Sentimental journey
Radio Times, 3-9th
March 1984.
On a train ride
from London a man remembers a family picnic on a summer’s day 30 years before.
Martyn Read’s play about childhood evoked very different feelings in Michael Pennington
and Richard Franklin, the actors who portray the character as man and boy.
Christopher Middleton reports.
The word ‘nostalgia’ means, literally, a painful longing to return home. It comes from Ancient Greek, and describes the fretful feelings of Odysseus after years of lonely wandering.
There could be no more appropriate word, then, to
describe the prevailing mood of Martyn Read’s play ‘Waving to a Train’. This
gentle drama portrays the return of Richard, a middle-aged man, to the scene of
a sunlit childhood picnic, where, 30 years later, and with the helpless
hindsight of adulthood, he watches once again as the tablecloth and the events
of that summer’s afternoon unfold.
Michael Pennington plays the man grown up, and
Richard Franklin his younger self. Their perspectives on the play are both
different and revealing.
“For me, it was an immensely evocative experience,”
says Michael. “It brought back all those half-remembered details of childhood
in the 50s: barley-sugar sticks, Tizer the Appetizer, sandwiches wrapped in
grease-proof paper and tied up with elastic bands.
“In fact, it was quite extraordinary what an effect
it had on everyone – film crew and actors alike; for the whole two weeks we
were on location, we were quite lost in a sort of nostalgic haze.
“ I think probably it’s something to do with being
40. People my ago, who were teenagers in the 60s, spent their lives either
rejecting or escaping from their backgrounds. At 40, though, you stop running
away, and start to rediscover your past.”
A process which causes no small sadness to
Michael’s character as he watches, this time with adult eyes, the struggles of
his widowed mother to meet both his and his sister’s demands, so innocent yet
so brutal in their effects.
“That aspect of the play will strike a chord in
everyone, I think,” says Michael. “It touches on that feeling you have in later
life of wanting to say to your parents ‘Now I understand what you were trying
to do, now I see what you were going through’.”
Not surprisingly, at just 12 years of age, actor
Richard Franklin’s sense of the past is not so well developed.
His earliest memories are not the ready-packed
idylls of hazy summers and waving grass, but the vivid and often bloody dramas
of childhood: falling off a swing and cutting his chin open, breaking a front
tooth in a playground accident, getting involved in fights with classmates both
jealous and scornful of his theatrical ambitions. No place, or need to even the
slightest impulse towards constructing an idealised version of the past, just a
concern with the all-consuming, day-to-day process of growing up.
Indeed, far from feeling an affection for the
nine-year-old character he plays, Richard is somewhat contemptuous of him. “Too
weedy,” he says, “just like a used to be a few years ago – the kind who’s
always running to mother and hasn’t learnt to fend for himself.”
That’s not a charge you can level at Richard. Like
all successful actors of his age, Richard's life is an extraordinary
juxtaposition of adulthood and childhood, of responsibility and running riot.
One side of him, for example, is taken up with the
standard 12-year-old activities such as co-ordinating water-pistol raids on the
next-door dormitory at his Sussex boarding school. At the same time, however, he’s
performing frighteningly grown-up feats like a six-month run in the Royal
Shakespeare Company’s ‘Macbeth’ at the Barbican, and contemplating a possible
eight-month tour of the States.
It’s a childhood which many of his contemporaries envy, and on which he too will probably look back with affection in later life. And it is then, no doubt, some 30 years later, that the Milky Way bars now in his tuck box will start to assume a golden remembered glow, that the commonplace half-term outings up to town will be invested with the status of epic pilgrimages, and the summer afternoons of his youth will grow mysteriously long and lazy in his recollection.
But try as he -, and we -, may, we can never quite
achieve both states simultaneously: an appreciation of the present both for
itself and for what it will mean to us in years to come. The mind can play
funny tricks, but no matter how long we live, we can never quite train it to do
that.
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