The last time Maurice Roeves appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
was in Gregory Burke's debut play, Gagarin Way. While the sell-out run
at the Traverse introduced the world to a raw new writing talent in
John Tiffany's production, for Roeves, an even more significant moment
came at the end of the play's run. That was when he and his partner,
Veronica Rawlings-Jackson, tied the knot, with a civil ceremony that
took place in the upstairs foyer of the Traverse itself.
“Vanessa and I knew each other years ago,” says Roeves, “but I was
having too good a time after my divorce [from Scots actor Jan Wilson],
and she went off and got married, and that seemed to be that. Then,
years later, I was doing a play in Kilburn, and she walked in to the
theatre. I recognised her, and things took their course. We were the
first people to get married in the Traverse after the law changed.
A decade on, Roeves and Rawlings-Jackson are still together, and are
the joint driving force behind Roeves' solo turn in Just A Gigolo, a
new play by Stephen Lowe based on the life of Angelo Ravagli, regarded
by some as the inspiration for Mellors, the gamekeeper who conducts a
cross-class affair with his titled mistress in DH Lawrence's scandalous
novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. If in Lawrence's book Mellors
reflected a mixture of both Ravagli and Lawrence, in real life, Ravagli
conducted a long-term affair with Lawrence's aristocratic wife, Frieda
von Richthofen, with the pair eventually marrying after Lawrence's
death.
It was only after von Richtofen's death that Ravagli came into full
possession of nine small paintings by Lawrence, which are still barred
from being seen in public in the UK due to their apparent obscenity. It
is this that forms the backdrop to Lowe's new play.
“Nobody's done anything on Mellors,” Roeves says of Lawrence's
fictional alter ego of Ravagli. “It was always about Lawrence and
Frieda, but in a way Ravagli is more interesting. Stephen has written
two other plays about Lawrence [Fox and the Little Vixens and Empty Bed
Blues], so we went up to Taos in New Mexico, where my wide and I have a
property, and I met a lady who was going to be a hundred years old the
next day. She knew Frieda, as well as Ravagli, and I said to her, did
he flirt with you, and she kind of blushed.
“He was quite a character, apparently. He was a great dancer, a
painter, and full of mischief. He was apparently very good with his
hands, and built a ranch. He did like the women a lot as well. He was
nearly thrown out of the States because of what was described as his
moral turpitude, so Frieda decided to marry him to keep him there. But
the shadow of Lawrence was always there, and Ravagli was the one in the
background, serving the wine and everything.”
Now aged seventy-five, after a career that took him from his native
Sunderland to Hollywood via a Glasgow boyhood, Roeves remains most
familiar in the UK for his role as over the hill rocker Vincent Diver
in John Byrne's seminal 1980s TV drama, Tutti Frutti. In fact, Roeves'
small-screen career dates back to the mid 1960s with guest roles in the
original series of Dr Finlay's Casebook. With post Tutti Frutti cameos
in Baywatch, Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Roeves also
played a down at heel God in The Granton Star Cause, one section of the
big-screen version of Irvine Welsh's book, The Acid House, and Chief
Superintendant Duckenfield, the police chief at the centre of events
recreated in Hillsborough, Jimmy McGovern's dramatisation of real life
events leading up to ninety-six football supporters being crushed to
death in 1989.
More recently, Roeves' marriage has brought him even closer to home.
“My greatest memory is of doing pantomime at Glasgow Pavilion,” Roeves
says. “Afterwards, Jack Milroy and everyone was backstage, and they all
gave me a big hug and said welcome to the club. That meant everything
to me. But when I did that after doing Shakespeare and working for so
long in Hollywood, someone said to me that my career must have been
slipping. I said, bollocks, it's an honour to be at the Pavilion, but
that's what you come up against when you do work like that. It's a
class system.”
Roeves' first brush with theatre came after he left the army following
his national service. He joined amateur drama clubs in Glasgow with the
idea he might meet some girls, then realised he quite liked acting
enough to take it seriously.
“One thing led to another, and I ended up at drama school, then went to
the Citizens Theatre. I was on ten quid a week. That paid my rent,
food, booze. That was all I needed.”
If class snobbery is something Roeves recognises, it was also at the
heart of both DH Lawrence's canon and Gagarin Way. The latter, about a
group of disgruntled Fifers whose botched kidnap of an international
industrialist, originally played by Roeves, provokes an ideological
debate, is now considered a contemporary classic.
Following it's Traverse run, Gagarin Way transferred to the National
Theatre, although its run was cut short, possibly in light of the
terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York that September.
In the last decade, Roeves has appeared in the likes of Hallam Foe, as
well as guest-starring in Brian Elsley's high-octane teen drama Skins
alongside fellow Gagarin Way actor Michael Nardone. Outside of work,
Roeves suffered a cancer scare which one might have expected to slow
him down. For Roeves, however, such a close brush with death only
seems to have fuelled his determination to live.
“I don't want to die yet,” he says. “I enjoy living too much. The one
lesson that nobody else teaches you is that when you're in your
sixties, trying to handle old age is difficult. I learnt that five
years ago when I had my cancer operation. I had half a lung taken out,
and now I don’t have cancer anymore. I'm healthy, but I had to battle
through it, and then I immediately got cast in The Damned United, and
was running about a football field.”
For the future, Roeves is happy to wait and see what happens with Just
A Gigolo. It's already received a successful reading at a Lawrence
symposium in Nottingham, and there is talk of it travelling beyond
Edinburgh. If not, Roeves has a crazy notion of doing an improvised
comedy act.
“It'd be great to be a stand-up,” he laughs. “You wouldn't write a
script. You'd just sit in an old bath-chair and say, 'I'm your comic
for the night,' then make things up.
“These are the crazy ideas you get. I suppose the older you get, you
can't always be bothered, but you make yourself do it. Another thing
you discover as you get older is that, even though you may be in your
early sixties, and you're cast as someone ion their forties as I have,
as soon as someone starts going on about your real age, you can lose
work. But I've got to the age now where it doesn't matter. In a way
it's an advantage, and to be honest I don't feel any different now to
when I was younger.”
Maurice Roeves: Just A Gigolo, Assembly George Square, August 1-27,
3.20-4.30pm
www.assemblyfestival.com
The Herald, August 16th 2012
ends
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