‘I was outside looking in; bit like sex really’

“You know, I couldn’t have been more out of place than a side of ham at a halal butcher.”

It was a steep learning curve. Needless to say, the next day he ditched the blazer and flannels, but the trouble was he didn’t possess any trendy stuff either. The best he could manage was to look dirty and interesting, a bit grubby. Gregor never felt he fitted in.

It was a rerun of school, that was the trouble; reawakening old insecurities, that tribal thing again. His fellow students were all A and B stream kids with slightly arty parents who lived in the smart suburbs of Milngavie or Bearsden, where people’s horizons were wider and the world was their oyster, whereas, with his lot, it was more a case of “Keep your head below the parapet, get a job, get your wages, don’t get ideas above your station.”

Here, quite simply, was another planet. The movement classes, for instance.

“I’d like you to move to the colour blue,” said the teacher.

“Well, I mean, Jesus, could you let me go now because I can’t do this,” Gregor was silently, internally, huffing and puffing.

“OK, now move to the colour black.”

“Well, I can do that. Black’s hellish! I’ll pretend I’m at a funeral.”

The next class required students to wear leotards and tights. And here was Gregor, the husky 18-year-old who didn’t feel he looked good in ordinary clothes, let alone . . .

“Leotard and tights. I mean, you’re talking about a sex-starved virginal boy who’s not at all happy about his rolls of fat in a leotard. It’s not good; it’s like a panic attack, all of us in leotards and tights, all the boys, all the girls. It was decided the boys should be trees and the girls would be vines growing up the trees. Oh, the whole thing’s not good, the girls wrapping themselves around us, and I’m thinking, Oh no, help, I can’t handle this!”

But he survived and went back the next day . . . and the day after that. To get to classes from his village home, Gregor had to travel into the city by train, then negotiate the Glasgow underground, where the distinctive smell was an entirely new experience to him. He’d never done anything like that before — cross the city, find the place and turn up, on his own.

“I was a bit of a yokel.”

He began to get to know his fellow students, realising, to his surprise, that they were in as much of a state of anxiety as he was. He started to explore an entirely different culture, and learnt how to prepare for parts in plays, modern and classical. Most of these works were completely unknown to a boy without O-Level English who had cut his teeth on Gilbert and Sullivan. Gregor didn’t have a clue about Shakespeare either.

Drama school was an odd place, he decided. It took him a long time to be confident enough to grow into his potential. He kept his head down, terrified he’d be found out. In those days, there was a state of affairs that would be unthinkable now: the RSAMD taught their students to speak proper English. It was drummed into them that in their normal daily lives they must adopt the standard middle-class southern English way of speaking, otherwise they simply wouldn’t get work. Voice classes were there to knock any accent and identity out of them. Gregor was happy to practise received pronunciation at home but paled — uh-oh — at the thought of walking into a pub in Neilston and trying it.

“Ah, a pint of your best bitter, please, old chap. I’ve popped in to meet my good friends, Timothy and Nigel.”

Besides, there was no comic acting in the course. In fact, there wasn’t much room for humour at all.

This gauche boy, then, had very mixed feelings about drama school. Part of him was in love with it — the mystery of the art, the thrill of performing. He was drawn instinctively to theatricality. It felt natural, and he felt very comfortable with all the crazy people. But, at the same time, he felt he was distanced from them; that he was outside looking in. He didn’t feel he was one of them. Part of this dissatisfaction lay in his persistent and preoccupying failure to lose his virginity. Sex just wasn’t happening for him, no matter how much he thought about it and how much he practised. For this, he could blame a religious upbringing, a lack of sex education and a rejection by a girl called Patricia Smith. Particularly Patricia Smith.

To tell this story, we must rewind to the days of Neilston Primary School, where Gregor, aged 10 or 11, was a member of the Life Boys, the junior section of the Boys’ Brigade. The Life Boys had Christmas parties, and Gregor, who was achingly fond of a girl called Patricia Smith, managed to pluck up the courage to ask her to go to the party with him.

It was a good party, with games, for which there were prizes, and Gregor won a smart propelling pencil and pen set. He remembers presenting it to the new love of his life with great ceremony and then he ran home, happy. As far as he was concerned, the romance was going to run and run, they’d probably get married and everything would be happy ever after. Nothing else mattered in the world; he was as far gone in love as it is possible for a small boy to be.

And the next day Patricia Smith went to the Scout Christmas party with someone else. Gregor was devastated. Only twice in his life did he fall in love as profoundly as that: once with Patricia, and then, many years later, with Vicki, the soulmate who became his wife.

At Barrhead High School, sex and girls had remained a mystery to him. He was very keen on them, but terrified at the same time, and acknowledges it might have been unconscious fear of yet more rejection in his life that caused him to be so reticent. When the stirrings came upon him, when, like all boys, he realised that an erection was not just for peeing over high walls, he remembers thinking it was something rather odd and filthy.

“Basically, I used to go to church too much.”

And so Gregor’s schooldays passed in a haze of unrequited lust and guilt. At drama school, the conflict continued, all mixed up with the tug of his stern Church of Scotland upbringing. His church attendance began to tail off when he passed 18, mainly because it was regarded as pretty uncool to be seen to be going to church at that age — although he still had a bit of faith.

There were some very strange people in drama school because theatre bred a more eccentric environment than most places of study. It was a funny hotbed of knowingness and naivety.

He remembered one-to-one interviews with Grace Matchett, one of the lecturers, who had an office in a little Edwardian-style conservatory at the top of the stairs in Atholl Gardens. Grace would ask him all kinds of quite personal questions and sometimes, with his buttoned-up background, he convinced himself she might be asking him about his sex life — or lack of it.

She was genuine, he was convinced, but drama school was all a bit strange like that, with illicit affairs between some of the other lecturers and the students. The drama students mixed with the music students, also highly sensitive young people, and Gregor remembers one sizzling anecdote that summed it all up. One of the music students had been playing some kind of Chopin nocturne on the piano, and his teacher suddenly interrupted him.

“Have you ever been to bed with anyone?” he asked.

The poor student, just out of school, sat at the piano stool, frozen.

“Well, go and get laid and come back and play that.”

“And it’s true. It’s true. You know it was that, it was raw. He was right to say that because that’s what the music is about. And it was the same at drama school. I should’ve gone away and got laid too. In a funny way I’d like to go to drama school now; I’d be more prepared for it, I’d get more out of it. You hear about all these Hollywood actors going to acting lessons, and you think, but they’ve made 49 films. Yeah, but you know, you have to keep scratching it.”

Glasgow, circa 1975: the curtains were swishing back and all kinds of things were happening. This was real life, in neon; rich with possibilities. Soon Gregor was off to a place where even John Knox could not rescue him. And it all happened when he ran away to join the theatre.