The Twist of a Knife

I have already mentioned Jordan Williams, who had agreed to play Dr Farquhar and was undoubtedly the star of our show. He was a Native American, the first I had ever met; a Lakota to be exact. I’d looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered that he had been born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in the USA. He had spent ten years working in Los Angeles and had received an Emmy nomination for his role as a psychopathic killer in American Horror Story. He had married his make-up artist, who happened to be English, and that was what had brought him to the UK. When he had first arrived, many of the newspapers had suggested that he might take over from Peter Capaldi as the first ethnically diverse Dr Who, but this hadn’t happened. Instead, he had taken on multiple roles in theatre, film and TV and if he wasn’t quite a household name, he was certainly respected.

I never feel at ease with actors and this was particularly true of him. He was a thickset, broad-shouldered man with extraordinarily intense eyes; I could feel them boring right into me every time we spoke. His face was defined by features that had a sort of mathematical precision, with a very straight nose and a square chin. He had greying hair that wasn’t quite long enough to be called a ponytail, but which he still tied back with a coloured band when he wasn’t onstage. He was by far the oldest member of the cast, but he wore his age well, sloping into rehearsals in tracksuits or jeans, his hands deep in his pockets, his thoughts far away. When he spoke, he chose his words carefully, with no trace of an American accent. It was as if he was performing … and this was in fact his defining characteristic. It was very hard to tell when he was acting and when he wasn’t – sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

We had quite a nasty incident at the end of the first week in Dalston. We were rehearsing the scene when Dr Farquhar attacks Nurse Plimpton and Jordan had grabbed hold of Sky Palmer, the actress playing her. I watched the two of them in the middle of the chalk outline, surrounded by the entire team. He was holding her, his hands clamped on her arms, his face very close to hers. He was shouting at her, in a rage. They must have done the scene a hundred times by now, but suddenly Sky began to scream. At first, I thought she was ad-libbing, trying something new. Then I saw the alarm on Ewan’s face and realised that this was serious, she really was in pain. At that moment, Jordan had become Dr Farquhar and he only released her when Ewan shouted at him to stop and everyone rushed forward to bring the action to a halt. Sky fell to the floor and I saw the bruising on her arms. She had been hurt and she had been frightened. That was the end of rehearsals for the day.

As we left, Ewan told me that this wasn’t the first time Jordan had behaved in this way. Apparently, he had quite a reputation. He was a method actor who took his roles very seriously. When he had been cast as the highwayman Dick Turpin in a BBC drama, he had not only learned to ride a horse, he had insisted on recreating the famous two-hundred-mile ride from London to Yorkshire and had almost been killed crossing the M1. On another occasion, playing King Lear at the Hampstead Theatre, he had often spent the night sleeping rough on the Heath.

To be fair to him, he could be generous too. He was mortified by what had happened and when we came back the following Monday, he presented Sky with a bunch of flowers so huge that it filled two vases.

Sky Palmer herself was something of an enigma.

I’d seen her perform many times, but I can’t say I knew her particularly well, which was hardly surprising as she was in her mid-twenties – three decades younger than me. Outside the play, we had nothing in common. When I first met her I had been struck by her intense, dark eyes, her self-assurance and, most of all, by her luminous pink hair – which she’d had to wash out once she’d started playing the part. She’d also lost her nose stud and multicoloured fingernails. She didn’t smoke but during rehearsals she vaped, blowing out little clouds of steam that evaporated immediately, leaving a faint smell of menthol in the air. I’d been worried that the part of Nurse Plimpton might be difficult to cast. The way I’d written the character had been undeniably sexist … but then I’d deliberately based her on the sort of character who might have appeared in an old Hammer film. Sky didn’t seem to care. She never asked me questions. She did everything Ewan told her. It was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or not.