Chapter Six Five Burning Rings
In a quirk of fate quitting the theatre business to become a nurse presented Danny with the chance to become involved in the biggest theatrical event in global broadcasting – the Olympic opening ceremony.
With under a third of the budget of Beijing’s opening ceremony the British production was depending on eccentricity and creativity to make an impression.
The request for doctors and nurses to take part took everyone by surprise since no one associated the National Health Service with the Olympic Games.
However, the remit was to showcase anything that was great about the host country, and the director, Academy Award-winning Danny Boyle, selected the National Health Service.
The ceremony’s stage was the purpose-built Stratford stadium in East London, once a neighbourhood of derelict factories and polluted canals.
Though some commentators mocked the stadium’s utilitarian design compared to the grandeur of Beijing’s ‘bird’s nest’ there were hidden triumphs behind its creation, including a massive clean-up operation.
Tonnes of arsenic and asbestos were removed from the grounds; decades of dirty coal tar were sieved from the soil.
Where there had once been poisons, there was now a park.
Ignoring the naysayers and recalling the excitement of his student theatre days, Danny had put himself forward.
Rehearsals started in an abandoned car factory in Dagenham with thousands of dancers and volunteers participating in a process taking many months, with bumps along the way, from government interference to cast replacements and a national crisis of confidence.
Yet Danny never lost faith, enjoying every moment, making new friends, including Matt, a mental health nurse from Park Royal Hospital in West London.
Finally, the rehearsals moved into the completed stadium.
Although Luis couldn’t be in the audience on the opening night since tickets were largely set aside for visiting dignitaries, he attended the dress rehearsal and loved the show so much, he organized a viewing party for their friends at the outdoor terrace of Yard Bar in Soho where he would be cheerleading the crowd.
In the centre of the stadium was a recreation of Glastonbury Tor planted with living grass and meadow flowers, surrounded by fields populated with a cast of wandering farmers herding goats and geese.
The actors were dressed in coarse wools and baggy linens, ambling under paper cumulus clouds in a vision that blended the beauty of a John Constable landscape with the absurd-surreal joy of a Monty Python sketch.
With a switch in tempo set to the beat of steel drums the Industrial Revolution was ushered in by a change of cast dressed in tails and top hats, merchants and traders.
Leading them was actor Kenneth Branagh playing the part of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the mind behind architectural marvels such as the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the original Hungerford Suspension Bridge across the Thames.
As with all great shows, it was possible to project your own life experiences onto the events on stage, with Danny recalling the night when he had stood on Hungerford Bridge, staring down into the Thames, at his lowest ebb, homeless, loveless, drunk on cheap gin and wondering if he should jump into the dark waters below.
He had been saved by the city skyline – the spotlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral to the north and the illuminations of the National Theatre to the south.
Understanding that suicide would be the end of everything, not only the end of sadness but also curiosity, delight, laughter, hopes, dreams and the pursuit of love, he walked off the bridge, telling himself that he couldn’t die without experiencing love – no one should die before they’ve experienced love.
He had bought a falafel-stuffed pitta from a food stall on the South Bank, a place he had never found again as if it had magically appeared that night, and sat on the cold stone steps down to the river, his fingers dripping with tahini sauce.
In the months afterwards he had enrolled in nursing college, met Luis and turned his life around.
Taking centre stage, Kenneth Branagh performed a fragment from Shakespeare’s The Tempest – the ‘Be not afraid’ speech, where the creature Caliban described the magical properties of a wondrous isle seen in an exquisite dream: When I wak’d, I cried to dream again.
Danny knew this play, having built the sets for a production at university, and these lines had stayed with him – the anguish of waking up from an exquisite dream and longing to return to sleep.
As a closeted teenager Danny had dreamed about surviving a shipwreck on a remote Pacific Island with one other man, believing that the only way two men could be in a relationship was if they were marooned with no other people to judge and no laws or society to stand in their way, dreams he preferred to reality.
The play seemed to have followed him throughout his life.
Sitting in a Soho cinema in 1991 he had watched a film adaptation of The Tempest called Prospero’s Books, directed by Peter Greenaway, spellbound by the naked figure of Caliban played by renowned dancer Michael Clark – magnificent, Danny had thought, the shape of his body and the way this dancer moved.
The thought was a revelation, that it wasn’t grubby or sordid to admire a man, that men’s bodies could be beautiful too.
At the end of Branagh’s performance the windmills collapsed, the countryside broke apart, and the towering blast furnaces of northern England pushed up from beneath the stage – chimney stacks bellowing steam while a cast of steeplejacks and labourers pounded the stage with giant hammers.
From five forges rose five colossal rings.
Molten red. Newly pressed. Lifted from separate segments of the stage, they joined together in the air to form the Olympic symbol.
As the five rings touched, their surfaces blazed and curtains of golden sparks fell.
Many in the cast wept for joy as they watched but Danny’s elation turned inward, realizing what he should do – what he should have done years ago.
This island had given him many opportunities, from performing in an Olympic ceremony, to becoming a nurse, to loving openly and now it was time to take another.
Inspired by a national celebration, he was going to create a personal one.
He was going to ask Luis to marry him. And he was going to ask him tonight.