Questors, Jesters and Renegades

The Story of Britain's Amateur Theatre

Michael Coveney

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350128408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize 2021 This is the vital story of the amateur theatre as it developed from the medieval guilds to the modern theatre of Ayckbourn and Pinter, with a few mishaps and missed cues along the way. Michael Coveney – a former member of Ilford's Renegades - tells this tale with a charm and wit that will have you shouting out for an encore. This is the first account of its kind, packed with anecdote and previously unheard stories, and it shows how amateur theatre is more than a popular pastime: it has been endemic to the birth of the National Theatre, as well as a seedbed of talent and a fascinating barometer and product of the times in which we live. Some of the companies Coveney delves into – all taking centre stage in this entertaining and lively book - include the Questors and Tower Theatre in London; Birmingham's Crescent Theatre; The Little Theatre in Bolton, where Ian McKellen was a schoolboy participant; Lincolnshire's Broadbent Theatre, co-founded by Jim Broadbent's father and other conscientious objectors at the end of World War II; and Cornwall's stunning cliff-top Minack.

1

The Agony and the Ecstasy

My fascination with amateur theatre dates back to my own youth, the idea of escape, a fascination with people living double lives, their vanity and delusions as well as their fantasies and desire to engage with the cultural legacy and create outlets for talent and inspiration. I love the story, relayed to me by Griff Rhys Jones, of the old amateur actor who, on encountering a taciturn Alec Guinness on the train from London to Brighton, regaled the great man with his own tales of triumph and disaster, regardless of the passive non-reaction he elicited from Guinness for the full sixty minutes or so. As they drew into the station, Guinness jumped up smartly to leave the compartment only to be followed by the amateur thespian who, flinging his arms impertinently around him, cried out, ‘Why do we do it, Alec, why endure this agony of working in the theatre?’

That assumption of ‘the agony of it all’ is a giveaway of a risible self-importance you sometimes find adopted by amateurs as a safety blanket, a reassurance of the value of the self-sacrifices they might be making for their art. It’s nailed wonderfully in Ngaio Marsh’s final theatrical crime thriller, Light Thickens, when the director of the Dolphin Theatre’s Macbeth, Peregrine Jay, is feeling the heat: ‘Why, why, why, thought Peregrine, do I direct plays? Why do I put myself into this hell? Above all, why Macbeth? And then: it’s too soon to be feeling like this; six days too soon. Oh God, deliver us all.’

Admittedly old Perry is a pro, and the Dolphin an unlikely sounding professional company on the banks of the Thames in 1982 – that’s six years after the National Theatre concrete complex opened for business – but the feel of the theatricality is pronouncedly amateur. Such was Ngaio Marsh’s grounding in New Zealand. She knew very well the world of student and amateur theatre before, in effect, establishing the serious professional theatre in her home country. ‘The difference between an amateur and a professional’, she said, ‘is that the amateur thinks it’s fun’.

All the same, I’ve long thought that amateur theatre in our country is not only an expression of our national identity, or part of it, but also a key element in the evolution of that national identity, especially, as I’ve suggested, through the last two world wars and beyond. There’s a kind of tension that exists between the world of amateur theatre and the ‘real’ world of our professional theatre, that grows more interesting and more interactive with every passing year.

Not everyone agrees with this prognosis. Many people I know would rather die than go anywhere near a production by amateurs. But then many quite reasonable, if deluded, people would rather eat their own feet than be caught dead in any theatre anywhere, anyway. And there is an element of white middle-class engagement with amateur theatre that you might find as off-putting as others find cosily attractive, a view of amdram once expressed by the great critic Kenneth Tynan as ‘an exhibitionist’s alternative to bridge’.

The moralising clean-up campaign in the theatre and film industries we’ve been going through is inevitable as a consequence of the #MeToo social media phenomenon, but the idea of cleansing the Augean stables of all inappropriate behaviour and sexual impropriety is probably a pipe dream. The theatre was never thought of as a respectable occupation. Even beyond the knighthood of Henry Irving. Restoration comedy and the modern plays of Noël Coward, Joe Orton, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill have long celebrated the unorthodox and downright louche in sexual mores and behaviour.

And because of this, many budding actors, especially women in the immediately post-war years, have been propelled into the amateur theatre, I now realise, because of indirect censorious pressures from society and the particular disapproval of their own families. This may have changed over the past two or three decades, but one possible ironic outcome in the present climate of debate is that youngsters may be debarred again from the theatre as a profession not only because of the costs of going to drama school but also because of a renewed parental anxiety over the amoral cesspit into which they might fall.

The appeal of the theatre may well become, for those who participate in it, an opportunity to change the world through art, but it usually starts with the attraction of social intercourse, freedom of expression, escaping the humdrum and, yes, meeting people for friendship and social, and indeed sexual, interaction. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding him- or herself. And in terms of the amateur theatre, those instincts are intensified by the fact that the participation really does constitute an alternative to, bordering on a get-out from, the life one is compelled to lead – through social respectability and economic survival – in ordinary civilian life.

Apart from the social and belonging aspects of amateur theatre, which are germane, and indeed the opportunities for unconventional, or even illicit, behaviour, one popular view of amateur theatre is that it’s always the play that goes wrong: the actors fluff their cues, the door knob comes away in the hand of the person entering, the scenery falls over and the third-act inspector enters with paper snow on his head.

All of that and a whole lot more actually happens in the play called The Play That Goes Wrong, a West End and Broadway hit originally conceived and performed by three then-recent drama school graduates, which panders shamelessly to our delight in disaster and misplaced props during a performance of the fictional ‘Murder at Haversham Manor’, by the equally fictional Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society.

The show is an anthology of what we now call Coarse Theatre, as famously propounded in Michael Green’s perennial best-seller The Art of Coarse Acting (1964), revised and rewritten on its thirtieth and fiftieth anniversaries. And here’s the thing: Green was – he died, aged ninety-one, in February 2018 – a long-standing member of one of the country’s leading amateur companies, the Questors in Ealing. And Henry Lewis, one of the Goes Wrong trio, was a member of Young Questors before going on to drama school.

The Questors is one of many high-minded amateur companies, as we shall see, which figures prominently in any cursory analysis of the nation’s community-based theatre as a whole. And yet, who does not relish Green’s account of how, at one particularly amateurish dress rehearsal, he fell off the stage, broke a leg, dislocated an elbow and arrived in hospital dressed as an eighteenth-century pirate with a parrot sewn onto his shoulder? Or his testimony that one extra at the Questors, who had applied warts and boils to his ‘diseased’ visage as a plague victim, emitted, one night, a gigantic sneeze which blew the pustular excrescences clean off? So afterwards, when the audience had dispersed, he crept back into the auditorium and went down on all fours, collecting stray warts and looking for his nose.

FIGURE 1 Original West End cast of The Play That Goes Wrong (2015), a spoof amdram mystery farce, Henry Lewis second left. (Photo: Alastair Muir.)

There’s a Victoria Wood sketch, ‘Giving Notes’, in which Julie Walters as an amdram director giving notes after a Hamlet rehearsal catches some other aspects of over-exaggerated innovation and all-too-recognisable, but unscripted, hilarity: ‘The Players’ scene: did any of you feel it had stretched a bit too long …? Yes. I think we’ll go back to the tumbling on the entrance rather than the extract from Barnum. You see, we’re running at six hours twenty now, and if we’re going to put those soliloquies back in … That’s it for tonight, then; thank you. I shall expect you all to be word perfect by the next rehearsal. Have any of you realised what date we’re up to? Yes, April the twenty-seventh! And when do we open? August! It’s not long!’

Professionals actually make just as many unnecessary elaborations in their shows as do amateurs, probably more frequently. The heart sinks when there’s a long, interpolated prologue, or extended dumb show, and three and a half hours of iambic pentameters and dodgy clowning still ahead, whether you’re at Shakespeare’s Globe or the MADS of Macclesfield. But it really is a defining feature of amdram that the rehearsal period is stretched over months, on two or three nights a week and often on a Sunday, before the whole enterprise implodes in a short run of a few (sometimes ten) performances. In the professional theatre, three or four weeks of intense, concentrated rehearsals (six or more at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National) are followed by several weeks, or months, of performances and, in extreme cases, a year’s run or longer in the West End, or – less often in these days of live screening to the rest of the country – a nationwide tour of the same or similar longevity.

There is still a prevalent (though false) notion of the professional theatre being a sort of club for which membership is limited, with amateurs the disgruntled, unentitled yokels at the gate who simply don’t know what a life on the boards is really all about. This view was elegantly expressed in a Daily Telegraph magazine article in November 2017 by the suave actor Simon Williams, whose West End credentials are impeccable: educated at Harrow, like Benedict Cumberbatch, he is the younger brother of the poet, sometime drama critic and old Etonian, Hugo Williams, son of the after-dinner West End acting/playwriting star couple of the 1960s, Hugh and Margaret Williams, and husband of actress Lucy Fleming, daughter of Celia Johnson and niece of James Bond novelist, Ian Fleming.

At the time of writing his article, Williams was appearing in The Archers, the world’s longest-running radio soap. The Archers, which is as important a cultural institution on BBC’s Radio 4 as are the Promenade Concerts on Radio 3, or indeed sports commentary on Radio 5 Live, is set in the fictional farming community of Ambridge, somewhere in the Midlands. At the end of 2018, Williams as Justin Elliott appeared in the Christmas show produced by the local queen of amdram, Lynda Snell (Carole Boyd), an omnibus edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with linking dialogue and bits of the various prologues to the eight tales chosen.

This was then broadcast as a two-part stand-alone drama, in two hour-long chunks, as if the fictional amateurs had burst their countryside bounds and taken over the airwaves. Simon/Justin, scourge of amdram, played a peppery, rather good version of one of the eight pilgrim ‘tellers’ in The Pardoner’s Tale, in which three fellows setting out to kill off Death, kill off each other in pursuit of a pile of unearned gold florins.

The adaptation (supposedly written by Lynda Snell but, in reality, the work of professional writer Nick Warburton) was further removed from Chaucerian medieval English than even Nevill Coghill’s great translation but the performance was suitably fruity and explicit, with sly coupling, treasonous and unprincipled behaviour, fables of love, greed and devotion, all amounting, said one of the villagers, to ‘the heart of England in an Ambridge barn’. The performance was anything but amateur as the professional cast rose to a challenge beyond that of merely playing their allotted characters in the daily soap.

A key prop in The Miller’s Tale – a fake bottom that was to be displayed by an adventurous lover in a window for the climactic hot poker treatment (‘And Nicholas is branded on the bum,/ And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come’ as Coghill re-phrased it) – provided a running gag when it went missing. A volunteer body double stepped forward only to be repulsed with a cry of ‘Who’d want to kiss that big hairy arse?’ and a firm riposte by director Snell: ‘I’m sorry, but if nobody else steps into the breach, I’m afraid Nathan is going to step out of his breeches.’ And grumpy old Simon/Justin had an actor’s tiff with his director when he protested that friars were just as concupiscent as the money-grubbing summoner he was lumbered with, pointing out that, in the original, the devil ‘hoisted up his tail and 20,000 friars flew from his arse like bees’. ‘That’s enough!’ snapped Snell. ‘But it’s in Chaucer!’ ‘It’s not in Snell!’

Ambridge amdram sounded lively and smoothly competent. The cast party duly followed, with an awards ceremony honouring Best Man in Tights, Most Medieval Make-up and Lustiest Wench. But the most touching moment was when David Archer (played by Timothy Bentinck, the 12th Earl of Portland, forsooth) congratulated Lynda – often viewed a...