Authors: David Essex
‘What show is it?’ I asked him.
‘It’s called
Godspell
.’
‘Don’t you mean
Gospel
?’ I snapped back, sarcastically.
‘No, David:
Godspell
.’
He explained.
Godspell
, a musical, told the story of Christ as related in the Book of Matthew. It had already opened off-Broadway in New York, and now its producers were keen to bring it to London, with a British cast. Reluctantly, I agreed to attend the audition.
Even though I auditioned a lot back then, I never enjoyed them. Beforehand, I would get ferociously nervous; afterwards, if it had gone badly, the rejection would be hard to take. I was deeply unenthusiastic about
Godspell
, and my mood wasn’t helped when I turned up at the Globe Theatre at 11 a.m. the following Thursday to find literally hundreds of other hopefuls milling around.
It was early afternoon before I was called on stage and greeted by the play’s co-writer and producer John-Michael Tebelak, a soft-spoken, bearded American hippy in overalls. Accompanied by a pianist, I sang ‘Going Out of my Head’. When he wanted to hear something a bit more music hall, I followed up with my old stand-by, Tommy Steele’s ‘What a Mouth’, which he seemed to enjoy.
John-Michael took my number. Thank you, we’ll let you know. Next!
How had the audition gone? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I was done with showbiz. The following Tuesday I fixed up an appointment for an interview for a job as a van driver. Maureen was at home, and as I painted what would be the baby’s room, lost in my thoughts, she answered the phone and called me.
Was it the
Godspell
people? I half-wondered as I made my way downstairs. No: it was the van depot confirming my interview. Then the phone rang again.
Godspell
wanted to recall me for a second audition.
When I arrived at the Prince of Wales Theatre, the situation was very different from the crowd scene at the Globe. No more than twenty of us had made the cut, and the producers soon had us singing, dancing, miming and impersonating trees and animals. I didn’t terribly enjoy jumping around being a monkey.
During a long and wearying afternoon, John-Michael Tebelak also guided us through some hippy-dippy, very American ‘trust-enhancing’ exercises. We took it in turns to fall off tables and not try to break our fall, trusting our fellow actors to catch us. We even walked hand-in-hand through London’s traffic, one person with their eyes firmly closed, the other leading the way.
This stuff didn’t come naturally to me but I stayed with it and my perseverance paid off. I got home to Seven Kings to a phone call from a very excited Derek. The producers had called him already, saying they were thinking of casting me as John the Baptist, who became Judas Iscariot in the second act. An actor named Murray Head was lined up to play the lead role of Jesus.
It transpired this wasn’t the whole story. There was a split in the producers’ camp between Tebelak, who favoured Murray Head to be Jesus, and his
Godspell
co-writer Stephen Schwartz, who liked my stage presence. The standoff was only resolved a few days later when Murray Head was offered – and accepted – a big movie role, in
Sunday Bloody Sunday
. So it was decided. I was to be Jesus.
The money wasn’t great but it was a lead role in an interesting-sounding production and the timing was wonderful. At least it allowed me to cancel the van-driving interview. Even so, I was wary about getting too excited about
Godspell
, especially when John-Michael and Stephen called me in for my first meeting and gave me their vision for my role: ‘We play Jesus as a rednosed clown.’
Godspell
was originally based on John-Michael’s university masters thesis and his interest in a book by a Harvard professor, Harvey Cox, called
Feast of Fools
, led him to decide that the cast would all wear clown costumes and/or hippy robes. At our first rehearsal, I met my fellow hippy clowns.
We were mainly young and unknown but it was still a fairly formidable cast. An upcoming actor and part-time busker called Jeremy Irons had taken the dual John the Baptist/Judas role that had originally been marked for me, while the male cast was completed by Neil Fitzwilliam, Deryk Parkin and Tom Saffrey.
Of the female cast, Marti Webb had already starred as Nancy in the first touring production of
Oliver!
Julie Covington would also become a household name in years to come, while Verity Anne Meldrum, Gay Soper and Jacquie-Ann Carr were all
ferociously
talented. I quickly realised that I would have to be on top of my game to carry this one off.
When rehearsals began, we soon developed into a very tightly knit ensemble, largely because it soon became very clear we would be essentially directing ourselves.
Godspell
was Jean-Michael Tebelak’s concept and he had written the script, but as a director this subdued, complex hippy in overalls, no older than the cast, was so laissez-faire that he verged on the comatose.
I wanted to respect Jean-Michael but it wasn’t easy. He gave us so little guidance. Whenever we suggested script or acting ideas, his answer was invariably a mumbled, ‘Yeah, sure.’ A positive side effect of this was that the cast began to feel as if this really was our own production, especially as we were all on stage for the entire duration of the play.
Our set was basically some big wire fences enclosing a space not unlike a schoolyard. There were planks, and two sawhorses. I had to play a ukulele at one point: at another, I brandished a ventriloquist’s dummy. This was not Jesus as Hollywood or Cecil B DeMille had ever envisaged.
The rehearsals were going well but outside a storm was brewing around us. It is bizarre to reflect that until 1970 it was illegal to portray Jesus on stage in the West End. When the media learned of the leftfield, arty spin
Godspell
was to put upon the story of Christ, they quickly scented a story.
Like most scandals confected by the tabloids in order to sell newspapers, it was disingenuous but highly effective. Papers screamed that the production would be blasphemous, while the
Evening Standard
’s headline implied that their sense of outrage
was
partly predicated on my own humble roots: ‘DOCKER’S SON TO PLAY JESUS AS RED-NOSED CLOWN’.
A few weeks earlier, I had been anonymous, signing on the dole and applying for van-drivers’ jobs: now I was at the centre of a media firestorm. I didn’t like it at all. The
Standard
’s comment seemed gratuitously offensive towards my parents and the overall coverage was deliberately misleading about
Godspell
’s intentions.
I had never been a churchgoer or interested in organised religion but nor was I an atheist. I guess you would call me an agnostic, and from that non-partisan standpoint it seemed to me
Godspell
illustrated some sensible Biblical teachings very cleverly. The play didn’t dress Jesus as a clown to mock him: it did it to strip away the High Church’s rituals and pomposity and reconnect people with the simplicity of the message.
In any case, we couldn’t do anything but keep our heads down and carry on rehearsing. The tabloid furore probably brought people in to the show in the long run, but in the short term it had a major drawback.
Godspell
was due to open at the West End’s Prince of Wales Theatre, but scared by the ongoing controversy, the theatre owners pulled the venue.
So now we had a show, but nowhere to play it. The rehearsals dragged on slightly aimlessly until one of the producers came up with the lifeline of an alternative. Banished from the West End,
Godspell
would instead open on 17 November 1971 at the Roundhouse, an old railway building turned arty theatre and gig venue in Chalk Farm, north London.
One or two of the more showbizzy cast members such as Marti Webb felt we were slumming it outside of W1 but most
of
us were just relieved finally to have a date for an opening night. I personally felt the rough-and-ready Roundhouse was ideal for our play, with its rudimentary set and four-piece rock band in towers above the stage.
Stephen Schwartz flew in from New York for the last couple of weeks’ rehearsals and provided a welcome dose of energy and creativity after John-Michael’s insipid direction. We had a full house for the opening night, as religious zealots milled around outside with placards proclaiming us SINNERS who would BURN IN HELL. I guess it made a change from people saying ‘Break a leg’.
When it comes to epiphanies and life-changing moments, the opening night of
Godspell
is one I will never forget. Despite the ongoing media outrage, the ten cast members had been in a hermetically sealed little bubble for months as we self-directed and diligently tweaked our audacious, taboo-busting production. It felt good to us, but we were too close to know. Would anyone else agree?
It soon became clear that the audience who had run the gauntlet of our fundamentalist detractors outside didn’t just like the show – they adored it. Schwartz’s great score went down a storm and the crowd seemed to respond to the moving narrative and our every idea. At one point they were laughing so much that I glanced behind me, convinced something must be going wrong, but no: it was sheer, spontaneous appreciation.
For the show’s dramatic crucifixion climax, Jeremy Irons as Judas marched through the auditorium to me and I told him: ‘Do what you must.’ On his return, the cast placed me on a beer
crate,
fastened bracelets with trailing red ribbons to my wrists and spreadeagled me against the fence as I sang, ‘
Oh God, I’m bleeding
,’ before carrying me through the crowd.
On paper it probably sounds ridiculous, especially as Christ was being sacrificed on the cross in a Superman T-shirt and stripy deckchair trousers, but the effect on the audience was hugely powerful. As I was held aloft and carried from the stage I heard both men and women crying, some of them uncontrollably.
Sometimes shows can be loved by the paying punters but slated by the critics, but when the reviews appeared, it was clear that
Godspell
had wooed the intelligentsia as well. To my delight, my own performance was praised beyond my wildest dreams, with the venerable critic Harold Hobson penning the following rhapsody in the
Sunday Times
:
This inward happiness, this fragility, a joyous wine in a frail vessel is the mark of David Essex’s Jesus in
Godspell
. This Jesus is a man who has found a splendid treasure and is eager to share it with everyone he meets. He is an agile but cheerful debater, with a ready answer to all objections, and a touching confidence.
There have been many Christs in the world of art; the tormented Christ of El Greco, the benign shepherd of Murillo, the bland Christ of Rubens, the soaring Christ in majesty of Epstein; and Mr Essex’s gentle and innocent figure, as capable of infinite and simple affection as it is incapable of seeing evil anywhere, is worthy to rank with them.
It is my opinion that Mr Essex’s is the best performance in London, the least histrionic, the happiest, and the most moving. That it should be so at a time when we all marvel at Olivier’s prodigious James Tyrone, one of our greatest actor’s finest creations, is a measure of Mr Essex’s achievement.
I may not have grasped all the reference points of this erudite write-up, but I knew perfectly well that being compared favourably with Sir Laurence Olivier was the kind of review that money couldn’t buy. My own in-house theatre critic, Derek, was in raptures: he had never seen such first-night notices.
As they do, the media had totally changed their tune.
Godspell
was suddenly the hippest show in town. When I arrived for the next day’s performance, the queues of people eager to buy tickets stretched away from the Roundhouse and right down the street. From being pariahs, we were offered three West End theatres within a week. Even the BURN IN HELL placards began to dwindle.
Having been on the verge of throwing my whole entertainment career in, I was now hot property, but the notable thing was that I felt vindicated not for me but for Derek. He had been the chivvying, constantly supportive figure who had pointed me towards theatre and sent me off into repertory when all I wanted to do was bang my drums. I had not always been kind to him but now I could not have been more grateful that he had persevered and had loosened my blinkers.
Life now rearranged itself into a high-adrenaline, exciting routine of eight sold-out performances of
Godspell
per week plus
loads
of media interviews and promotion. Journalists invariably asked me if I believed in Jesus and I told them the truth: that I thought he was a great teacher and he made a lot of sense to me, whether he was the son of God or not. I would circum-navigate the whole divinity aspect by saying that his teachings were more important than the folk tales and fairy stories about walking on water and the resurrection.
After years of being a nobody, it was certainly interesting to be having my opinions canvassed on such weighty matters, but there was no danger of my newfound fame going to my head. I had other things on my mind.
It was mid-December 1971 and Maureen was now eight months pregnant. Our energies were all focused on the birth. It’s a sign of how ridiculous my overnight celebrity was becoming that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, got wind of my imminent parenthood and offered to baptise our firstborn person-ally. I was tempted but Maureen said no. I guess I can’t blame her.
Her waters broke on the morning of 18 December and I drove her to Ilford Maternity Hospital in Newbury Park in my beaten-up £150 Mercedes. The nurses took charge and after an hour or so Maureen told me that I should head for the Roundhouse, as there was no way of knowing what time the baby would come.
We had two shows that day and the matinee passed in a dream-like haze as I waited for our company manager, Tony Howell, to relay any news from the hospital.
Godspell
had an interesting interval in that audience members were invited on to the stage to drink some frankly disgusting rosé wine and chat
with
the cast. Normally, overly earnest Americans would corner me and inquire: ‘Do you believe in Jesus? Do you think he was the son of God?’ This particular day, I was far too distracted to give any sentient or coherent replies.