Many Lives (7 page)

It's a very interesting thing not to kowtow to an audience, but to woo them without being a whore; to gather them up. It's an art. It's usually about the cast working together, unless you're the main focal point on stage. When I toured
Master Class
in 2010–2011, I had sole responsibility for gathering the audience and taking them with me. The play's set inside the Juilliard School of Music. It's based around a master class being given by the great diva Maria Callas. For two hours, Maria talks to the audience as if they are Juilliard students. It was an extraordinary experience. The way I would woo them, the way I would gather them was different in each town. In Cheltenham, where everyone seemed to me to be so fragile and insecure, I had to be rather gentle and encouraging, whereas in Brighton the audience just adored Maria flagellating them!

My preparation before going on stage is sacred, and silent. Some people natter; I don't. I absolutely have to zone in. Immediately before going on I rub my hands together until I feel the energy all around myself, and then excitement. Then I just say, ‘Let go, let God.' It's a ritual I've always done. It's all about me getting out of my own way; I get out of my way to let the higher power come in and guide me. I let go and let God.

Once on stage you have to be truly in the moment, following each one as it comes to pass. There's no living in the moment quite like there is on stage, apart from, perhaps, childbirth. If you're thinking ahead, you're mucking up. If you're doing a post-mortem about what went slightly icky a moment ago, you're mucking up. It's like skiing slalom – like downhill racing. You can't think ‘I've just flicked that post'; you have to think, ‘I've got to do this one and this one and this one.' With ‘let go and let God', you
are released to be in each and every moment of the performance, conscious and awake to its unique magic. If I didn't do this I'd be nervous, ego-ridden, fixated on wanting to do well, and fearful.

You can apply it to any situation that demands some kind of performance. If you're going for an interview, or to an important meeting, it's the only way to be. As long as you've done your best to prepare. After all, you've got to do the work – this isn't about expecting God to do it for you. If you've done your preparation, take off your mental pinny, wash your hands and say, ‘Let go, let God.' Just be in the moment. Only put in the energy that each moment requires. Don't try too hard. Trying too hard is trying too hard. Trying too little is too little. Just be there. If you've done the work, just being there is enough.

Charlton Heston once said to me, ‘We've got the best job in the world, but don't tell anyone. They'll all want to do it.' And I can remember Kenneth Cranham breathlessly exclaiming, as we came off stage during a performance of
The London Cuckolds
: ‘Oh Steph, this is better than sex!' It's true; it can be a lot of fun – as well as hard work. And it's not just actors who have licence to play.

I
remember talking with a friend about whether she should buy a silver fox fur coat or do an acid trip with R D Laing. It was 1967 and we were at the epicentre of a movement that was sweeping the Western world. For a minute or six, love was there on the streets. It was tangible, it was vibrant and I was living in the front seat of a radical social experiment we were creating from one moment to the next. The whole of youth seemed to be involved in an expansion of consciousness. Our mentors and guides were magicians and wondrous folk.

R D Laing typified the time. A psychiatrist and psychotherapist, his approach to mental disorders drew as much on philosophy and real-life experience as it did on medical theory. Rather than individual people being mad, he thought it was society, and the institutions that control our lives, that were insane. In harmony with a spirit of the time, his approach was based on compassion and humane understanding. Though he was totally against the use of anti-psychotic drugs in the treatment of mental illness, he thought
that mind-expanding drugs – like LSD and mescaline – had the potential to unlock the unlimited reservoir of our imaginations and give us insight into the wonders and mysteries of the universe. He was also an advocate of communal living. At Kingsley Hall, in East London, patients and therapists lived together; an experimental alternative, challenging what Laing thought was the inhuman system to which people with mental illnesses were usually subjected.

We were pushing against the world of our parents in order to gain momentum and move forwards. We wanted to do things our way – to smash the mental manacles that we felt had limited our parents' lives. We were fearlessly forging our way towards a brave new world. There were a lot of us, we were the post-war babies, and we were well educated. We could study whatever we wanted and get a grant for anything. You'd ask a friend what they were studying and they'd tell you Egyptology at Balliol or Theoretical Physics at Imperial. We wanted to learn. We wanted to know. We were changing the world.

The mores and hypocritical suburban attitudes that had underpinned our parents' lives were being challenged. We were bored by that suburban outlook. We wanted more. We wanted better. But we weren't prepared to have more war. The anti-Vietnam movement was huge. My American friends at RADA were either saying they were gay, attempting to get ulcers by eating toothpaste or going to Canada to avoid the draft. We all knew that Vietnam was a useless war and that the West had no right to be there. We were agents of love and we were absolute – and, mirroring the lack of compassion shown to returning GIs in the US, not particularly respectful of people who had fought in the Second World War.

Soon after my rooftop experience I saw a note on the RADA noticeboard:

ACTRESS WANTED IN COMMUNE…
PHONE THIS NUMBER…

I did, and became one of eight people living together in a planned and conscious model of communal living. Unlike our parents, we weren't interested in getting married and settling into a predetermined order. People like R D Laing were saying that the nuclear family was a source of neurosis and dysfunction. We wanted to explore alternatives to the norm; different kinds of ‘family'.

True communal living is about a lot more than simply sharing a house with other people. It takes work and effort. It demands structure, principles and rules. We wanted to be able to live in a family in which people didn't take each other for granted or disrespect one another. Learning not to be selfish, to be able to listen to others and share, took thought and practice. As members of a commune we had to be ready to put in the time to make it work. We were.

It wasn't that easy. If you're hung up about what you think is yours, and only yours, it's going to be a challenge. It was also about sharing your skills and labour and contributing to household maintenance; the mundane and routine and the fun and interesting. I learned so much from the people I was living with.

Our commune consisted of a sculptor and a silk-screen printing artist, both students at the Royal Academy of Arts, three architects studying at the Royal Institute of Architecture, Annie,
who worked in publishing, and Judy, who partnered up with one of the architects and gave us Yossarian Yggdrasil, a gorgeous baby boy known as Yggy. There was also a cat, a hamster, and me.

Even the make-up of the commune's members was consciously worked out in order to try to create a balance of personalities and professions. Sharing our skills and professional expertise, debating philosophy and ideology, we created a rich and rewarding habitat in which to live and grow.

Communal living is a mini-society. If it's going to work, there's no room for ego. Unlike the hierarchical model of the family, with dad – or mum – at the top, followed by the older siblings and on down, the commune's field is level: no one's boss. Everything was done by consensus. You needed to make lots of compromises. Everything we did was discussed at length. We'd have long philosophical debates about the domestic rules of the house. Should we wash up before or after we'd eaten? If you were going to turn on the oven to bake a potato, should you let everyone else know so they'd have the chance to cook something as well, so the commune could save on fuel bills?

Middle-class children developing a new set of life values, we were making up the rules as we went along. We had a large noticeboard, which we called The Interpolation Board, where we jotted down anything we had bought. When we came to do the tally, if we thought one person wasn't as well off as another we'd ‘interpolate' so they didn't have to pay as much as others who were better off. We had an extraordinary sense of commune. We had detailed conversations. If I break this Minton china teacup, can I replace it with another vessel that holds liquid? What are we dealing with? Is it a vessel for holding
liquid or is it the aesthetic of bone china? Our conclusion was that beauty was where
you
saw it, and manufactured beauty wasn't of that much interest – a vessel was just a vessel. So, if you broke someone's Minton cup it could be replaced with a mug from Woolworths.

We were far from unique – back then there were a lot of people living in the same way; some similar to the way we were doing it and some more experimentally, like R D Laing's community at Kingsley Hall. We were learning how to live with others – and be laid back. You'd hope people would try to use their own toothbrush, but if someone used your toothpaste, it wasn't important. What was important was that we were all just people trying to survive and share.

We shared all the influences of that era. Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, The Beatles – we actually had a party the day
Sgt. Pepper's
was released. Our reading list included Gurdjieff, Castaneda, the I Ching, the underground newspaper
International Times, Rolling Stone
magazine and, of course,
Private Eye
. We laughed a lot, we learned a lot, and had a really good time.

Gradually, though, I found myself putting my individual needs above the communal needs and it was time to move on. My career had started and I needed a different way of living. I wasn't a student any more. I had to go to bed at 9 p.m. if I was going to get up at 5 a.m. to be on a film set. For a lot of people at that time, living was a career. I was no longer prepared to see a drinking vessel simply as a drinking vessel. I wanted to have nice things from Heals that wouldn't be replaced from Woolworths if they got broken. I was developing taste as well as philosophy.

In the end my girlfriend decided on R D Laing, not the fox fur coat. Drugs like LSD and mescaline were not taken recreationally. People approached them with a sense of purity and purpose. They were treated with respect, and the potential consequences of what might happen if they weren't used responsibly were not taken lightly. We took it for granted that your mind, your soul and your spirit could be accessed through very carefully monitored psychedelic trips. If you were deciding to take a trip, it was done responsibly. You'd find a safe, beautiful place; you'd get your toys out, paints, good food, and the right people. LSD and mescaline were used to experience a higher level of consciousness, and were completely in line with anyone who was spiritually seeking. Taking these drugs responsibly involved having a friend with you who hadn't taken anything to act as a guide, facilitating you to use the trip most effectively.

I took mescaline once and had an extraordinarily powerful experience. I encountered a previous incarnation in a mirror. He was a South American Indian. It was completely riveting. Well, I thought it was; I stayed in front of that mirror for about an hour. Then I went outside into a field and saw my own funeral pyre. At first I was terrified, but then I gently started kicking at my skeleton and it turned to dust. I experienced the phrase ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust' as a totally lucid and vivid reality. I experienced the truth that matter is never destroyed – merely changed.

I came back from the experience with the knowledge that death is inevitable and nothing to be afraid of; that it's part of a circle and a cycle – the circle of life and the cycle of death and rebirth.

London in the 1960s – there were so many things happening. You couldn't help but get caught up. My first introduction to meditation came through Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's technique of Transcendental Meditation. He got a huge profile in the UK after The Beatles adopted him as their guru. We were all investigating, searching, exploring. I went along, too, in my Afghan coat, with a flower and an offering of some money and was given a word to chant.

It was very
Barefoot in the Park
– delightful but not particularly deep. We all sat there, breathing and meditating. It didn't feel like an internal experience but was wonderful fun. I'm glad I did it. I didn't have to use it again until many years later when I had to lie still in a hospital room for three weeks with my second daughter Chloe inside me, to prevent her from being born prematurely after my waters broke too soon.

At any time a situation can arise and you pull out what's already inside you. Suddenly it comes to the fore. During the 1960s I was having a good time. I wasn't doing things for my survival. I was playing and also hoping for more experiences that come out of nowhere – like Versailles and the RADA rooftop.

I was experimenting for experimentation's sake and there were so many opportunities to do just that.

I was eager and hungry to learn. At a lecture given by Buckminster Fuller, the American engineer, theorist and futurist, I was completely blown away. It was the first time I'd come across the
concepts ‘synergy' and ‘synchronicity'.

He gave a scientific explanation of synergy. It went something like this: if you know the prehensile strength of this metal and you know the prehensile strength of that metal, you'd imagine you understood the strength of these two metals joined together. But, in fact, these two metals joined together have an exponentially greater strength; so, too, when human beings join together. This is synergy – unexpected but scientifically true.

We are meant to join together. We have the potential to do so much more when joined than we ever could achieve alone. Team effort, the power of the group, the strength of the commune, a congregation of believers or the experience of good theatre are all synergetic experiences.

The term ‘synchronicity' was first coined by Carl Jung – a Swiss psychiatrist and spiritual seeker. He used it to refer to the way seemingly unrelated and – on the surface – disconnected events come together in a deeply meaningful way: always with a message and sometimes with profound implications. Deepak Chopra calls it ‘synchrodestiny'. These events are like miracles; reminding us that
all
things are connected.

Synchronicity is like having the stage curtains pulled back to reveal a perfect scene that had been there all the time – you just couldn't see it. It's like having the lights go up on a pattern that's somehow shaping your life. It's definitely in the realm of fractals – those incredible self-replicating geometric shapes that were first created by mathematicians, then discovered to exist everywhere in Nature.

Sometimes things appear to come together in a moment; sometimes over a period of hours, weeks, months or even years.

Our lives join up; just like a good haircut.

The way I landed in
The London Cuckolds
at The Royal Court back in 1979 is a good example of how things often join up in unexpected ways.

I'd been in
The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs
with Susannah York at the New End Theatre, Hampstead. It was directed by Simone Benmussa, a tiny French visionary who used lighting and music in the production in a way I'd never experienced before. I wanted to introduce Simone to Stuart Burge, who was The Royal Court's artistic director. Stuart had directed me in Ibsen's
The Doll's House
at the Nottingham Playhouse a few years earlier.

While we were having tea, Stuart asked me what I was doing the next day. I told him I didn't know. Then he asked me what I was doing for the next couple of months. I told him that I wasn't sure. I was entering a very difficult and dark period in my life. The way I replied characterized the uncertainty of that time. Stuart gave me a script that he had with him and told me to read it – it was
The London Cuckolds
. He called me later and said he was casting. He told me to come along. It just came out of the blue; I wasn't looking to be cast, I was just looking to make the introduction. I wasn't thinking of acting; I just wanted to bring together two people I thought would have synergy.

I find the way things work best is not to connive and contrive but to try to maintain a spirit of generosity; to be open to possibility and, rather than thinking ‘I want,' to think ‘I'm ready and I'm willing.'