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Interviews
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"A common misperception of me is..." Sandra Giorgetti talks to Jack Shepherd during a short break in the tour of Only When I Laugh. Jack Shepherd is a man whose talent and principles run both deep and broad and I sense that if he stops mid-sentence and starts again differently, the motive is more likely to be precision than indecision. He seems a man not only thoughtful but full of thought. In The Independent's "5-minute interview" he said, "A common misperception of me is... That I'm very serious." He attributes this false impression to TV's popular detective programme Wycliffe, in which he had the unsmiling title role across five series, but even for those of us who associate him primarily with his theatre work I suspect the misconception will stick: the likes of Teach in American Buffalo, Hickey in The Iceman Cometh and Judas in The Passion, are more comfortably associated with solemnity than frivolity. Jack Shepherd is currently touring his play Only When I Laugh, a piece set at the Leeds Empire in the 50s; it reflects both his affection for Variety and his interest in exploring the moral conflict of rising above the class you were born to. He says of the tour, "[We're] just back from St Andrew's and Harrogate. It got a very warm response. The play can be quite hilarious but it can be quite sad, so it functions if people quietly enjoy it and it functions just as well if they let their feelings out." To write this piece Shepherd returned to the theme of a previous play, Comic Cuts: "I've revisited it every two or three years since we first did it. I knew what I wanted the play to be about but I couldn't dig it out. It was like a plantation and all the trees grow up and there are no big trees and no little trees, they're all the same size. It was like that, and I've managed to prune it and structure it in such a way as you can now see what the play is about." The new title reflects the amount of new material but the theme remains a challenging one: "[It] is not an easy theme to write about: the way that the working class hero both stands up for and betrays the class that they come from. There's Peter MacDougall, the Scottish writer - his plays about tenement life in Glasgow - I know he feels he's ripping the people off that he grew up with. He's using them. "It's as much about the [working class] audience watching Reg in a sense as it is about Reg himself. He's grown above the class he's come from. He's proud of that, so whether you're a writer or a performer as in Reg's case, there's this terrible ambivalence that people both envy and secretly resent your success." Top-billing Variety comic Reg Henson is the principal character; his name is taken from director Nicky Henson's father, a famous Music Hall comedian, but Reg's character is inspired by the rabble-rouser, alcoholic and comic genius, Frank Randall. In the play Reg blackmails the theatre management with his drunkenness and destructive behaviour; as Shepherd says, "He was Keith Moon before Keith Moon was born." Reg's unintentional antagonist is radio crooner Janey Shore, a replacement performer from London whose status justifies her having the number one dressing room and thereby threatens Reg's spot at the top of the tree. Shepherd sees her as "the future of women, liberated before her time who doesn't need female emancipation ten years later to know who she is - she knows who she is already and she's fine." In the middle is theatre manager Stanley Hinchcliffe, played by Shepherd. He describes him as "... inspired from my childhood. The archetypical hypocritical northern working class man who fancies that he's got into the middle classes. Most of the characters in the play come from my past, from Leeds. They're voices from my childhood." In addition to this and his other plays, Jack Shepherd has co-written, with playwright Keith Dewhurst, Impossible Plays, an account of the Cottesloe Company of which they were both key members. Inspiring and unpretentious, it is part-history, part-autobiography and part-study of how a new style in British theatre emerged from its social context and the very nature of its contributors. "It's a true work," he says of it. "It's not glamorised or polite fiction. It took me a long time writing the book… [Prose] doesn't come easily, I have to work very hard. I sit in the morning having a coffee or something with one of these books" - he pulls from his pocket a little notebook, an accessory he clearly keeps close at all times, and points to a page messy with notes and jottings - "full of that scribble, and then put it on the computer in the afternoon reducing it as I go. When I can hear the character's voice in my head that does come easily. I find prose very difficult, that doesn't come easily at all." >> The Royal Court and the Cottesloe
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