Julie Hesmondhalgh: A Working Diary

Julie Hesmondhalgh

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350025714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Actor Julie Hesmondhalgh's working diary begins in November 2016 at the end of a full and exciting year of theatre-making with her company, Take Back. The company is a northern-based collective creating immediate script-in-hand responses to social and political events (of which there were many in 2016). Her work with Take Back fell between filming the third series of Broadchurch for ITV and starring in the award-winning play Wit at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. She kicks off as she prepares to start rehearsals for Mike Leigh's epic film about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; visits schools and colleges representing Arts Emergency - an organisation set up to promote opportunities for young working-class actors; and awaits news of a possible London transfer of Wit. The book takes in Hesmondhalgh's unique experiences of working in film, theatre, TV and radio drama, and through the ups and downs of life as a working actor and producer, while balancing family life. The events described throughout take place against the backdrop of the huge political change and upheaval as Britain votes in favour of Brexit and Donald Trump is elected as US president. Throughout, Julie Hesmondhalgh considers the impact and challenges of starting a brand new chapter of her career after 16 years in Coronation Street; growing older as a woman in an industry preoccupied by youth and appearance; working with a legend of British film making; running a company; being a parent; experiencing first-hand the huge changes and pressures in the creative industries and arts education; and the lesser-known aspects of an actor's life post-production and publicity. All the while, she attempts to pass on any knowledge or experiences she might have accrued to people starting out in the business in this fascinating year-long journal.

JULIE
HESMONDHALGH:
A WORKING
DIARY

3 November 2016

I’m in MediaCity, Salford, to do a radio play, and – as usual – I’m lost, wandering around from building to building trying to find the MPAS studio. I have no sense of direction and the white maze-like corridors bamboozle me every time. I make it by the skin of my teeth. It’s just a read-through today, and a friendly chat over a cup of tea with the producer and her team, the writer and the cast. I’m in and out within the hour and off to Ashton College where I have a longstanding arrangement (and it has been months in the planning) to talk to a group of young people about Arts Emergency, since they are piloting the northern wing of their scheme in the Further Education College.

I grew up in Accrington, a small industrial town in north-west England, not unlike Ashton-under-Lyne, except even further from the bright lights of Manchester. Through a lucky accident of birth, I grew up in a time when young people from backgrounds like mine were supported in every possible way in our journey to becoming artists of one kind or another. I was taken on subsidized school trips to the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester all through my teens, and had a brilliant teacher, Martin Cosgrif, who taught us A level Theatre Studies and who instilled in us a belief that we could be actors, directors, writers. That we had as much right as the next person to pursue a life in the arts. We all loved performing, but I don’t think any of us signed up to that course thinking for a minute we could actually be professionals one day. It just wasn’t something that kids like us did. But, after two years with Martin, a disproportionate number of us got into top drama schools. In 1988 when I went to LAMDA on a full grant (covering fees and maintenance – can you even imagine?), there were five of us there from Accrington at the same time. Three of us in my year of twenty-five or so. Four out of the five of us are still acting.

Young people today are really up against it. The crippling debts that face anyone leaving higher education now, not to mention the devaluing of the arts by policy-makers who regard them as ‘soft’ subjects, make the choice to pursue a creative degree or arts-led course feel like a daft risk, and one that fewer and fewer kids from low income families are prepared to take. Arts Emergency is a charity dedicated to encouraging these young people to follow their dreams, and to creating an ‘Alternative Old Boys’ Network’ with a mentoring programme that already has 4,000 industry professionals involved. This kind of work is crucial if we’re going to have an arts community in this country that truly reflects the diversity of its population. If we’re not careful, in a matter of years our arts institutions will be entirely run by the children of the wealthy, and the stories we tell each other will be representative of that tiny stratum of society.

The talk goes well, I think. Ian Kershaw (Kersh), my husband, who mentors a fantastic young English student from the college, comes with me and I manage the PowerPoint more easily than I thought I would. Martha, our fifteen-year-old daughter, is here with a group from her school (hilariously, I had to sign a permission slip to allow her to come and see me talk). I’ve worked hard to keep the content uplifting, whilst acknowledging the very real and quite bleak backdrop of how hard it is for young artists these days, certainly in comparison to when I was starting out. I spend some time apologizing to the audience on behalf of my own complacent generation for not fighting hard enough to keep in place the things that made our lives so much easier back then. There are positive things I can say, though, about the many opportunities available in the burgeoning creative industries, and that there are people who want to help.

I talk about Bread and Roses, the old protest song, with its beautiful line ‘Hearts starve as well as bodies’. In my opinion, it offers the template for a good life: you need to balance the bread – having enough to sustain yourself and your loved ones physically with food and shelter and essentials – with the roses – the need to experience beauty, art, music, literature, culture. I feel the government at present would like us to believe that to be an artist is some airy-fairy choice that will leave you starving if you’re mad enough to pursue that life. I believe it’s possible to have the bread and the roses.

There’s a good Q&A afterwards with intelligent and thoughtful questions from the young people, including:

How do you cope with being recognized?

Answer: It’s not as fun as you think it’s going to be, but most people are lovely and just excited to meet someone off the telly, and it takes as much energy to be grumpy about it as it does to just smile and graciously pose for the inevitable selfie.

and

How do you cope with rejection?

Answer: You just have to! It’s part of life and part of the job; you have to find ways to lift yourself and be kind to yourself when the disappointments come.

Someone asks me if there’s anything I wouldn’t do and I talk about the things I’ve surprised myself by doing over the last few years including sex scenes (Cucumber), nudity (Wit) and shaving off my hair (Wit again). Afterwards, Kersh says he’s surprised that I didn’t talk about commercials. It didn’t occur to me in the moment. I’d be very careful of what I put my face and name to in the name of promoting a product, but of course I’m painfully aware how that kind of choice comes with the privilege of having enough money to say ‘no’ to stuff. One advert can support a lot of unpaid and interesting work.

I dole out advice like I know something about anything, but try to be honest about how much I’m still learning and how I have to work very hard to remember these things too. ’Course I do. So, for what it’s worth, these are some of the things I hope I’m starting to learn…

Look after yourself. The Five-a-Day for Good Mental Health are also the Five-a-Day for a Rich Creative Life. So:

1 Move your body …

… however you can, according to your ability. Get out in the world and breathe the air and get your heart pumping. Being an artist does require some stamina, so stay well, especially if your art is fairly sedentary, such as writing or drawing. You’ll have more energy. Tiredness is so boring. Stop going on about how tired you are. Everyone’s tired. My friend Brian Astbury set up the then illegally multiracial theatre The Space in South Africa in the 1970s at the height of that most brutal of apartheid regimes. The black actors would work twelve hours a day labouring or cleaning for their rich white employers, then come on the bus to rehearse into the early hours, with the constant threat of arrest hanging over them. When the police raided the theatre, as they did on a regular basis, the black actors would grab brooms that had been strategically placed around the theatre and pretend to be cleaners. They were probably quite tired. They probably didn’t go on about it as much as half the actors I know. Go for a walk. If you can. Or a swim. Whatever. Move.

2 Connect

Be around other people who feed your creativity, encourage you and who you support in turn. Champion each other, help each other develop. Ask for help. You’ll be amazed at how much people really want to talk to you and help you. You’ve no idea how inspiring it is to meet young people with vision and passion and ideas, who are trying to make stuff against the odds. Seek out the artists who inspire you, write to them, ask for advice.

3 Learn something/do something new

Feed yourself. If you go to an audition or an interview and you haven’t worked for months, you can say that. You can sit and tell them what a shit year it’s been. Or you could tell them that you’ve taught yourself to play the ukelele by watching YouTube; that you’ve read some William Blake, which inspired you to write some poetry for the first time since you were thirteen; that you’ve hired a room above a pub and put on a scratch night of a play idea with some mates. Say how you’ve listened to David Bowie’s back catalogue, watched Spike Lee’s epic film on the New Orleans flood, genned up on feminism or watched the seminal box set you always meant to. If you’ve joined a class, gone walking in the Peaks or volunteered at a food bank, tell them. You might not be any better an actor than the person who went in before you, but your good energy and lust for life will get you the job, I’ll bet you.

Take any opportunities that come your way. If someone offers you a free ticket to see something, snatch it (thanking them profusely, obviously). If someone recommends a book, read it. If a great theatre company comes to your nearest town, do what you can to see them and then hang around at the bar to talk to them about it afterwards. Or tweet them. Read the great plays. You can still order them from the library (at the time of writing). BE ARSED. The world is full of people who Can’t Be Arsed. Buck the trend.

4 Be in the moment

I love Facebook. I can happily lose two hours scrolling through the minutiae of my acquaintances’ lives. I run a political theatre collective almost entirely on Messenger (8,000 messages between the three of us at the last count). But real life is better. Now and again, leave your phone at home. Be hard to get hold of. Go a different way to work, look up, take out your earphones, listen to conversations on the bus. It’ll reboot your brain and make you a better artist. Look at stuff again. OBSERVE. Break a habit. DO NOT BE ON YOUR PHONE IN A REHEARSAL ROOM EVER. It’s properly rude.

5 Put something back

Try not to disappear up your own arse. Art is about connecting and creating and making the world better. But try and see the bigger picture. Be pragmatic. A couple of jobs I’ve done have been quite emotionally full-on in terms of content, especially Black Roses. It was a tiny but intense and beautiful play by Simon Armitage about the life and death of Sophie Lancaster, a young woman from Lancashire who died from her injuries after a group of lads attacked her and her boyfriend in a park in 2007 because they were goths. I played Sylvia, Sophie’s mum, and the words I spoke were hers, verbatim, from interviews she gave for the piece, interspersed with poetry by Simon Armitage, spoken as if by Sophie. Most nights people sat in silence at the end, and a few people would always wait in the bar afterwards needing to talk to me and Rachel Austin, the brilliant actor playing Sophie, about how the play had affected them. It’s a heartbreaking story and the audience were taken on a little journey through Sophie’s life from birth every night, and so they felt the loss of her in some way at the end. It was an upsetting play to be in, and people would always ask how we coped with ‘putting ourselves through that’ every night, especially with me being a mum of daughters myself. Most nights Sylvia, the real Sylvia, would be in the foyer during and after the play selling wristbands and handing out literature about the foundation she’d set up in Sophie’s memory, campaigning for better legislation on hate crime and raising awareness about the need for promoting tolerance and diversity in schools. I would have been a proper wanker to come offstage and allow myself one iota of indulgence about how draining it was for me to pretend to be Sylvia every night, when the real Sylvia was there working her arse off to change the world in the face of such horrendous and unimaginable loss.

The same goes for Wit, the play about cancer by Margaret Edson I was in at the Royal Exchange earlier this year. After every performance, there would be people in the foyer who had survived cancer or were living with it, had lost someone they loved to it and – in a couple of startling cases – knew they were soon to die of it. It was a complete privilege (an overused word, I know, but very apt here) to spend time with these people and hear their stories. For me, it was a massive part of that job. And because of Black Roses, I anticipated it. I talked to the rest of the cast early on about that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Julie Hesmondhalgh: A Working Diary
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright