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MONDAY MARCH 23rd 1998

We are rehearsing in a grotty hell-hole, a church hall in Camden Town, which runs a soup kitchen for the homeless at lunchtime.
    Ray Cooney attends the read-through, and laughs his encouragement for the actors. Ron Aldridge is the director, and will be playing a small part in the last five minutes of the play, and therefore touring with us. When the director is with you the entire time, you can never seem to relax somehow.
    I’m playing the taxi driver, Bill, whose taxi meter is running throughout the play while he waits for Henry Perkins, played by Rodney Bewes, to attempt an escape to the Costa Brava with some crooked money that has mistakenly come his way, and is waylaid by the usual farcical events.
     Lunch is taken in the nearest pub, and everyone seems to get on reasonably well. Stories are swapped. So far so good.

THURSDAY MARCH 26th 1998

The first glimmer that things might not be plain sailing. I have a sure fire laugh on a line in Act 2, and out of nowhere Ron Aldridge tells Rodney that if he moves on that line he will smack him one.
    He knows Rodney of old, having worked with him in another Kenwright production, and Rodney took over from Charlie Drake in the West End production of Funny Money, playing the taxi driver.
    I remember being in a tour of Peter Nicholls’ Forget-Me-Not Lane for Kenwright in the Seventies, and Dave King, a comedian whose career was rumoured to have plummeted when he hit Lew Grade (Managing Director of Associated Television at the time), made a sudden move on a sure-fire laugh of mine. I wondered why my line met with a stony silence, and as I was playing Dave King’s character as a youngster, and he was standing behind me watching his former self, it was difficult for me to see what was happening. Another actor told me what was going on.
    If Rodney’s inclined to resort to these pathetic tricks, I begin to feel reassured that Ron is touring with us.

FRIDAY MARCH 27th 1998

Most of the morning I sense a strange atmosphere. As we break for lunch, Hilary Crane seems tearful and stays behind in the rehearsal room with Ron. When we return from the pub, Hilary has gone home. Ron tells us that Hilary feels she cannot go on tour as her husband, the playwright Richard Harris, has cancer.
    Ron needs Bill Kenwright to find him a replacement quickly, someone who can get to grips with the part in one week. We open at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, on the 6th April, and farce is not the easiest genre to perform at short notice.

MONDAY MARCH 30th 1998

Anita Graham, a tall, busty blonde, takes over Hilary’s role. She is great fun, nothing fazes her, and she is a confident farceur. And already she seems to know her lines better than Rodney, which is a bit worrying.

WEDNESDAY 1st APRIL 1998

No Northern Line trains between Charing Cross and Camden Town. Maybe it’s a fool’s day gag. I catch a bus, which stops and starts up Charing Cross Road. I know I’m going to be late, but what can I do about it?
    At Tottenham Court Road, I glance towards Bloomsbury, and vaguely remember – unless it’s false memory – that somewhere in that district we rehearsed in much more salubrious surroundings for Titus Andronicus. As the bus jerks and grinds its way towards Camden Town, I think back 41 years, probing and delving to see just how much I can remember.

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