First Theme - Aberystwyth University 1976

A big hit of Drama, Music and Film to change my brain.

It is October 1976. Aberystwyth has waved a fond goodbye to its summer holiday trade (Harry Worth and Norman Vaughan have played the Kings Hall), Chicago’s “If you leave me now” is Number One for (seemingly) ever, and it is the first Sunday I haven’t been to church or youth club. Freshers weekend had been so scary for my limited social skills that in order to dodge the wallflowering I signed up as a member of the Entertainments committee, which meant that I roadied for the bands playing that weekend. Over three nights I carried Linda Lewis’s lighting gear, Little Bob Storey’s amps and managed to drop John Peel’s entire singles collection. He was lovely about it. “Don’t worry, I don’t like those much”, I heard, in unmistakeable lugubrious Scouse, as I scrambled to pick up T Rex and Elton John singles.

The Drama Department turned out to be the perfect therapy for a shy, inhibited teenager. Physical workshops were mandatory, there were shows rehearsing or performing continuously and, to my amazement, I found myself crossing the stage of the Theatr Y Werin within six weeks, playing Salerio in the Merchant of Venice. To counter any growing cocksureness, I was relegated to the bum end of a dragon for the Mummers play immediately afterwards. We were treated as actors, not kids, given a free hand and responsibility from the start, and I found I could do the job of acting. I went for good parts and mostly got them, enjoying the sense of becoming somebody else, and the courage that performing gave me to stop apologising for who I was. In the second term I brought up a second-hand, newly-purchased (with the help of friends) electronic piano, and before I knew it, I was providing incidental electronic music and the part of Captain McNure for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

But on a personal level, Aber was having an even more profound effect on my life. Partially through the required intimacies of drama training, partly through the joy of group experiences, both good (hilarious rehearsals, nights in the pub, successful compositions and post-pub sessions in breezy seafront rooms with stoned mates) and bad (unrequited loves, throwing-up drunken nights, screw-ups of all kinds) I started to discover who I was. And to not mind the result. Because of its isolation, it was possible to become a Big Fish in Aber very quickly. Although I never aspired to that position (many who did were, it has to be said, utter bastards) I got a chance to shine in a small arena, and that did wonders for my self-confidence. It’s no surprise that the friends I made at Aber are still my friends now, a close-knit and supportive crowd who turn out to each other’s parties, weddings and opening nights, who are at the end of a phone whenever, and the ups and downs of whose lives match and give meaning to one’s own. Unlike the cliché that drama groups are full of facile, manipulative people, my experience was of young, awkward adolescents learning the twin arts of acting and life-skills with more or less success. None of us really came out of Aber really knowing the paths our lives would take, but we definitely acquired some of the tools to start the journey.

Meanwhile, our ‘old school’ (or as I thought of them at the time, ‘school’) lectures in drama texts were providing valuable ammunition for the future. We had to be able to analyse scenes from Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekov and Beckett, marking the text with what was going on in the subtext, showing where control of a scene passed from one character to another and where the big reveals or turning points were. I started to see words as building blocks, and scenes as marvels of well-hidden construction. Above all, I began to learn about theatrical storytelling.

As all the great writing gurus will tell you, story is about character, and vice versa. The myriad ways we learn about character have always fascinated me, particularly the non-verbal signs, those wonderful signals that spell out human nature but are not about what people say (which is not always the truth anyway) but how they behave – in dance it’s about motion in the air, attitude, response to music. In film it could be about body language, or where the character is in the frame, or how they tap a cigarette onto an ashtray, or even, in the case of the great silent clowns, how they react to a house falling down around them. But when writing for the theatre, character has to start with the text, which will give enough ammunition for the actor to draw out personality traits, and create an entertaining, recognisable person. Once you have that, as a writer you embark on the next hardest job – creating scenes.

A useful rule of thumb learned much later from Robert McKee’s Story Structure classes is that every scene has at least three levels of drama going on that will affect character – first, and most obviously, the outside world – where is the scene taking place, what’s the weather like, are our characters shouting across a field or stuck in a broom closet? Next, and the one that will be brought out most in the text, is the interaction between characters – who are they, what do they want, what is their relationship? Are they strangers, lovers, hated rivals, children – above all, who has ‘control’ of the scene? A husband walks into the room where his wife is sitting at a table and announces that he is leaving her for another woman – in that moment, he has control of the scene, he is the stronger, he leads the conversation, she is playing catch-up. Then she tells him she’s delighted he’s leaving because he’s made her miserable and she loves somebody else – now she has control of the scene, having reversed the roles, telling him something he and we don’t know and weakening him in the eyes of the audience. In good scenes control shifts continuously between characters, sometimes with only the smallest, most domestic lines – but that shift in control is what keeps us watching – it’s called The Hook, and in both writing and music it is vital. We’ll come back to that a lot!

But we have one final element of drama in a scene which is just as vital, and has to be gleaned from the subtext – what are our characters thinking? What is going on in their heads? In real life, we almost never say exactly what we mean in conversation – if we did, we would probably end up in a psychiatric unit. Instead, we hide our intentions through dialogue until we are ready to impart something truthful, maybe not trusting the person we are talking to, or are aware that the surroundings are wrong, or that what we say may hurt other people. Proper dialogue is full of elisions, obfuscations, editorialising and random changes of tone and subject – learning how to shape that dialogue so that we understand what is happening in a person’s mind, without giving them lines that are right ‘on the nose’ – “I love you” – “I hate you” – “You’re ugly” etc etc – that is the biggest and most alluring challenge in writing drama.

All the above boils down neatly to “Who are they, what do they want, how do they get it” but stories are about detail and the tiny signals that tell us everything. And there we have the secret to hooking the audience – not telling them everything, keeping them guessing, MAKING them want to know answers. Great playwrights, like great filmmakers, pose a huge question to their audience at the start of a story, then drip-feed enough information to keep their audience satisfied but still curious. The very best make the big reveals, when they come, completely unexpected, changing everything that we have already seen and heard – (“Luke, I am your father” or Orson Welles’s smiling face briefly illuminated in a Viennese doorway) and know instinctively when and how to end a story. Shakespeare understood all these principals, from setting up the worlds of the play, to drawing fascinating and detailed characters, to allowing glimpses into their heads to follow their thinking – above all by allowing the story to unravel ahead of the audience, keeping them hooked until the final, cathartic events.

All of this magic began slowly to appear during my time at Aberystwyth as we took deep dives into Sophocles, Wilde, Shaw, Congreve, all wonderful snapshots of their time but with the added necromancy of theatre as I watched actors embodying the creations of long-dead playwrights. Not that I saw myself as a writer at that time – a composer, maybe, because I could come up with tunes, and sometimes put lyrics to them. But then my music was put to its ultimate challenge, and I was invited to take on a job for which I was absolutely untrained.

Because Aberystwyth was a holiday town, the Drama Department didn’t just put on shows for academic or college-related reasons – there was a trapped Summer Season audience in Aber, especially when it rained, and they needed family entertainment. So, students studying drama stayed on through the summer to mount shows in the department’s theatre. And that meant children’s shows. And those meant songs. And that meant musical accompaniment requiring a musical director. And there was only one person in the department who fitted the bill – me, with my Grade 5 piano, inability to sight-read and zero experience in teaching songs to actors. Of course, I jumped at it.

The show was a little-known family confection by Bernard Gosse called The Fantastic Fairground, subtitled ‘A Musical Play’. It came with a score, thankfully staying in reasonably predictable keys, and we had only three weeks to rehearse a company of about twelve. I had done a bit of playing with other students and gained a drummer, Chris Dixon – he with his kit, and I with a borrowed organ, my electronic piano and a very early synth I had bought second-hand that year (a Roland SH-1000 for those interested). Chris and I were the pit band, stuck behind a screen as the director was concerned that we might ‘draw focus’!

The amount of sheer front I put up to do that job astounds me now – if my music reading was barely adequate, the rest of the cast knew no better, and, as with Mozart in my piano lesson days, I would make improvements here and there, adding to songs, writing dances, improving on Gosse’s score to order. As a company, we began to own the show, and first appearances in front of audiences were heartening. I grew in confidence with the playing, people responded to my musical direction and I found I had an unexpected string to my bow – because, secretly, I didn’t care about the music or MD-ing – I had taken the job because it came with a sweetener – if I MD’d the summer show I would get a good part in the show following – Toad of Toad Hall, in which I would get to play Rat. Now THAT was an incentive.

On Saturday evenings we would race back to the company’s digs to catch BBC2’s horror double-bills. I now realise how lucky my generation was to have access to the entire history of cinema on the four channels we then enjoyed. Film Studies as a scholarly pursuit was just moving into the mainstream, and between the BBC’s huge catalogue of movies, Leslie Halliwell programming ITV and Channel 4 and Alex Cox’s Moviedrome presenting the edgy and offbeat movies the others wouldn’t touch, I watched the films that would become central to my life. Those late-night Universal and Hammer horrors celebrated in the mid-70s double-bills were best watched with adrenalin- and booze-driven drama students, who could be relied on to scream the place down at appropriate moments, or collapse laughing at yet another over-ripe performance. British pictures of every vintage turned up at the strangest hours of the day, particularly during holiday periods, and finding that my contemporaries didn’t sniff at Will Hay or Ealing added to my sense of belonging.

But it was through my one year of American Studies that I found myself experiencing something that would later change my life. Aber’s AS department periodically showed films that represented the themes of Americana we were studying as literature. John Ford was there, of course, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra, but before all of that I found myself staring at a 187minute epic unfolding on the lecture theatre screen in complete silence – DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, in all its bitter, racist glory. This groundbreaking epic told its story of civil war and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan with an intensity that gripped us all. It was the first time I realised the power of cinema in even its pre-sound days. That eerie silence in which we watched Griffith’s storytelling was full of sound in my head – voices, shouts, gunfire, galloping horses. I was as immersed in it as I would be in any sound film, and it worked its magic on me no differently to its impact on those first audiences of 1915.