Dramatic events

Dramatic events

For some reason I was not invited to take part in the coronation. Indeed I was not even given a part in the St Albans pageant that followed. Forced to stand on the sidelines I am pictured watching Boudicca (who spelt her name Boadicea in those days) rallying her troops against the invaders; the first Battle of St Albans; Queen Margaret, who led the looting of the town by the Lancastrians; and more strangely a fire breathing dragon. All this in an attempt to match the regal spectacle taking place elsewhere.

My own entry onto the dramatic stage took place later in the year. Holes were cut in an old pillowcase for head and arms, a pyjama cord tied round my waist and my opening lines of the school nativity play ensured there was not a dry eye in the house. I've been playing to the audience ever since. Often they've been rolling in the aisles - especially during the more tragic moments of Shakespeare. Some would say I still leave the audience in tears.

Over the years I have done most of the jobs in the theatre.

In school plays I was usually put in a dress - either to play women in my all-boys schools or in the miniskirts of the Roman citizen. I brought the house down every night during the most tragic scene in Antony and Cleopatra as, in my squeaky half broken voice, I exclaimed “all dead” over the final scene of carnage. The peak of my Roman career was to carry a spear alongside Colin Blunstone who went on to international fame as a singer first with the Zombies and then solo. I keep threatening to take the photo of us for him to sign next time I see him perform. Colin has a far better memory than me and always asks after my brother, they were a couple of years ahead of me, and also claims he gave me a prefect’s detention, though I can’t remember why.

At university auditions I gave what I thought to be the definitive version of Henry V before Agincourt and was told I was ideal to do the lighting. So for three years I designed and operated lights for drama and music. This included creating the lighting for the world premier of Howard Rees’ “Cat’s paw in the silence of the midnight goldfish” during the Cardiff Twentieth Century Music Festival. Perhaps it was also the last performance. We certainly did the first and last performances of “The long lonely voyage of Chester Winchester” as Francis Chichester’s widow threatened to sue if we did any more. On another occasion I was lighting a play for another Cardiff college and the director would never get back to me on what lighting was needed, so I went away for the week before the play and only turned up half an hour before the curtain went up with the key to the lighting desk in my pocket.

Later, as chaplain at Hatfield Poly, I came back as an actor in a student theatre company that toured local schools in an improvised version of Robin Hood, with me as Robin. We were soundly told off by one head for giving out sweets during the performance. Apparently the children were laughing so much that they were in danger of choking. In the evening at the end of the run we performed a largely improvised and much more risqué version in the polytechnic bar.

The company also travelled to Edinburgh a couple of times to perform on the fringe and we spent a week sleeping on floors and trying to round up an audience larger than the cast. After performing to an audience of just five, we discovered one was from the Jewish Chronicle and he gave us the only review of the week. One of the dangers of Edinburgh was the pubs and a swift half before the performance could be risky as the locals enjoined you to, “Have a drink wi’ me Jimmy”. Later, on stage, instead of missing out a few lines I actually went back to a bit of the play I did remember and we had to repeat a couple of pages before I managed to remember what came next. Luckily it was a play by Jean Genet so the audience didn’t notice.

Then at the St Albans International Youth Festival I noticed the youth officer looking perplexed beside the sound system - 32 channels with several knobs and a fader to each. I asked if he needed help and he (almost) ran away leaving me to run the festival sound for a week of concerts culminating in Cliff Richard in front of 2000 people. Cliff’s idea of a sound check was an A4 duplicated sheet of mike settings that I was supposed to follow. Other acts that week spent the afternoon doing a sound check and then came back to thank us (sound and lights) for looking after them.

In Africa I installed stage lighting in the sports club and started directing. I directed Alan Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Loves”. A few of us met once a month or so to read plays and wanted to put on “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe” with black actors playing the younger couple. But somehow it never got around to being put on. My final show there was Cinderella. I directed; Sue was musical director; Alison and David were performing so there was no one to look after John - then two and a half. So we put a costume on him and he appeared in almost every scene. There was a cast of twenty and a dozen musicians. UV lighting created the magic for the transformation scene. And we packed the sports club every night for a week.

In the Lakes Sue and I produced Christmas schools shows, involving the whole school (all 55 of them). I treated them as professionals, expecting them to be word perfect and setting up ‘proper’ lights. The infants were put in animal costumes for the nativity scene. The term started with workshops were I encouraged improvisation and getting into character and managed to draw out one child who had spent his first two years under a table saying he was a tiger. Sue wrote the book, music and songs and then acted as musical director. It was the traditional Christmas tale of God and the Archangels playing Trivial Pursuit on their spaceship watching planet earth’s collapsing environment. God then instructs Gabriel to go down and sort it out so he tells Mary she is to have a baby and when the baby is born the Archangels get so drunk they crash the spaceship on the hill where the shepherds are looking after their sheep. And everyone has a party.

I also performed at the Palladium, Millom Palladium that is. They had originally wanted to do My Fair Lady and had auditioned me for Henry Higgins, but offered me Pickering. Unfortunately the actor who was to do Doolitlle had a heart attack and the production was cancelled. So they replaced it with South Pacific. I was cast as Captain Bracket. At one point alone on stage I dried completely and tried to get someone else to come on early to get the show going again. But they remained in the wings and left me to sweat it out. Eventually the prompt came to my aid and gave me the next line – “We should have heard something by now”.

Another fortuitous disaster happened in one of the village halls during the village panto. It was one of the rock Frankenstein shows. At the point where the monster is supposed to be coming to life I was flashing the lighting on and off. Everything went black. I assumed that I had blown the main fuse. But someone shouted, “has anyone got 50p”. It got a great laugh, but then it was repeated, “no really, has anyone got 50p?” What they hadn’t told me was that the hall was on a meter and we should have stacked it with coins before the show started. But the timing was immaculate.

As a family we developed a travelling show based around Celtic themes. Ali and I did the words and Sue, Dave and John the music. We put it on a few times as a fundraiser, among them at Rosehill Theatre in Whitehaven. Ali and Sue were going off on a schools exchange and we raised the money to send them. We also took it as part of a Celtic festival to one of the local churches in Haile. For this I wanted to do Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, but 18 minutes of Tennyson is a bit much to expect anyone to sit through. So I asked David to write some background music. This he promised to do and we bought him a keyboard to compose on, complete with disc drive for multi-tracking. As the day drew nearer I became more and more anxious as we hadn’t heard any of the music (Dave was a weekly boarder at St Bees). Always there was some excuse: the disc had been wiped, was left at school. Finally the day of the performance arrived and I pointed out that we really needed to rehearse with the music that afternoon. David disappeared to his room. After lunch he came down with keyboard and disc and we went through the piece. Atmospheric music all through; the battle to start, then the storm and then the sword thrown in the lake and finally the boat coming to take Arthur across the mere. All perfect. After the show that night Ali told me that 14 year old David had written it all that morning.

To mark my jubilee as an actor I took to the stage at the Grand in Wolverhampton in My Fair Lady. After telling the director I could neither sing nor dance, he naturally put me in the chorus. Far enough away for my singing not to reach the mikes and tucked at the back so my ‘dancing’ wouldn’t frighten the Ascot horses. That was iwth the South Staffs Musical Theatre Company. For them I also provided props for Cabaret – printing German money and making American passports; and I did the lighting for a couple of fundraisers in a local school.

More recently I have been part of local companies doing a mix of crewing and acting.

In between I have worked on small scale productions in village halls, churches or schools with few costumes and little in the way of props. The magic of the theatre had to come from the words and interaction on the stage rather than the spectacle and technical wizardry involved in the production.