The Gangster, the Window Box, and the Wardrobe
VICTORIA KINGHAM talks to playwright Francis Saunders about his work and reviews his recent adaptation of Gangster No. 1
Gangster No. 1 was staged at the Kino, St Leonards, on 14 June as a one-off performance. It isn’t a new play – it was first performed at the Almeida Theatre almost thirty years ago, with Peter Bowles (the comic actor of To The Manor Born, Perfect Scoundrels) playing the lead part, with an emphasis on the ‘comedic’. Written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who also wrote Sexy Beast and 44-Inch Chest, it was made into a film five years later, directed by Paul McGuigan.
This performance, however, was directed by Jonathan Linsley, actor, director, presenter, extremely well-known television face (Last of the Summer Wine, Emmerdale, Casualty, The Bill) who lives locally in Bexhill. He’s a great friend of Francis Saunders, who produced this version.
Though there were a few comic moments in this production, it was overall simultaneously menacing and tragic. Linsley’s direction and Saunders’ interpretation laid emphasis on the essential unmitigated depravity of the main gangster, (whose crime resulted in an associate being sent to prison for thirty years), his contradictory psychology, bravado, repressed homosexuality, and psychopathy. It was a compelling act. Linsley’s direction required all the actors to be on stage the whole time, remaining in character whether or not they were the main speaker. They spoke directly to the audience, but were sometimes required to be also addressing another character. Difficult, I thought, but managed convincingly by all the actors.
Saunders, a most engaging human being, lives locally. To find out more about his work as actor, director, producer, and youth mentor, we talked by the window at the Kino. Our conversation was paused several times as people walked by and waved to him through the window; he has many friends in the local community and elsewhere. He talked candidly about his early life, his acting, his playwriting, his ambitions.
“I’ve always acted,” he begins. Saunders fell into acting by chance, spotted by the drama-teacher mum of a friend, who told him he should study. So he studied at the Actor’s Centre, and did some short courses at RADA. ‘Keep that rawness’, he was always told. He’d love to do Shakespeare, and indeed I could see him as King Lear personified. The only reason he didn’t get Titus Andronicus was that he was too young.
“I started writing by chance. I’d been doing a big advertising campaign for TV Licensing, then the work dried up, and that’s when I saw the writing competition.” It was a BBC competition to write and direct a movie in two days. It was about alcohol, and he wrote about under-age drinking and the damage involved. “I won it,” he says, “and they said, go ahead and do it!” After that I wrote Tales From St Leonards [2019] and we showed it here at The Stables and The Horse and Groom, then at Eastbourne.
“More recently, we filmed a men’s health campaign, Why Men Don’t Talk, at the barber’s. We spoke about suicide, anything, everything. Men don’t really show their feelings – they’ll say ‘yeah, all right’? All right? We tend to say what we’re doing, rather than what we’re feeling. So I’ve written a film called Window Box, about a war hero, played by Don Warrington [Rising Damp, Death in Paradise, New Street Law]. It’s based around an old war hero alone in a tower block. I got that from my dad, who was a decorated paratrooper. I was brought up in Camden, when it was Camden, and King’s Cross was King’s Cross”. I know what he means. “I rarely go back.”
Hastings Independent also rave- reviewed his recent play The Tenant which showed at The Stables last August. I’m lucky that I’ve got friends like Bill Fellowes and Jonathan Linsley [actor, and director of Gangster No. 1]. We developed a really great friendship and I’m so grateful. I feel like I was in Educating Rita, only the other way round, obviously.”
He talks about Linsley’s direction of Gangster, which requires the actors to remain in character the whole time, even when not speaking. There are only very basic stage directions in the play, and the presentation was all Linsley’s vision.
It’s about the tail-end of a milieu that probably doesn’t any longer exist? “Yes,” Saunders agrees, “but it was there, and that’s what I love about the play.” He plays the character as a closet homosexual; every remark he makes about women is derogatory. “Actually”, he continues, “Gangster No. 1 actually means: Gangster No-one. A bully and a psychopath, but in the end, nobody.”
His approach is probably close to Method Acting: “I kind of really try to think how they think. I’d get up at 6 a.m. and put out my book, list the names of characters I was going to torment in rehearsals, and how. That’s what someone like that would do. My voice is very London, so when I spoke in Gangster I found it easy to bring that. Walking around afterwards I felt I had to respond to everyone in a gangster-type way.
Saunders also works with young offenders for Rother District Council, running film and acting courses. A lot of the youngsters are in an intervention phase – they are recognised as troubled but social work attempts to divert them from criminality to creativity. “It was amazing to do it”, he continues. “I still see them about. I mean a lot of them just need somebody there, to give them options, like, why not make a film instead of going out and doing a crime?” Watching the film, the boys know which is the one that makes good cinema and which one is in real life the best option. They know right from wrong, in other words. “Luckily enough, I walk in with a London accent, and they naturally assume that I’m an ex-offender or something like that. If you get youngsters into art, I think any art, while their minds are wandering, then they’ll wander in the right direction.”
Future projects? He’s approaching the Gangster No. 1 writers, who hold the publishing rights, to see if they will allow him to take the play to London. But he’s also working on a play that he’d like Jon to direct: “It’s a comedy about a woman who marries an ex-gangster, and both are going through the menopause. It’s based around a wardrobe. He thinks she’s having an affair, so he kidnaps the therapist and puts him in the wardrobe.”
It sounds a bit Pinteresque, with undercurrents of farce. But it will certainly be unique. Here’s to the next phase.
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