Person: Derek Crouch

The Dracula Spectacula

It’s been seventeen years since Theatre Workshop Coulsdon first staged ‘The Dracula Spectacula’. At the time it was regarded by the group as probably the biggest and best production that had been performed by them up to that point (we’d only been in existence seven years by that time), involving over 50 people and having a full band.

1995 will be our 25th anniversary year, and we decided that we’d start the celebrations early, by revisiting what was a landmark production for the group.

Amazingly only two of those fifty members who were involved in the 1977 production are actively talking part this time – those being Chris Argles, the director who played Dracula in the original production, and Tim Young, who will recreate his role as Hans, the Innkeeper.

So, how well has ‘The Dracula Spectacula’ stood the test of time? Was it really the terrific show that we fondly remembered, or have the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia left us with a false impression? Well, let’s be honest, we had to make some changes to the script. Seventeen years doesn’t seem like a long time, but its enough to make some of the dialogue, and the characterisations, sound dated. A number of the songs too, which may have knocked them un-dead back in the day, really don’t cut it now, and so we’ve replaced them with exuberant pastiches of songs that you might just have heard before.

What you see tonight then is very much a brand-new incarnation – albeit of an old favourite, resurrected and rising from its dusty resting place with a whole new lease of life.

Whether this is the first or second time you’ve seen Theatre Workshop Coulsdon perform ‘The Dracula Spectacula’ we hope you enjoy the experience, and live to tell the tale!

The Three Musketeers

France 1625.

A young nobleman called D’Artagnan leaves his family in Gascony, south-west France, and makes his way to Paris to seek his fortune and join the King’s Musketeers. Unfortunately he encounters Rochefort, Captain of the Cardinal’s guard at a rural inn, and after an ill-advised confrontation, loses his letter of introduction to M.de Treville, (the captain of the King’s Musketeers), his money and his sword. So, when he finally arrives at the French capital, his welcome is far from warm. Things take a turn for the even worse when his first meetings with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the best of the Musketeers, result in him challenging each of them to duels. Finally, taken under the wing of the Three Musketeers rather than being killed by them, the young Gascon finds himself embroiled in the machinations of the cunning Cardinal Richelieu and his deadly agent, Milady de Winter, with plans to dishonour the Queen of France herself. A tale of high adventure, full of fun, swordplay and affairs of the heart…

Originally written by Alexandre Dumas (in collaboration with his regular ghost writer Auguste Maquet) and published in 1844, this swashbuckling historical tale became one of the most enduring adventures in literature, challenged only by, perhaps, ‘Treasure Island’. Numerous adaptations have been made, for stage and screen, including musicals, animation, and even an opera. The script that Chris Argles chose to direct was by Willis Hall, and had been published just the previous year, 1995. Although it keeps to the story, more or less, inevitably some liberties are taken and Hall leans into the humour, no doubt one reason for its selection.

It has passed into Workshop legend that Mike Brown, playing, or rather completely inhabiting the role of Porthos, at one point during the production ran across the stage completely naked, except for a strategically placed broad-brimmed musketeer hat (with a large feather). The part demanded it, obviously.

Treasure Island – The Panto, or ‘Panto Walks The Plank’

‘Treasure Island’, that perennial favourite of British children since its first publication, might seem like an obvious candidate for panto treatment. However, actually arriving at a well-rounded pantomime, incorporating all the essential elements of that genre but also sticking fairly strictly to the plot and characters of Stevenson’s great novel, poses a few problems!

So if ‘Panto Walks The Plank!’ gets under way as a close pastiche of ‘Treasure Island’, you might notice it change tack part way through, in order to accommodate a boarding party of pirate clichés inspired by a wider literature.

After all, as any fan of the Hollywood pirate epics of the 1930s and 1940s will tell you, ‘Treasure Island’ (one of the most famous adventure stories in English literature) is fatally flawed. There’s absolutely no love interest. In fact there are no women at all, with the exception of Mrs Hawkins, and she’s written out of the plot by page 27!

Now, no good pirate movie was truly complete without the love interest, usually represented by Maureen O’Hara. Or the presence of the dastardly Spanish, immaculately attired, elegantly presented and constantly scheming. In fact, the two elements were so quintessential that they were frequently combined through the well-worn dramatic device of ‘Swashbuckling hero falls for the haughty yet gorgeous daughter of the wicked Spanish governor’. So, expect to find both in our version too,

There are other important omissions from ‘Treasure Island’ that undermine its credentials as a bona-fide all-round classic pirate story. For instance, absolutely no-one walks the plank! Now, as it happens, that’s probably because no-one ever really did walk the plank. People who really know their pirates will tell you that this infamous punishment was simply the macabre whimsy of the Victorians and their overheated imaginations. However, if you’re set on telling a good old-fashioned blood and thunder tale of skulduggery on the high seas, you’ve got to include it. It’s part of the tradition.

Being a pantomime also dictates certain changes to the story. For instance, no-one is horribly murdered. Any violence is strictly of the gratuitous slapstick variety. And of course, Long John’s legendary parrot serves splendidly as a pantomime animal. This one even talks! And a ‘Crimson Parakeet’ does have a certain resonance with the 1952 Burt Lancaster comedy adventure movie, ‘The Crimson Pirate’, filmed in glorious Technicolour!

So, shiver your timbers and splice your mainbrace, while Theatre Workshop heaves to and delivers a hefty broadside of fun and adventure. And you may lay to that, arrrrrh!

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340 – 1400) has been called the father of English Literature. Certainly there is nothing quite like his epic ‘The Canterbury Tales’ to put the present-day observer in touch with the ordinary life of our medieval forebears. Nothing to match the unflinching realism of Chaucer’s portraits of his fellow men. And nothing quite so effectively holds up a mirror, not only to the England of his times – but to the unchanging nature of human experience.

We considered four different published playscripts before creating our own adaptation of ‘The Canterbury Tales’. In the end we decided against paying royalty fees to use someone else’s script. After all, Chaucer is part of our shared heritage – his words should belong to all of us.

Across the different playscripts there had been a range of selections made regarding which tales were best to tell. Clearly, given that there are 28 tales in all, you can’t use all of them in one two hour show (and note that Chaucer had intended for there to be 120!), so a choice has to be made. However, most seemed to go for the stories with classical settings, such as The Knight’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale and The Merchant’s tale.

Focused on the nobility, and concentrating on stories of courtly love and mortal combat as they are, we decided that these rarified tales were not the ones we wanted to tell. We wanted to hear from the ordinary people, engaged in the medieval day-to-day of simple pleasures, petty jealousies and mundane squabbles. Exuberant and resilient folk, yet dominated by an overbearing Church. So, these are the stories we chose:

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

The Friar’s Tale

The Pardoner’s Tale

The Miller’s Tale

The Reeve’s Tale

Our adaptation is actually based on the 1985 Oxford University Press translation by David Wright, though we’ve edited out much of the narrative in favour of dialogue. This is a drama after all, not a story telling, and that has meant some minor amendments in order to make sense of the editing. Regardless, we’ve actually added or rewritten very little. So the words you’ll hear spoken are Chaucer’s own, translated with fidelity into modern English by one of the foremost scholars in this field. If you take any pleasure from the tales we unfold for you today, reflect for a moment on the fact that these are the same stories that entertained your ancestors, some 600 years ago.

Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett is rightly regarded as one of the fantasy genre’s most popular and successful authors. He is without doubt one of its most prolific, with a string of best-selling novels set on his imaginary Discworld, a planet-sized disc that sits on the backs of four huge elephants, who in turn stand on the back of an enormous turtle called the Great A’Tuin as it swims through interstellar space.

His books frequently parody the vast body of ‘sword and sorcery’ literature that has been spawned by generations of Tolkien imitators, but he doesn’t stop there. Social comment is often interwoven into his humorous tales, and then there’s Shakespeare, whose plots and themes have been known to appear. ‘Wyrd Sisters’, for instance, seems to resemble at times a certain Scottish play, at others ‘Hamlet’. ‘As You Like It’ and ‘King Lear’ get a look in too.

‘Wyrd Sisters’ was Pratchett’s sixth Discworld novel, written in 1988, and the first to feature the Lancre coven of witches, composed of Magrat Garlick, Gytha ‘Nanny’ Ogg and Esmerelda or Esme ‘Granny’ Weatherwax. Favourites of both the readership and Pratchett himself, they would go on to feature in a number of his other books. In neopagan traditions, there exists the Triple Goddess, the maiden, the mother and the crone, and Pratchett has knowingly taken this as a model.

In the play, adapted from the novel by long-time Pratchett collaborator Stephen Briggs, King Verence I of Lancre is murdered by his scheming cousin, Leonal, Duke Felmet, after his ambitious wife persuades him to do so. However, a fleeing servant manages to rescue Verence’s son and heir, along with the King’s crown, and both are given to the witches, who in turn pass them onto a troupe of travelling actors. The crown is hidden in the props box and the boy will be brought up as the actor/manager Olwyn Vitoller’s son. The witches understand that in the fullness of time, destiny will take its course and the child, Tomjon, will grow up to defeat Duke Felmet and take his rightful place as king. Of course, it doesn’t turn out like quite like that…

We’d like to give our particular thanks to both Stephen Briggs and Terry Pratchett for giving us permission to stage ‘Wyrd Sisters’ now. The authorised adaptation hasn’t actually been published yet, so we’re grateful to get a head start on the rest of the amateur theatre brigade. 

Lark Rise

Welcome to the tiny hamlet of Lark Rise. It is the first day of the harvest, one summer early in the 1880’s…

Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy ‘Lark Rise’, ‘Over To Candleford’ and ‘Candleford Green’, describing her childhood in a remote Oxfordshire farming community has been termed English Literature’s classic masterpiece of a lost way of village life – a vivid and moving account, rich in fascinating detail.

In 1978, Keith Dewhurst’s acclaimed adaptation for The National Theatre took characters and episodes, songs and scenes directly from the books, to create two composite plays – ‘Lark Rise’ and ‘Candleford’. Each of the plays also featured a wealth of traditional music contributed by the influential British folk-rock group, The Albion Band. (John Tams and Ashley Hutchings, both members of the band, acted as musical directors for the play.)

The result is an enchanting play which, while lacking a strong narrative, does offer an evocative and entertaining glimpse into how our ancestors lived and worked in the years before The Great War, and the machine age that finally succeeded in sweeping England’s rural innocence away forever. In place of The Albion Band we have The Royal Borough Band, led by Dave Hankey, with a few of our own members helping to provide vocals.

We hope you will accept our production of ‘Lark Rise’ as a pleasant diversion fit for a summer’s evening – especially in the garden of what is still, very much, a village pub.