My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (18 page)

RUSSELL BRAND

I started to cry he gave me my bike back, which I was then able to exchange for some amphetamines the next day. We were conducting this symposium in my mum’s shed having returned to Essex from wherever the hell we were staying especially to collect collateral. We were both high having taken a couple of tabs and while I wept and hugged my bike’s front wheel, for in that moment my bike became a talisman of childhood, innocence and the soul, Dean chatted with my mum with the grace and ease of Lady Diana visiting a children’s ward.

We went into the house, Dean charming my mum’s friends and delivering perfectly judged anecdotes while I had a mental breakdown because the plates they

were dining from were

slightly different to how I remembered them. It wasn’t the acid, they were slightly different, it was a very subtle diff erence, they were still brown and cream floral plates but a bit diff erent, that’s what threw me, the subtlety. If you’re gonna get new plates, get new plates. They were so similar that I couldn’t understand the logic of the replacement. It was like looking at your mum’s face and noticing that her eyes were a centimeter closer. Which they were, but that was definitely the acid.

I left Dean doing card tricks to the enchanted gathering who were oblivious to his expertly concealed intoxication and went into the garden to continue my maligned evaluation. With the help of my constant mistress, the moon, I decided I needed to go to drama school. I dashed into the house, told my startled mother of my epiphany, smashed a couple of my crockery-foes and disappeared into the night leaving Dean to apologize and close with a song.

There were two places that I auditioned for in the hope of re-building my life. One of them was RADA, and the other was called Drama Centre, which was built around the teachings of Stanislavski—the great Russian dramatic theorist, who popu-142

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larized Method acting. You had to pay twenty or thirty quid to audition, and that was a pain in the arse to get hold of. I probably tried to swap my bike for auditions.

I can’t remember what happened at RADA, but I didn’t get in, so I assume it didn’t go well. I’d developed the habit at Italia Conti of drinking and taking drugs when I performed.

And when I rehearsed. Or read scripts. Or moved about. Before performing I used to get so nervous that it was impossible to cope without chemicals. The nervousness is not vague, but overwhelming—almost crippling. It loosens my stools. It aff ects me bio chemically and anatomically.

This is what the auditions are like: two students from year 2

sit on the panel with Christopher Fettes, the intensely charis-matic inspiration for his ex-student Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, his partner, Yat Malmgren, a Swedish Yoda who once danced for Hitler—why he did this I’ve never understood.

Why did Hitler even need dancers? No wonder we won the war, Hitler was dicking about watching ballet while the Eastern front was being compromised—and Reuven Adiv, who was a contemporary of Al Pacino at the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio.

You go in and do your two pieces, one modern, one classical, while they sit in a line behind a desk in front of you like on a TV

talent show.

It was an intimidating atmosphere. Christopher was snooty.

And Yat muttered mysterious things; he asked me what my favorite color was. “I like purple,” I said. “Oh, purple.” He responded as if my answer had given him all the information he’d ever need on me as a person. “People who like purple are vain and are unable to cope with the adult world.” A lucky guess.

I’d got all nice and drunk before the audition. One of the second years who was on the panel—Adam—later reminded me of some of the things I did, so I can now recount them with clarity.

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I do remember being formally announced—“This is Russell Brand”—and swaggering drunkenly into the room. “So,” said Christopher Fettes, in his perfect clarinet voice, “what are you going to do for us today, young man?” And my reply to Christopher Fettes—this elegant, Oxbridge-educated man (Fettes College in Edinburgh, which is where Tony Blair went to school, is named after the Fettes dynasty)—was, “I thought I might wop out a bit of acting.” When Adam recounted this to me, he placed par ticular emphasis on the word “wop.”

“OK,” he continued crisply, “so what have you got for us?”

Over the thirty years that they’ve run that school they’ve trained Simon Callow, Colin Firth, Paul Bettany, Tara Fitzgerald, Pierce Brosnan, and numerous other very good actors. I walked into the performance space, took the chewing gum out of my mouth and stuck it out on the wall, did a piece from Pinter’s Th e Home-coming (“One night, one night, down by the docks . . .” that bit), then pulled the gum off the wall, put it back in my mouth and sat down again.

Next I had to do a piece from Antigone. It’s a speech where Haemon implores Creon to show clemency to Antigone, who’s buried her brother’s body after some war—obviously I didn’t read the whole play, so I’m not sure what the fuck went on, I was doing it how I would talk to my dad if I wanted something from him: “Oh come on, show a bit of clemency. You’re a powerful man, let’s not fuck about, people listen to you . . .”

I didn’t know how to take direction at that time, I bristled when they offered guidance. “He’s educated, so it’s like a lawyer in court,” Christopher said. I just went “Yeah, alright,” and did it the same again. I didn’t like people telling me how to act, I found it insulting, so I’d pretend to listen then carry on with my instinctive interpretation or, depending on how drunk I was, ar-144

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gue. Or cry. Despite my surly, drunken behavior those three brilliant men saw fit to accept me into the Drama Centre, snatching me from the dole queue and handing me back my dignity.

Actually I continued to sign on throughout my time there and my dignity was diminished. If anything. V

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It was obvious that Drama Centre was a magical place from looking at the building. The school was in an old Methodist church in Kentish Town, where it was rumored that the brilliant Irish poet W. B. Yeats and devil-worshipper Aleister Crow-ley had once engaged in a bizarre cult.

Central to the training are the teachings of Stanislavski. Th e

basic principle of Method acting is that you should draw on your own personal experience—“You know how you felt when you were seven, and your dog died? Well, think about that when you’re playing Hamlet.” It sounds simple enough, but it involves learning lots of techniques to heighten your capacity for emotional recall. Those techniques were westernized from the original Russian templates by people like Lee Strasberg, who taught James Dean and Al Pacino, and Stella Adler—another teacher in New York at the time—who taught Brando.

Drama Centre London transplanted those ideals from New York, along with at least one teacher who had trained there (in the form of the aforementioned Reuven Adiv), and set out to teach its young students how to approach acting like a craft.

Fettes was an articulate, stylish and brilliant homosexual man who could also be quite clipped and brutal on occasion.

The students deified Christopher, Yat and Reuven. Th ey were

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great men—excellent teachers and wonderful characters—but obviously that gets exaggerated when you’re a young person trying to learn acting and these people hold the key to knowledge and they’re in absolute authority and they’ve created this system where their word is law. As a result, Drama Centre was a very intense place.

It was no coincidence that its nickname was (and still is, even though Christopher has moved on, and Yat and Reuven have both died) “Trauma Centre.” Going there was like being a member of a cult. The first day I went to Drama Centre, I didn’t like it. I scanned the room to get a sense of my contemporaries.

There was Romla, the daughter of George Walker, who owned William Hill—his brother was Billy Walker, the boxer—she was quite an imposing character.* Then there was Jamie Sives, a really good Scottish actor, who went on to work in some excellent films. And Karl Theobald, the brilliant comedic actor, who would later be in Green Wing. Initially these people seemed quite intimidating.

The ideal of the impoverished artist really pervaded that school. They liked people from modest backgrounds, who were good-looking and talented. And drinking neat liquor from the bottle, with all my long hair and my shirt undone and my beads, not so much the lizard king, more a gecko duchess, I fi tted in nicely with their idea of what a creative person should be.

The social makeup of Drama Centre was based around a fairly clear divide between the working-class kids, who were there on grants, and those from the middle-class families which could afford to send their kids to a place like that. I’d managed to wangle myself a grant from Essex Council. As if determined

* William Hill is a famous high street bookmaker, inwardly gurgling with tiny pens, discarded paper and broken dreams.

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to uphold the county’s reputation for philistinism, Essex Council only give out three grants a year for the whole of the arts. I was proud to receive that grant, especially in the knowledge that I’d fought off competition from all of Essex’s poets, paint ers, dancers and stage hypnotists to get it.

A charity, the Stanley Picker Trust, gave me a thousand pounds a term in response to begging letters that I sent. I don’t know who Stanley is, or was, but thanks for that money; it went to a good cause.

There was also a fund, Friends of the Drama Centre, which gave the financially insolvent students—myself included—extra money for maintenance. I did my best to spend every penny of that money on drugs, while living on people’s floors, wearing shit clothes and drinking filthy five- quid- a-liter vodkas named after Rus sian authors. Tolstoy Vodka, Dostoyevsky Vodka. I may not have read their books, but I was devoted to their stinking booze.

I selected friends that were in a similar financial situation from comparable backgrounds who were as mad as I was: Mark Morrissey—who claimed to have been in prison for robbing a post office when he was seventeen, which I thought made him incredible glamorous, but was never sure it was true—and Tim Renton, this Geordie bloke who was a bit nuts.* I ended up living with these two above a pub in Kentish Town.

Mark Morrissey was an amazing character. He’d been brought up by his nan. I love people who’ve been brought up by their nans: nan-kids. They speak funny, because they’ve missed a generation of talking—“Alright, nan . . . Countdown’s on in a

* “Geordies”—fiercely proud inhabitants of Tyneside. They were traditionally miners and shipbuilders, industries that were destroyed under Thatcher, and their pride now largely focuses on their inconsistent and financially troubled football team. Their identity is more regional than national.

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minute. Shall I get some working-out paper, it looks like we’re in for a cold snap?” Although Mark wasn’t a square like most nan-kids, or a boffin, he did waffle on in an anachronistic vernacular.

Here’s an example of something Mark Morrissey said which was funny. In the first year at Drama Centre, they make you build the sets and work as crew, including preposterously dangerous work with electrics for the final year students’ productions. When they allocate which department you’re in—set, electrics, makeup, wardrobe, front of house—you pray for one of the cushy numbers like make up or front of house, like in prison, where as far as I can assess from Porridge, you want to work in the library or in the kitchen. I got the equivalent of breaking up rocks in the unforgiving midday sun for every one of my three terms—electrics. On wardrobe you just sit drinking tea with actresses. I, however, was drilling holes and running wires through walls and ceilings. It was terrifying, “I could actually die,” I thought. “This cable doesn’t know I’m a student being taught a valuable life lesson, it’s a conduit for electricity, it’s going to assume I’m qualified.” It’s not like a rollercoaster, where no matter how scared you are you know that it’s sanctioned fear, you can’t actually die. Life is not a theme park and if it is the theme is death. They make you work eighteen-hour days.