Person: Howard Payne

The Arabian Nights

For our inspiration, ‘The Arabian Nights’ draws on the 1001 tales supposedly told by Shaharazad (or Scheherazade). King Shahryar, having suffered at the hands of an unfaithful wife, has become bitter and vengeful, undertaking to marry every day, but execute each wife as the next day dawns to prevent their infidelity. Shaharazad, the clever daughter of the court vizier, volunteers to become his wife, to try and prevent the needless bloodshed. Every night she tells Shahryar a story that enthralls him, but deliberately leaves it unfinished come the sunrise, and so the King stays her execution. She does this again and again, for 1001 nights, by which point he renounces his violent ways and spares her life permanently.

In reality, the stories, which are many but nowhere near 1001, are taken from sources across the Islamic world. From Moorish Spain to the borders of China, across the Middle East, reaching as far south as sub-Saharan Africa and north to the Balkans and the Caucasus mountains. The fullest version of the 1001 tales was compiled, translated and edited by the eminent Victorian explorer, Sir Richard Burton, who had published a massive 16 volume edition in 1885. However, it remains only one of a dozen or so major retellings written across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Most of the stories are simple folk tales, a number sharing many similarities with folk tales from other cultures. Two of the tales (strangely enough, two of the most famous, ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’) were almost certainly shoehorned into the collection at a late stage, bearing little resemblance to the story structure of the rest and differing in other aspects too.

For our production, we kept part of Shaharazad’s tale to frame the other tales we wanted to tell, a mere six against 800 or so we had to choose from. We’ve tried to cover a range, from the profound to the absurd, the sinister and the scary to the comic and just a little bit naughty. All human (and some non-human) life is here. Enjoy.

The tales are;

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

The Talking Head

The Simpleton and the Two Sharpers

The Little Hunchback

The Lady and Her Four Suitors

The Strange Tale of Sidi Nu’uman

 

Peter And The Wolf! – A Pantomime of Old Russia

A pantomime drawing on all sorts of classic old Russian themes? Coming right up, comrade!

The villain of the piece is Grand Duchess Irina Bogovsky, whose personal vanity and quest for immortality has led her down a dark path, as only by sacrificing young peasant girls will she stave off her personal march of time. Against her is set the heroic, young, thigh-slapping principal girl, Pyotyr Pyotrovich, who must rescue her true love from the Duchess’s evil machinations.

Does Pyotyr stand a chance against the devilish Irina and her fiendish Cossack ally Ivan and his men?

Oh no, he doesn’t!

Oh yes, he does!

With Grandmother Masha by his side, and help from various over-sized and over-furry animals, Pyotr will trawl through an entertainingly curated collection of recognisable Russian folklore, from mad monks to Firebirds, rescue Dasha and free the motherland. With songs too!

That’s Theatre Workshop for you, always giving you plenty of bang for your rouble.

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!’.

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.