Enjoying Mam

MARLENE SIDAWAY left her home town of Stockton 50 years ago to become an actress, a decision with which her parents weren’t comfortable. “My mum and dad said you don’t want to do daft acting, get a job that will see you through,” she says.

So she trained as a comptometer operator – it was an adding and calculating machine – to please them, but the lure of acting proved strong. And as she points out, “Comptometers are obsolete now, but acting still goes on”.

She’d belonged to an amateur drama group in the North-East. “It had an excellent producer called Bert Woolley who was a teacher and had an vision. He’d find a new kind of reason for doing plays,” she explains.

It was the time the work of theatre director Joan Littlewood, sometimes called the “mother of modern theatre”, was being recognised and people’s perception of theatre and performers was changing.

“A lot of the people I worked with had known Joan and liked her work. So there was all of that going on. It was a change in the way people saw theatre and so people like me were able to think ‘yes, I could possibly go on the stage because real people are now on the stage rather than people who just say ‘anyone for tennis?’.”

She’ll be back on home ground in July at Ormesby House, near Middlesbrough, in one of the events marking Littlewood’s centenary.

She’ll be talking about Littlewood and Margaret Walker, who came from the North-East and worked with Littlewood before founding East 15 acting school.

A role in Alan Bennett’s play Enjoy brings Sidaway back North to West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. “I knew the play because I saw it in London a couple of times because my friend Alison Steadman played Mam. We were at drama school together, so I’ve seen everything she’s done and she’s seen nearly everything I’ve done. She’s a difficult act to follow,”

she says. Enjoy concerns the Cravens, one of the few remaining occupants of the last backto- backs in Leeds. The house is due for demolition.

“Mam is quite distressed about this because all the things she’s grown old with, all the familiar things are going,” says Sidaway.

“She’s also got a dream that she can sing and if she’d had the opportunity she’d have been able to sing in the Philharmonic chorus and with that she’d have met a whole different class of people – doctors’ wives, solicitors and people with their own transport and she could have been going to coffee mornings.

“Dad is very keen to move into some new maisonettes. They’ve got a daughter Linda, who despises her parents, can’t wait to get out.

They also have a son, Terry, who disappeared about ten years ago to London. Dad was forever quarreling with him, mum absolutely adored him.”

The cast also includes Philip Martin Brown, from Waterloo Road, and former Emmerdale actor Sian Reese-Williams. This isn’t her first Bennett play. She’s performed two of his Talking Heads monologues – A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, at Harrogate Theatre and Lady Of Letters at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, as well as Lady In The Van at Salisbury.

Enjoy wasn’t one of Bennett’s biggest successes when first staged in 1980 because, she thinks, itwas ahead of its time. “It was written before everything started to change in our cities and people decided to knock down all the shops in the high streets and build new places and new places to live. Nothing was the same again – some of it was better but quite a lot of it was worse.

“I come from Stockton-on-Tees and we had a lovely Georgian high street when I was growing up. Now that’s knocked down and there are other things there. I haven’t been back for a long time and when I do go, it’s all different.”

Marlene Sidaway in rehearsal

In a career spanning four decades, she’s played a variety of parts on stage and screen but away from acting she has another role as president of the International Brigade Society, which remembers and honours the volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was previously secretary, succeeding Jack Jones as president after his death.

Her association came through her late partner David Marshall, who was from Middlesbrough and whom she first met in the local drama group. “He was a civil servant, but used to build sets for us. He was also involved with the group that had got to know Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop,” she explains.

“We kept bumping into each other over the years.

“Eventually when his wife died – I’d been married and it had broken down – we got together and it was very good. But he’d gone to Spain when he was 20 on his own before the international brigades were formed and unfortunately – well, fortunately I always think – he was wounded and, as it was very early on in the war, was sent back to England. A bit later on he would have been hospitalised there, then gone back to fight and possibly died.

“A lot of the people he was with died in the next battle they were engaged in. He always felt the survivors’ guilt . He did talks, raised money and was part of the International Brigade Association which was for veterans.

“Gradually the wives and children wanted to have more to do with it because as their husbands died they felt isolated so in 2000 we decided to join together the IBA and the Friends of, which consisted of the families, to make the trust which David and I ran.”

There are groups all over this country and abroad with memorials in many cities. There’s also a touring exhibition, currently in Spain and a permanent exhibition in Newhaven.

“Our main aim is to keep alive the memory and spirit of those who went to Spain and those who supported them at home,” she says.