do you believe in ghosts?

Brian Astbury visits me with a forceful prod

The last time I spoke to Brian was on Facebook Messenger. It feels too heavy to go back and see what that exchange is. We had a tricky relationship, reasonably fraught at times. I was so angry at him for all sorts of things he couldn’t quite understand, and I desperately needed him to be proud of me. He was but he was also from a different generation and a time when you didn’t tell people you were proud of them. He also wanted to build me up as a person who didn’t rely on affirmation from others in order to create or flourish in this harsh world. 

Brian was my mentor and teacher. He came into my life when I was 19 and in a particularly low place. I was in my second year at Oxford and utterly heartbroken - though maybe it was later. I didn’t keep a very precise diary but I remember not knowing what I was doing. I wanted to make things and I wanted to perform but couldn’t find my way to the work I wanted to create. Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up taking a week-long acting course with Brian Astbury in the upstairs room off Marylebone High Street. I took the coach every morning from St Clement’s to Marble Arch and in that room, I felt like I suddenly had access to myself in a way that was entirely new. Through his guidance, I was being not performing which was what I desperately wanted yet couldn’t language.

Later, when I was in my final year of university, Brian emailed me. I desperately wish I still had that email but it was to my ox.ac.uk account which is long gone along with all the emails I exchanged with my first-ever partner. No paper trial. Good for storage but bad for reminiscing. Brian asked me to come on this year-long course he’d created - The Forge. Said I was one of the people he wanted to teach before he died. I bit. 

That was how I found myself in Guildford, in the back room of a pub with Brian which was where we began to tussle. It was not a simple year. Despite all and any conflict, he always supported me. He was famous for turning up. Every show I made, he would be there, hands resting on his belly. After he would wait in the theatre foyer, with notes. 

Brian was the king of self-publishing. In fact, that was the last thing we talked about. I told him about my publishing deal for Everything Is Going to be KO, a book I adapted from a stage show I developed on The Forge. He wondered why I was bothering - I might as well self-publish. Fuck, I was angry. Old men telling me what to do is a trigger, which was ultimately at the core of the clashes between us. Yet I was determined not to let shit get in the way so I made a plan. I wouldn’t talk to him during the writing process. Instead, I wanted to wait until it was published, send him the book and go for a cream cake with him afterwards. 

But he died in March 2020, missing both the publication of my book and thankfully, COVID. 

For a good string of years, I saw Brian on the tube. On second look, I would realise that these old white men with goatees and carpeted gilets were not him but other men of that generation. When I searched for an obituary, I discovered he had had a heart attack on the tube. 

The list of things I learned from Brian is long, and I’m not sure I can even sum them all up. In fact, I know I can’t because it becomes clearer each year that I’ll discover more things he gave me as time passes. He wrote several books, all self-published and still available. Though the sales no longer support his trips to Maison Bertaux, I recommend reading Trusting the Actor because he better than I can explain his methods.

He said, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In apartheid South Africa, he saw the way that oppression was used to dehumanise in order to keep a tight hold on control and wealth. Brian knew how dogged and resilient one had to be to question the status quo. Now I’ve been on the other side of the teacher/student dynamic, I understand a little more about the difficulties in guiding others. He never wanted me to submit; he wanted my fight to push in the right direction, into the work.

Make the work. This is not a lesson I learned solely from Brian, but I certainly learned how much work and how quickly I was capable of creating. He really didn’t see barriers or rather he refused to see them. The king of the hustle in many ways. He knew that institutions and high-ups weren’t interested in helping until something was already successful. You had to do the hard stuff on your own and with the people around you.

 In therapy last year, I was talking about not knowing what to do with the huge waves of rage that had been flooding me. And Brian appeared. How could he not? I was asking and he wanted to remind me that I already knew where to put the anger and the drive. He prodded me right in the solar plexus, a signature move. Out of me poured a howl, the sort I first accessed in the upstairs room off the Marylebone High Street. As in life, this ghostly visitation of Brian was telling me what to do and reminding me of all the things I was forgetting: the anger runs, the exercises, morning pages, push some walls, make the work. Stop waiting to be given permission. You know what to do. Do it. My cry turned into hysterical laughter. When I looked up, I realised that my poor therapist didn’t quite know what had possessed me. 

I have been deeply sad that I haven’t had Brian around for the last four years. But this most recent apparition was a reminder that he hasn’t really gone anywhere. I carry him about with me, both the wisdom and the infuriating rightness. It isn’t a coincidence that I’m basically self-publishing now. It was the correct advice, just meant for a different time.