Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Read Online Free PDF Page B

local kids doing classes at the Theatre Royal. In workshop exercises, initiated by Joan Littlewood, youths from the estates pantomime the toffs: class satire taking the crap out of judges and bent briefs, a milieu with which Barney Platts-Mills had some familiarity. He documented these sessions, preparation for Bronco Bullfrog , in a short film called Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said. As with all period footage, it is the random details of time and place that catch our eye. A torn centrefold from a vanished publication, Parade : Jayne Mansfield, her augmented bosom in a wispy white wrap, recalling her visit to Hackney for a budgerigar show. A poster for Edward Judd in Invasion. ‘Aliens crashland near a hospital and mount a night attack on an English village.’ Scratchy young men in considered outfits that don’t cohere, tight trousers showing white socks, work boots with cardigans and trilbies, negotiate with the camera: actual and simulated boredom, snorts of derisive smoke.
    ‘Hang about the streets, it’s all I’ve ever done … Stratford, Plaistow, Forest Gate, East Ham, Leyton, Chingford, everywhere.’
    ‘It’s not acting,’ one of the lads says, ‘it’s remembering.’
    Washed-out colours of Hackney Marshes. Blue-grey prairie divided by scraggy rivulets and clogged canals. The Stratford boys, time out from work, kick a ball around, encumbered by one-size-fits-everybody overalls. They decide that the theme of their drama will be redevelopment. They have done the research. They know that civic structures have been torn down to provide a car park. They pretend that the marshes are a private golf course, on which developers schmooze corrupt politicians. ‘From St John’s Church to Maryland Point, that’s what I want to bung you for – to get the buildings off it, to build a car park.’ The fantasy is recurrent and persuasive. A reflection of the late 1960s and an anticipation of the coming millennium. ‘I’ll make a bomb off it, off every car that comes in there … Take everything down, no clubs on Stratford Broadway.’
    The script of Bronco Bullfrog , unconstricted by a bullshit narrative arc or conventional three-act structure, derives from the earlier Theatre Royal exercises. Characters, remembering not acting, move around just enough to quantify a portrait of place. Allotments. Prefabs. Tower blocks. Steamed-up, all-day-breakfast caffs. Launderettes. And the rail yards that provide the setting for the fateful robbery: the Borstal runaway Bronco Bullfrog, in his premature braces, wedged in a room of useless white goods. Territory is familiar, lifelong, and endured with affectionate exasperation: circumscribed lives made awkward by hormonal surges and the transitory beauty of youth. You can’t help wondering about the afterlife of Anne Gooding, who was discovered by Platts-Mills while ‘working in a dairy shop’. Her presence on the screen, docile but dissatisfied, not yet resigned and defeated, is easy and authentic. Tumble of hair and panda eyes. That sense of always looking out of the frame in any conversation, expecting the worst. Del Walker uses a flair for troublemaking as a badge of integrity. ‘He challenged Joan’s or anyone’s authority,’ Platts-Mills said. Del is the one slumped at the back of the class, cranking up the volume on his alternative soundtrack. The actors were given a share in the phantom profits of the film’s brief notoriety.
    The problem in Bronco Bullfrog is Stratford’s dust overcoat, the sucking gravity of place, how the young are held to what they already know, the fact that lives are fated, the story is written: they will wither into their despised parents. The liberating run on the motorbike to ‘the other end’, up west, is a failed attempt to see the Oliver! of Carol Reed and Lionel Bart. Too expensive. ‘Winner of 6 Oscars.’ Too popular. The young lovers give themselves up to the hopeless melancholy of Hackney Marshes, a bench near the dog