Mindgame itself would never have reached the stage but for my sister, Caroline, who at the time was running a small but successful theatrical agency, representing actors and actresses. She read it and liked it and, without telling me, showed it to a producer she knew called Ahmet Yurdakul. A few days later, he phoned me and asked me to come round for a chat.
I will never forget that meeting. Ahmet worked out of an office near Euston Station, so close to the railway lines that it vibrated every time a train went past, like something out of one of those old black-and-white comedies starring Sid James or Norman Wisdom. He offered me a cup of tea that tasted of engine oil and biscuits that danced on the plate. Ahmet was a small, neat man with jet-black hair. He spoke very quickly and bit his nails. There was a button missing on his suit jacket and throughout our discussion I couldn’t keep my eyes off the patch where it should have been, the three threads hanging down. He had an assistant, Maureen Bates, dressed in a cable-knit cardigan with silver hair and glasses on a chain around her neck. From the way she bustled around him, she could have been his aunt or perhaps an elderly bodyguard. She seemed to be endlessly doubtful and suspicious, taking notes in tiny handwriting, but she barely said a word to me. They were about the same age – in their fifties.
The office did not inspire confidence. Situated in the basement of a three-storey house, it had a window too dusty to see through and furniture that was ugly and mismatched. I remember casting my eye over the posters on the walls and wondering if I had found the right home for my masterpiece. Run for Your Wife, a farce by Ray Cooney that had opened in Norwich. It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, adapted from the long-running BBC sitcom at the Gaiety Theatre on the Isle of Man. Rolf Harris in Robin Hood at the Epsom Playhouse. Macbeth （Abridged） performed in the open air at Middleham Castle with a cast of six.
To be fair to him, Ahmet loved my play. When I came into the room, he rose up to embrace me, overwhelming me with the smell of aftershave and tobacco. As we sat down, I noticed the packet of American cigarettes and heavy onyx lighter on his desk.
‘This is a great play. A very great play!’ They were almost his first words to me. The typescript was in front of him and he emphasised his words by striking it with the back of his hand. He was wearing a heavy signet ring that left dints on the first page. ‘Do you not think so, Maureen?’
Maureen said nothing.
‘Ignore her! She doesn’t read. She doesn’t know. Anthony, let me tell you. We will take this play out on tour. Then we will come into town. I love your sister who brought this to me. I cry with happiness to meet you.’
Ahmet was Turkish. I think he quite revelled in the part, using deliberately ornate phrases as if to illustrate his ‘otherness’。 Once I got to know him a bit better, I realised that he actually spoke English perfectly well. His parents were Turkish Cypriots who had emigrated to the UK in the seventies, fleeing ethnic fighting and terrorism. Ahmet was ten years old when they arrived, moving into a small flat in Enfield, north London, from where he took the bus each day to the local comprehensive while they set up a clothing business. He mentioned that he’d studied computer science at Roehampton University and that he’d lived with his parents for ten years, working as a software developer for Enfield social services. Every time we met, he told me a little more about himself and I got the feeling that he was hoping I’d write a book about him … just like Hawthorne. I listened politely, but, to be honest, I was more interested in his plans for the play and his ability to achieve them.
Maureen had already typed up an outline of the tour that they were planning and slid it in front of me. Bath, Southampton, Colchester, York – they were all good-sized cities with excellent theatres, and I should say at once that Ahmet was as good as his word. He managed to entice a well-known director, Ewan Lloyd, to come on board and over the next few weeks I received regular updates. The money had been raised. Jordan Williams was interested in the part of Dr Farquhar. The theatres had been signed up. They were starting work on the designs. Jordan Williams had accepted the part of Dr Farquhar. A rehearsal space had been booked. I’m condensing the events of several months into just a few lines because I want to get on to what happened in London, but I can’t overstate how exciting this all was for me. It was my earliest dream, my first ambition, still somehow alive.
This is the plot of Mindgame:
Mark Styler, a journalist and ‘true crime’ writer, is visiting a lunatic asylum called Fairfields where he hopes to interview a notorious serial killer, Easterman, for a book he is writing. First, he has to persuade the unwilling and unhelpful director of the institute, Dr Farquhar, to allow him access to his patient. Quite quickly, Styler comes to realise that not all is as it should be at Fairfields. For no good reason, there’s a full-length human skeleton hanging in Dr Farquhar’s office, and his assistant, Nurse Plimpton, is clearly frightened of something and tries to warn Styler to leave while he still can. As the action continues, the sense of uneasiness erupts into violence until it is revealed that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The real Dr Farquhar is dead. Styler is trapped.