At that time, in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, Equity was sharply divided on how best to fight apartheid. A growing list of international playwrights, including Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Muriel Spark and Arthur Miller signed a declaration through the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, refusing performing rights for their plays to all theatres in South Africa where discrimination was practised on grounds of colour.
I agreed, I felt that artists and sports people should refuse to work there – we had to name and shame the South African government by boycotting all commercial artistic engagement in the country.
As an Equity Council member, I attended all the meetings. Vanessa Redgrave was never a member of the Council, but she and her brother, Corin, regularly spoke at the annual general meetings with fire and fluency – both superb speakers without notes. I first worked with Vanessa in 1972. Ted Heath was in Number 10; in Equity likewise, the right wing was in power: people like Marius Goring and Nigel Davenport and Leonard Rossiter. Leonard was a bastard: a good actor, but a nasty, spite-driven man. With all those right-wing actors flexing their muscles, the Workers Revolutionary Party faction were the great opposition, and so Vanessa became an important element in the deliberations.
Vanessa was quite retiring, except when there was anything political going on, and then she would harangue you from morning till night. I didn’t know her well but, intoxicated by her articulate conviction, I started to join her at the WRP meetings.
When you were interested in politics in those days – and I suppose for some people it is still the case – you had to go to meetings. You wanted to stand up and be counted, and I was no different. I soon became a signed-up member, though whether I joined the WRP literally because of Vanessa, I don’t know.
Not long after I became a member, the WRP annual summer camp was held in an enclosed field by the Blackwater estuary in Essex; naturally I went along. Gerry Healy, the leader of the WRP, was an unpleasant, devious chap; he was dangerous in fact. There were talks and discussions in a big tent and Gerry would lecture us all about how to move England to the extreme left. I’d never been to that sort of political meeting before, and it was not appealing. Most of the other camp attendees clearly found it rousing: I found it threatening and nasty. I realised then that this wasn’t my idea of a left-wing revolution, but the summer camp was in a beautiful place, and Vanessa and people like Frances de la Tour were there, so I stayed. In the morning, I thought I’d go for a walk with a chum. When we arrived at the fence enclosing the camp, a man with a gun was guarding the gate. He said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I said, ‘For a walk.’ He said, ‘Oh, no. You can’t leave.’ I said, ‘What do you mean we can’t leave? We want to go for a walk.’ ‘Well, you can’t. That’s against the rules,’ he said. ‘No one can leave the camp.’ And he put his hand firmly on his gun. ‘All right, love, keep your hair on,’ I said and we went back to the Red House, our revolutionary hostel. Although I stayed to the end of that particular jamboree, that incident marked the end of my workers’ revolution”
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