BACKSTAGE at a West End theatre might appear a glamorous place – but only until you’ve been there, it seems.
For those of you who haven’t, Simon Annand’s new exhibition of dressing room shots may be about as close as you can get.
Pictured somewhere between warts-and-all and their high-gloss stage appearance, many of the actors – captured moments before going on stage – seem caught in a hinterland between themselves and the parts they play.
But for the real inside dope on what it’s like inside the cramped, Victorian chambers, I defer to Alison Steadman, who was snapped by Annand in 2000. Steadman, who is appearing in Losing Louis in the comparatively luxurious surroundings of Hampstead Theatre, sent a note to the opening which read: “One of my worst experiences was in a basement changing room at a West End theatre – I won’t tell you which one.
“It had one high window at ceiling level opening out to the street.
“I had laid out drinks and nibbles for friends on a tablecloth, and it was only after that that I realised that men were using that corner to urinate in the street above.
“Big streams of urine ran onto the table and the food, and we had to clear the whole thing up with copious amounts of Dettol.”
Annand, who got his big backstage break with Dr Jonathan Miller in 1997, said of Steadman’s tiny dressing room at the Arts Theatre: “If she wanted to lie down flat she brought a blow-up lilo and used it in the corridor.
“The room was too small for a proper bed.”
His snap of Hampstead and Highgate MP Glenda Jackson, caught laughing in a dressing gown at the height of her 1970s’ fame, seems hardly recognisable.
Annand told me: “She was being interviewed by the senior theatre critic of the Spanish paper El Pais.
“The critic was a long standing admirer of Glenda’s and had dressed up smartly for the interview and had expected her to do the same.
“The photo captures her response.”
Glenda, of course, could be joined among the ranks of Oscar-winners by West Hampstead actress Imelda Staunton this year.
For anyone who doubts her star qualities after her brilliant but dowdy portrayal of Vera Drake, Annand’s vampy snap of her in Guys and Dolls may force a rethink.

• ANNAND’S exhibition is being held at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.

I DON’T possess the mental steel of that great Camden Town thinker Jonathan Miller who describes himself as “disbeliever” – he rejects the term ‘atheist’.
But all my confused feelings on the God question seemed to come together on Monday when I heard Britain’s ageing Socrates, Tony Benn, say George Bush’s statement that God told him what to do was enough to make anyone an atheist. He’d been saying that Bush claimed God had come to him at night and told him to make war on Iraq.
I’d heard this before, of course. But Tony Benn the orator managed to make it sound new at a rally at Friends House in Euston organised by Stop the War Coalition.
You couldn’t help agreeing with him, that is if you are anti – and by that I mean anti-war.
He warned that the new anti-terrorist laws proclaimed by the new home secretary Charles Clarke threatened our ancient liberties laid down in the Magna Carta.
Benn has a knack of making connections between different events – a typically cunning dialectician.
So, he warned that the reason behind the continued privatisation of schools, hospitals and every other Town Hall function was... the Mastricht Treaty which limited public expenditure. Which makes the cosmetic tussle between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown irrelevant. Whoever is in the chair at No 10 – Mastricht Rules, says Benn. The elections in Iraq also got a bashing at the rally. An Iraqi trade unionist Hassan Juma’a accused the Americans of wanting to steal his country’s wealth. It took a strike among oil workers in southern Iraq, in the British zone, to compel the US to increase the pay of oil workers of 35 dollars a month, about £25.
Iraq had suffered for 35 years under Saddam Hussain and it was time Iraqis governed themselves – and that meant the US occupation had to end, he said.
I wondered whether a lawyer Nadine Finch was stretching a point when she warned that MPs in the House of Commons were ‘cowed’ and ‘bribed’ – and that was why the Home Office wanted to stifle the public voice with new repressive laws, such as putting suspects under House Arrest.
Later, a Stop the War Coalition leader John Rees echoed this when he quoted the Law Lord Hoffman who had said the greatest threat to Britain came from the government’s new laws, not from terrorists.
That other orator George Galloway was baffled by the publicity surrounding the elections in Iraq. If Bush and Blair are in favour of elections, he said, why don’t they call for elections in Saudi Arabia where women cannot vote, or in Egypt.
The Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he joked, was elected in a ‘free election’ by 98 per cent of the Egyptians, and was now preparing for his son to stand in the next elections.
The rally was held to drum up support for a national demo in central London on March 19.