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A scriptbook, claiming to be the original screenplay, of the 1970 film Dougal and the Blue Cat by Eric Thompson, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC in 1999, and features stills from the film.
Introduction by Bruce Robinson[]
My first year at Drama School ended in near disaster. I was hauled in by the theatrical authorities to be informed that I suffered from a substantial disability in terms of my aspirations. It wasn't just the lisp, stoop, and sweating. They could handle that. What they couldn't deal with was the almost comprehensive lack of talent. It was explained that what might have gone down its in the arts columns of the Isle Of Thanet Gazette, wasn't going down well here at all. 'You've had a very nasty year, haven't you?' I distinctly remember the conciliatory suggestion that there were all sorts of amateur-dramatic societies about the country that would satisfy my kind of requirement. Apparently I wouldn't make had Hamlet in Herne Bay. Twenty-seven shillings and six pence would be the price of a one-way railway ticket that would destroy my life. This was 1964. And I was eighteen.
I can't remember whether I wept, but I do remember a certain intensity of pleading. In those days becoming an actor was everything I had ever wanted. The boss of Central School, Geroge[sic] Hall, was probably right, but also had a compassion the professional theatre doesn't readily allow. It is not the trade of angels. 'Anyway,' he said, 'listen, you can do a probationary term in the second year, but if things don't improve, I'm afraid it's the train.' I seized the straw, freaked myself sick with apprehension all that summer, and came back in September for the beginning of the second year. It was then that something astonishingly fortuitous happened. I met Eric Thompson.
Eric was a professional actor and friend of George's who had been persuaded to come to Central to direct us students in a play. Everything about Eric was immediately different to everything we had been accustomed to. He was carrying far too much energy for the usual thespianistic claptrap. You didn't even get a good morning. He was short, dark, and already getting on with it. I sat there in the gloomy theatre, a perspiring mess of anxiety with a sibilant S. My arse was on the final line and there would be no negotiations.
It was my turn to read and I ground it out through hissing teeth. This went on for a minute or two before Eric interceded. 'What's the matter with you?' he said. 'What are you staring at the table for?' I forced my eyes from the text to reply. 'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I've got a bit of neck-tension.' He looked at me, Gauloise in his mouth, with an expression of benevolent contempt. 'Well then,' he snapped, 'get a bit of back-tension, and sit the fuck up.' It was an apocalyptic moment for me. It was the most pertinent and startling piece of theatrical instruction I had ever recieved, then, now, and forever. I sat up. I got my head up and under Eric's direction managed to navigate the probation and acted my way into three full years at the Central School.
Years later, when I was just about scraping a quiad as a professional actor myself, Eric cast me as Hibbert in Journey's End, a masterpiece of First World War histrionics that we played to enormouse success at the Mermaid Theatre, London. I'd got a lot better by then, as I suppose had he. He was a magnificent director, and, although I couldn't have known it then, taught me so much about the craft of conspiring with actos, which I was to use when I too became a director (or, another long gang of years away. Working with Eric was the most important event in my theatrical career. Acting for him is among my most precious memories, so ingrained it re-emerged subliminally when I directed my first Withnail and I, long after he'd died. It is Journey's End that Marwood is reading in the disintegrating cottage at Penrith, and the lead in Journey's End that he abandons Withnail for at the close of the film.
I wish Eric could have seen Withnail. I know he would have liked it. Without learning from him, his precise and brilliant technique, I could never have directed it. It is a tragedy that Eric is gone. He was an extraordinary talent and shouldn't have shuffled it that young. But his spirit is still here. And when I don't know how to do it, I can still hear his voice.
On the opening night of Journey's End he gave me a book of poems by Siegfried Sassoon. I have it by me now, heartbreaking stuff of the First World War. There's one in there, untitled, that I can never read without thinking of Eric Thompson.
Watch with me, inward solemn influence,
Invisible, intangible, unkenned,
Wind of the darkness that shall bear me hence,
O life within my life, flame within flame,
Who mak'st me one with song that has no end,
And with that stillness whence my spirit came.
I don't know quite what it means. But as far as I'm concerned, it means something quite important about Eric. Anyway, it's good enough for me.
B.R. July 1999
Trivia[]
- Bruce Robinson's introduction in this book was brought up in Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson, containing Eric Thompson's explicit quote.