Chris Strachan – Theatre Workshop Coulsdon

Grimm Tales (2001)

A collection of traditional European folk tales are here given a new lease of life, stripping away much of the saccharine coating so many have accumulated through adaptation for children’s books, TV and film. Yes, we’re looking at you, Disney.

We’ve chosen nine tales all told, each with it’s own director and unique music composition, from one of three talented musicians, Pete Bird, Dominic Russell and Mark Taylor. See the programme for full details. The nine stories are;

Ashputtel

The Golden Goose

The Lady and the Lion

A Riddling Tale

The Hare and the Hedgehogs

Hansel and Gretel

Little Red Cap

Rumplestiltskin

The Magic Table

We like to finish our open air shows with a song, where we can. For this production, we’ve chosen ‘Who’s The Fool Now?’, an old song, first published in 1580 but most certainly far older than that. It doesn’t come from a Grimm tale, but it is a song about tall tales, and it’s also a drinking song, which given we’re sitting in a pub beer garden seems very appropriate. Join in the chorus if you fancy.

A Christmas Carol

‘A Christmas Carol’ is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound journey of redemption over the course of just one night. A financier and money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth, he holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and particularly the Christmas season. But when on Christmas Eve he is visited by the dread ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, and subsequently by other spirits who show him what his life has been before and what a bitter fate lies ahead of him, he is forced to make a decision that will change his life, and all those around him…

More Grimm Tales

The root of all theatre is storytelling, and the unfolding of a simple tale in the space between the teller and the listener is arguably the purest form of theatre.

Theatre Workshop has visited the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, best known as the Brothers Grimm, before. Just three years ago we put on ‘Grimm Tales’ here in the pub beer-garden of The Woodman. That time we used a script taken from Tim Supple and the Young Vic Theatre Company, based on translations of the original German text by no less than Carol-Ann Duffy, the Scottish poet (who went on to become Poet Laureate in 2009). This time though we’re taking the project into our own hands, and the adaptation of the tales has been done by Richard Lloyd, with Heidi Bush and Mike Brown. This has the advantage of a script that plays to our company’s strengths. At least, that’s the plan. And though the tales hark back to some of the darker aspects of folklore, indeed we’ve leant into that idea, it remains a family show in more ways than one. The Lloyd family entire will be on stage this evening, as will three quarters of the Martin family, while the remaining quarter will have undoubtedly given you ‘The best seat in the house’ as you entered the auditorium area. So it can’t be that scary, can it?

The stories we have selected for your entertainment are;

Little Snow White

Briar Rose

The Robber Bridegroom

Clever Hans

The Musicians of Bremen

The Spirit in the Bottle

The Devil and his Mother

The Frog Prince

Now listener, make yourself comfortable and we shall let the tales unfold.

The Wind in the Willows

For our eleventh summer production, staged in the open air at The Woodman, we’ve picked a classic of children’s literature ‘The Wind in the Willows’, based on the 1908 book by Kenneth Grahame.

There’s not a great deal one can say about ‘The Wind in the Willows’. Almost everybody is familiar with the adventures of Toad, Ratty. Mole, Badger and co., either because they’ve read the book, or at least they think they have. It’s certainly amongst the most widely loved of books – a rural riverbank idyll of friendship and innocence which seems to strike some peculiarly English sentimental chord.

Maybe it’s the little furry animals. Perhaps, viewed through the prism of history, the modest, meandering adventures of Rat and Mole, set as they are in an evocative pastoral England where good manners and tranquillity are only occasionally disturbed by the vainglorious antics of a certain ‘Nouveau Riche’ amphibian, genuinely do call to mind an time of lost innocence and comfortably parochial concerns. An England before the cataclysm of The Great War, and all the horrors of the industrialised, globalised conflicts that have occurred since.

However, ‘The Wind in the Willows’ doesn’t simply hark back to a bygone age. It presages the uncomfortable shape of things to come as Grahame saw them in 1908 – the ‘menace’ of the motor car for instance, and the upheaval of the deferential norms of polite society, where Wild Wooders and other assorted ‘lower orders’ simply don’t seem to know their place any more, and are starting, as Ratty says, ‘to break out’.

Much of the appeal lies in the story’s great comic set pieces, its sympathetic characters and larger than life caricatures such as the irrepressible Toad. Appalling amoral and utterly incorrigible, he’s become a firm favourite on stage for much of the twentieth century, mostly due to A.A. Milne’s ‘Toad of Toad Hall’, the first and most enduring of the many adaptations that the story has undergone.

That said, we’re actually using the more recent (1990) adaptation by Alan Bennett, with a few choice embellishments of our own. Some critics have said that Bennett’s version is somehow truer to the book than Milne’s classic, but if you watch our show closely, it’s clear that Bennett’s voice can be heard intermixed with that of Grahame’s. Regardless, as Mr Toad so succinctly put it, ‘Poop Poop!’.

Return To The Forbidden Planet

Since its debut in an inflatable tent on Blackheath back in May 1983, this strange, hybrid ‘juke-box’ musical, ‘Return to the Forbidden Planet’, has acquired something of a cult following, similar in some ways to its far raunchier predecessor ‘The Rocky Horror Show’. The Bubble Theatre Company used a cast of ten who acted, sang and played all the instruments. For a number of reasons, TWC have decided to spread the workload a bit further.

Writer and director Bob Carlton took as his inspiration the 1956 science fiction movie ‘Forbidden Planet’ (Starring Leslie Neilsen as John J Adams, commander of the United Planets starship ‘C-57D’), itself drawn on loosely on William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’. He’s then plundered several of the Bard’s works for dialogue, and then added a score composed of numerous songs from the 1950s and 1960s, such as ‘Wipe Out’, ‘Great Balls of Fire’, ‘Shakin’ All Over’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ and ‘Born to be Wild’. It probably shouldn’t work. The story only just about makes sense. But is it fun? Heck, yeah!

So join Captain Tempest, commander of the starship ‘Albatross’, and his crew, on a routine scientific survey flight across the stars that becomes anything but routine. A meteor shower drives the ship down toward the planet D’Illyria, where they encounter the enigmatic Doctor Prospero and his daughter Miranda, along with Ariel the robot. They have been marooned on the planet for years, having been sent into space by Prospero’s scheming wife Gloria, but now they are rescued, and everything will be fine. Won’t it?

Warning. As passengers on the ‘Albatross’, you will be required, when the order is given, to undertake the Reverse Polarity manoeuvre to ensure the ongoing safety of the ship.

Step 1 Put both your hands in the air

Step 2 Place your hands on the top of your head

Step 3 Press, using a downward motion, several times

Step 4 On the command ‘Polarity Reverse!’, equalise the external equilibrium by quickly raising both hands and arms and exhaling thus – ‘Phewwwww!!’

The Mummy – The Panto

A brand-new and original pantomime from the fevered imagination of Mark Taylor, who wrote the script, directed the show and the music as well as played piano and keyboards. That’s dedication. Or possibly he’s just a control freak. Either way, this unique tale follows the adventures of a daring expedition into Egypt, in search of the tomb of Imhotep, lost to history thousands of years ago. Professor Pottering and Rose Garden not only have the threat of the evil Ardet Bey to contend with, and the curse that surrounds the long-dead ancient Egyptian ruler, but Mrs Beryl Pie’n’mash, foisted upon them by the needs of a pantomime to contain at least one man dressed as a woman with no dress sense and make-up applied in the dark with a trowel. There is nothing like this Dame.

Brokers men Muk-Itup and Kok-itup are on hand to help carry out Ardet Bey’s malicious wishes, but incompetently, of course, and there’s a four piece band to accompany a dozen songs all hand-picked and adapted to amuse and entertain.

All in all, a trip to the sun-scorched desert by the banks of the Nile with Theatre Workshop Coulsdon is a great way to spend a cold December evening.

Hamlet

Once upon a time there lived a Prince Amleth, whose father, the King of Jutland, was killed by his own brother, the prince’s uncle…

This was a story told by the wonderfully named Saxo Grammaticus, a thirteenth century Danish historian. The tale was picked up in the mid-1500s by Matteo Bandello, an Italian writer of short stories, and adapted to his needs, and then the French writer and translator, Francois de Belleforest, took Bandello’s version and did much the same in 1570. He expanded the original story in his version and introduced the main character’s famous melancholia, and it’s almost certain that Shakespeare took his inspiration for Hamlet from this version, translated into English. (‘Cymbeline’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ almost certainly trace their roots in much the same way, as does John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’.).

Shakespeare’s play was published in 1601, though it had been in existence, and performed, before then. It’s even thought that a early version of it existed as far back as 1589, written by either playwright Thomas Kyd or Shakespeare himself, but the script has been lost. It’s thought that the ‘Ghost’ made its debut in this version, but to date, that remains unproven.

Our script is not as Shakespeare wrote it. It’s simply far too long for our needs. Branagh’s film adaptation (1996) retained every word and ran for over four hours and a standard stage version will easily run to three and a half. In our version we’ve edited the text significantly, taking out fully a third of what was there. However, we’ve not been so foolish as to endanger the story proper. The key plot components, important speeches and oh, so quotable lines are all there. Gone are many of the political aspects, and (purists look away now) some of the flights of poetic fancy. We believe we’ve struck the proper balance here between art and comfort. We’ll leave the decision as to whether we called it right down to you.

‘Hamlet’ is part of the English revenge play tradition. A crime or wrong-doing has taken place and the drama proceeds from the protagonist/s attempting to seek some form of justice, either by simply disclosing the offence or exacting revenge upon the perpetrator. The history of revenge plays goes back at least as far as Aeschylus and his Oresteian trilogy in 500BC, which were translated into Latin by Seneca half a millennia later and from Latin into English over a thousand years after that. These then provided the model from which English playwrights would craft their own stories. Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedie’ (1588), John Marston’s ‘Antonio’s Revenge’ (1599), Cyril Tourneur’s ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) are classics of their kind. Of all of them, however, ‘Hamlet’ remains the exemplar, for its depth, its questioning of the human condition, its ability, centuries on, to make itself so clearly understood.

A final note. In Old Norse, in which the original tale was told, the name ‘Amleth’ meant ‘Not sane’. Which of course throws into question any and all of the protagonist’s considerations and actions. Perhaps think on that.

The Three Musketeers – Le Panteau

Our pantomime version of ‘Treasure Island’ was not only immense fun for us to do, but proved to be a big hit, not just here in Coulsdon but in the wider world of amateur theatre. In the two years since its publication, there have been over 60 productions of our tongue-in-cheek swashbuckling tale!

So, what better reason to give another classic story of adventure and derring-do the pantomime treatment. Like ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Three Musketeers’ transcends age and generations, and has slipped across the border from literature into folklore. Written originally in 1844, there have been so many adaptations over the years, across so many media, that people who are perfectly familiar with the characters, the plot and the musketeers’ bold call to arms, have never read so much as a word of Alexandre Dumas’ original tale. Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan are no longer confined to the printed page, they are creatures of myth, with a life all their own.

So, our pantomime is not so much a spoof of the book, as a pastiche of the very idea of ‘The Three Musketeers’, only taking those parts of the plot and the characters that easily lend themselves to being funny. Yes, it does bear some resemblance to the original, but only very loosely (probably about as much as the usual Hollywood treatment). One very significant difference to most versions is that in ours, D’Artagnan and the other gallant comrades in arms are all played by women.

It’s our opinion that the female of the species can swashbuckle as well any male, but rarely are they given the chance. Well, here’s that chance, and alongside Dame D’Artagnan (the would-be musketeer’s aunt) and a pantomime snail (yes, really) they will fight for honour, justice and outright silliness, along with some excellent songs.

‘All for one, and one for all!’*

*For the record, Dumas may have used this as the Musketeers motto and made it famous, but guess who wrote it and used it first? Yep, William Shakespeare, in his narrative poem of 1594, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. We’ll not be making a panto out of that.