Cinnamon Twigs (11 page)

At the moment, I
’m playing a count…’

‘
A what?’ a prop asks, trying

to make a crass pun.

‘A
count
,’ I repeat, ‘in a comedy

of manners.
There’s nothing

like standing on a proscenium stage,

the lights in your eyes

as
the drapes are opened.

Nothing like the cold touch

of a prop weapon and the stench

of the costumes you wear ea
ch night,

as sweat pours down your brow,

your heart thunders, and you deliver

your lines to an expectant audience.

I’ve loved acting since I was a boy

with a tail poking out of my arse,

asking Little Red to join

her grandma in bed.
’

The lads just nod.

Some with respect. Others amazed

their number eight
has been prancing around on stage since childhood.

I take another swig of my pint,

smile and say:

‘
By the way, lads, did I mention that I like to write poetry?’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Drama Society

Cardiff University’s drama society is called
Act One
. It’s been going for donkey’s years now and despite being just that, an amateur university drama society, full of some students who were there for the fun (and the society was
incredibly
fun) and were well aware they couldn’t act their ways out of paper bags, has produced successful actors, writers and directors. Little acorns.
Act One
made my university experience. I became obsessed with it. At first, Michael and I didn’t fit in. We were regarded as too laddish, just there to chat up girls, swag and slag around. That was before anyone saw us act. I like to think their reservations disappeared after that. Michael and Daniel became the gruesome twosome of
Act One
before long, the Hugh and Laurie, the Bert and Ernie who didn’t, fortunately, sleep together.

             
The society put on a number of plays each term. We’d rehearse on Mondays and Thursdays each week. These rehearsals would become more frequent and intense as it got closer to opening night. It could be difficult to balance the intense rehearsal periods with essay writing.
Act One
was a massive, often dysfunctional family. Michael gave the best description of it I can conjure: ‘Every group of friends has at least one show-off, one person who wants to be the leader, the constant center of attention, the entertainer, regardless of whether he or she is entertaining and talented or not.
Act One
is essentially a society consisting of at least two hundred of these fuckers.’ He also compared our fixation with amateur drama to heroin addiction, because you had to ‘contend with a great number of pricks to feed your habit.’

             
Our introduction to the society didn’t go too well, although we landed very good parts. I was Don Pedro and he was Claudio in Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
, which just happened to be the first Shakespeare production in the history of the society to sell out every night. During the Halloween social, in a pub in Cardiff, someone called me a shit actor as I made my way to the loos.

             
He’s never seen me act before, the cheeky prick
! I thought to myself.

             
So Michael and I approached him, offered to take him outside for a private dance. Turns out he was a good kid. It was just a joke. He’d heard a lot about me from my director but understood I didn’t know who he was, so the banter could be misconstrued. I felt like a twat. At a fancy-dress house party a week later, dressed as a hippy ironically enough, Michael threatened to punch an obnoxious
Act One
veteran in the garden. I’m not surprised this society of lovey-dovey wannabe actors felt threatened by us. They really didn’t take to Michael’s pulling technique either. He’d walk into a social and talk to (try to charm the knickers off) every single girl who wasn’t totally troglodytic within the first hour, so he’d have plenty of options for a quick shag at the end of the night.

             
Much Ado About Nothing
was great fun. I learned a lot from that production. It was my first opportunity to shine in a decent stage role. Since
Little Red Riding Hood
anyway. The directors, a Mutt and Jeff, friend and foe couple named Mikey and Rhian, wanted to make the production accessible for those who didn’t know Shakespeare, which is often a problem when showing the Bard’s plays to modern audiences. So they cut it, extensively, even getting rid of a major character - Antonio. The play is a comedy, and a very funny one it is too, but there are moments of darkness concerning the villainous Don John’s deception, with themes of infidelity and voyeurism, all concluding in a tragicomical resolution. The plot concerns my character Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, arriving at Messina to stay with the elderly Governor, Leonato. Michael’s character, Claudio, serves under my command. Incongruous as the casting choice might be, I have to advise his character how best to woo the beautiful Hero, Leonato’s daughter. Don John, Pedro’s bastard brother, tricks Claudio into believing that Hero has shagged another bloke on the eve of their wedding. It’s all very Jeremy Kyle. The central characters are not Don Pedro and Claudio, however. They are Benedick, or Benedickhead as I liked to call the actor playing him, and Beatrice. Benedick was the part I originally wanted. He is tricked into falling in love with Beatrice, and vice-versa. At the start they are both antiromantic, but end up falling hard for each other. Both actors were excellent in many respects. The girl playing Beatrice, Charlotte, was a raven-haired beauty from Edinburgh who showed a great range of emotions. Chris, who played Benedick, was excellent at making Jacobean dialogue sound as modern and accessible as possible. Looking back, I can’t deny I was jealous of him. He had the starring role. And he always wanted to be the center of attention in
Act One
, organizing the annual paintball trips, barbeques and whatnot, anything so long as he got to be the lead. But what I really didn’t like about him was how bitchy he was, how two-faced. A smiling villain if ever there was one. He epitomized everything that was ugly in the society. For every saint in
Act One
, there was a Judas puckering up.

             
The directors focused mainly on the comedy in the play rather than the complex themes, which meant we were all grand gestures and silly voices, bordering on
Blackadder
protagonists. Looking back, I should never have played Don Pedro like that. My arms were all over the place, the character was larger than life. I had no subtlety. I suppose it fitted in with the direction of the play. Some people thought I was great, others probably thought I was shit. Well, I know for a fact some people thought I was less than terrific. Michael always told me that all that really counts, conceited as it seems, is that you are happy with your own performance. If you’re a perfectionist, and you are content with the job you did, then it doesn’t matter what the quibblers think. I just wish I’d learned to stand still on stage at that point, displaying authority and confidence as an actor. Instead, I was so gesticulatory that I poked Michael in the eye on the last night during our first scene.

             
Despite the reservations I have about my performance, all brought on by dubious hindsight, the play went swimmingly. It was the most financially successful Shakespeare play
Act One
had done in all its years of putting on Shakespeare plays. I loved making the audience laugh, although I had so many bad habits, altering my performance to suit the kind of audience in on the night (no audience is ever the same) and never really reacting to what was happening on stage as if I were truly in that moment. Every reaction, every movement and grand gesture I made, had been pre-planned. Michael demonstrated a lot more subtlety and spontaneity, but that fitted with the character, Claudio. A reviewer likened his reaction to discovering that the love of his life Hero wasn’t actually dead to somebody discovering their car keys. Maybe we were extreme opposites. I’m just glad I didn’t get a mention in that particular review.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

After Show Parties

It was like playing the Big Bad Wolf all over again. During show week, and for a while afterwards, people around university would
recognize me as Don Pedro. It was a tiny taste of fame, and I bloody loved it. One of the best things about doing a play is the party afterwards. Michael and I got hammered at his straight after the final performance, and then headed to one of the directors’ houses. Michael couldn’t talk after a few hours. He just grunted, burped and farted his way through proceedings. The girls, as is customary, and not just because of Michael’s farting, got emotional at the end of the night. It was the last performance, and the cast would be separated. No more intense rehearsal periods, bonding like a family. So Michael, in his one moment of clarity that evening, decided to put Jeff Buckley’s
Hallelujah
on the CD player. The mellow guitar strings and the melancholic lyrics caused the girls to sob until they were shrieking.

             
‘I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord…’

             
Michael stood by, murmuring the lyrics, a big bottle of cheap cider in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a mischievous smile on his face.                                                              

             
Michael and I could afford to cause trouble at our own after show party, but it was when we crashed someone else’s that shit went down.
Act One
put on a very well done production of
The Breakfast Club
that year. I’d had my doubts that they could take this eighties’ American movie classic directed by John Hughes and adapt it for the stage, set in modern day, with British accents. Don’t ask me how, but they did it. The audience roared with laughter. The characters, five high school stereotypes, were reinvented and played very well by the amateur students. Michael and I had a few at the bar and then bought some stinkingly cheap cider from a local newsagent that tasted and smelt like cat’s piss. We somehow found ourselves at the after show party, despite not being invited. At the time, there was a drug boom. This boom wasn’t quite the ecstasy generation with all its romantic bullshit and rave music. No, it was the boom of a legal high known as MCAT, which you’d shove up your nose and immediately realize it shouldn’t have been legal. 

             
MCAT, or Mephedrone, became the drug of
Act One
that year. Every fucker was at it, even those you’d least expect to insufflate some mysterious powder that nobody at the time really knew anything about. The drug has a similar effect to MDMA or cocaine. It makes you grind your teeth and love life for a while. Students were buying the stuff in bulk on the Internet and selling it when it eventually became illegal in the United Kingdom. I’ve never experienced anything like it when I did a line at
The Breakfast Club
after show party. Just one line and I felt electricity in my fingertips, my heart thunder, a hot flush, my eyes grow wide and the urge to talk shit for as long as my inhibitions were gone. I’ve got no idea what happened at that party. All I remember is having a bag of that stuff in my hand, sitting on the bog, eating and snorting it like a wreck, at 11am. I fell out of the house, having not slept for an entire night, and bumped into Michael.

             
‘You’re a fucking wreck!’ he said.

             
I was covered in a strawberry milkshake I’d just bought, a fag between my twitching fingers, my eyes like red stars.

             
‘Where are you going? Why aren’t you still at the party?’ I asked, puffing vigorously on my cigarette as if my life depended on it.

             
‘I’m going to my lecture. The party ended hours ago. Just you and a couple of crazy bastards decided you wanted to stay up for breakfast. Where are they now?’

             
‘Mate, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t remember anything. All I know is I’m buzzing my tits off and if my mother sees me like this when I get home I’ll get castrated…’

             
‘Ah fuck it. I didn’t want to go to lecture anyway. Come back to mine. You can kip in the spare room.’

             
I didn’t wake up until late that evening. MCAT made me feel depressed as hell. My life suddenly, and without reason, felt worthless. I was a wreck. But then I ate some fried chicken and got merry at Michael’s. The problem with MCAT was how addictive it could be. There was a period when I couldn’t go out and drink without doing a few lines. It really worried me, so I took some time off going out in general (a whole two weeks without being intoxicated) and then enjoyed just having a fair few beers without stuffing that dangerous shit up my nose. It wasn’t worth the palpitations and the depression. It concerned me that I could get addicted to something so easily. Especially drugs. Michael was addicted to shagging, but I suppose that isn’t a healthy addiction either when you’re as careless as he was with what he liked to describe as ‘an innocent game of hide the sausage.’ He was forever playing Russian roulette with STIs.