Sam

The foyer of The Royal looked like it sounded, quite royal, but a faded 1950s kind of royalty.

They used to serve you, at your seat in the stalls, tea or coffee in chipped china cups, with jammy dodgers or custard creams or McVities digestive biscuits – not the cheap ones – on chipped china plates.

New management took over and all of that stopped. Health and safety regulations they said. Although in all the years that I had been going  to the matinee I never saw anyone scalded, roasted or even partly boiled.

So, now at intermission, we troop to the foyer and get our drinks in paper cups and eat the ‘own brand’ store biscuits from paper plates.

Everyone is saying how good the production is. It’s West Side Story. The part of Tony is being played by an actor from Eastenders. He had only just finished singing the lines ‘With a click, with a shock, Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch’, when a mobile phone ring tone from somewhere in the audience played, ‘Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah…….’

Everyone one laughed.

Was it staged?   

I felt quite relieved knowing he was going to be killed, although wished they might bring that forward rather than wait to the end of Act 2.

Maria could certainly have done better for herself.

That’s where I saw Sam.

I’d last seen him when he left school after Sixth Form to go to university. I taught Geography and he was just one of those all-round outstanding students. Liked by everyone. Great personality. Grounded. Lots of friends. Intelligent. Which given the fact that his shitty family had thrown him out when they discovered he was gay, was all very surprising.

I only discovered that side of his life much later at a school reunion for ex-teaching staff.

He introduced – or rather didn’t introduce – I forced the matter by extending a hand and offering the information that I had been a teacher of Sam’s – the older man – dare I say, much, much older, given that Sam could only have been 21ish – as his university tutor.

I see Sam now-and-again at the theatre.

The older man accompanying him to ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ was introduced as a friend.

The damp man who sat next to him during ‘Singing in the Rain’ (the front row was not the place to be for that production) was an uncle.

The very old man with him at ‘The Blues Brothers’ was his grandad. I suspect of them all this was the only truth.