Chapter 17 of the memoir "Rescue of a Rock'n'Roll Child".

Introduction

"The Twilight of an Actor" existed in the first place as nothing more than "Such a Short Space of Time", and as such was published at Blogster on the 19th of February 2006. This versified piece was based on extracts from an unfinished autobiographical story, penned I think in early summer 1999 as the decade, century and millenium were all three coming to an unquiet close. In time, the title piece, "The Twilight of an Actor" was added to this basic structure as were, more recently, "Fireworks Frantically Exploding" and "Dispersals and Endings", both originally part of "A Final Distant Clarion Cry" which follows. Final editing of both pieces was completed in October 2008.
 

The Twilight of an Actor

Following on from Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", which I touched on in some detail in "The Trials of a Teetotaller", I performed in one last play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy "Lovelives". Directed by Ian McGlynn and written by the cast, David French, Stirling Gallacher, Jane Gelardi, Andrea Searle, Deborah Wilding, and myself, this ensemble piece consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, it could in my opinion have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show. 

 Then later in the year at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square, I played two small roles in a production of Euripides' "Iphigeneia in Taurois", directed and translated by my longtime friend Adrian Thurston-Gordon. These were Pylades, right hand man  of one of the main characters, Orestes played by Kevin James, and the Messenger, a maniacal buffoon of a character which I interpreted with the kind of refined cockney accent once supposedly favoured by policemen and regimental sergeant majors.
 From January 1996 until the following summer, I served variously as actor, MC, script writer, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. A group of three consisting of myself, and two locals girls, 19 year old Esther, and married company leader Sally, we toured several shows around schools in various tough multicultural south London areas including Croydon itself, as well as Thornton Heath, Norwood, Crystal Palace and so on. One of these, "Choices", was almost entirely written by me, although it'd been based on an idea by Sally who also heavily edited it for performance purposes.

 On the whole the kids, most from relatively deprived backgrounds, were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with almost uniform enthusiasm and affection, which was a surprise and a delight to me at least, although Esther had told me before our very first show that they tended to be very easy to relate to. Whether she meant towards visitors I'm not sure, but I imagine she did.

Towards the end of the summer, Sally asked me to write a large scale project for the group. She suggested a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic Christian allegory "The Pilgim's Progress". Once I'd completed it my enthusiasm for Street Level had begun to wane. This had nothing to do with the company itself which for a few brief months in 1996 was marked by frantic creativity leading to shows with a radical Christian message performed to great success for the benefit of some of the capital's least privileged young people. The fact is that the long and costly early morning train journeys to Croydon via Wimbledon or Clapham Junction were starting to exhaust me. In consequence I suddenly quit, which wasn't a very kind thing to do to Sally because I think she'd started to see me as her rock, and she'd a lot of responsibility on her plate with regard to forthcoming performances and the training of a fresh crew of young Christian actors. My decision was especially mean given that Esther had herself left some weeks earlier, but I had to consider my finances. What's more my spiritual health was poor at the time after weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour. As things turned it was never produced, and I'm not surprised, because although artistically it had its merits, spiritually it was grossly immature. In Christian terms I was still only a little over three years old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it.

By early 1997 I'd vanished into the sanctuary of office life. This included a happy and socially lively period as a panel recruiter for Surrey's Topflight Research which came to a close when I  started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's infamous Scottish Play at Fulham's Lost Theatre in the spring of 1998. Despite my cameos as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man being praised by cast and audience members alike, I've not acted since other than a handful of auditions. As things stand, while I'm still open to the possibility of film or television work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually nonexistent. Quite simply put, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me for more than two decades has long been quieted.
 Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the prose piece that eventually mutated into "Such a Short Space of Time". My parents were on vacation for a few weeks during the period of its creation, a glorious summer as I recall that was the last of the millenium. Therefore I was often at the house in which I'd spent my adolescence and young manhood, performing a variety of tasks such as watering my mother's flowers, or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved. Taking sneaky advantage of my parents' absence I transferred some of my old vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable of doing. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I'd not heard for ten or fiteen years, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time in my life when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I'd first heard them, despite the colossal changes that'd taken place since then not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confonted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the devastating effect the passage of time exerts on all human life.

Such a Short Space of Time

I love...not just those...
I knew back then,
But those...
Who were young
Back then,
But who've since
Come to grief, who...
Having soared so high,
Found the
Consequent descent
Too dreadful to bear,
With my past itself,
Which was only
Yesterday,
No...even less time...
A moment ago,
And when I play
Records from 1975,
Soul records,
Glam records,
Progressive records,
Twenty years melt away
Into nothingness...
What is a twenty-year period?
Little more than
A blink of an eye...
How could
Such a short space
Of time
Cause such devastation?

Dispersals and Beginnings (for the Millenium)

A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century ceded to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood. Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I'd latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. But once again the Lord blessed my family, and she made a full recovery. I found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, although I knew that as it went on, there was a strong chance that writing about contemporary Literary Theory would come increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even compromise my integrity as a Christian. As things turned out, I did leave the course although only on a provisional basis. 

 This was a time in my life marked by what appear to me now as an extraordinary succession of sudden starts and endings, and subsequent to my quitting UCL I was appointed chief musician of a worship group for the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre. Liberty was a satellite of London's famous Kensington Temple, and I'd been recommended for the post by my friend Marina, Russian wife of Pastor Louis, late of New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with Martha, another close friend, originally from Peru. It was Louis who'd got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset.

 Soon afterwards I also quit my position as a telecanvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thereby bringing a fairly lengthy period as an office worker to an end. Since then I’ve worked only casually in various fields of employment including telemarketing, leafleting and as a television extra.

Another beginning came towards the end of 2000 when I was made lead singer for a Swing-flavoured band formed in that year by composer-musician Barrie Guard which became known as "Nuages" after the famous instrumental by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard, but soon afterwards this was counterbalanced by the heartbreaking dissolution of Liberty. And so, in early 2001 I returned to my first spiritual home of the Cornerstone Bible Church based in the Surrey suburb of Esher. Now known simply as Cornerstone the Church, its South African pastor Chris Demetriou, a musician who co-composed John Kongos' classic "He's Gonna Step on You Again", is one of the most electrifying preachers I've ever witnessed.

 His church, Cornerstone is a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. Before defecting to the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship, I’d gone to Cornerstone for about two years from early 1993, in fact, had attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in ‘92. Drunk at the time as I recall, I'd sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner". Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who'd laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian mentor, if only very fleetingly. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn't return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she'd moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I've never forgotten her.

 I left Cornerstone yet again in late summer 2002 in consequence of a fresh desire born of internet research to seek out places of worship existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Spiritually speaking, this'd been my whole world for nearly a decade, to the degree that I barely acknowledged any other church as worthy of the name Christian.

 By this time, disillusioned by nearly two years of sporadic gigging, Nuages too had called it a day. We disbanded in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival held in St Mary's Church near the village of Shelton, Norfolk, which was a real shame in my view, because those who attended the festival were the audience we’d been searching for all along, evidenced by the passion with which they greeted our final performance.

Among the churches I visited during the wandering year of 2003 were Bethel Baptist Church, Wimbledon, Christ Church, Teddington and Duke Street Church, Richmond, all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south west London. 

 Bethel is pastored by the gracious American Bible teacher and writer Jack Moorman, and is what is known as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, and therefore KJV only, in other words using the King James Version of the Bible alone. I attended three services at Bethel and fully intended to return for a fourth and so witness the preaching there of pastor David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries preach, something I was looking forward to doing given that I was familiar with bro. David from the Sermon Audio website, but never did. I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my last Sunday at Bethel, and this experience may have put me off travelling by train to church. But the truth is I'd left too many churches in my time and was tiring of the position of new boy brought about by perpetual church-hopping. I now believe church-hopping indeed luke-warm fellowship in general to have the potential to be lethally dangerous to the soul of a professing Christian.

 Christ Church is a Free Church of England fellowship, The Free Church of England having separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It is resolutely Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism, these being Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. Their two key beliefs could be said to be that those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity. Duke Street is also a free grace, in fact, Grace Baptist church, while Bethel is free-willist. This would cause many Calvinists to describe it as Arminian, although this is inaccurate given that the true Arminian maintains that salvation can be lost, while most Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are to my knowledge believers in what is known as the eternal security of the Saints.

 The rector of Christ Church,  the Reverend Dominic Stockford, is a former Roman Catholic priest with the compelling presence and speaking  voice of a classical stage actor. The few conversations I had with him left me with an impression of a true man of God, totally dedicated to doing the will of his Heavenly Father. I felt the same not just about the Reverend Stockford but Jack Moorman too, and the pastor of Duke Street Church, Dr Liam Goligher, although I've never personally met him while I've seen him preach innumerous times. As well as being an inspiring expositor of the Word of God, he's a broadcaster on London's Premiere Christian Radio as well as the Sermon Audio website, which contains the largest collection of audio sermons on the internet. Sermon Audio was one of the websites I returned to again and again throughout 2003. Its broadcasters are all cessationist by theology, which is to say they don't believe in the continuance of such supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit as tongues and prophecy, unlike those within Holiness, Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. I still listen today, even though in the last five years I've attended churches both within and beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold. The fact is I believe that all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the historical basis of the faith such as the deity of Christ without which there can of course be no salvation, even when they are divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths.

                1997?                             1999?

                       1999?