I'd been learning to play the clarinet since I was 11, but had no experience of acting beyond the Sunday School Nativity Play. I had found Sunday School a bore - one bit of mythology is just like another - but the acting bit had been OK, so I went along for an audition.
The theatre struggled to cast the schoolboys, so rather than playing in the band I ended up on stage with a small speaking part. This was long before Alan Bennett attained his national treasure status : Forty Years On was his first play after the success of Beyond the Fringe. It was my first involvement in "proper" theatre, so I read the script without any knowledge of what was to come.
I was totally immersed with it from the first scene: the whole play was about British History and English Literature, with a whole series of revue-like sketches with some dreadful jokes. Inevitably - especially in the context of Bennett's later work - the First World War was a major theme and the following speech always drew some horrified laughs from the audience:
"If the ten million dead of the 1914-18 War were to march in columns of four into the gates of dearth, they would take eighty days and eighty night to pass through, and for eighty days the marchers would be the British dead." In the light of that information I want you to calculate (1) the width of the gates of death to the nearest centimetre and (2) the speed in miles per hour at which the column was marching."I'd never realised that it was possible (allowable?) to make jokes on a subject like this. Shortly afterwards the BBC screened Bennett's film A Day Out, set just before and after the Great War, and I decided that Alan Bennett's work was always worth watching.
And by the time The History Boys came along I had a strange sense of deja vu.
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