Back Story Page 0,93
times and it worked perfectly. And it was hugely worth doing. Our fee for a night of ushering was £10 plus a percentage of the commission on programme and ice cream sales. Around Christmas, this could be as much as £2 a night but for most of the year it was about 50p. The Tube fare was £1.50 each way. So, if you paid the fare, you lost nearly 30 per cent of your wage in travel costs.
But, other than on a handful of occasions, I always bought a ticket. Not because I felt it would be terribly wrong not to, but because I couldn’t take the stress of worrying that I’d be caught. I was willing to pay nearly a third of my income for peace of mind. I’m amazed I’ve never been scammed by an insurance company.
Ushering at the Lyric was a nice respectable holiday job for a teenager, which is what it had been for Jon when he’d started there, six or seven years earlier, when he was a schoolboy growing up in Chiswick. He’d returned to it because he wasn’t getting any acting work, it was the only job he’d ever had and he felt, quite rightly, that if he got a ‘proper job’ that paid good money and actually had prospects, he might be lured into a career he didn’t want. There’s no risk, with ushering, that you get so used to all the money and perks that you forget to follow your dream.
Rob and I asked him to get us jobs there as well, because we didn’t have any better ideas and because it was related to our chosen profession. But that fact only made it more soul-destroying. Not only were we doing teenagers’ part-time jobs despite having Cambridge degrees, we also had to witness other people being properly employed as actors on a daily basis. We’d have been so much happier doing data-entry.
As ushers you got to watch, or as it felt at the time ‘had to watch’, the theatre’s shows again and again. I don’t remember thinking the standard was very high – but then I wasn’t seeing these productions in their best light. I was usually watching for the umpteenth time, eyes watering from sour grapes: other people were on stage instead of me.
No one can spot an actor’s flaws as quickly and as mercilessly as an out-of-work actor. ‘I could do this!’ Rob and I thought and said to each other. Having so recently left an environment where you could just roll your sleeves up and get involved, this was a very frustrating feeling.
But I used to enjoy watching the productions decline. The one I saw most often, because it was on at a time when I had absolutely nothing else to do with my life so I was ushering every shift I could get, was Mrs Warren’s Profession. All I can now remember about that show, which at one point I could practically recite, is a moment when one character, a personable old duffer, meets a younger, more serious character. They shake hands. Early in the run, the old chap had done a very subtle movement or gesture to indicate that the younger man’s handshake had been rather too firm. It was beautifully done and got a big laugh. I then had the pleasure of watching that moment deteriorate.
The actor’s reaction got larger as the audience response got smaller. You could tell he was worrying about it between shows, fretting over how to recapture that comic moment from earlier in the run. Sadly for him he only ever came up with the same answer: he needed to do it more. He started to wince and exhale visibly. The laughs got quieter. He cheated his body round to project his apparent discomfort across the stalls. They got quieter still. ‘Why aren’t they noticing?’ he must have wondered. By the end of the run he was desperately wrenching the tiniest titter from the crowd with a shameless piece of tremendous ham.
But such moments of schadenfreude were few and far between. Mainly I was wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and bitterly reflecting how I had left everything too late. Why didn’t I have an agent? Because I hadn’t really tried to get one – I hadn’t written to any agents and then I hadn’t rung them up and persuaded them to come and see shows at Cambridge or in Edinburgh. And now there wasn’t anything for them