Two different plays a fortnight was a treadmill, but the end was in sight. When Duncan said to me one day, ‘Lis, how would you like the lead in the last play of the season?’, I was so happy I didn’t wonder what the catch was. Because with Duncan, there’s always a catch …
I soon found out.
Mary Mary wasn’t a weekly – it had a four-day turnaround. Four days! And it was a two-hander, which meant that I would have half of all the lines and the stage time.
My co-star, Paul Webster, who went on to work with the RSC and with whom I still keep in touch today, was a lot of fun but the play was impossible. I remember walking on stage for the third and final act, putting my key in the door, opening it to come on stage, and thinking, I don’t know a damn word. By then it was too late – I was in front of the audience. Paul was the perfect pro, however. He carried me until the curtain, working with the odd crumb I could recall.
Your memory goes when you’re tired, but that wasn’t the only problem. I was so hungry as well. It wasn’t until I moved to Lytham St Annes and had to pay for my own lodgings that I realised how hard it is to get by on theatrical wages – by then up to about eight pounds a week. I couldn’t afford much food and the weight fell off me. When you’re busy you don’t always notice your tummy rumbling and there are only so many bananas you can weave into a show. Afterwards I’d stagger home, famished, to empty cupboards.
Shelagh Elliott-Clarke’s had taught me so much about acting but they hadn’t prepared me for the truth – that you don’t earn enough to have three meals a day, even when you’re the lead.
It will be all right when I finish here and I’m with Brian, I thought.
How wrong could I be?
* * *
Brian and I have never been ones for planning – I don’t think you can be when you’re an actor. We sort of go with the flow and see what happens. So when he finished at Malvern, with no other options, he took a room in our friend Terry Lodge’s house in Clapham, south London. (Terry, like Brian, was another actor from the Midlands.) A few weeks later, I joined him. It was just like when I’d left home – no fuss, no big romantic gestures, just Brian and me living together as a couple for the first time.
The room was big, but bare, and there was no running water in the house. If you needed the loo or a wash, the tap and toilet were outside. But it was cheap – and cheap was what we needed. With neither of us working, just getting by was hard. I lost even more weight because I used to skip meals so Brian could grab something, not that he ever knew. I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t fancy this roll – you have it.’
Looking back, you wonder why neither of us got a proper job – although I don’t know what on earth we’d have been qualified for. But just when I thought we’d made a mistake moving to London, our fairy godmother, Tony Colegate, stepped in. He’d been appointed director at the Manchester Library Theatre and wanted Brian to go up and join the company. At the same time Jenny Smith, our stage manager at Liverpool, offered me an ASM job in Farnham. I didn’t think twice even though I might not get on stage. It was the opposite end of the country to Brian but it was work. That’s all I thought about, that’s all that mattered.
And at least I’d be able to eat.
I wasn’t at Farnham long before Tony called again, this time inviting me up to join them in Manchester. I wasn’t fooled – he mainly wanted me to be his ASM.
‘But there’ll be parts as well, I promise.’
He didn’t have to ask twice. The chance of being back in the Northwest with Brian was irresistible, even if I was back on the book again.
The first play at Manchester was a panto, The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew, in December 1966. Brian had one of the leads, Obadiah Bobblenob, Terry Lodge, our landlord, was the storyteller and I was listed as one of the ‘Poor and Needy’. I had to go on stage in rags, a hood over my head, and pretend to tie something. It was a funny little piece.
I remember David Jackson coming down one day to talk about doing Antony and Cleopatra. David had been at Liverpool with Brian. He was a big, big bloke and obviously very heavy. I was talking about him afterwards with Linda Polan and she said, ‘Oh, I knew Jacks when he fell through his first flat.’ (Linda later appeared with me in K-9 and Company and a couple of other things. It’s funny how these things go round.)
I remember I was in my peasant’s outfit when Jackson wandered by with Tony. He took one look at me and said, ‘They don’t pay the staff very much these days, do they?’
Actually Brian and I were both on the Library’s top pay of eighteen pounds a week, which for doing what we loved was a fortune. After the horrors of St Annes I even managed to save about ten pounds a week. Working such long hours, all day long and into the night, didn’t leave much time to spend anything anyway. If it hadn’t been for a couple of places that stayed open for us I would have saved every penny. My favourite, Tommy Duck’s on Barbirolli Square, used to wait until the actors had arrived after eleven then lock us in. It felt so naughty and, I admit, it was a nice boost for the ego that they went to such trouble for us. But then trouble wasn’t exactly a stranger to Duck’s. The owner, Tommy Duckworth, was an ex-wrestler, I think. If only half the rumours about him were true then he was quite a handful, but he bent over backwards for us and was a real character. You just had to look at the ceiling with its ladies’ knickers pinned to it to realise that.
George Best had his club at the same time, so we went there as well.
It was such a fun time. Tony was a great raconteur – he’d tell us all about working with Joan Littlewood and even persuaded her to come and have a chat with us. My parts got bigger and better. That season he gave me Iras in Antony and Cleopatra, Fran in The Poker Session, Deidre in How’s the World Treating You? and Leanthe in Love and a Bottle (played ‘with charm’, according to one review). Then, after the summer break, I got the big one. Tony wanted to do Othello – and he wanted me to play Desdemona. What an honour! I don’t think I appreciated how lucky I was, even when the reviews came in (‘Elisabeth Sladen’s final scene with Emila (Linda Polan) was a little gem’ – The Observer). If I’m honest, I was more delighted that Brian was playing Iago.
Another big play for me was The Promise. It was a gloomy affair, set during the German occupation of Russia in 1942. I played Lika and Brian and Paul Webster were Marat and Leonodik. Our characters were just trying to survive – my raggedy trousers were held up by a tie, not a belt; it was that sort of look. So when they find a can of food, of course, they fall upon it.
It was Brian’s job to open this thing – it was Fray Bentos corned beef – and then mash it up for us to share. One night his hand slipped and raked against the tin’s sharp edge. It was as if he’d cut his jugular. Blood just spurted out – all down his arm and over the corned beef. I thought, He’ll have to go off to get that looked at, but he didn’t flinch. He looked at the tin, then at me and said, ‘Well, it’s only me.’
Couldn’t you have thought of a different line? I wondered.
But he had to be the consummate professional, didn’t he? So there we were, eating the bloody stuff and trying not to vomit.
Of course, the bleeding didn’t stop, so I remember taking the tie off my trousers and winding it around his hand to stem the flow. I was not happy. Brian had gone with it so I followed, but when we came offstage I said to the stage manager, ‘You make damn sure that tin is opened properly in future!’