Interviews

Actor. Agents; Birmingham Rep.; censorship; Covent Garden; Equity; finding jobs; Fings Aint Wot They Used T'Be; working in Ireland; Keswick Century Theatre; Harold Pinter; The Homecoming; regional theatre; Royal Shakespeare Company; Shakespeare; Spotlight; television; working in London.

Conducted by Kate McNiven

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Interview continued...

KM: Was there a definite feeling that London was the place to be or was the repertory around the country thought of as highly or was London…?

TR:  The repertory of the ones I’ve mentioned to you were very, very highly thought of and were the places that you could seduce managements up to see you occasionally with the help of circumstances. But mostly the agents or the managements, (the agents are agents and the management are people who actually put money into shows and make shows) they’re much more likely to go out to Bromley or to Greenwich or to Windsor because they live in London and it’s just down the road really for them for an evening and back, whereas if they go to Liverpool, Manchester, all these places maybe they stay in a hotel and it becomes a whole package.

But the point is, what did actors do when they were in-between regional jobs? And there was a whole group of people like myself who were doing good work and who eventually, in time, became well known as serious actors and we had no agents, so the opportunity of getting film work or television work - which was starting to become quite big in the sixties, not so before. We used to go to these very tiny, tiny agents who used to do walk-ons, so you could do walk-on, be a crowd artist for a day or two days, and get like £2.50 a day, which in that time was quite a lot of money - keep you going for two or three days. Incidentally, my salary at Birmingham Rep was £12 [and a half: deleted by interviewee] which was very, very, very good in 1961.  Twelve pounds was a lot of money.

So, as I was saying, there was a whole group who would stay in London and do these what we used to call ‘Noddys’ that was the term which was created by an actor called Alan Lake who was married subsequently to Diana Dors, I don’t know if you know these names but they are both very famous people in British theatre history, he invented that phrase ‘doing a Noddy’ which meant, it explained exactly what you did. You would be in a scene with other actors, now, if the other actor looked at you or said anything to you as he was passing you weren’t allowed to say anything, so you would go [he nods]

KM: You’d nod! [Laughs]

TR: So they called it a ‘Noddy’, [Laughs] because if you spoke the television company would have to pay you money.

KM: Oh I see, you weren’t allowed to.

TR: So just before the take the man would say, ‘All right, all right you extras, no talking.’! [Laughter]

KM: What did you prefer doing, did you prefer the theatre or did you prefer being on television and in films?

TR: Well of course, one was learning from doing these ‘Noddys’ quite a little bit, quite a lot about television, but you weren’t allowed to do it because you couldn’t get the part.

KM: Because it was harder to get a part?

TR: Yes, and sometimes what would happen is that a director would single you out and he’d say to the floor assistant ‘is he a proper actor?’ because all sorts of people used to do this extra work, and if it was established that you were a proper actor he might even give you a couple of lines to say and get you to do special business: walk into a room put some papers down say ‘There you are sir.’ And another man would say ‘Oh take those through to Miss Bloggs’ and you’d say ‘Yeh, all right’ so you’d get a little part like that which wouldn’t be in the main script, you know.

And obviously there was a little bit more money involved in television if you got enough of these little parts, but they didn’t come frequently and so you used to worry; people used to say ‘No you mustn’t do these walk-ons, because if you do walk-ons you will never get to play parts because they will always think of you as a walk-on, they’ll have your name down as a walk-on’, so actors used to make up names - pretend they were, say, Bert Smith.

KM: What was yours?

TR: [Pause] I’ve got no idea! [Laughs] I don’t know whether I actually ever did that, but I know some chaps did.  That was the general feeling that that was the best thing to do.

KM: Going back to the theatre at the time. As well in being in the repertory, were you going to see much theatre yourself? Was there any particular playwrights or plays at the time that you enjoyed?

TR: [Pause] I did go to the Old Vic and I saw Richard II done by an actor called John Justin which I was very impressed with. I used to occasionally go to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in London to see plays. One was very aware of the up-and-coming writers at the time like Arnold Wesker and maybe John Arden, do I mean John Arden, I’m not sure whether I mean John Arden. He may have been a much earlier writer, I’m not sure, I’m sorry I can’t think of that. Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, John Osborne, those were all ones that ring in my head as being the modern writers at that time. But I think it would be true to say that I didn’t go to the theatre very much. Well, actually you couldn’t afford it unless you got a free ticket. You know, there were sometimes free tickets or you used to meet the porters in Covent Garden you know, which is one of the areas where all the actors milled around in that area, Leicester Square, you used to go into these cafes - you know, Joe Lyons, where all the actors used to meet - and there’d be the odd Covent Garden porter, and he somehow used to get hold of tickets, so he’d give you a ticket, a free ticket; but you didn’t set out to pay good money, because you hadn’t got the money. But somebody would say ‘Oh, they’re giving out free tickets at the Old Vic’ or there was a preview, so you’d all go down there and have a look maybe, if you weren’t working, because other jobs you’d used to have to do to try and find jobs to pay your rent, and usually you lived with another actor at least in one room and so between you, you had to make the rent. I had a job at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, clean up tables, you know, and I would do it one night and then my mate - also an actor - he would do it the next night, and then whoever was on would bring back a load of sandwiches, because they used to let you take all the sandwiches at the end of the night. It was quite good, because it was to do with theatre, it was opera and sometimes you saw some opera, sometimes the stage-doorman would give you a ticket. I remember seeing Nureyev and Fonteyn dancing Swan Lake.

KM: And Covent Garden is a really exciting place still.

TR: Yes, yes

KM: I love it.

TR: Yes it’s great. And eventually I proved to be so well-liked that I was allowed to run the artists’ bar, so that was great too because you meet all the great opera singers and all the ballet dancers, because they used to get so dehydrated they were always at the bar drinking to go back on for the second half, or the third act, or the fourth act-like they have in opera and ballet. But I was always conscious no matter these jobs I had in London these little jobs to keep going that I wanted to get back into the regions to do more work.

At the time one had a bit of a struggle becoming a member of Equity. As far as I recall the system was, it was very difficult to join Equity because in order to join Equity you had to have a contract, and if you hadn’t got a contract, but you couldn’t get a contract unless you were a member of Equity you see. Anyway, I think they introduced this provisional thing whereby if you could work for two years on and off, embracing so many weeks of work over two years you could be allowed to have a provisional membership of Equity, and then later you could become a full member you see, but it wasn’t until you became a full member that you were technically allowed to work in the West End.

After about ’62 I heard about, I went to an agent’s office, sometimes there were some small agents’ offices where they didn’t mind if total strangers walked in and asked about jobs, they weren’t top flight of agents, they were middle agents, there was one in Cambridge Circus, a man called Smithy, Smithy and Diana… I can’t remember her second name. And I walked in there one day and they said ‘Well, there’s this job going up in Keswick, they want somebody to take over from this other actor who was leaving the company and they are a kind of touring theatre but at the moment they are in Keswick’ and there were six plays, and four of them I think, four or three, were already on, and they used to work in repertory like, Monday night they’d do She Stoops to Conquer, Tuesday night they’d do Twelfth Night, Thursday they’d do…

KM: And would these be all the same actors?

TR: Yes, yes.

KM: That’s so different than today.

TR: Yeah, yeah so they were somehow able to say ‘Yeah, OK, you suit the parts, you go’. And that was like another £12 pounds a week job so I had to take a night train up to Keswick, I think it was an overnight train as a matter of fact, and I was met by some, no I wasn’t met by anybody, I found my way to Keswick. In those days you went to Carlisle, then you got a little, tiny, tiny, tiny train, which I don’t think exists any more. Anyway, I got to Keswick and I discovered that this wasn’t just a regular theatre, it was a travelling theatre and you had... it was all made out of caravans, so you had like a caravan and then another trailer there and there and then they would open it all up like a Meccano set and it would make the shape of a theatre. Then around the theatre were smaller caravans right round and you’d have a big generator which created light for the theatre and also created light for all these other caravans which is where the actors lived, and each caravan was divided into two so you’d go up the steps and you’d have one little room there and one little room there and that’s where you lived. So that was really different.

Interview continued...

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