Person: Katie Dobson

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 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.

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.