One of the most common questions Pru and me are asked by members of the public is whether or not we have ever acted alongside each other, and we always reply that we have, many times. I am not referring to our endeavours on the waterways. In that particular series, which I will come on to later, Pru and I appeared together as ourselves, and it was great fun.
The first time Pru and me appeared opposite each other in a play was way back in 1964. Given the fact that we knew so many of the same people within the industry, it had been only a matter of time, although I must confess that I hadn’t expected it to happen quite so quickly. We’d been married for less than a year and in all the time we had been together we had barely spent more than a week or two in each other’s company at any one time.
The play in question was an intriguing four-hander called The Trigon by James Broom Lynne. Pru had been attending a series of classes given by an American director called Charles Marowitz who was putting on the play and he thought Pru would be ideal for the female lead.
‘And there’s a part for you if you’d like it?’ she said, after informing me of her good fortune.
‘Oh, really. Who would I be playing?’
‘A rather pathetic over-age Boy Scout. I think you’d be ideal.’
‘It’s kind of you to think of me.’
Although I eventually accepted the part of the pathetic over-age Boy Scout, I found Charles Marowitz rather annoying. His instructions, for instance, when directing Pru and me, seemed pretentious in the extreme. During a rehearsal one day he said to me, ‘Tim, I think you need a physical reorientation here.’
‘You mean you’d like me to move?’ I said rather disdainfully.
Pru gave me one of her looks. She’d worked with Charles several times before and admired him enormously. This went on for a while and eventually we sort of met in the middle. He became more direct, I became less cantankerous, and in the end, we became friends.
I have a similar story regarding Sam. We were appearing on stage together in Henry IV Parts I and II – me as Falstaff and Sam as Hal. During a rehearsal one day we each picked up each other’s script by mistake. Both had been opened at the scene we were rehearsing. Sam had written, ‘Palliate the follies I can neither avoid nor deny,’ which I believe is a quote from a book written by a rather eminent Shakespearean scholar. I, on the other hand, had written, ‘Pick up boot.’ My excuse for this is that acting is called acting because it is committing actions, and picking up the boot is what I intended to do.
Directors with slightly irritating habits notwithstanding, I do remember being a little bit worried about the effect that suddenly spending every waking hour together might have on mine and Pru’s relationship. After all, she and I had spent many months moving heaven and earth in order to steal just a few precious hours together. What if absence really did make the heart grow fonder?
What saved us, I think – apart from the fact that the whole thing lasted just five weeks back-to-back – was the fact that, at least when we first started performing the play, we were each doing other things. I was working with the BBC Drama Repertory Company on radio and Pru was rehearsing Marriage Lines with Richard Briers.
The big test was when we first went on tour together. By that time, not only had we learned how best to avoid a confrontation, but we had realized that we actually enjoyed each other’s company over prolonged periods of time. Hurrah!
I think the most fun we’ve ever had on a stage together – or in front of a camera, for that matter – was in J. B. Priestley’s excellent comedy, When We Are Married. Set in Priestley’s home county of West Yorkshire, it tells the story of three respectable nouveau riche married couples who discover on their joint silver wedding anniversary that, due to a technical oversight, they are not in fact married at all. Pru and me were one of said couples, and the cast also included Bill Fraser, Patricia Routledge, Patsy Rowlands, Brian Murphy and Elizabeth Spriggs.
The TV version followed a very successful stage production that took place at the Whitehall Theatre with virtually the same cast, all of whom had been born or brought up in the north. As you know, Pru had spent much of her childhood in West Yorkshire, so she was all right, while I kept very quiet about having left the city of Bradford aged three weeks. It was one of those blissful shows where everyone worked together wonderfully as a team, and we still watch it occasionally.
My character, Councillor Albert Parker, is a deluded misanthropic narcissist who, for the last twenty-five years, has endeavoured to make his quiet and long-suffering wife Annie appreciate just how lucky she is to be married to him. Fortunately, I hadn’t long since finished playing a bombastic self-obsessed northerner, as from 1980 until 1983 I’d been appearing as the indomitable Bradley Hardacre in the comedy drama series Brass. If you have seen that particular show, you will undoubtedly recognize it as being a perfect platform from which to base a character like Albert.
On realizing that they are not in fact married, Albert sits Annie down to reassure her that, despite her failings as a wife and as a human being, and despite his elevation from being just plain Albert Parker to Councillor Albert Parker who has ‘come to be a big man at chapel, vice-president o’t’cricket league, an’ so forth’ he is still willing to do his duty and marry her.
‘Y’know, Annie,’ says Albert conceitedly, ‘I’ve sometimes thought that right at first you didn’t realize just what you’d picked out o’t’lucky bag.’
When Annie finally gets a chance to speak and informs Albert that she actually might not wish to marry him he is, of course, somewhat perturbed.
‘You talk about your duty,’ says Annie. ‘Well, for twenty-five years I’ve done my duty. I’ve washed and cooked and cleaned and mended for you. I’ve pinched and scrimped and saved for you. I’ve listened for hours and hours to all your dreary talk. I’ve never had any thanks for it. I’ve hardly ever had any fun. But I thought I was your wife and I’d taken you for better or worse and that I ought to put up with you –’
‘PUT UP WITH ME!’
Annie’s final depiction of Albert, before the penny finally drops that he’s being discarded by her, is sublime.
‘Well, to begin with, you’re very selfish. But then, I suppose most men are. You’re idiotically conceited. But again, so are most men. But a lot of men at least are generous. And you’re very stingy. And some men are amusing. But – except when you’re being pompous and showing off – you’re not at all amusing. You’re just very dull and dreary.’
Key to the scene working is obviously the juxtaposition of Albert’s arrogance and his dismissal of his thought-to-be wife, and her calm and measured but ultimately merciless annihilation of his character and of their relationship. It really is the best fun that two actors can have on a stage together and the fact that Pru and I were being paid to perform it eight times a week was rather wonderful.
In 1991 a new opportunity arose for Pru and me to act in a play together, this time in a co-production between the Bristol Old Vic and the National Theatre of Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Widely considered to be O’Neill’s magnum opus, Long Day’s Journey into Night had been awarded the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and concerns Connecticut-based James and Mary Tyrone and their sons, Jamie and Edmond. Me and Pru played James and Mary and the sons were played by Stephen Dillane, who is perhaps best known for playing Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones, and Sean McGinley, who, like me and Pru, has appeared in pretty much everything.
The entire play takes place in just one day and portrays a family who are struggling to come to terms with the realities and consequences of the failings of each family member in relation to their own. The mother, Mary, is a morphine addict who suffers from psychosis and the father, James, who is a Shakespearean actor by trade, is wealthy but miserly and despises himself for having given up a prestigious career in exchange for commercial success. The entire family are continually at war; rather tragically, the play was based on O’Neill’s own upbringing.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Pru asked me after the approach had been made. ‘Four acts, Tim. And it won’t be anything like When We Are Married. It’ll be really hard going, and for fifteen weeks. Don’t you think we ought to think about it?’
The choice of the play had not been ours, of course. There is a common misconception that when two reasonably well-known married people are cast in a play together, they have personally selected that play as a vehicle for themselves, possibly with an eye on saving money on hotels and taxis. They are perceived as the proprietors of the play, rather than performers in it. The knowledge that the couple on stage are partners in real life also conditions the audience’s response: if the story is of two individuals who may or may not come together, or whose relationship is torn with strife, people can nevertheless sit back happily and think, ‘Well, they’re all right, really.’ It’s cosy. Long Day’s Journey into Professional Suicide, as I began to call it, is anything but cosy and if it was going to work Pru and me would have to be at our very best.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, attempting to reassure her. ‘We’ll be fine.’
If truth be known, I too was harbouring certain doubts and worries about what might come to pass over the next fifteen weeks, and some of these were realized as early as during the rehearsal period. Regardless of what we might be appearing in, when working independently of each other Pru and I are always able to switch off once we have shut our front door behind us. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that it is an essential part of our wellbeing. This was never much of a requirement during When We Are Married, as after returning home from the theatre we would often quite happily regurgitate the evening’s presentation. With Long Day’s Journey into Night, this, alas, was all but impossible. In addition to it being, as Pru put it, ‘really hard going’, the play lasted just over three and a half hours and we found it difficult to switch off afterwards.
‘I simply cannot relax,’ I complained to Pru one evening after a day’s rehearsal. ‘And if it’s like this now, what’s it going to be like on tour or when we open at the National?’
Another worry was how the press might react to us appearing in something like this – and how we might react to them. Normally, if one of us is in a play and the other is doing something else, should things go badly for one, then the other can offer advice and consolation. But when you are both in it together every sort of feeling you have is doubled. So, if it is all going wonderfully you feel doubly delighted. However, if it is not …
Despite this, Pru and me went about our business of interpreting our characters in the usual fashion. As part of her research Pru talked to several doctors and psychiatrists, and she also spent time with some ex-addicts at Wandsworth Prison.
When we opened, the reaction from audiences was mixed. Like it or not, some people had undoubtedly bought tickets hoping to see either Sybil Fawlty or a happily married acting couple doing happily married things. What they got was a couple arguing all the time, and one’s taking morphine and the other’s getting drunk.
The production itself was physically all that could have been wished for. We had a superb set, wonderfully clever lighting, admirable direction and two fine performances from Stephen and Sean. Somehow, though, me and Pru failed to deliver, at least that was the verdict of the national press. Well, you can’t win them all.
‘Let’s not do that again for a while?’ I said, shutting our front door after the final performance.
‘Let’s not do what again?’ said Pru.
‘Exactly.’