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Jack on the piano
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Jack sets his politics to a classy jazz riff
Tom Foot talks to playwright Jack Shepherd, who describes himself as a ‘dissident’ about his new play
JACK Shepherd, star of the top-rated 1990s television detective series Wycliffe, is back in north London indulging the two loves of his life – jazz and political drama.
Aside from the unsmiling, enigmatic detective Chief Superintendent Charles Wycliffe, Shepherd’s most remembered television role was as radical left-wing Labour minister Bill Brand in the 1976 TV series of that name.
Since those days, he spent a decade running a drama studio in Kentish Town with actor Richard Wilson and has directed Shakespeare at the Globe.
Now this accomplished saxophonist and pianist is combining his jazz with his interest in politics at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston, where he will be playing the lead in his own play Chasing the Moment.
Shepherd confesses he didn’t pay much attention at school in post-war Leeds. He was happier “clutching his Bakelite radio” and listening to the sounds of the ’50s. But his childhood dream of joining a band fell apart after he discovered he had “a problem with harmony” – and not the musical sort. “I come from a non-conformist background,” he says. “I had a Baptist upbringing. It is a type of brainwashing, I suppose, but it taught me to question everything at each turn,” adds the 66-year-old who regards himself as a lifelong dissident.
“I never wanted to join a party. There are lots of people like me still about. When I hear about people using gunpowder to blow up parking cameras I’ve got a bloody good mind to join them,” he adds in his thick Yorkshire burr.
Chasing the Moment was inspired by his experience of the bygone era of “popular theatre” which he recalls with great affection. It is a fusion of jazz, impromptu acting and politics and it promises to be a raucous affair.
It tells the story of a visionary West Indian who decides on his deathbed to turn his basement flat in a north London high-rise estate into a jazz club. Shepherd says he wrote it in a jazz style. “I love it when actors don’t really know what’s happening next,” he says. “A feel for jazz informs my work, in the writing and idiomatic language. In the play, everyone has a solo.”
“The play gets to grips with racial tension, not so much in the estate where it is based but over who owns jazz itself.” This reflects the great historical debate about whether jazz belongs to black or white people.
So where does Shepherd stand?
“You will have to come and see my play,” he replies. “My view is that working-class people in Britain were just as badly treated as the slaves from the West Indies. The blues was a music for the people; the exploited, the oppressed – from the Victorian era through to 1945.”
Shepherd recalls playing Trevor Griffiths’s radical Labour minister Bill Brand. “I remember Trevor saying the Minister it was most like was Neil Kinnock. You can see how much British politics has changed from that.”
Shepherd remains friends with the left-wing playwright Griffiths.
“I don’t share his politics,” he says. “Griffiths was a dedicated Marxist. His lot took a real hammering in the 1980s but he has always stuck with it. I have always been a radical – I’m a dissident but I have never committed to a single party. I walked into a Workers’ Revolutionary Party meeting once, but that’s it.”
Shepherd opened his drama school in Kentish Town with One Foot in the Grave actor Richard Wilson, who lives in Hampstead.
“Richard established it and I joined up,” he says. “It was for Equity members and we called it The Group. It ran for several years.”
Still an Equity member himself, Shepherd directed the first play when Shakespeare’s Globe crossed the river to its new home on London’s South Bank in 1996.
He continues: “I was chosen to direct The Two Gentlemen of Verona and I’m still on the artistic board. I have followed all the political manoeuvring of the past 10 years with Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole. I have been commissioned to write a play (Holiday Fire) this year by Dominic so I won’t say too much about that.”
Shepherd is no stranger to political theatre. He has written for the Dalston theatre before – on the Chartists, Milton and Cromwell and four of Shakespeare’s finest.
“They are all stories about political pragmatism versus idealism,” he says.
“I want to get back to something I became involved in during the 1970s – the idea of a popular theatre. The working class struggle for a popular theatre was something I became embroiled in when I did the Mystery plays. I loved it when people come in and dance at the end. I say this in complete confidence that people who saw those plays re-experienced a sense of community that has since been lost in London.”
“I believe that people should come to the theatre and take part – find themselves in a different place, not just a dark room where they clap. They should come to see a play and leave a little different at the end.”
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