Four Summers, continued

Edinburgh 1994

Episode One

1.

The Byact theatre group – origin of name uncertain – was a group of predominantly young people who were to be performing Frederico Garcia Lorca’s classic tragedy “Blood Wedding” at the 1994 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And here they are; well some of them…

Clockwise from left

Matt Ball (seated), Tilusha Ghelani (seated), Jim Keane (standing), Pete Newton (bending over), Sheila Ghelani (standing), Lucy Collins (seated in front of Sheila), David Lewis (back to camera), Kate Mitchell (seated), Ian Jones (behind the camera lens)

Matt, Tilusha, Jim and I had all, until the summer, been members of the same ‘A’ level theatre studies class at Burleigh Community College, Loughborough. Ian and Kate were our contemporaries and friends, who had been introduced into the acting world – or rather, the strange theatre studies/Byact dominated world that, at the time, a number of us seemed to inhabit – by appearing in pieces of work conceived by myself, Matt, and others. Pete was a year younger than us, and was half way through a BTEC National Diploma in performing arts at the same college. Sheila, Tilusha’s cousin, and Lucy were both former Burleigh students who were now at University.

Not pictured: Daron Oram (university student of drama), Steven Yule (professional actor), and Lindsay Ross, who was directing “Blood Wedding”. Lindsay was many things to many people. As we take up the story, she was, variously, to various members of the group, teacher, former teacher, confidante, friend, girlfriend, inspiration, and object of lust, love, and admiration. How she became both more to some people and a great deal less to others, is one of the stories of this summer.

2.

The majority of the group arrived at the celebrated drama studio of our recently departed alma mater, Burleigh College, wherein we’d been rehearsing for the previous three weeks, at some time in the morning of 10th of August, 1994, ready for the off. Portentously, perhaps, it was as atypical an August day as one could imagine – grey, cold, and autumnal, and as time began seriously to pass without the arrival of the others, the foremost thoughts on everyone’s minds was getting inside the studio to get out of the imminent rain. However, there was something of a problem here. The members of the group who hadn’t arrived were the three who lived in Leicester – Lindsay, Steve, and Daron. As well as having to travel a greater distance, they had also had to pick up the mini-bus, and take the “Blood Wedding” set to East Midlands airport, to pack it on a plane to Edinburgh, so there was plenty of potential for them to be delayed. However, the problem for us was that as it was the summer vacation, the drama studio was locked, and access depended on Lindsay’s arrival, as she, being a teacher, was the only one with the authority to go to the college’s reception and pick up the key. In fact, this was only partly true – I had a key that opened not just the drama studio, but several other doors in the expressive arts department, which had been loaned to me by another teacher, Paul Farrell, at some point in the past, and never returned. However, the group sensibly decided to send an envoy to reception on a mission of mercy to explain the situation and plead for a key, and only to use mine as a last resort if the initial plan failed.

Thankfully, it didn’t, and from reception not only did we get a key – brought by the psychotic-looking caretaker, who looked very disgruntled that we should be disturbing the tail-end of his summer respite - but also news that Lindsay had already called and left a message, saying that they were held up somewhere and would endeavour to pick us up a soon as possible. And so, we waited, in the place that for several of us had been pretty much, home from home, for the last two years and more. We listened to tapes, chucked a Frisbee around, and generally didn’t talk about the play itself. The reason for this was pretty obvious – it was nowhere near ready for performance, and we were shitting ourselves. The majority of the rehearsal period had been dedicated to theatre exercises and games designed to unite the group as a single entity, and to a great deal of work with the set – which consisted entirely of chairs that were moved all around the stage, built into all kinds of things, and also used for sitting on. There had been some work on individual scenes too, but with just over two days until the first performance, there hadn’t been a full run through of the play as a whole, let alone anything resembling a dress rehearsal. There was also, for one person, a certain amount of apathy about it, too – although I was looking forward to going to Edinburgh again with the spirit of the adventure, the journey, the act of “going away”, I wasn’t really looking forward to anything other than going to the Fringe Club and getting pissed. My obsessions of the summer had been being in a band, girls, and getting drunk, and as far as I could see, there was no way of attaining similar pleasures by sitting through, for example, a Steven Berkoff solo performance at the Traverse theatre. Other members of the group, such as Matt and Ian, were looking forward to going to seeing lots of plays and places, but I was apathy personified when it came to these things. However, I was in the company of good friends, and I had that sneaking feeling that it would be the last time a lot of things would be the same in my life, so it wasn’t difficult to muster at least a modicum of excitement about the trip itself, even if the theatrical part of it held no interest whatsoever.

Finally, the others arrived, and we were off. The journey from Loughborough to Edinburgh is a long one – five and a half hours if there are no problems with traffic, weather, or any of the other problems that stalk the highways of Britain – and it seems even longer if one is cooped up in a small mini-bus with lots of luggage and ten other people.

The previous year, when the Byact trip to Edinburgh was as part of Youth Arts in Leicestershire, a large group of performers from across the county, we had travelled overnight, on large and almost luxurious coaches. Apart from a hideous hangover and a bizarre meeting with one of my teachers, the aforementioned Paul Farrell, in a service station somewhere in the God-knows-where of the North at dawn, that trip had been quick and mostly painless. However, this time, the journey seemed like an age. We passed the time playing word games, telling jokes, and attempting to listen to music on the mini-bus’s desperately inadequate cassette player. The highlight of the journey was a service station on the A1(M) just before the Scottish border. Well, for service station, read a journey into a forest to find one petrol pump and a shack that was supposed to be the cash desk and mini-mart in one. Although this hardly sounds like the highlight of anything, the service station, despite being barely big enough to swing a particularly small cat, did contain the traditional service station fare of adult magazines, which, to our tired and road-weary minds, were the funniest thing ever, particularly one title, “Mega Boobs”. I christened this place, and its selection of trashy mags, “the last porn in England”, and although we never made a purchase, just the incongruity of the place and its selection of reading material was enough to keep us amused for the last leg of the journey.

3.

Our home for the next week and a half was to be the same place as it had been on the previous year’s visit – the picturesque Moray House halls-of-residence on East Suffolk Road, in the Craigmillar Park area of Newington. Moray House consisted of four halls surrounding a large green, and while in 1993 we stayed in the hall at the northern end of the quadrangle, pictured here, this time around we were in the western hall – which looked pretty much the same as the one in the photograph.

The only other people in Moray House apart from ourselves were a spattering of overseas students from the University, whom we only saw infrequently, and the warden, whom we barely saw at all. The hall was ours; our rooms were our little bases, our retreats, our infrequent gathering places, a place to sleep, to eat, to write diaries, to listen to music, and to smoke and to occasionally indulge in other recreational substances – more of that anon. Having said that, they bore little other resemblance to halls of residence – there were several common rooms, one large one in particular that we used as a rehearsal room in the first couple of days before our opening performance, and another one that Pete and I found to use as a television room where we’d watch Neighbours and Home and Away whilst everyone else was out exploring the city and going to plays. Again, more of that to come.

The rooms that we were in were all twin bed accommodation, which of course had led to earlier discussion and argument as to who was to share with whom. Tilusha and Sheila were an obvious pairing as they were family, and Kate and Lucy were happy to be roommates, but the others were more difficult. Although Lindsay and Steve had been something resembling a couple for the previous year and more, there were rumours throughout the rehearsal period that the affair had either hit the rocks, or ended completely, although that was never established as a fact. The matter was confused further because it had been quite an open relationship anyway, so we were never sure what was going on. Couple or not, they didn’t share – Lindsay bunked with Daron, who was probably her closest friend and confidante within the group, while Steve shared with Ian. Ian had initially wanted to share with me, but I had pointed out that as a fervent anti-smoker, he’d probably not appreciate the haze of Marlboro smoke that was my permanent companion throughout the day. Although he conceded this point, he wasn’t happy about it, and when it came to sharing with Steve, he was very apprehensive, being as Steve was a much older man whom Ian really didn’t know all that well. Sharing my love of smoking, Matt was the obvious choice to room with me, particularly as we had successfully shared a room the previous year, and had pretty much shared the summer together as well. Finally, Pete and Jim had drawn the short straw of each other, a tenuous pairing if ever there was one.

4.

Almost as soon as we arrived, we dived straight into rehearsal, to complete the scenes that hadn’t yet been mapped out, and to try and put the play into some semblance of order. This rehearsal, and one the one the following day, were tense, fractured affairs that did little to improve the group’s anxious state of mind, so it was a relief to get out in the evening for a drink. The only thing was, like going anywhere from Moray House, it took quite a while to actually get to a pub in the city centre.

From the entrance gate of the halls, one turned left down East Suffolk Road to get onto the A701, one of the main roads leading from the southern suburbs into the centre of Edinburgh. The journey into town was an epic trek that we made at least once a day, every day, for the duration of our time there, the name of the road changing as we got closer and closer to the city. It starts in Craigmillar Park as Mayfield Gardens, then changing to Minto Street, then South Clerk Street, then Clerk Street, then Nicolson Street, then South Bridge, and finally the North Bridge which intersects the Royal Mile and joins Princes Street. God knows how long it took us, but I suppose it kept us fit, and it’s no surprise that at least a couple of times, late at night, some of us elected to get a taxi home instead of walking.

It was even further to get to our venue, which outside of the festival season was a Masonic lodge. The Rifle Lodge, on Broughton Street, had been the venue of Willy Russell’s first ever fringe production back in 1972, but the other plays that were concurrent with ours were nothing like as memorable - I can’t even remember any of their names, let alone who wrote or directed them, and I don’t think any member of Byact went to see even one of them. As well as our venue, and our digs, there were two other places that we regularly visited as a group: the Blue Moon Café Bar that was just down the road from the Rifle Lodge, where we would convene post-performance for a drink and the director’s notes from Lindsay, and the Fringe Club, which was basically the Teviot Row Students Union building, in Bristo Square; a sprawling mass of entertainment and relaxation which was for the benefit of Fringe performers – one needed to have a Fringe Club Membership card for access to the building in the evening, which caused Kate problems one night when she forgot hers. Fortunately, a lot of pleading from her, and myself, and others, eventually persuaded the doormen to relent and let her in.

Most evenings ended in the Fringe Club – frequently, for some of us, it was where it started as well. There was a cheap cafeteria to eat in, loads of bars with extremely cheap booze, and there was a nightclub downstairs. We frequently ate, post-performance, together, before going our separate ways for the evening, although the following photo shows the dire financial straits I was in by the end of the week – the Drifter wrapper on the table in front of me shows the extent of the nutritious meal I’d just consumed.

Obviously, there were other places that people went to see plays, and to eat, and drink, and meet people. There was St Margaret’s Community Centre, the Youth Arts in Leicestershire venue where Byact had performed the previous year, and where a group including friends from Loughborough were performing “The Beggar’s Opera”. There was Calton Hill, where several of us went a few times – once, we went up to smoke some dope – another, Ian and I took a walk up there to see the spectacular views across the city, and to ruminate on matters of cosmic importance, as was our wont. There’s me, gazing Northwards – I can’t tell if I’m dwelling on some deep, meaningful issue, or if I’m trying to see if I can see our venue far below. Maybe I’ve just dropped a cigarette and it’s blown into the distance. Who can tell?

5.

On Friday 12th August, in the late afternoon, Byact’s version of “Blood Wedding” finally made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Despite the worries and anxieties of the cast, things went surprisingly well. There were a few people in the audience – bearing in mind the average fringe audience for a small play like ours was probably one or less – and for a first night, it was really rather good.

As may have become clear, I’m not going to dwell on the play very much in the story as it unfolds – in fact, apart from where the performances have bearing upon the offstage dramas, or vice versa, I won’t be mentioning much about it at all. This is partly due to my addled memory having very little recall of it, but it’s also because this is a human story about me, and what the summer meant to me, and the play was, to be fair, incidental. It was the reason I was in Edinburgh, but it wasn’t the centre of my world. It certainly isn’t what I remember most about the trip to Scotland, and it isn’t the event that had an enormous bearing on my life in the months to come.

That happened two days later, on the Sunday night.

But that’s for next time.

To be continued.