The Word Is Murder(83)

Anyway, I talked to the students about this and many other things and I’m not sure how much they benefited from the session. I enjoyed it very much, though. There’s nothing a writer likes more than talking about writing.

I had been invited by an associate director. I’ll call her Liz as she’s asked not to be identified. I telephoned her from the café. Fortunately, she happened to be at RADA that afternoon and agreed to see me for an hour at three o’clock. Liz is a smart, rather intense woman, a few years older than me. She had trained to be an actor herself but had ended up writing and directing. She had gone back into teaching following a bruising encounter with the press. This had involved a play about British Sikhs which she had directed. Though well intentioned, it had led to riots, with two local councillors (she told me they had neither read nor seen the work) whipping the crowds into a fury. The artistic director had grovelled. The play had been cancelled. Nobody had come to Liz’s defence. Even now, many years later, she prefers to remain anonymous.

RADA’s main building on Gower Street is an odd place. The entrance, with its two statues of comedy and tragedy sculpted by Alan Durst in the 1920s, is both imposing and barely noticeable. The narrow door leads into a building that seems far too small for the three theatres, offices, rehearsal rooms, craft shops and so on that it contains. I remembered it as being a maze of white corridors and staircases, with swing doors everywhere, so that on my first visit I felt a little like a laboratory rat. This time, I met Liz in the rather chic new café on the ground floor.

‘I remember Damian Cowper very well,’ she told me. We’d both sat down with cappuccinos, surrounded by black and white photographs of the current third year. There were a few other students at the tables around us, chatting or reading scripts. She kept her voice low. ‘I always had a feeling he’d do well. He was a cocky little sod, though.’

‘I didn’t realise you were teaching here then,’ I said.

‘It was 1997. I’d just joined. Damian would have been in his second year.’

‘You didn’t like him.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. I tried to keep my feelings about all the students under wraps. The trouble with this place is that everyone is super-sensitive and you can all too easily get accused of favouritism. I’m just telling you the facts. He was very ambitious. He’d have stabbed his own mother if it would help him to get cast.’ She considered what she’d just said. ‘That’s not very appropriate, is it, given the circumstances. But you know what I mean.’

‘Did you see his Hamlet?’

‘Yes. And he was absolutely wonderful. I almost hate to admit it. He only got the part because the boy who was cast got glandular fever. We had a bit of an epidemic that year and for a while the whole place was like London during the Great Plague. Of course, he’d wanted the lead from the very start. He did it for his Tree, which was his way of showing off. Actually, you know, you were right – what you said a moment ago. I didn’t like him. He had a way of manipulating people which I thought was a little creepy and then there was that business in Deal.’

‘What about it?’ I was suddenly interested. Was there a link between the car accident and the drama school which Hawthorne didn’t know about and which we had both missed?

‘Well, it’s just that he used it in one of the acting classes. We were exploring what we called public solitude and the students had to bring in an object that mattered to them in some way and talk about it in front of their classmates.’ She paused. ‘He brought in a plastic toy, a London bus. He also played us a recording of a song, a nursery rhyme: “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. You must know it? He told us it had been played at the funeral of the little boy who had been killed in the accident, when his mother had been driving the car.’

‘What exactly was creepy?’ I asked.

‘I actually had a bit of a set-to with him afterwards. He was very emotional about it. He said the song had torn him to shreds, that he couldn’t get it out of his head – all that sort of stuff. But the truth is, I didn’t feel he was really connected to what had happened. I felt he was using it, almost like a prop. His monologue was too self-centred. In a way, that was the object of the exercise but in this case an eight-year-old boy had died. Damian’s mother might not have been entirely responsible but she had killed him. I didn’t think it was appropriate to use it in class and I told him so.’

‘What can you tell me about Amanda Leigh?’ I asked.

‘I remember her less well. She was very talented but quiet. She and Damian went out for a while and they were very close. I’m afraid she didn’t have very much of a career after she left. A couple of musicals but nothing much else.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the way it happens sometimes. You can never really predict which way it’s going to go.’

‘And then she disappeared.’

‘It was in the newspapers and we even had the police asking questions here although her disappearance must have been four or five years after she’d left. There was some talk that she’d gone to meet a fan … you know, a stalker, although later on the police changed their minds and said it was probably someone she was dating. She’d dressed up smartly and her flatmates said she was in a good mood when she left. She was sharing a place somewhere in south London.’