The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Confessions of a jobbing actor
When Covid struck, this West End stalwart had to get a supermarket job – and write a funny memoir
WORK… AND OTHER FOUR-LETTER WORDS by Joseph Millson
352pp, Unwin, T £8.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £9.99, ebook £4.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
This time last year, Joseph Millson was in his element, playing stuffed-shirt paterfamilias George Banks in Mary Poppins in the West End. The show provided a good salary, rapturous audiences and a chance to display his mettle: a gift for comedy, strong presence and old-school good looks.
When the pandemic struck, that relatively cushy gig turned into a familiar tale of fending off financial calamity. The 46-year-old took a job in a supermarket, started teaching and recorded “radio dramas for the BBC from my wardrobe,” he revealed in a recent interview. One of the small mercies of the grim Covidian year is that it gave him time to write Work, this entertaining, zestful memoir of his days spreading his wings as a young actor. One year per chapter, it conveys this committed hopeful’s progress honestly, with all its ups and downs. As a result, it distils on the page some of the thrills of the stage audiences will have missed of late.
Even in the thick of it, Millson has the eye of an outsider, by turns amused, astute and awed. He opens with a vignette of Hollywood glamour. The scene: the Bahamas, March 2006. The occasion: a birthday party for Daniel Craig thrown by the producers of Casino Royale (in which Millson played an MI6 agent). Craig greets him, screaming: “‘Yes! Another f-----actor! Welcome!’ He stuffs a fat cigar into my mouth, slaps my back and bounces off towards the dance floor.”
He then rewinds a decade to his first paid acting job, having spent three years living “on milkshakes and baked potatoes” at drama school. His debut? A hilariously awful-sounding touring musical production of David Copperfield. His digs: “A small, dark, child’s room at the top of a large unfriendly family home”. His first entrance – as Steerforth – left him stranded on the stage of the vast Liverpool Empire, waiting for the other actors to join him. For two long minutes, “I made noises like a cow in labour”.
In contrast to the autobiography of an ensconced star, we’re not in for some reassuring trajectory. Semi-celebrity rears its head when Millson lands a regular role on Peak Practice at the end of the 1990s. But for our tenacious jobbing hero, fortunes ebb and flow – the slog’s the thing. An RSC Spanish Golden Age season sees him triumphing in Stratford and Madrid – with a lot of after-hours Bacchic revelry thrown in to celebrate – but when it reaches the West End, the pay proves so tight that he finds himself inquiring at a nearby McDonald’s about work.
He relives moments at his own expense: driving Dennis Waterman nuts by whistling The Minder theme tune in his presence, or his audition for a drinks ad that involved a major wardrobe malfunction. But he also names and (slightly) shames others: Ned Sherrin giving next to no directorial attention to a revival of Salad Days (“He also sometimes made our toilets at those rehearsal rooms unusable”), and that musical’s composer Julian Slade inviting him to sit as an artist’s model, it turns out only to gawp at him on the sly; there’s nothing on his sketch pad to show for all their weekly sessions.
Millson can descend into pointscoring, but such frustrations are more testament to his puppyish devotion to his vocation than any claws-out vindictiveness. Work is the unfashionable drug he can’t get enough of. It has its personal challenges (especially when storm clouds gather over his marriage, and family responsibilities grow) but it’s also a character-building raison d’être. It’s as if he puts under the spotlight the inescapable question: what’s your passion, and what are you willing to do to achieve it?
Cycling home at the end of one punishing 19-hour day, he experiences: “That rare, luxurious, vital and slightly lunatic feeling of being used on this planet; used to the very edge of your strength, intelligence and stamina. It was exhausting… but as I felt the cold air rushing into my lungs, I knew I was alive.” For a second, you’re with him, in his fastpedalling shoes. I can’t wait for the next instalment.