Do you have any early memories of being attracted to the arts?
I do have a few, and I remember some of them quite distinctly.
My father was a Glaswegian and a doctor, but he had wanted to be a dancer. He had been to a dance school and he was a very good dancer. Earlier in his life he had danced semi-professionally, but we didn’t know who he danced with. It was all a bit mysterious, shrouded in the mists of time, if you like.
When we were children we found a box with lots of his costumes, which my sister and I used to dress up in. One was a pink damask ‘Prince Charming’ costume with ruffles down the front and at the cuffs.
Although we knew little about his background or early life, what we do know is that his mother, variously known as Jean or Jane, and sister also Jane, persuaded him to train as a doctor rather than a dancer and supported him financially through Medical School at Glasgow University.
You had a sense of dance and theatre in the family?
My father – Walter – loved dancing and he loved the theatre, so there was always an interest in dance, and theatre, in my family. When we were older and there was someone like Fred Astaire on the television, my father was up doing a soft shoe shuffle. He was President of the local Caledonian society and we used to go to Scottish Dances.
Could you say there was a family connection to theatre and dance?
Not directly, but one of my most vivid memories is of myself and my sister Varie, and my brother Stuart, going to a pre-school – I think it was called Eversley House, but I’m not sure about that. What I do recall was that there was a locked cupboard in one of the rooms that was full of make-up; it was probably Leichner grease-paint and although I couldn’t see it, I loved the smell of it.
I also remember going with my mother to a local theatre at a very early age. It was probably amateur theatre because the venue might have once been a church. I remember a balcony, it was cream and it was a wrap-around with two cream ‘follow spots’ mounted on either side.
What fascinated me was not the spotlights or the light operator, but when the stage was dark, how these spotlights illuminated something on the stage. And I suppose essentially that has been the metaphor for what I’ve done throughout my life; “bringing something into the light”. I’d like to think so anyway.
It sounds like you had an interesting, quite unique, early life?
I suppose so. We lived in Stoke-on-Trent where my father was the junior partner in a medical practice and general surgeon at the local ‘cottage’ hospital, where I was born. I like to tell people I was conceived in Glasgow and born in the Potteries!
We first lived in a semi-detached house, and there was a shed at the bottom of our garden with an old table in it. I got a set of curtains from somewhere and someone older must have helped? I must have been very young because we moved from there when I was 7 years old? Anyway, I convinced some local girls to allow me to put them on a stage and I ‘directed’ them………
I think the inspiration for this shed ‘theatre’ might have come because my sister, at that time, attended Molly Shaw’s Ballet Classes and I remember standing in the wings at the Theatre Royal, Hanley, watching Varie and the older girls dancing in tutus. That was very alluring.
I was too young to join the classes but I guess I wanted to be part of what she was doing, so I made little dramas or dances happen in the shed with the local kids.
I can’t really tell you what happened in some of the little dramas I organised – I can sort of see what happened although I couldn’t describe exactly what those young children were doing on the stage we created. While I know that something happened it’s not always clear why things took place or how they took place.
The one thing I do remember clearly is that at one point, I bashed a hole in the asbestos wall at the end of the shed and used a soap packet opened into a tube to make a spotlight, by directing the rays from the sun on to the ‘stage’.
It does sound like you have plenty of wonderful childhood memories?
A lot of people will say that you don’t really remember your early experiences but I think as you get older lots of memories come back to you. I really can still see these events pretty clearly, but of course we never quite know whether it is our memory or the mind playing tricks on us.
What I do know was that the shed wasn’t actually my family’s shed, it was the man next door’s shed and he wasn’t best pleased that I had bashed a hole in it – his name was John Brough and his daughter Jane was one of the performers.
I like to think that I was already a director – at the age of 7.
Soon after that, we moved away from that house and my father bought a medical practice. In those days you had to buy a practice, and we moved to the other side of the city, Longton. It was a much bigger house with a much bigger garden, and there was a cloak room.
How did you go on from your early interest?
I had started to play with puppets and I woke up one Christmas morning to find a huge parcel, and in the parcel was a puppet theatre. My father had made this incredible puppet theatre, he had worked over several nights to create this little theatre and I put it in the room where we used to hang our coats, which at that time was not fitted out, and I started to create puppet performances.
I cut a hole in the bottom of the stage and that allowed me to put my hands through, along with the glove puppets. After Christmas I took the fairy lights off the tree and made footlights out of them, and then I found a piece of corrugated iron in a local stream and created a waterfall. Not a really bright idea to mix water running down a corrugated sheet with unprotected fairy lights, but I didn’t know any better then. Fortunately nothing happened. I saved up and did odd jobs to buy an old army signalling lamp which became a spotlight for my puppet theatre – someone else must have been cajoled into working it – probably my sister.
Clearly you got a lot of support at home?
When I look back on it, my childhood was quite extraordinary.
We were taken frequently to Blackpool to the Tower Circus where we would see the red nosed Charlie Cairoli, known and renowned as one of the great Augustes and his bespangled clown Paul. I remember that the circus rink went down at the end, and it filled with water and there were girls who did a sort of choreographed swimming.
We were taken to Stratford-on-Avon to see Shakespeare – Frankie Howerd playing Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and staying at the Swan’s Nest Hotel (I still love staying in hotels) and Manchester to see theatre shows like Oklahoma. Every Christmas we went to the pantomime with people Nat Jackley playing the dame.
During my whole childhood, I had an extraordinary theatre education from my parents, principally from my father.
One year we went to Scarborough for a holiday, and there was a man selling magic tricks at the end of the pier, and for a period I had a magic act, and I would do little shows. I even did fire breathing until I burned down someone’s curtains. It was in Scarborough that year that I first saw ‘theatre-in-the round’.
Looking back, I suppose it was because of these experiences that I wanted to work in the theatre from an early age. There never seemed to be any doubt about it!
My father insisted that I had to get an education – he wanted me to go to university. I was 19 when he died from a massive heart attack and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was only 52 and sadly, he never saw me go
to university and he never saw what I have accomplished.
To see more of Alistair Livingstone’s work go to the following links.
