‘It was all because of Chichester. Bloody Chichester! Theatre people are the worst in the world. There’s so much malice. Everyone’s at each other’s throats. They’re always waiting to get you and the moment they get the chance, they pounce!’
According to Ewan, his problems had begun eight years ago at the Chichester Festival Theatre. He had been directing George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, starring Sonja Childs in the title role. We don’t usually see the burning at the stake. This happens offstage. But Ewan had decided to open with a striking tableau of the flames, the smoke, the great pile of firewood, the bare-chested executioner, the crowd. He wanted it to prefigure what was going to happen, to illustrate the fate of the main character.
On the opening night, it had all gone terribly wrong.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he told me. ‘It was all so bloody unfair! I did everything by the book … producer’s notes, control and management procedures, emergency plan. We’d spoken to the police, the local authority, the local fire authority … I couldn’t have done any more. There was a full investigation afterwards. I spent hours being questioned and, in the end, everyone agreed that I was in no way to blame. Of course, the play closed immediately … not that it mattered. I will never forgive myself for what happened to Sonja. It was horrible.’
‘Was she killed?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He looked at me sadly over his glass. ‘But she was very badly injured: it was the end of her career. And mine! Nobody wanted to know me after that. I had two productions cancelled even though I’d already signed the contracts. It was as if I’d lit the bloody match! And look at me now. I mean … Ahmet’s decent enough, but he’s not exactly Cameron Mackintosh, is he!’
And what of the cast?
I have already mentioned Jordan Williams, who had agreed to play Dr Farquhar and was undoubtedly the star of our show. He was a Native American, the first I had ever met; a Lakota to be exact. I’d looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered that he had been born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in the USA. He had spent ten years working in Los Angeles and had received an Emmy nomination for his role as a psychopathic killer in American Horror Story. He had married his make-up artist, who happened to be English, and that was what had brought him to the UK. When he had first arrived, many of the newspapers had suggested that he might take over from Peter Capaldi as the first ethnically diverse Dr Who, but this hadn’t happened. Instead, he had taken on multiple roles in theatre, film and TV and if he wasn’t quite a household name, he was certainly respected.
I never feel at ease with actors and this was particularly true of him. He was a thickset, broad-shouldered man with extraordinarily intense eyes; I could feel them boring right into me every time we spoke. His face was defined by features that had a sort of mathematical precision, with a very straight nose and a square chin. He had greying hair that wasn’t quite long enough to be called a ponytail, but which he still tied back with a coloured band when he wasn’t onstage. He was by far the oldest member of the cast, but he wore his age well, sloping into rehearsals in tracksuits or jeans, his hands deep in his pockets, his thoughts far away. When he spoke, he chose his words carefully, with no trace of an American accent. It was as if he was performing … and this was in fact his defining characteristic. It was very hard to tell when he was acting and when he wasn’t – sometimes with unfortunate consequences.
We had quite a nasty incident at the end of the first week in Dalston. We were rehearsing the scene when Dr Farquhar attacks Nurse Plimpton and Jordan had grabbed hold of Sky Palmer, the actress playing her. I watched the two of them in the middle of the chalk outline, surrounded by the entire team. He was holding her, his hands clamped on her arms, his face very close to hers. He was shouting at her, in a rage. They must have done the scene a hundred times by now, but suddenly Sky began to scream. At first, I thought she was ad-libbing, trying something new. Then I saw the alarm on Ewan’s face and realised that this was serious, she really was in pain. At that moment, Jordan had become Dr Farquhar and he only released her when Ewan shouted at him to stop and everyone rushed forward to bring the action to a halt. Sky fell to the floor and I saw the bruising on her arms. She had been hurt and she had been frightened. That was the end of rehearsals for the day.
As we left, Ewan told me that this wasn’t the first time Jordan had behaved in this way. Apparently, he had quite a reputation. He was a method actor who took his roles very seriously. When he had been cast as the highwayman Dick Turpin in a BBC drama, he had not only learned to ride a horse, he had insisted on recreating the famous two-hundred-mile ride from London to Yorkshire and had almost been killed crossing the M1. On another occasion, playing King Lear at the Hampstead Theatre, he had often spent the night sleeping rough on the Heath.
To be fair to him, he could be generous too. He was mortified by what had happened and when we came back the following Monday, he presented Sky with a bunch of flowers so huge that it filled two vases.
Sky Palmer herself was something of an enigma.
I’d seen her perform many times, but I can’t say I knew her particularly well, which was hardly surprising as she was in her mid-twenties – three decades younger than me. Outside the play, we had nothing in common. When I first met her I had been struck by her intense, dark eyes, her self-assurance and, most of all, by her luminous pink hair – which she’d had to wash out once she’d started playing the part. She’d also lost her nose stud and multicoloured fingernails. She didn’t smoke but during rehearsals she vaped, blowing out little clouds of steam that evaporated immediately, leaving a faint smell of menthol in the air. I’d been worried that the part of Nurse Plimpton might be difficult to cast. The way I’d written the character had been undeniably sexist … but then I’d deliberately based her on the sort of character who might have appeared in an old Hammer film. Sky didn’t seem to care. She never asked me questions. She did everything Ewan told her. It was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or not.
This was mainly because, whenever she wasn’t working, she was plugged into her iPhone. It was the very latest model, the iPhone 8, in rose gold with a protective cover that sparkled with crystal glitter. She played games – Minecraft and Monument Valley – and she was forever checking her Twitter account. I never actually heard her speak to anybody, but she was endlessly texting, obviously in a relationship with someone. Her phone would ping in the middle of a scene and drive Ewan Lloyd to distraction. She would apologise sweetly even as she was firing off a reply. I had never seen anyone’s thumbs move so quickly.
Nothing about her quite connected. For example, the sweatshirts and leggings she liked to wear had come straight out of Sports Locker, but she also had a Cartier watch and her shoes were Jimmy Choo. She talked about popular culture – Star Wars and The Hunger Games – but I noticed her reading Franz Kafka. The playlist on her iPhone included Björk and Madonna, but finding a piano in the rehearsal room, she sat down and played the first bars of a Bach prelude. I was quite sure there was something she wasn’t telling us.
That left Tirian Kirke, playing Mark Styler. He had come in late, replacing the actor who had decided that five months on the road was enough for him, and I’m afraid he was the only cast member I didn’t warm to … but then he and I had history.
A couple of years older than Sky, Tirian had made many appearances on TV, playing a junior case officer in Spooks, a police constable in Line of Duty and, for three seasons, a footman or some sort of under-butler in Downton Abbey. He wasn’t quite a household name, but he was well on his way to becoming one, so I had been very pleased when he was cast in a show I’d written called Injustice. This was a five-part legal drama starring James Purefoy, screened by ITV in 2011. It was also, coincidentally, the show where I first met Hawthorne. He was our technical adviser.