Actor reveals his cancer battle as he prepares for stage return
BARRIE RUTTER BACK IN HOME CITY FOR SHOW NEXT MONTH
HULL-BORN actor Barrie Rutter’s last appearance in public was in his home city in January 2020, when he shared the stage at Hull Truck Theatre with his friend and colleague Eliza Carthy.
Little did the audience know at the time that just two days previously, he had been diagnosed with throat cancer.
Following treatment that has included weeks of radiotherapy and keyhole surgery, Barrie is back to performing again and is once more returning to Hull for A Night Upstairs With Barrie Rutter, next month.
Not long after his last show in the city, Barrie, 74, who grew up in Hessle Road, underwent six weeks of daily radiotherapy at the Bexley Cancer Wing, in Leeds, the first coronavirus lockdown falling exactly in the middle of his treatment.
Barrie said: “That Monday, the M62 was like a Christmas morning. The patients’ ambulance that transported five or six of us at a time to our appointments became my personal chauffeur, and the sad sight of the blanketed grand piano where previous volunteers had greeted us with sweet sounds from Cher to Chopin, displayed its triangular ‘Closed for Covid’ cardboard sign in miserable isolation.”
While Barrie received the news that the treatment had been successful, following a scan in early August, the same scan showed a growing nodule in his right lung.
A biopsy was not possible, as Barrie’s diaphragm was blocking the path of the needle, so in April this year, keyhole surgery removed a “wedge” of lung.
Barrie said: “In the operating theatre I was offered a choice of music; choosing Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee I sailed away to oblivion on a bluesy cakewalk rhythm with the image of the whole surgical team boogying gently with me.”
The nodule was malignant, but again the “mighty NHS” delivered a positive outcome for Barrie after the follow-up scan showed clean tissue.
Luckily, the cancers were primaries, not linked or metastasised, as indeed is Barrie’s slow-growing prostate cancer.
“Oh yes, that’s there as well,” he said. “It’s the ‘Freeman, Hardy and Willis’ of an attack force on the body.”
Born in 1946, the son of a fish worker, Barrie was raised in a two-up two-down in Hessle Road.
His acting career began colourfully, invited by an English teacher into the school play because he “had the gob for it”.
He left Hull aged 17 and later founded and became the artistic director of the Northern Broadsides theatre company, based in Halifax.
He has played major parts in many of the company’s productions and has many film and TV appearances to his credit, including the part of an armed robber in the film version of BBC sitcom Porridge.
In 2009, he directed Lenny Henry in a production of Othello.
A Night Upstairs with Barrie Rutter is described as “an intimate and entertaining choice of readings, memories and anecdotes from someone who will always have the gob for it”.
From the RSC and the National Theatre, where he first worked closely with Tony Harrison and discovered a passion for performing in the Northern voice, to establishing the ground-breaking Northern Broadsides; from surviving hand-to-mouth on a shoestring budget, to winning numerous awards, culminating in the country’s largest and most lucrative arts prize, Creative Briton 2000, Barrie’s “Night Upstairs” will share all this more at Wrecking Ball Music and Books, in Whitefriargate, on Sunday, November 14, at 7.30pm.
Tickets cost £15 from Wrecking Ball Music and Books or online at wreckingballstore.co.uk