This is how it all began. I had just moved out of London into Hertfordshire with my wife and baby son. The very weekend we handed over the deposit to secure our new rental we found out that our family of three would become a family of four in about eight months’ time. I had no acting work lined up. None at all. Not a thing. But then, a few months down the line, came a call: a meeting for War Horse, which had enjoyed two runs at the National Theatre, six months in its new home in the West End and was now looking to recast some roles for another six-month contract. Perfect. I’d worked at the National before, I had a range of physical skills that would lend themselves perfectly to the show and hopefully lift me above some of the other actors auditioning. I even knew that director Marianne Elliott had a young one herself; surely she’d sympathise with my plight and give me the job just to provide for those two hungry mouths!
The day of the meeting arrived. Now, as a little side note, I should add that the previous day our ageing car had died so catastrophically that we had left it at a garage to be made roadworthy. They had kindly provided a courtesy car so that my – now noticeably pregnant – wife could take our son up the very steep hill to nursery. Anyway, I made my way to the station to catch my train into London and sensed, as soon as I entered the building, that something wasn’t right. I looked up at the boards and saw lots of horrible turquoise, which meant cancelled or delayed trains. This was fine. I had left loads of extra time to get there, this being possibly the most important audition of my life: a slight delay was only going to result in my being on time rather than stupidly early. Except that when I got up to the platform I saw one of those huge Pendolino trains stranded on platform 2. We only ever used to see these beasts speeding through our lowly station, doing that scary tilting thing that apparently helps them maintain speed. With the train now stationary it seemed to be sitting at an impossible angle, as if it might topple on its side. If I wasn’t in such jeopardy myself I might have been able to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude as I noticed those in first class struggling to keep all of that ‘freshly roasted’ coffee in their china cups. The signals were all red, the information was sketchy and there seemed no other way, bar a prohibitively expensive cab, of getting into town.
I waited a little. I phoned my agent to let her know what was going on. I waited some more. Nothing was moving, nor did it look like it ever would. My agent rang back: the latest they could see me was four o’clock that afternoon. After that they would have left the building, goodnight Vienna, opportunity gone. I had to get there…
‘… Darling? I need the car.’
You can imagine how well that went down – but it was, by now, the only way of getting there. So I took an unfamiliar, and frankly uninspiring, Ford Mondeo on the drive of its life. Through Hertfordshire and Greater London I drove like a god amongst men, a lifetime of experience having taught me the best routes to my destination, suggesting alternatives when new problems arose. But I’m only mortal, after all, and quickly realised as I got nearer town that I would need to dump the car and get on the tube. I picked a free parking spot I was familiar with near Highgate, parked up by the woods and began running to the station; my once pressed linen suit now a crumpled mess and beginning to stick to me. This short run seemed to take forever, a slight incline felt like I was trying to sprint up Ben Nevis, and why did I suddenly feel so unfit?
There are moments sent to test us and I’m afraid, for a moment there, I nearly gave up. The station entrance still seemed to be miles away, my lungs were burning with the effort and I felt as if I was about to burst into tears. I actually looked up to the sky, panting, and said ‘I can’t do this!’ But then I had an image of my now heavily pregnant wife pushing that buggy up the hill. I couldn’t go back to her after stealing the car and say I hadn’t even made the audition. I thought of another six months struggling to make ends meet. And I thought of how much I needed to be an actor again. Act is a verb, it’s something you need to do. I wanted this job more than anything and if I had to push myself to the limit to get it then that was just what I was going to have to do. I ran again. I finally got down to the tube platform. The next train was in two minutes.
One minute.
I got on. Then came a glance at the tube map, a check of the time, and the fateful calculation: thirteen stops (not now, damned superstitions!), two minutes or so a stop, it was nearly quarter past three, three minutes the other end to get to the stage door. I could still make it. Just.
This calculation was repeated after every station. Every three-minute stop was a disaster, each two-minute one a little victory, less than two minutes and I actually got a little giddy. I dread to think what I must have looked like to the other passengers. I was too absorbed in my own situation to notice them but when I look back on it now and imagine the sight of me sat there, sweating and staring maniacally at the tube map, I’m amazed I didn’t cause a security alert.
As the stops grew closer together towards the end of the journey I felt like fortune was on my side. Out at Waterloo, I began running once again. The National Theatre isn’t the most beautiful building in the world but I had never been so glad to see it in all my life. I pulled open the glass stage doors, slapped my hands down on the desk in front of the familiar face of Linda, who has been stage door supervisor since 1984, and lifted my head to look at the clock: five to four.
‘I’ll let them know you’re here,’ said Linda.
I collapsed.
It sometimes helps when going into an audition if you have something to talk about; a story, something to break the ice, something to make you seem like the interesting, exciting actor that you are. Now, after all the frantic phone calls between me, my agent and the NT they presumably knew about my train troubles but they didn’t know quite how bonkers it had been so I had a great opening gambit: a story that showed just how much I wanted to be part of this company. It would tug on heart strings, push buttons, could it open the door? I made my way up to Casting, glugged several plastic cups of water-cooler water, tried desperately to make myself look less like the sweaty maniac that I was and, shortly after four o’clock, made my way into Rehearsal Room 6 (notoriously small) to meet directors Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott, along with the casting director.
‘Hi William, how are you?’ asked Marianne, and I knew from the way she asked it that she had no idea what I’d just been through to get there, didn’t even know I was late, probably, let alone about train troubles, broken cars and impending births.
So now I had a choice. Should I tell them about it all or just carry on with the meeting normally, as if nothing unusual had occurred? Do you even need to ask? I gave it to them with both barrels, of course; they needed to know that nothing short of a Herculean effort had brought me through that rather ordinary looking door into RR6 and to appreciate the fact that, even after all that, I was going to compose myself and deliver an audition of devastating insight and emotion. And that of course is exactly how it went. Sort of. Admittedly it did involve talking in a rather questionable German accent and pretending that the casting director was a horse (this still remains the only occasion on which I have stroked a casting director’s head and kissed them as part of an audition). All I know is that the next day my mobile rang with the unique ringtone I had chosen for my agent (‘I Hope I Get It’ from the musical A Chorus Line) and after I had fumbled enough to accept the call, she delivered the news that I had to go back in for a recall.
I decided to make multiple travel arrangements.
It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to realise that I eventually got the job. Otherwise this would be the shortest theatrical memoir in history. The phone call came just as I was filling in the paperwork for an interim office job of no artistic merit. For an actor, there may be no better feeling than walking away from the soul-sapping strip lights of a job-between-jobs towards the stage lights of some actual acting. During that phone call I didn’t even find out which character(s) I would be playing. All I knew is that I would likely be given a handful of small roles and getting my hands dirty as a part of the ensemble. I had never been happier to be in the dark. I couldn’t possibly have known then what a life-altering opportunity it would turn out to be.
Four and a half years, over 1,700 performances, thirteen different roles, five changes of cast, four different character moustaches, and one show beamed live to over 700 cinemas across the globe. Even when you try and reduce it to mere statistics it still sounds epic. I was what they call a ‘jobbing actor’, which basically means I made a living from it but if we met at a bus stop and you asked what you might have seen me in I could reel off the names of a few TV programmes but the chances of you having seen me in that episode or two would be pretty slim. Or you wouldn’t have remembered me in them. ‘Mostly theatre,’ I’d probably say and that would end that conversation. Of course, if we met now I’d mention War Horse and there might be something to talk about. You may have seen the show or the film, read the book or heard from someone, somewhere, that it’s supposed to be amazing. And you might have some questions to ask of someone who was in the show for long enough to see the arrival of royalty, Broadway stars, Hollywood directors and Vanessa Feltz. Someone who saw the play become a film and a worldwide phenomenon, the most successful play in the National Theatre’s history, ‘the theatrical event of the decade’ according to one of the broadsheets.
Each time you begin rehearsals for a play you never know what the reaction to it might be. You don’t know what the critics will make of it, you may not be sure if tickets are selling well or not, and you certainly don’t know what the audience will make of it when they finally get to see what you’ve made. Success, when it comes, is always uplifting; being rated highly by critics is always a pleasure, but the real reward comes from the audience’s reaction when you’re performing night after night (and this is the reason why some people prefer acting on stage to any of the recorded media, like film and TV) – the instant feedback of laughter, tears, or a collective sharp intake of breath. Even the knowledge that I was joining the company of a play already enjoying success didn’t prepare me for the way it would lift off whilst I was a part of it (I make no causal link of course!).
In the book you’re about to read you will find out how it felt to be an ordinary actor caught up in an extraordinary production. A genuine look backstage at the workings of a play now seen by millions of people from the New London Theatre to New Orleans, an insight into the day-to-day life of an actor within it and a chance to answer some of those questions you might have had at our imaginary bus stop. The only thing I might not answer is the question every actor gets asked on multiple occasions: how I remember all those lines. Oh, go on then… I just say them again and again until they go in. I wish it was more interesting than that, and maybe when my brain starts to falter it will be, but that’s all I can say on that one. Now, to begin at the beginning… again.