Today we interview the immensely talented Leslie Clack from Dear Conjunction Theatre Company in France. The UK Premier of More Lives than One – Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas is on at Augustine’s, George IV Bridge from the 2nd to the 17th August at 7.25 pm nightly (except the 3rd and 11th August).
Leslie sent us the DVD of the show to take an excerpt from for his Virtual Flyer. We’ve watched it four times already – it’s that’s good! So let’s chat with Leslie as he reveals his pearls of wisdom…
1. What inspired you to become an actor?
Even as a child I was a bit of a performer, though only among my familiars. In both my mother’s and father’s families there were and are many very funny people, natural raconteurs, entertainers. As I lost my father very young these uncles, aunts, grandparents were my role models. I was always a raconteur, a joke teller, but suppressed my desires to become an actor and went into teaching. Only at the age of 32 when living and teaching in France did I kick over the traces and join a theatre group. I won a Conservatoire Award, gave up teaching and have never looked back (or is it forward?) since.
2. What is your show about and what should the public expect from your show at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe?
The show is about the life and works of Oscar Wilde, with extracts from his plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his poetry, his letter De Profundis, and his trial , with his cross examination by Sir Edward Carson. The public should expect to be not only amused but deeply moved – and perhaps surprised by little known facts. I try to present a balanced view of Oscar Wilde, with, dare I say, a tiny bit of sympathy for Lord Queensberry. (But not a lot for Lord Alfred Douglas).
3. What are your funniest and worst experiences performing in front of an audience?
Worst: 1) Performing in an (empty) private swimming pool at Gassin near St Tropez at a private function for the over-rich of the Riviera and a few strays from the Cannes film festival, getting buzzed by giant moths, screeched at by 24 peacocks on heat, and getting peed on by an erotic statue on the edge of the pool when some joker turned the tap on. We nevertheless carried on to the end of the play, took our money and left.
2) Drying stone dead twice in “The Business of Murder” at the Grand Opera House, York.
3) As George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” preparing to come on with a gun behind my back to pretend to be about to blow Martha’s brains out, when I found there was no gun! Stage management cock up. All I could find was a hammer. You should have seen the faces of the other actors who were expecting me to do a number with a gun.
4) Being in my dressing room two floors above the stage and hearing my cue over the intercom.
5) Being 15 minutes in to my one man show “Gros Calin” (Cuddles) in French when all the lights fused. I carried on for an hour, in the dark. The audience stayed. Well I suppose they couldn’t have found their way out anyway.
Funniest.: Being in a dreadful production of “Andromaque” by Racine and having a stray ginger cat, bushy tail in the air, come strolling across the stage several nights in a row (they could never catch him) and wailing in a perfect imitation of the leading lady. And other stories to do with that production.
4. What was the last Fringe or Festival you performed at and what was it like?
1978 Edinburgh Fringe. Difficult, not to say hell. I was a complete novice. I had translated a French monologue called “Cuddles”, and drove all the way from the south of France with wife, two small children and director. The only accommodation we could find was a caravan on the site at Port Seton, alongside Cockenzie power station.
Opening night produced one man on stage and one in the audience. As I had never even done a run through, we decided to go ahead. The man was great: did everything right – laughed in the right places, gave the right sort of silence when moved, applauded all on his own at the end. We chatted then that was that. Off he went. In the first week I totalled 18 people. I was the only show at the venue (The French Institute) not to have had a reviewer from The Scotsman. Well…unknown actor, unknown author, play, director…who’s interested? So in desperation on the Tuesday of the 2nd week I went to the phone box on the camp site, and putting on my best Scottish accent, phoned The Scotsman. I asked for the editor and , incredibly, they put me through. I then as an irate Scotsman told him that I’d seen the best show so far in the Festival (mine) and that the poor actor performing (me) was dying the death from lack of audiences, due to lack of review etc etc and it was scandalous that he hadn’t sent a reviewer along. Damn me if he didn’t apologise and promise to send a reviewer asap. Which he did. It was Robin (or Robbie) Dinwoodie, who gave me a good crit, and I got great audiences…for the last three nights.
Two years later, I received a letter, via my director in Paris, which started “Dear Mr Clack, in 1978 I was the only spectator at the world premiere of your play “Cuddles” at the Edinburgh Festival. It is still the funniest play I have ever seen, and since I saw you I have taken up acting and this year performed at the Edinburgh Festival…” and it went on. This was a great lesson for me. Often when audiences are small, you really don’t feel like going on. But you never know who’s out there and the effect you might have on them.
There’s another, even more incredible, chapter to the story of that one spectator (who was Peter Jones from Chesterfield), a chapter connected with “Crimewatch” , but we’ll have to leave that for another time.
5. What’s your best advice for aspiring performers in your theatrical medium?
Do your own thing, and do it as well as you can. Forget about becoming a star. Some of the stars are not very good, they just had the right contacts or the right family. Be true to yourself. Do good work and you’ll get a following of real people, even if you’re not on the front page of some awful newspaper. Don’t give up. Samuel Beckett said “Try again. Fail again. Fail Better”.
6. Are there any dreams or goals that you have yet to fulfil?
I want to keep doing good theatre till I’m old enough to play King Lear and still with it enough to remember the lines, I want to play, Archie Rice in “The Entertainer” and Sir in “The Dresser”, I want to score 100 in a cricket match, I want to bump into the producer/director who got me kicked out of the BBC, so I can tell him what I think of him.
7. What is the best advice you have ever been given? And did you follow it?
“Play the whistle”. Chris Carlssen a warm-up man on a BBC recording I was doing told me that. He meant by that “Do as much as you can, go over the top, propose what you like in a scene. The director will tell you when you’re overdoing it” No I didn’t, stupidly. I might have been more “successful” if I had. But I tend to be rather low-key. I don’t want to be thought a show off.
Also “Make it your own, love” is what Bill Gaunt said to me when I was about to take over the lead from him in “When Did You Last See Your Trousers” at the Garrick.
8. What is the best book or books you have read and why do you like them?
The early books by John Irving (“World According to Garp”, “Hotel New Hampshire” etc) They are original, racy, funny, sexy , tragic. He has the awful habit of making you really interested in a character then suddenly killing them off. That’s life. “A Prayer for Owen Meany” made me weep.
9. Who is the person you most admire and why?
My mother. In spite of losing 3 brothers during the war and being widowed twice, she always struggled back on to her feet and lived her life with not an ounce of self pity and a generosity to all that was second to none.
10. If you could change one thing about the world what would it be?
I would like to persuade people to abandon the trivial things which seem to fill our modern life and which the marketing people have convinced us are important, and get back to the appreciation of things that are simple, authentic and real even if they are not so easy and comfortable. I would make every mobile phone on the planet disappear.
