Just Williams

Simon slips up on stage

‘I was so immersed in smoothness, I had forgotten that I can’t play the piano’

THE WORST FIRST NIGHT at the theatre I ever had was in a stage adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector , a twohanded play – my co-star was Marianne Faithfull (surely a name from a Restoration comedy). Briefly, it is the story of a psycho kidnapping the girl of his dreams and keeping her locked in his basement lair. Having chained Marianne to the bedpost, I explain to her my obsession, I laboriously mime locking the door, and put the key in my pocket. Eventually, I unchain her, saying, ‘There’s no escape.’ We circle one another silently; the tension is massive. Marianne runs to the door that I have seemingly locked. She tries to open it, desperately rattling the handle. She then has to turn and deliver her first line, ‘Give me the key.’ On the first night, she ran to the door, opened it wide, paused, closed it again, turned and shouted, ‘Give me the key!’ I’ve never heard laughter like it on a first night.

Things weren’t any better in a play I did with Lucy Fleming. I was the smooth villain (or was I?) taking her, the cool victim (or was she?), prisoner in a Spanish villa.

Again, I lock the door. I then toss the keys down on the piano and play a tune that we once knew (or did we?). Miming to a recording of course, I played with a smoothness to die for – Russ Conway meets Jools Holland.

At one point I had to say, ‘OK, there are the keys, take them – you won’t get far.’ At the matinee, in a moment of absent-minded smoothness, I slipped the keys into my pocket by mistake. Come the crucial line, I realised in horror that the dratted keys were not where they should be, and instinctively reached into the pocket of my black safari suit (imagine!). The stage manager did not see my hands leaving the keyboard, so the recording went on. I was so immersed in smoothness, I had forgotten that I can’t actually play the piano. I stared at the keyboard in disbelief – what a miracle – playing by itself like that. I couldn’t understand why the audience was laughing.

As the music played on, Lucy gave me the kindly smile she uses when I cock things up, and raised an irritating eyebrow. (We weren’t even married then.) There were tears of laughter rolling down the cheeks of 500 pensioners in the stalls. Mr Smooth had morphed into Mr Prat. I raced to resume playing, but as my fingers landed on the keyboard, the stage manager abandoned hope and stopped the recording. More laughter. Lucy improvised, ‘Why don’t you play it again? With your hands on the keyboard.’ Applause. Collapse of smooth party. Simon and Lucy will be performing Posting Letters to the Moon at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, 1-3 November