“This has got to be good — Shakespeare is art, you can’t abuse that!” Shaun Johnson is about to step out on stage as Malvolio in a very special production of Twelfth Night. Visit any rehearsal room less than a week before opening night, and you can usually count on an atmosphere thick with last-minute jitters. The play is the thing and the pressure is on — yet Johnson and his fellow cast members seem remarkably sanguine. These, though, are no ordinary actors.
The Combat Veteran Players, formed by artistic director Jaclyn McLoughlin in 2010, are a group of ex-servicemen and women making professional-level theatre. Originally envisioned as a short-term, experimental initiative to help former members of the armed forces deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, CVP became a runaway success, presenting accomplished productions at such prestigious venues as the Old Vic Tunnels and Shakespeare’s Globe in London, as well as the RSC’s outdoor theatre, the Dell, in Stratford-upon-Avon. The stakes remain as high as ever. “If a production isn’t 110 per cent ready, I won’t put it on the stage,” McLoughlin says firmly. “It has to be something that everyone’s going to walk away from feeling proud of.”
CVP has its foundation in meticulous preparation, hard graft and patience. McLoughlin, who originally came to London from her native Washington DC to study directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), spent an intensive research period at Combat Stress, the veterans’ mental health charity in Surrey, before setting about recruiting actors for what was then a small-scale project. “I spent probably the greater part of a year just trying to get somebody in the room,” she recalls. “Back then, if you said the word ‘theatre’, these guys would go running, and if you said ‘Shakespeare’, they ran even farther. And there I was, doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairies and love potions. It didn’t exactly endear me to them.”
Gradually, though, veterans joined up, and began to bring their friends — and whatever initial doubts some may have had, there is no question of their commitment now, or of their devotion to “Jackie”. “When I first saw Jackie, that little girl half my age — I thought, what can she know?” jokes Maltese-born Androcles Scicluna, a former signalman in the Royal Signals who at 65 is the oldest, and probably the most flamboyant company member, with a flair for operatic singing. “We are used to taking orders from big blokes. But she is a tigress — we love her, and we would protect her against anybody.” Johnson, who did two tours of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, admits that the initial group of men, each struggling with mental health issues, didn’t give McLoughlin an easy time of it. “Some of the boys were in a bad place, and the behaviour in the rehearsal room could be shocking. Nine bulls in one ring, and Jackie, the matador in the middle trying to sort it all out.” The results, though, speak for themselves: the achievements of the company — now expanded to include veterans with physical injuries — go far beyond just the artistic. “It really can change you,” says Johnson. “I still have my bad days, I always will — you learn to cope with it. But I don’t need to go back to the psychotherapist every single week. You don’t have time to think about that when you’ve got lines to learn. And we rely on each other. It’s the unity of a real-life band of brothers.”
Choosing the fantastical comedy of The Dream for the company’s first show was a carefully calculated policy on McLoughlin’s part — “laughter is the best medicine, and I wanted to keep things light-hearted” — and as there were no women in the company at that point (there are now three), it called for lots of cross-dressing, which she laughingly admits was often hilarious, and “took a lot of nudging and pushing”. That was followed by an exuberant Henry V, with its apt military setting, and last year they tackled a tragedy — Hamlet, in which Johnson played the title role.
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The performance, at Shakespeare’s Globe, was “the most rewarding moment of my entire career”, says McLoughlin — though it was tough for the leading man. Since being discharged from the Army following injury in 1994, Johnson had struggled to adjust as a civilian — so much so, that his spiralling condition eventually saw him sitting in his car with a hose attached to the exhaust pipe. Passers-by smashed the window, and he spent 11 weeks in hospital, where he began to get help. Hamlet, with its brooding soliloquies and existential angst, was painfully near the knuckle. “The darkness of that character — oh, there were tears in that rehearsal room. Tears and anger,” he says. By contrast, he’s having a ball as the ludicrously pompous Malvolio: “I love this bonkers guy.”
Beyond their stage work, the CVP is also engaged in an ambitious, and rapidly growing, programme of schools workshops. It is hugely rewarding, says Andy McCabe, an ex-seaman radar operator in the Royal Navy, who served in the Adriatic during the Bosnian conflict. “Kids don’t have inhibitions, they just get stuck in. They teach you a lot as an actor.” For McCabe, who in Twelfth Night plays the drunkard Sir Toby Belch, CVP has been a revelation: “I’ve always been quite a creative person, I just didn’t know how to channel it. Stupidly, when I heard about CVP, I thought, ‘yeah, acting, how hard can it be to pretend to be somebody else?’ But I was so awkward at first. I’ve had to learn to open up. I’m actually very shy, and I find it much easier to talk to people now.”
Incredibly, Scicluna suffered a mild heart attack just a fortnight ago, but refuses to let even that keep him from his role as the fool, Feste. He positively glows as he describes what CVP has done for him. “If I am in a bad mood because of my PTSD, I can escape into another character. All these bad feelings, suddenly they are not there — I am Feste, the jester, and by the time I go back to being myself, I have accomplished something, so the negative side of my own character is fading.”
A lover of music since he was a toddler, and quite possibly a born performer, he has a passion for the company that is unmistakable. “All that I had lost, which I thought had become just wishful thinking — it’s happening here.” He beams. “It has given me life again.”
Twelfth Night is at the Leicester Square Theatre on August 27 (020 7734 2222)