Emma Rose – 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.

Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos

“Good evening. This is the BBC Light Programme broadcasting from London. It’s 6.45 and time for the next thrilling episode of ‘Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos’!”

Yes, Barton is back, and in his toughest assignment yet!

London. 1949. Wartime rationing remains in force, and only marmalade – that nutritious, morale-boosting foodstuff – continues to fortify our island nation’s grit, spunk, vim and pluck after six long years facing down the Nazi peril.
But now there’s a fiendish foreign conspiracy afoot to kidnap Tiggy Zesty-Peel, heiress to the Zesty-Peel preserves empire, and only Dick Barton can stop it. But who has evil designs on the Marmalade Millionairess? And just what is their nefarious purpose?

Meanwhile, Snowy White and Jock Anderson, Barton’s salt-of-the-earth working class assistants, are each in a jam of their own. Snowy’s been injected with bonobo serum during a brush with a batty Bulgarian ballerina, and has gone more than a little ape. And Jock has fallen for the charms of ex-Nazi filmmaker and flaxen femme fatale, Leni Fuchs.
Throw in the homegrown villainy of the Crayfish Twins (the East End’s favourite lovable cockney mass murderers) and mysterious Italian yoga swami, Contessa Bianca Di Scalzo, and the plot is thicker than a jar of rough-cut.
Can Barton unravel the mystery and save Britain’s marmalade? Or will our favourite spread succumb to the spread of evil? To find out, tune in to the next thrilling instalment of ‘Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos’!

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon’s third outing for Dick Barton, Boy’s Own adventurer, all-English hero and teatime wireless star, is another ripping comedy adventure, full of improbable characters, glorious gags, and a cheeky sprinkling of spiffing song and dance numbers. Pip pip!

The Producers

The Producers was Mel Brooks’ first ever movie back in 1968. Starring Zero Mostel as Max and Gene Wilder as Leo, it became both a cult and a commercial success, and Brooks even picked up an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. An improbable hit as a movie, it was an even less likely one as a Broadway musical, which Brooks did in 2001. A byword for tongue-in-cheek bad taste, it became the most successful Broadway show of all time, winning a record breaking 12 Tony awards and running for more than 2,500 performances over six years. And then art imitated art, as a movie of the musical based on a movie came out in 2005, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman.

Born into a German Jewish family who fled the Nazis in the 1930’s, Mel Brooks was uniquely qualified to poke merciless fun at the Third Reich. Frankly, it’s impossible to believe that anyone without his background could have got away with it. Then again, the whole premise of a couple of Jewish con-men staging a sure-fire Broadway flop based on a camp musical about Adolf Hitler is so absurd, it would be difficult for anyone to take genuine offence. Besides, Brooks has many targets for his satire in The Producers – not least the whole shallow pretentious ‘bubble’ of Broadway itself. (Which is rather ironic, as it turns out, given the huge success of the show.)

The Producers is an extraordinary musical. Set in New York in 1959, the one-time ‘King of Broadway’, Max Bialystock, sees his latest show ‘Funny Boy’ close after just one night. Down and out, dependent on playing the aging lothario to wealthy but very elderly spinsters and widows, Max is thrown a lifeline back to success and the high life in the unlikely form of timorous accountant, Leo Bloom. Bloom discovers that a flop show can make more money than a hit, and so the two set out to lie, cheat and schmooze their way to a million bucks by staging a sure-fire Broadway flop – the worst taste musical ever written: ‘Springtime For Hitler’. The rest is showbiz history. Bursting with laugh-out-loud jokes and outrageously funny musical numbers, The Producers is pure, unadulterated joy.

Now it’s fair to say that Theatre Workshop Coulsdon are not, first and foremost, a musical group. But we do like projects that are a bit unexpected. So we’ve rescued ‘The Producers’ from the cold dead clutches of of the light-operatic am-dram circuit, and given it the down-and-dirty TWC makeover it deserves. We aren’t dancers, we aren’t singers. We don’t have the required 37-piece orchestra. But we do have a bunch of talented musicians and chutzpah to spare, and what could be more in keeping with the spirit of Mel Brooks than that? We hope you enjoy the show!

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.

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 Adventures Of Tom Jones

Back in 1746, when Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’ was first published, there was an uproar amongst polite society. Why? Because Fielding’s biting satire painted a very unlovely picture indeed. Polite society was, in fact, anything but! Fielding’s masterwork wasn’t just a hatchet-job though. It was brilliantly funny, a rollicking comedy tale told over two hundred chapters (!), intricately plotted and with probably as many characters. There was depth too, with Fielding using the smokescreen of humour to discourse long and loud on such subjects as politics, philosophy, morality and religion.

All of which may be wonderful for a quiet Sunday afternoon’s reading, but for a dramatic evening’s entertainment, it just won’t do. What we want, nay, what we need, is a full-blown eighteenth century romp, full of colourful costumes and no less colourful characters, so with apologies to Mr Fielding, he’s been rather hijacked.

Into the heady mix have been brought characters and situations from other playwrights, whose swagger matches the feel and atmosphere of the base material. George Farqhuar provides the landlord Boniface and the roguish highwayman Gibbett for instance, both characters and situation taken from ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ (with just a dash of MacHeath from John Gay’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ of 1728). The recruiting sergeant’s opening speech is taken from Farqhuar’s ‘The Recruiting Officer’, and if Farqhuar’s highwayman is infinitely better character than Fielding’s own take, then the two recruiting sergeants are strangely similar. The rascally recruiters may possibly have a been a familiar stereotype and both authors took delight in playing with it.

So, literary fidelity you don’t get. A number of Fielding’s characters have been merged, others ejected wholly. What you do get is an evocative venture into eighteenth century England, following Tom Jones as he looks to find his fortune, leaving his numerous indiscretions behind him and with bold new exploits tantalisingly awaiting just over the next sun-lit hill. Enjoy.

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.

Abigail’s Party

Somewhere on the London side of Essex, Beverley and Laurence Moss are holding a drinks party for their new neighbours, Angela Cooper and her husband Tony, who moved in just two weeks ago. They also invite divorcee Susan, whose 15-year-old daughter, Abigail, is holding her first teenage party next door.

Beverley, an ex-department store cosmetics demonstrator with a love of Demis Roussos records, desperately tries to impress her guests, forcing cigarettes and drink on them while continually clashing with her less flamboyant estate agent husband, Laurence. He’s in her bad books, arriving back home late from work, only just before the guests appeared. Laurence aspires to better things, even if he doesn’t quite understand them, and has decorated their house with Van Gogh and Lowry prints, as well as a leather bound collection of Shakespeare that’s there to be seen, not read.

Quietly spoken, verging on taciturn Tony, an ex-Crystal Palace football player, is in computing and his wife, the seemingly childlike and cheerfully tactless Angela, is a nurse. The house purchase has been a bit of stretch for them financially, and they’re feeling the pinch.

Sue is a longstanding resident, quiet, conventional and ill-at-ease, having misunderstood the invitation and not ‘dressed up’. Expecting food, she finds herself becoming more and more hungry as the evening progresses but tries to keep the hunger at bay by eating peanuts. The constant round of drink ‘top-ups’ is also making her feel unwell.

As the evening progresses and the drink flows, things become… interesting.

Mike Leigh’s play debuted in April 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre and was an instant success, spawning a revival that same summer which was a sell out. Quick to spot an easy win, the BBC filmed it in the autumn, and it was broadcast that November as a ‘Play for Today’.

A suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the tastes of the the new middle classes of the 1970s, it evolved from a series of improvisations in which the actors played the characters but without knowing what events would take place while they did so. The various back stories were created by the original cast, drawing on their own experiences. For instance, John Salthouse, who played Tony, had been a professional footballer.

It has become something of a period piece, but is no less funny for all that.

The Fairy Godfather

In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola gave us the gangster epic ‘The Godfather’. Set in 1940’s New York, it centred on the criminal empire of the Corleone family, led by Marlon Brando’s iconic Don Corleone, and it single-handedly set the tone for American Mafia/Mob/Gangster movies to follow ever since. Nowhere did it say anything about pantomimes.

Richard Lloyd made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. He’d written a pantomime that less than delicately mashed up a bucket of well-used mafia gangster tropes, spread them over a comedy base, added some spicy panto sauce and served them up with side order of rollicking good songs, finishing with a rousing (everybody join in!) rendition of ‘That’s Amore!’. There are good fairies, evil villains, a dame and a gondola-full of Italian cheese gags. You just have to look at the cast list.

So we had to put it on. Really, we had to. And now you gotta to watch it, capisce?

Cut yourself in for a pizza the action tonight.

Zenobia

AD 268. The once mighty Roman Empire now lies in chaos. Corrupted from within, its borders besieged, the Empire could be be overthrown by one man… or one woman. Zenobia, the upstart warrior Queen of Palmyra, seizes her chance to change history forever, and moves her forces into battle with the legions of Aurelian, an Emperor seeing his grip on the Eastern end of the Mediterranean slip. However, Zenobia’s son and heir, Wahballat, has no desire to become King, and spends his time engaged in strange alchemical experiments with Porphyry, a philosophy student with a secret.

A story of love, adventure, ambition and their costs during of the decline of the Roman Empire.

Written by Nick Dear and first performed at The Young Vic in 1995 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Zenobia is a story of love and adventure, death and betrayal. Seeded heavily with dark humour, this tale is based on historical fact, but its use of modern language makes it easily accessible and is in turn dramatic, moving and funny.

This the first ever amateur production of Zenobia.