I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This is not typecasting. ‘Why do we actors have so much self-esteem and so little self-respect?’ demanded Edmund Kean in the eponymous play Kean,which I last saw in 1990. Funny, I never forgot that line. I’d been bobbing along merrily in rehearsals, learning, improving, rejecting and rejoicing. Now, suddenly, it was a technical rehearsal in a real theatre, the Brighton Royal, and there was a microphone taped under my wig, battery packs belted to my underwear – real orchestrations, quick-change shoes. My ancient make-up sticks must be laid out and lip and tongue exercises from my Lamda days, 60-odd years ago, must be performed. My brain turned to cod’s roe and I forgot not just my lines, but my children’s names, my marital status and my reason for living. Yet you will have seen enough Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movies to know that in the end the show went like a rocket.
Just before curtain up on opening night I received an email from a friend, Deirdre Kennedy, telling me her son Fraser had died. I have been in touch with this family, two of whose children have now died from the effects of the genetic disease Friedreich’s ataxia, ever since I helped Deirdre with some charity work more than 30 years ago. Rebecca, Fraser’s sister, died at 34 of this wasting illness, but Fraser seemed utterly indomitable. Even in a wheelchair and without sight, he skied, he parachuted, he surfed, he beat all the odds to live the fullest life he could until his 45th year. At the curtain call I dedicated the show to Fraser, which was a bit pretentious of me, but how else do I mark the passing of a real superhero?
I am forced by government inaction on anti-Semitism to hire security for the tour. A few bigots in Aberdeen have been campaigning to get the show cancelled because of my support for Israel, which they describe as ‘extremist’ and, for good measure, ‘hateful’. Online they’ve circulated a version of the show’s poster which has been doctored to give me horns and a pitchfork. That dopey old trope again. Actually, my husband, David, who is erudite and even poetic on all matters of faith, told me that the Hebrew word for horns, keren, also means radiance or halo, such as Moses sported when he returned bearing tablets from his encounter with the Lord on Mount Sinai. Medieval artists didn’t need much encouragement to adopt this mistranslation into their devilish depictions of Jews. The pitchfork, I assume, is for barbecuing the matzos.
Anyway, Mark, my security man, protects me and even brings me a flat white and a flapjack when I can’t exit via the stage door. Meanwhile, the kidnapped Ukrainian children remain brainwashed in Russia, their parents are scatterbombed nightly, and 35,000 Iranian kids are slaughtered, but nobody marches against these actual genocides. No Jews, no news. Bigots instead want to boycott a British actress in a non-political play.
After a week of performances in High Wycombe, I am hoarse, hysterical and, frankly, gaga. I climb into the marital bed and fall into the sleep of all sleeps, only to wake at 2.38 a.m. with ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’, Tiny Tim falsetto version, pounding my hippocampus, full of beans and ready for the next leg of the tour – in Aberdeen. Can I be allergic to my own adrenaline?
Sweet, sunny Sunday and, joy of all joys, I must spend three hours on Zoom, doing a speed awareness course. My third. The earlier two punishments were in person. Somehow, in the previous sessions, I had managed to cheer up my fellow criminals to the point that we were all swapping addresses in the car park afterwards. ‘See you next year!’ a girl in a burqa had yelled from her BMW. ‘Sure hope not!’ I had yelled back, waving and grinning, before immediately backing up on to a high traffic island. Anyway, on this Zoom course the instructor did a first-rate job of explaining the obvious to eight or nine of us. It was no easy task, since his accompanying videos failed to synch up properly, so the whole thing looked like a dodgy crime report from Tajikistan.
Heading for Heathrow, I took out my novel of choice. It is When the Cranes Fly South, but I swear when I bought it I read it as ‘When the Crone Flies North’.
In the end, the show in His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, was not disrupted once. The glittering granite city lived up to its motto – ‘Bon Accord’. And perhaps, once again, Hadrian’s Wall fulfilled its purpose to keep the barbarians out.
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