Waterworks

Many years ago, I acted in Richard II in the National Youth Theatre (in round about 1872). I played Aumerle and had to cry so that Richard could say to me: “Aumerle thou weep’st, my tender-hearted cousin!” It was my big moment, and was certainly easier than delivering my opening line in Act 3 scene 2, “How brooks your grace the air, after your late tossing on the breaking seas?” – which always had the schoolboy audiences in stitches. I managed to cry every night, but sadly, tears came more readily from my right eye, which was upstage, so I had to sniffle and turn at just the right moment so the audience could see them stream down my right cheek.

These days tears come easily. Pretty much anything will set me off. John Lewis adverts, American rom-coms, inspirational moments in The West Wing (the TV show not the place, obviously), funerals, declarations of love, anything vaguely emotional on Strictly, 70,000 Welsh men and women singing the Welsh national anthem in harmony in the Principality Stadium in Cardiff. Part of me is proud of this lachrymosity. It’s a family tradition. When I was a child, my father, my mother and younger brother would watch the 1937 black and white movie Captains Courageous every year and sob in unison when Spencer Tracey disappeared under the waves, while the precocious little brat whose life he had saved looks on, completely bereft.

But I …