Music hall’s last act

In the winter of 1974, aged 29, I was playing Archie Rice’s son in The Entertainer, directed by the play’s author, John Osborne.

Max Wall, then 66, was playing Archie. We had to wait in the wings, stage left, during the interval. As the play started again, the lights came up and the dialogue started. Max told me he had a headache.

He was smaller than me, although, on his own on stage, he could look huge. I held the nape of his neck gently in my right hand and rubbed his temples on either side between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.

The skin on his forehead rippled slightly and Max closed his eyes. It was like holding the head of the Sphinx.

We heard the cue for our entrance and walked upstage towards the light. As we were about to enter the scene, Max muttered wearily, ‘Course, the trouble with this game is you’re only as good as your last performance.’ He paused. ‘It’s a bit like marriage, really.’

And then into the light and our stage family – the only family he had at the time.

In 1966, I’d also worked with Max in Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry at the Royal Court, designed by David Hockney. Max was Ubu, the King. I played his parasolbearer and my task was to replicate whatever Max did with his legs.

He was 56; I was 21. I was hardpressed to match his contortions. John Cleese happily admits to Max’s being the inspiration for his Ministry of Funny Walks in Monty Python.

The idea for The Entertainer came out of an illustrious meeting in 1957. While Marilyn Monroe was filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Arthur Miller let Olivier know he wanted to see Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court.

Olivier had already seen it and hadn’t liked it, but arranged to go again with Miller. After the performance, Osborne met Miller and Olivier, who asked Osborne if he could write a play for him.

The Entertainer was the outcome. It gave Olivier a new lease of life. The great classical actor became a great modern actor. He triumphed as Archie Rice in London, on Broadway and then in a great 1960 film directed by Tony Richardson.

I loved The Entertainer. It brought back memories of my grandfather. He came from the East End and was full of references to George Robey and Fred Karno and his travelling comedy troupe, part circus, part music hall, which took Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and a stilt-walker called Cary Grant to America. Three geniuses.

As a schoolboy in Camberwell in the 1950s, I saw the last days of this world. Music hall became variety and a handful of the comics had spots on the television. There was Beryl Reid, who played a

Brummie schoolgirl who kept mice in her knickers. And Terry Scott, as an awful schoolboy who scowled at the camera, saying, ‘My dad’s rotten. Our dog had puppies and he drowned them… He wouldn’t let me drown any.’

And then there was Max Wall as Professor Wallofski. These performances enlivened a world where television was intermittent and Sundays were endless.

All three of them were influences on me. In 1975, I was the last of Beryl Reid’s Mr Sloanes

(pictured, above right) in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane

My grandfather admired my imitation of Terry Scott. And I perfected the art of extending my wrists to reach the piano in the style of Wallofski.

During rehearsals, John Osborne talked of those music-hall legends Marie Lloyd and Max Miller as if they were his adored friends.

Marie Lloyd had looked after Max Wall when he was a boy, and both his parents, Jock and Stella Lorimer, played the halls. Max was born Max Lorimer in 1908, later taking an abbreviated version of the surname of his stepfather, Harry Wallace, to become Max Wall.

Osborne let Max put in a joke of his own into The Entertainer: ‘Take my wife – puh-lease, take my wife!’

John couldn’t stop laughing and it stayed in. The line had a particular echo for Max. His first wife, Marion Pola, and his five children wanted nothing to do with him. He’d taken up with a Miss Great Britain.

Nobody’s eyes were sadder than Max’s. Marie Lloyd was, funnily enough, entranced by Dan Leno’s sad eyes. When they shared a show, she would always watch him from the wings. Max heard some of Dan Leno’s old records and was startled by the similarity of Leno’s patter to much of his own material.

Max had the good fortune to spend time with the artist Maggi Hambling, who painted and drew a wonderful series of portraits of him.

Maggi is Colette meets Burlington Bertie. She went to his stage shows and even helped him learn his lines for Waiting for Godot, which became her favourite play.

To have a host of Maggi’s portraits and to be buried in Highgate Cemetery – as Max was, on his death in 1990, aged 82 – is grand and apt.

One night in Greenwich, Max and I were alone after the show. It was my 30th birthday and there were no trains back into town. He drove us to Covent Garden in his Hillman Minx. Maggi Hambling told me he once had a goldplated Rolls-Royce.

In Goodwin’s Court, he took me to a Chinese restaurant with a window full of splayed orange ducks. He told me wonderful stories of his travels: as a comic dancer, he found there was no language barrier.

In Paris, he worked at the Casino de Paris in a revue, with Maurice Chevalier. He had a girlfriend, Susie, older than him and gorgeous – maybe on the game. She wore silk stockings and they were lovers whenever he was in Paris.

In Germany, he was free to study Grock (1880-1959), the Swiss clown and physical comedian who mesmerised his audience. As with Max, his act knew no language barrier. He came to England but when they approached him to claim income tax, he disappeared, never to return again!

Max shared the bill at the Palladium with Frank Sinatra. After the show had been on some time, the management told him he had to curtail his act by six minutes. He worked out at what point to stop, walked to the front of the stage and, placing one foot on the footlights, said,

‘There was a young man from Dundee,

Who got stung on the neck by a bee.

When asked if it hurt,

He said, “Not very much.

It can do it again if it likes.”

Goodnight, folks.’

Dan Leno would have been proud.

Max’s good fortune was that Greenwich Theatre had a panto being rehearsed and, for two weeks after the close of The Entertainer, there was no evening show.

So Max put on a one-man show, Aspects of Wall, which then transferred to the Garrick Theatre and brought him back to the centre of things.

I saw it many times. The last time I took choreographer Eleanor Fazan, an elegant, joyous woman known as Fiz.

After the show, we went to Rules restaurant in Covent Garden, where the staff remembered Max from when he’d been in The Pajama Game at the London Coliseum. Max was very taken with Fiz and she was delighted to be with him. A great night – and the last time I saw him.

Max’s second wife, 26 years his junior, wrote a note when she left him, saying, ‘You will end up in one room, alone, with nothing.’

Well, she was wrong. Max collapsed and died in his favourite restaurant, Simpson’s in the Strand, where he was entertaining two friends and the staff. The last thing he saw was a joyous, loving audience.

I recently saw a documentary on Max on Talking Pictures TV. The last sequence of the film was him on stage, facing his audience in his Wallofski wig, making bourgeois utterances of no meaning whatsoever.

The audience was delirious and vocal, expressing their happiness for him and for the fact that they were present.

Dan Leno would have been proud and Grock would have been mesmerised. The night of the splayed ducks was a highlight of my life.