Person: Alison Illingworth

The Recruiting Officer (1992)

It’s been said that ‘The Recruiting Officer’ reflects the warm afterglow of Blenheim’, and certainly, for a play written in a time of war, it is a confident and optimistic work. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun in May 1702, the latest in a series of European wars triggered by the ambitions of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, ruler of France. Queen Anne had succeeded to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland just two months previously, and she immediately appointed the John Churchill, the Earl of Marlborough, as the Captain-General of her armies. As war began, Marlborough was made supreme commander of the combined Anglo-Dutch army, and the campaign began well for him. So well that in December 1702, Queen Anne made him a Duke. The apex of his success however, lay at Blenheim, in Bavaria, on 13 August 1704, where a masterclass of planning and logistics paired with tactical and operational brilliance saw his forces defeat the Franco-Bavarian army so heavily that Bavaria was no longer capable of continuing the war. Patriotic fervour reached a crescendo, with even his enemies at court acknowledging the scale of his triumph. The Queen gave him the royal manor of Woodstock, on which Blenheim Palace would be built. And it is into this atmosphere that the play invites its audience.

George Farquhar, in 1704, was a soldier, having taken a commission as a Lieutenant of Grenadiers in the Earl of Orrery’s Infantry Regiment as a means of earning money. His recent plays had been unsuccessful, and he’d married a woman the previous year who already had three children from a prior marriage. He was practically penniless. That summer, his duties took him to Shrewsbury for a recruitment drive, and it was his experiences there that led to his writing of ‘The Recruiting Officer’. Supposedly he even wrote it in Shrewsbury, while staying in his lodgings at The Raven Inn.

The play, when it opened on the 8 April 1706 was a huge and immediate success, but his share of the income from the play was barely enough to cover his outstanding debts. Worse, he had contracted tuberculosis, and had to resign his commission in the army. Weakened by illness, he wrote one last play, ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ in just six weeks during the autumn of that year, and it opened on Drury Lane in March 1707 to universal acclaim. Sadly, its success came too late, and in May 1707 he died, aged just 30 years old.

‘The Recruiting Officer’, played in the traverse along the length of the main hall at the Coulsdon Youth and Social Centre, turned out to be the last, to date, summer production to take place there. From the following summer of 1993, Theatre Workshop Coulsdon would take its shows out into the open air. ‘The Recruiting Officer’ too would see the open air, being revisited by the group only six years on, in 1998.

Jack The Ripper

In the autumn of 1888, the East End of London was home to a sordid, brutalised community of prostitutes, immigrants, petty criminals and political renegades.

Potentially an explosive flashpoint behind the grand façade of Victoria’s London, the panic and terror that gripped the inhabitants of the slums and tenements during the series of murders attributed to the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ threatened to plunge the entire East End into riot and revolution, and shake the very foundations of the capital of the Empire.

‘Jack the Ripper’ was written for the stage in 1974 and features a score by Ron Pember, with book and lyrics by Pember with Denis De Marne. A musical reconstruction of the incidents relating to the historic East End murders is told through the company of the fictional Steam Packet Music Hall in Whitechapel, a device that presents an atmospheric commentary on the murders as opposed to a historic re-enactment, with the ensemble moving between real and fictional characters.

The production was first staged at the Player’s Theatre in London, opening on June 25th 1974  It subsequently transferred the production to the Ambassadors Theatre in September 1974, followed by the Cambridge Theatre in February 1975, and earned a nomination for ‘Best Musical’ at the 1974 Evening Standard Theatre Awards. The show went on to debut in the United States in March 1979. Since the amateur production rights were released in 1976, ‘Jack The Ripper’ has remained a popular production choice with societies worldwide.

Ron Pember was a best known as an actor, with a career spanning several decades. He worked with both the National Theatre and the RSC and appeared in TV series such as ‘Only Fools and Horses’, ‘Red Dwarf’ and ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’. Coincidentally, he had a part in the 1979 film ‘Murder by Decree’ which starred Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes, as the famous detective attempts to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper.

The boisterous nature of the show, all rough edges and black humour, has a certain appeal to Theatre Workshop. We’d performed it before, back in 1983, when it was directed by Chris Argles. And we’d do it again, in the open-air, in 2006.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ is one of the classics of 20th Century theatre. A fictionalised (or at least in part) account of the witch trials that took place between 1692 and 1693 in the small settlement of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, New England. Miller wrote it in 1953 not as a historical piece, but as an allegory for McCarthyism, rampant at the time of his writing, where people were shamelessly persecuted for alleged Communist ties, without evidence. The accusation in and of itself was considered damning enough regardless of its origin, and there was the link to that earlier, dark time.

At best, ‘The Crucible’ was an ambitious reach for Workshop, but this was a ‘troubled’ production, as they call it in some circles. Originally slated to be the Spring 1990 production, it had been proposed by Christine Blake and Wendy Cole, who, it was intended, would co-direct. However, the project was almost completely derailed when both of them left the group. This left Paul Ford, who had been drafted in as an assistant director, to carry on in their stead but with no real vision for what the show should look like. One of the immediate difficulties was the presence in the cast of the key character of Tituba. Although her ultimate origin is disputed, it was thought that she was Barbadian, i.e. from the island of Barbados. No-one in the existing membership of the time could pass themselves off as such, and even in 1991, ‘blackface’ was a no-go. And so Paul elected to shift the entire thing into space. Salem became a settlement of puritan theocratic colony on a planet orbiting a distant star. It covered off the Tituba problem, but of course caused others.

The staging was abstract, geometric shapes painted to look as if they’d been scavenged from old starship hull-plating. They could be moved to form different combinations, which would represent various rooms and locations. An over-sized fan behind a grill turned throughout, with a ever-present ‘tic’ as its malformed blades hit the grill.

Despite some eventual outstanding performances, not least from the young girls in the cast, it nearly didn’t make it. The first weekend’s performances were billed as ‘previews’ as even at that last stage, the production was not pulling together. The review picked out that there were beautiful moments, and as ever, Madgwick was right. When it worked, there were some truly excellent scenes, but overall it really didn’t do the script justice.