Sometimes Shad well came in to watch the show, and one day he started being nice to me. I asked Terry why this was. ‘I’m baffled too,’ he said. Then Shadwell took me to Joe Allen’s and offered me a part in his next production, which would be Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Terry, whose gentleness of heart so melted my own that I helped him sell his newspapers outside factories, on picket lines and outside East End tube stations at seven-thirty in the morning, was encouraging. ‘Accept it,’ he said. ‘It’ll do you good. ‘Course, it’s crap for actors, but it’s experience for you.’
Unlike the other actors – they’d been in the business much longer than I had – I had no idea what work I could get. So I accepted. Shadwell and I embraced. Eva said nothing about it.
‘What about you, Terry?’ I asked one evening. ‘Have you got any work lined up?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing precisely,’ he said. ‘But I’m waiting for the call.’
‘What call?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Karim. But I can say confidently that the call is going to come.’
When I turned up at the theatre and Terry and I got changed next to each other, I frequently made a point of saying to him, ‘Well, Terry, has the call come yet? Has Peter Brook rung?’
Or one of us would rush into the dressing room just before curtain-up and tell Terry there was someone who urgently needed to talk to him on the phone. Twice he fell for it, running half-dressed out of the room and instructing everyone to hold the show for a few minutes. He wasn’t thrown by our malice. ‘I’m not bothered by your childish games. I know the call’s going to come. It’s not something that makes me anxious at all. I’m going to wait patiently.’
One night, half-way through the run, the box-office manager excitedly rang through to us back-stage and said that the theatre director Matthew Pyke had booked a ticket for The Jungle Book. Within fifteen minutes everyone in the cast – apart from me – was talking about this. I’d never seen such chatter, nervousness and exhilaration in the dressing room before. But I did know how crucial such visits by hot directors were to actors, who worried constantly about their next job. The Jungle Book they’d forgotten about: it was in the past. Now they sat in the tiny dressing room, their washing hanging on the radiators, eating health food and tirelessly sending information and soft-focus photographs of themselves to directors, theatres, agents, TV companies and producers. And when agents or casting directors deigned to see the show, and stayed to the end, which was rare, the actors crowded around them afterwards, buying them drinks and roaring with laughter at anything they said. They ached to be remembered: upon such memories an actor’s life depended.
This was why Pyke’s appearance was so exciting. He was our most important visitor ever. He had his own company. You didn’t have to go through him to get to someone who counted: he counted in his own right. But why had he come to see our pissy show? We couldn’t work it out, although I noticed that Terry was being very cool about the whole thing.
Before the show some of us crowded into the tiny lighting box as Pyke, in his denim dungarees and white T-shirt – he still had long hair – took his seat. He was accompanied by his wife, Marlene, a middle-aged blonde. We watched him consult the programme, turning each page and examining our faces and the oblong patch of biography beneath the photographs.
The rest of the cast stood outside and waited for their turn to get a look at Pyke. I said nothing, but I had no idea who Pyke was and what he’d done. Was it plays? Films? Opera? Television? Was he American? At last I asked Terry; I knew he wouldn’t be contemptuous of my ignorance. Terry eagerly gave me the whole picture; he seemed to know enough about Pyke to write his biography.
Pyke was the star of the flourishing alternative theatre scene; he was one of the most original directors around. He’d worked and taught at the Magic Theater in San Francisco; had therapy at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur with Fritz Perls; worked in New York with Chaikin and La Mama. In London, with a couple of contemporaries from Cambridge, he started his own company, the Movable Theatre, for which he did two ravishing productions a year.
These productions played in London at the end of their well-meant journey around arts centres, youth clubs and studio theatres. Fashionable people attended the London opening: there were bright rock-stars, other actors like Terence Stamp, politicos like Tariq Ali, most of the ordinary acting profession, and even the public. Pyke’s shows were also commended for their fantastic intermissions, dazzling occasions where the fashionable audience came dressed in such style they resembled Chinese peasants, industrial workers (boiler suits) or South American insurgents (berets).
Naturally Terry had hard-line views on all this, and as we changed for the show on that charged night he proclaimed them to the entire cast, as if he were addressing a meeting.
‘Comrades, what is Pyke’s stuff? What is it, after all – just think for a minute – but a lot of reformist and flatulent “left-wing” politics! It’s plump actors pretending to be working class, when their fathers are neuro-surgeons. It’s voluptuous actresses – even more beautiful than you all are – hand-picked and caressed by Pyke! Why do they always perform the whole show in the nude? Ask yourself these questions! It’s fucking crap for actors, comrades. Absolute crap for actors!’
The other actors shouted Terry down.
‘It’s not crap for actors!’ they cried. ‘At least it’s decent work after doing The Jungle Bunny and thrillers and beer commercials.’
Terry had taken off his trousers by now, and two women in the cast were looking through a gap in the curtain as he prepared to propagate his analysis of Pyke. Slowly he hung his trousers on a hanger, which he placed on the communal rail which ran through the dressing room. He liked girls looking at his muscly legs; he liked them hearing his muscly arguments, too.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. There’s truth in what you say. It’s better than fuck-all. Much better. That’s why, comrades, I sent Pyke my particulars.’
Everyone groaned. But with Pyke to impress in the audience we had good reason to spring energetically over the scaffolding. The show was the best it had ever been, and its proper length, for once. Recently we’d been taking ten minutes a night off it in order to have more time in the pub. After this show we changed quickly, without the usual bickering and jokes and attempts to pull each other’s underpants off. Naturally I was the slowest, having the most to remove. There wasn’t a working shower and I had to clean off my make-up with cold-cream and by splashing water from the sink over myself. Terry waited impatiently for me. When I’d finished and it was just the two of us left I put my arms around him and kissed his face.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’ s move. Pyke’s waiting for me.’
‘Let’s stay here for a while.’
‘Why?’
I said, ‘I’m thinking of joining the Party. I want to discuss various ideological problems I have.’
‘Bollocks,’ he said. He moved away from me. ‘I’m not against this,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Touching.’
But he was against it.
‘It’s just that I have to think about my future right now. My call has come, Karim.’