From London's West End to writing in Andalucía

Many years before Antonio Banderas staged A Chorus Line at his Soho theatre in Malaga city, former London theatre stage manager Graham Mulvein, who has lived in inland Andalucía for 10 years, was production supervisor on the first UK tour of the Broadway musical.

This led to Mulvein, 67, meeting the Malaga-born Hollywood actor at the premiere of his show: “Baayork Lee, the Tony- Award- winning director-choreographer and a great friend of mine from our A Chorus Line days came out to Malaga to co-direct and choreograph it alongside Antonio. She very kindly invited my wife and I to attend the opening night and we met up with him backstage after the performance,” Mulvein told SUR in English.

Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, Mulvein moved to London with his family when he was five, “so I really grew up in London, he says”. He says his long career in theatre began “rather impulsively” and he explains: “I walked out of school a couple of weeks before my A-levels and, later that same day, got a job selling programmes at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. I suppose you could say I left school in the morning and went into show business that afternoon.”

From selling programmes, Mulvein moved his way up until he eventually became production supervisor and general manager of a London-based theatre company.

Unsurprisingly, Antonio Banderas isn't the only well-known name he can boast of meeting: as stage manager of the original West End production of The Rocky Horror Show, he worked with a young Tracey Ullman, who played Janet, and became friends with Richard O'Brian, who wrote the musical and played Frank-N-Furter's hunchbacked butler Riff Raff.

Rocky took Mulvein to South Africa, and other popular musicals he has been involved in include Little Shop of Horrors, The Wizard of Oz and Godspell. As a producer in his own right, he created the world stage premiere of Scrooge, The Musical, starring Anthony Newley, which, after a UK tour, went to Australia and Japan, taking Mulvein with it as coproducer.

Harry Secombe, Queen Elizabeth II, James Cagney, Liberace, Sir Elton John, Boney M, Dame Shirley Bassey, Sir Cliff Richard and Lionel Bart are just some of the other names that Mulvein can drop into conversation.

“Looking back, it was quite a journey for someone who started out selling programmes at Drury Lane,” he reflects.

The decision to move to Spain in 2016 was less dramatic than the career; before the pandemic, before Brexit and after spending time simply enjoying a stay at a friend's holiday rental flat on Menorca. “One afternoon, while staying there, lapping up the sunshine and enjoying a drink on her terrace, we suddenly thought, 'Why don't we do this? Why don't we move to Spain?'”

That was it. Mulvein says that he and his wife spent the next year on the internet researching different areas before eventually settling on inland southern Spain and they haven't looked back since.

He says that he speaks a little Spanish, although confesses it's “not nearly as much as I should after ten years”. He's started taking lessons three times a week, “so I'm determined to improve,” he says. Mulvein reveals that he's also adopted the habit of the Spanish siesta “when I can find the time”.

The theatre producer also tried to start a drama club in Iznájar near his home, which he says “was great fun and we had plenty of enthusiastic would-be actresses”. However, “finding enough would-be male actors proved rather more difficult and eventually the group closed down”.

He says he has “enormous admiration for what they do at the Salón Varietés in Fuengirola” and adds, “they've got a brilliant setup there; a great little theatre company that mounts some really excellent productions. I would have loved to be involved in something like that”.

Graham has instead turned his hand to writing fiction inspired by life here in Andalucía and has just published his second novel, Prey. “When we first moved to Spain, we bought a property in Iznájar. Year after year, there seemed to be very little rain and we watched the water level in the lake gradually fall. The further it fell, the more it began to reveal.”

He goes on to say, “First we saw chimneys emerging, then rooftops, the remains of houses in the valley that had been lost when the area was flooded to create the reservoir. That was the inspiration for Prey”

Mulvein adds, “Watching this lost world slowly reappear fascinated me, and one thought kept nagging away at me: What else might have been buried beneath the water? That's where the story began.” The book has also recently been translated into Spanish as Presa.

His first book, Tornado Alley, is set in the American Midwest and there's another book in the pipeline too. Mulvein also continues to be involved in the world of acting and writes screenplays.

His TV pilot, Newley!, based on the life of Mulvein's late friend Anthony Newley, recently won the Las Vegas International Screenwriting Festival award for Best Original TV Drama Pilot. Also a screenplay he wrote, The Unknown, inspired by the story of the Unknown Warrior, has won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Screenplay.

Behind the inspiration for continuing to write both books and for the screen, Mulvein says, “When we moved to Spain, for the first time in years I found myself with time to relax and I quickly discovered that I'm not very good at it.”

He goes on to say, “With fewer demands on my time, all sorts of ideas and stories began going through my head. After a lifetime spent helping to bring other people's stories to the stage, I suppose I finally had the time and the urge to start telling some of my own.”

Reflecting back on 10 years of living in Andalucía (he now lives near Loja in Granada province), Mulvein says, “We love our life here in Spain. I now have my writing, which I believe I would never have had the time, nor opportunity to get down to in the UK.” He concludes, “We live here full-time and see ourselves living out our lives in this wonderful country.”