I got a call from my London agent, who asked me whether I was sitting down. He said Madonna wanted to play the lead in Up for Grabs in the West End and I would need to come to London before rehearsals started, as she wanted “changes”. If I didn’t come, the producer said, sounding worried, Madonna might decide to “walk”.
It wasn’t a great time for me to be travelling, as the minor heart attack of a few years before was still causing me regular and sometimes quite debilitating bouts of atrial fibrillation. I’d been hospitalised twice and fed intravenous amiodarone to pull me out of it. Nevertheless, when the Queen of Pop says she’ll star in a West End production of one of my plays if I go to London, I go to London. I spent a lot of time in the plane reading about her and memorising the names of a list of pop hits I’d never heard.
