result.
Caroline and I share the bus to and from uni and become proper friends. We look out for each other when it’s getting close to last bus home time. It’s a platonic friendship, there’s no hanky-panky involved. She’s my first proper female friend. My hanky-panky interest is focused on her room-mate, a psychology student.
I keep getting asked to perform in people’s shows: Peter Fieldson’s plays, Louise Jeffrey’s production of The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice, fellow student Ian Christensen’s take on Everyman called Everybod, and the department production of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.
The move to Tyntesfield is a success in that I no longer want to leave. But something’s still not quite right in the state of Denmark . . .