The Collection (1976)

By Harold Pinter (1961).
Granada Television, 5 December 1976.

Pinteresque (adj.) Resembling or characteristic of his plays.… Pinter’s plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Harold Pinter is the only modern dramatist to enter the dictionary. Which is ironic, in a way, since his plays use a smaller vocabulary than those of his contemporaries – little more than a thousand words, on some estimates. It’s the spaces between the words that count as much as the words themselves. And how actors love to insinuate themselves into those spaces!

Among British actors none came bigger or more actorly than Lord ‘Larry’ Olivier. In 1975, still smarting from the protracted labour-pains of establishing the National Theatre on the South Bank, Olivier was offered the chance by ITV to choose six of the best plays of the twentieth century and produce them for television, directing and/or acting in as many of them as he pleased. His first choice fell on Pinter’s The Collection, written originally for TV in 1961, later adapted for the stage, which he now brought back to the small screen. “It’s a brilliant little play… the best Pinter has ever done,” Olivier enthused to The Guardian:

I saw the one Ralph [Richardson] and John [Gielgud] are in [No Man’s Land], and I didn’t think it had any depth to it, just is marvellous mood-dialogue, but this – I thought when I first saw it, ‘That is a really waggish piece’, and the more we worked in it, the more depths we found in it.

The Collection is a four-hander. Olivier plays Harry, a middle-aged – we presume gay – couturier who lives with a younger man, Bill (Malcolm McDowell). Bill is visited by another man, James (Alan Bates), who accuses Bill of having an affair with James’s wife, Stella (played by Mirren), while the two were on a business trip in Leeds. Stella first confirms the story, then seems to deny it. Bill keeps changing his story. Bill and James grapple on the floor: as the two men fight over one woman, there are undercurrents of homoerotic attraction between them. Harry seethes with resentment that his “slum slug” of a protégé may have betrayed him. In Pinter’s world, ‘truth’ will not out. At the end we still do not know what happened in that hotel room in Leeds.

The Times was impressed:

Michael Apted directed these memorable faces through a faultless round of confident charm (in attack), lowered eyelids (to acknowledge a passing defeat) and dilated pupils (to denote rage and the likelihood of physical violence). As the fourth of this rag trade quartet, Olivier had little to bite on until the dénouement, but the bite, when it came, was swift, fierce and clean. There was, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, a good deal less to all this than met the eye. But what met the eye was certainly good.

Olivier personally edited the text by reading all the parts aloud and selected the actors he wanted to work with. This is a man who, less than two years earlier, was in the grips of a wasting muscular disease that left him helpless, having endured a coronary and pneumonia before that, and cancer before that. Now, according to one of his biographers, he “returned to an Olivier as vigorous as ever, lost in a blur of auditioning, cutting, editing, dubbing, directing and acting.”

As Stella, Mirren radiates the sphinx-like unknowability required of her character. Except for one interpolated scene in a dress shop, we never see her outside her apartment, where her most loyal companion is a beautiful white Persian kitten. “Definitive Pinter performances,” the Sunday Times declared of Mirren and Bates. She had only one scene with the Grand Old Man, of which The Listener commented: “In [Harry’s] scene with Stella (Helen Mirren, delicious as ever), his voice acquired a special register of plumminess”. That “plumminess” risked tipping over into caricature, as Mirren later recalled:

I’m not easily overawed, but if anyone had the potential to frighten me, it was Olivier. But he was wonderful. Within hours we were simply colleagues, fast becoming friends. I even plucked up the nerve to tell him I thought he was overdoing it in one scene, getting a bit hammy; far from chewing me out, as I half expected, he immediately thanked me, said he thought I was absolutely right, and toned it down. (Quoted in Holden, p440)

As usual, Clive James, then The Observer’s TV critic, praised the actress while bad-mouthing the play: “Helen Mirren’s patent abundance of flesh and blood only served to emphasise how her lines lacked both these substances”. The play itself he found “diaphanous”.

Perhaps the most Pinteresque of all performances was that of the white kitten. Its part is precisely notated, as you would expect from this dramatist. The cat’s part consists entirely of pauses (or pawsies). It is there to be “nuzzled” (the word occurs several times in the stage directions). After the filming, Mirren got to keep the cat, which was later “hijacked” by her parents, and the actress has a charming anecdote in her memoirs about the “psychic connection” that developed between her father, Basil Mirren, and Flossie, this “prima donna” among cats.

References

Elkan Allan, ‘Pick of the day: new peak for Olivier’, Sunday Times, 5 December 1976
Peter Fiddick, ‘The Olivier collection’, Guardian, 3 December 1976
Anthony Holden, Olivier (1988)
Clive James, ‘Television: last of the Romans’, Observer, 12 December 1976
Harold Pinter, Plays: Two (1977)
David Pryce-Jones, ‘Television: classic fantasy’, The Listener, 16 December 1976
Michael Ratcliffe, ‘Television’s own Olivier theatre’, Times, 6 December 1976     

Caesar and Claretta (1975)

By Jack Russell.
BBC TV, 9 May 1975.

In November 1971 Richard Burton received a visit from one Carlo Cotti, a “neo-fascist” who “appears to be a cut above the average in intelligence”. An assistant director itching to graduate to making films of his own, Cotti had a proposition for Burton and Taylor:

He wants to talk to me re Benito Mussolini I think for whom, I’m told, he has a great and relatively unfashionable admiration. He is anxious for me to play the last days of Mussolini in a film. Never know, it might be interesting and with E possibly playing his mistress Clara Petacci it would certainly set all Italy by the ears. (Diaries, 13 Nov 1971)

This intriguing project never got off the ground, although under a different director, Carlo Lizzani, it mutated into another venture for Italy’s Cinecittà studios: Mussolini – ultimo atto, a vehicle for Rod Steiger, with Lisa Gastoni as the dictator’s loyal mistress.   

Meanwhile, back in England and on a much smaller scale, the BBC had a Mussolini drama of its own in development. It was one of a series of single plays under the title ‘Private Affairs’. (Other episodes tackled the relationships between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, David Garrick and Peg Woffington, Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O’Shea, and George, Prince of Wales, and Mrs Fitzherbert.) Clive James, writing in The Observer, was unimpressed by the whole concept:

These famous modern love stories must have looked a good idea in outline, but when it comes to the scripts there is not much for the actors to bite on, and they are obliged to spend most of their time coal-heaving the exposition.

This is a bit harsh, even by the Antipodean’s acerbic standards. Caesar and Claretta, in my view, is one of the strongest of Mirren’s early TV appearances.

The play is based closely on historical events. Mussolini was captured on 27 April 1945 as he tried to escape to Switzerland disguised as a German soldier in a German motorised column. They were stopped by partisans, who insisted on searching all the vehicles before allowing the Germans to proceed. One figure slumped in the darkness at the back of the truck had attracted attention. “His face was like wax and his stare glassy, but somehow blind,” the partisan leader later remembered. “I read there utter exhaustion, but not fear.” After being detained at the town hall of Dongo, Mussolini and his mistress were transferred overnight to a farmhouse near Lake Como while their captors pondered what to do with them. As is well known, the following day a group of communists arrived with orders from Milan to carry out summary justice on the Duce. He and Petacci were shot, their bodies later transferred to Milan where they were exhibited, to the howls of a raucous and unforgiving public, dangling upside down from scaffolding in the Piazzale Loreto.

Writer Jack Russell took that last night in the farmhouse as the basis for an intimate drama. The dictator and his mistress retire to a well-guarded bedroom for the night. According to the testimony of their guards, there was only a little whispered conversation before Mussolini fell asleep; Claretta stayed awake for a long time before dropping off. Russell used dramatic licence to imagine a long duet between the doubly impotent Duce (“my power is gone with my power”), unable either to “save” Italy or make love to his mistress, as he railed against the perfidy of the French, English, Americans and Germans (“my friends, the wolves”). Then the old vainglory stirred, and with it (we were to suppose) came a stirring in the loins. Many details of the historical record were woven into this compact drama: Petacci’s squeal of delight when she mistakenly believes that the leader of the execution squad has come to liberate them, her stumbling through the farmyard mud in fashionable high heels.

The production moved in and out of black-and-white, suggestive of Italian neorealist cinema, and Mirren in broad-brimmed hat and scarlet lipstick looked every inch the Cinecittà star. She has spoken of her early admiration for Italian actresses like Monica Vitti and Anna Magnani; here was her chance to make good. Michael Ratcliffe wrote of her performance in The Times:

Miss Mirren is an actress who always seems to know what she is doing and why. She is also very sexy and Mr Whatham [the director] was not going to let us forget it. He shot this Claretta Petacci… through the Duce’s own intermittently devoted, if not fetishistic eyes.

Yet, “against this pin-up presentation”, and here I agree with him, she “cleverly retained the essential simplicity of Claretta’s character.” Petacci, described by one of Mussolini’s biographers as hailing from the “comfortable Rome bourgeoisie”, was no intellectual, but, in Russell’s script, she was more than a gold-digger – more than just another Fascist groupie. Clive James’s TV review underestimated how these qualities were captured in writing and performance:

Mussolini and Claretta Petacci trailed a few tatters of tragic grandeur but that was scarcely the point – the point being that in real life there was no grandeur at all, since Mussolini in his last days was nothing but a farceur without a theatre and Petacci was a B-girl on the skids. Neither Robert Hardy nor Helen Mirren (especially not her) could play it that low down, even when supplied with dialogue drained as dry of interest as the Pontine Marshes.

The writing never sought to rehabilitate the old rogue or his floozy, merely to take baby steps in comprehending them. As the Telegraph’s reviewer commented,

It was essentially a melodramatic, operatic piece of writing, but very much, one felt, in the style Mussolini would have used in private as well as public. Towering over all was the virtuosic performance of Robert Hardy as Mussolini, a portrayal uncanny in its physical resemblance, memorable for its restraint as well as its power.

Mirren recalls this play with affection, likening Petacci to Eva Braun as “someone who is absolutely at the height of ‘mistressdom’ and then has to pay the ultimate price”. She’s also full of admiration for her co-star Robert Hardy, whom she sees as a great screen actor manqué. From him she learnt ”how much repressed energy has got to be there, underneath the performance”. These two giants were to have reunited on stage almost forty years later in The Audience, in which Hardy was scheduled to play Churchill opposite Mirren’s Elizabeth II. Alas, Hardy, now 87, had to withdraw after suffering cracked ribs as the result of a fall. Let’s hope he makes a full recovery. The man, like his erstwhile co-star, is a national treasure.

   

Sources

RJB Bosworth, Mussolini (2002)
The Richard Burton Diaries, ed Chris Williams (2012)
Clive James, “Formula for soap opera”, The Observer, 1 June 1975
Richard Last, “Robert Hardy makes Mussolini a man”, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 1975
Ray Moseley, The Last Days of Mussolini (2006)
Michael Ratcliffe, “Private affairs”, The Times, 10 May 1975

Parkinson (1975)

February 1975. The Labour Party in government under Harold Wilson. It was the week of the Conservative leadership election that brought Margaret Thatcher to the top of her party. In The Observer, Clive James, whose weekly TV column was always the first thing one turned to on a Sunday morning, was engaged in his favourite sport, baiting Michael Parkinson:

This week’s number 2 lady superstar was Helen Mirren, who squared off against Parkinson (BBC1) in yet another doomed attempt to scale down her vitality within the limits of the medium’s butter-brained expectations. Parky kept referring to ‘your physical attributes’, apparently oblivious to the fact that his gesturing hands were busy grasping a pair of imaginary breasts. La Mirren bashfully dodged such frivolous questioning but seemed all unaware that no other form of questioning was available – as a serious actress she seemed to think that the true topic for the evening, serious acting, was somehow being purposely held back. The truth was, of course, that it had never been conceived of: whatever Parky might be, he isn’t devious. When she told him that Playboy was a disgusting magazine, there was no reply, the opinion doubtless having been dismissed as an aberration. She sneezed. Her shoulder-strap fell down. O! that I were a glove upon that hand! That I might touch those physical attributes!

(Clive James, Observer, 16 February 1975, Review section, p28)

Thirty years later, and the man himself is in apologetic mood:

… you can really admire someone, and long to meet them, only to be disappointed when you do. My first meeting with Helen Mirren was like that. I enjoyed her as an actress and thought she was a beguiling woman, an intriguing blend of intelligence and sex appeal. When she first came on the show she wore a revealing dress and carried an ostrich feather. This might have accounted for a clumsy line of questioning about whether or not her physical attributes stood in the way of being recognised as a serious actor. Ms Mirren bridled and wondered if I was asking if breasts prevented her from being taken seriously. I was wrong-footed and blundered on to a point where I could feel her hostility. We didn’t meet again until many years later, and we recalled that first meeting. Helen said she thought I behaved like a complete ass and I couldn’t disagree.

(Michael Parkinson, Parky: My Autobiography, pbk edn, 2009, p206)

I remember watching this interview when it was originally broadcast. I squirmed. The nation squirmed. Perhaps I squirmed more than most – an adolescent punch-drunk on literary studies, imagining myself some obscure vassal and Mirren my liege-lady:

She look’d as grand as doomsday and as grave;

And he, he reverenced his liege-lady there…

(Tennyson, ‘The Princess’)

It was hard to visualise Parky crammed into the stalls at The Other Place, Stratford, or peering down from the gods at the Aldwych. Cricket was his thing, surely, not Shakespeare? Since then, the whole interview has been issued on DVD (in a box set of her work for the BBC) and, inevitably, uploaded to YouTube.

It makes curious viewing now. These days Dame Helen is a frequent guest on chat shows. She comes across as amiable and relaxed. She’s happy to answer questions on any subject under the sun and can be relied on to deliver herself of headline-grabbing – and occasionally bonkers – opinions. She seems unfazed by, even prepared to laugh about, some of her past indiscretions, positively basking in the admiration that is now accorded her (and not averse to milking the applause, I notice, as she makes her entrance). In 1975 her younger self was much more suspicious of the publicity machine. And with good reason: in portraying her as “Stratford’s very own sex queen” (a notorious headline of the day), the British media were a threat. They could undermine the seriousness of purpose which radiates from all the work she did at the time (which was primarily in theatre – she had little profile as a film actress when this was recorded). Sure, the Parky interview is “sexist”, though not particularly so by the standards of the time, or the standards of his other interviews. What seemed to bug her was not so much the line of questioning as the fact that he refused to “spit it out” (as she put it). Euphemism was the enemy here. Once he’d embarked on a risky interview strategy, old-school gallantry held back the Greatest Living Yorkshireman from naming of parts.

Macbeth (1974/5)

Among actors, Macbeth has always been considered an unlucky play, and not without reason. When Olivier played the title part in 1937, he narrowly escaped death when part of the scenery collapsed and demolished the chair in which he had just been sitting. In a 1942 production starring and directed by John Gielgud there were no fewer than four fatalities. Two of the witches, the actor playing Duncan and the designer all died in the course of the run. The set was then repainted and used for a light comedy, whereupon the lead actor in that production also died.

Fortunately, nothing so serious blighted Trevor Nunn’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, first seen at Stratford in late 1974, which transferred to London in early ’75. But it was not without incident. Nicol Williamson, playing Macbeth to Mirren’s Lady Macbeth, refused to rehearse. ‘I think his plan, if there was such a thing, was to hold back until the first night and then just let it explode,’ Mirren recalls. There was no love lost between the principals: he was ‘just horrible to me… he hated me,’ she says now. I don’t know – perhaps they had smoothed over their differences by the time of the London run – but I saw the London version twice, both times in a state of heightened emotional awareness brought on by my having developed a massive crush on Ms M, and I wasn’t conscious of animosity between the leads so much as chemistry of a very different kind. One felt this was a characteristically modern reading, playing up the sexual co-dependence of the Macbeths’ marriage.

The idea is surely in the play, and it has a long history. In 1884, Sarah Bernhard upset straight-laced Victorian critics by dwelling on the lady’s ‘insidious erotic influence’. AC Bradley railed against this interpretation in his 1904 lectures on Shakespeare:

... there is not the faintest trace in the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied in Madame Bernhard’s impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised. Shakespeare was not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.

Yet ‘seductive attractions’ were precisely what Mirren’s Lady Macbeth used to further her ambitions. Her body would be the reward for an obediently performed murder. Associations between sex and violence were established from the beginning. When we first saw Lady Macbeth, reading her husband’s letter (I.v), she held it in her right hand while toying with a small dagger in her left. Then, as she invoked the ‘Spirits | That tend on mortal thoughts’, inviting them to ‘unsex me here’, she used the dagger to draw blood from her arm. The lines of soliloquy that follow were carefully delivered: ‘Come to my woman’s breasts | And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers…’

When Williamson entered, Mirren threw herself with unequivocal affection into his arms, sensing ‘the future in the instant’. Greeting his wife with ‘My dearest love’, Williamson held her for what seemed like minutes before breaking the embrace to speak the next line. Her conversational tone at ‘Your face, my Thane’ troubled some critics (‘she giggles, as if he had just seen the gas bill’ – Wardle) but suggested an easy relationship between them as he entrusted ‘this night’s great business’ into her ‘dispatch’.

Act I scene vii, where Macbeth prevaricates before the murder of Duncan, seems to me highly charged with eroticism, even on the page, as Lady Macbeth taunts her husband with lack of manliness: ‘From this time | Such I account thy love.’ Macbeth declares he will ‘do all that may become a man’, to which she responds, ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’. Williamson and Mirren intensified their intimacy at this point.

There was symmetry between I.v – Macbeth, back from the war, greeting his wife with ‘My dearest love’ – and II.ii, as Mirren received Williamson with a jubilant cry of ‘My husband!’ and an ecstatic hug after he’d killed Duncan.

In this production the sexual dynamics of the marriage were exposed to view, so that Lady Macbeth’s decline began at the point where the frisson goes out of the relationship. As Irving Wardle wrote of the Stratford production, ‘Up to the coronation, Miss Mirren is sex triumphant; afterwards, her collapse begins from the sense of being sexually discarded.’ To be precise, no sooner has Lady Macbeth entered ‘as Queen’ (III.i) than Macbeth orders her out of the room to plot the murder of Banquo without her aid. In III.ii she asks ‘why do you keep alone, | Of sorriest fancies your companions making?’ At the exhortation to ‘sleek o’er your rugged looks’, Mirren offered her embrace to Williamson, but engrossed in his own thoughts, he ignored her, and she dropped her arms.

And yet this kind of reading can be overdone. Bernard Levin, in a column written around this time, made a right charlie of himself by obsessing about Ms Mirren’s mammaries. In I.vii, as in I.v, Lady Macbeth references her breasts; but the context as before is that of breast-feeding:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

Coleridge’s gloss on these lines is of interest:

… though usually thought to prove a merciless and unwomanly nature, [this passage] proves the direct opposite: she brings it as the most solemn enforcement to Macbeth of the solemnity of his promise to undertake the plot against Duncan. Had she so sworn, she would have done that which was most horrible to her feelings, rather than break the oath…

The thematic associations of maternity, fecundity and dynasty have to be present. After all, the original prophecy that drives the plot is that Macbeth shall be king, but Banquo’s issue, not Macbeth’s, will later occupy the throne.

But if I had suspicions that the production was emphasising one aspect of the play at the expense of others, I couldn’t resist the many memorable details in Mirren’s performance:

- After Duncan’s murder (II.ii), using a napkin of purest white, Mirren tried to wipe off the blood but she was unable to clean either her own hands or Macbeth’s; they left the stage still bloodstained.

- In II.iii Lady Macbeth faints. Nunn had devised some business to motivate this. Duncan’s catafalque was brought down the stage and Mirren, confronted with the result of their crime, perhaps reminded of her ‘father as he slept’, broke down under the strain. Her hysterical outburst was interrupted by Williamson, who took her by the shoulders, turned her round and led her to the door.

- In the banquet scene (III.iv), after Macbeth had addressed a stool for minutes on end, a white-clad Mirren rushed to sit on it. (The entire production was in blacks and whites, as if viewed in silhouette.) Afterwards, fighting for control, she moved compulsively about the room as she reacted to Macbeth’s raptness in the face of Banquo’s ghost, at one point clinging to the back of a chair to regain her self-possession.

- In the sleepwalking scene (V.i), the Doctor and Gentlewoman treated her as a disturbed child implicated in a business she didn’t understand. Marvin Rosenberg summarises:

Mirren wore a stark white robe as she acted out the movement to her desk, from which she took her paper. She turned half-front as she began to speak, still seated, working hard at her hand washing. She seemed to lick or spit on a handful of robe which she rubbed fiercely against her palms. She was wildly urgent in the scene, her anxiety-ridden voice returning to the tones of childhood.

Nunn’s aim in the original staging, so he told the company’s historian Sally Beauman, had been to confine the awesome spaces of the Stratford stage, producing ‘a chamber stage within the proscenium’. This was Mirren’s first production after a year of intermittent travelling with the Peter Brook company. In November 1974 she’d had a letter published in The Guardian complaining that the RSC’s expenditure on costumes, sets and staging had become ‘excessive, unnecessary and destructive to the art of Theatre’. I suppose if you’d spent the previous months performing on a bare carpet in African villages and Native American reservations, any of the trappings of European theatre would seem extravagant. Whether as a result of her protests (which were not well received by a company management suspicious of unauthorised contact with the press) or an unrelated design re-think, the production was notably sparser by the time it reached London. No set now, just massive ebony furniture dragged about by black-cowled scene shifters, which seemed to trap the actors within its confines. Williamson by the end was clambering up and down a pile of furniture, like a chimpanzee in a cage, spitting out his ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech. Irving Wardle listed the changes in his review of the London production:

Gone are John Napier’s heavy ecclesiastical furnishings, the traverse curtain shadow plays, spotlit asides, coronation pageantry, and the witches swinging on chandeliers. In their place, Trevor Nunn bases his production on the naked physical properties of the stage. It is like moving from an Italian cathedral to a primitive Methodist chapel.

Macbeth is the shortest of the Shakespeare tragedies. The brevity and speed of the play are astonishing, especially when played, as it was in the 1975 production, without interval in two hours flat. Lady Macbeth's sinewy, unmetaphorical language, so often rooted in the colloquialisms of Shakespeare’s day, was a perfect fit for the unforced style of verse delivery that Mirren had learnt from her RSC mentors. Although histories of the play usually give preference to Nunn’s later production with Judi Dench as the Lady, I will always cherish this one.

References

Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company (1982)

AC Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)

ST Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor (1930)

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (1987)

Bernard Levin, ‘Bringing the followers of Thespis back into the temple’, Times, 3 December 1974

Helen Mirren, In the Frame (2007)

Helen Mirren, ‘Stage set for an empty pageant?’ [Letters], Guardian, 13 November 1974

Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (1978)

Irving Wardle, ‘A Christian tragedy’, Times, 30 October 1974

Irving Wardle, ‘Macbeth’, Times, 6 March 1975

Welcome!

1972

2011

Welcome, new readers. This is a blog dedicated to one of the greatest actresses of our time and someone I’ve admired ever since I first set eyes on her as a moonstruck schoolboy in 1974. My plan, over the coming months, is to look back at some of her career highlights. The emphasis will be on her early work, to about 1980, hence the subtitle ‘Becoming Helen Mirren’. I go back to that time, not just because my most vivid memories of her are the earliest, not just because back in the day she was kind enough to answer the self-obsessed scribblings of an adolescent fan, but because I feel no one quite knew – not least Mirren herself – what she would become in the next thirty years. Who in 1974 would have confidently predicted that this self-declared Trotskyite would end up a Dame of the British Empire and a global brand so recognisable that she has only to step out in a bikini or utter an expletive in a TV interview for the Twittersphere to go into meltdown?

Well, perhaps there was one person who foresaw all. In her autobiography, Mirren describes visiting a palm-reader in a back street of Golders Green. This would have been about 1968. ‘He was an Indian man, more like an accountant than a mystic,’ she recalls. He told her that she’d be successful in life but would see her greatest success later, after the age of 45: ‘Not something you want to hear at the age of 23… I realised that I did not want to know what the future held. I wanted my life to be an adventure.’