Person: Lucy-Ann Martin

Treasure Island (2010)

Long before Jack Sparrow was ever dreamt of, an even more irredeemable rogue bestrode the rolling quarter-deck of pirate fiction. A one-legged villain by the name of Silver…

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ‘Treasure Island’ in 1883, he created not only the most famous adventure story in the English language, but an entire genre. Maps marked with crosses, buried treasure chests, one-legged seafarers with parrots, tropical islands full of mystery and danger, black spots and ‘Yo-ho-ho’s – all these commonplaces of pirate fiction were entirely Stevenson’s invention. He was writing about a world 150 years before his own time, about which he knew very little. That didn’t stop him writing a thrilling story that also held a wry commentary on coming of age and the ambiguity of morality – in the maimed shape of Long John Silver – unusual for children’s literature both then and now.

In our 40th year, choosing Treasure Island for our summer, open-air production seemed both obvious and fitting. It marks the fourth time we’ve set sail with this tale of derring-do, having done so previously in 1974 and 1989, as well as spoofing it with a panto version in 1995. One tradition has remained throughout, the trademark of TWC. In the absence of female characters (with the exception of Mrs Hawkins) we have the heroes played by women and the villainous pirates played by men. Now that might sound a little strange perhaps, but believe me, it works well.

The songs in this production are traditional sea songs and shanties, a rousing accompaniment for life and adventure aboard the Hispaniola. Several hundred of these traditional songs are known, with literally thousands of versions, many blurred into hybrids of several different songs They formed a constantly evolving oral tradition passed on by seamen around the world during the great age of sail. The songs took their influences from different languages and cultures: from Gaelic and Scandinavian dialect song to Wild West ballads; from the rhythms of the South Sea Islands to Negro Spirituals. They were only ever sung on merchant ships though, not the Royal Navy, who frowned on the practice.

Traditional sea songs divide into two main types: the shanty, a chanted work song with a repetitive chorus designed to help gangs of men synchronise the heavy tasks hauling, heaving or pumping aboard ship, and the foc’sle ballad – songs composed and sung just for entertainment. The divide is far from hard and fast however, and many shanties have, over time, developed a more lyrical form.

Our band for the production, pressganged into service of course, are called ‘Ninepence Three Farthings’. Enjoy.

Dracula

A bloody, poetic and sexually-charged interpretation of the world’s most infamous horror story!

Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ wasn’t the first Gothic Horror tale (that honour falls to Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ published over a century before) but it is, arguably, the most famous exponent of the genre, though it has stiff competition in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, R L Stevenson’s ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. However, none have quite the strange sexual allure that the Transylvanian aristocrat has, even to this day. This creature, for human he most certainly isn’t, should be repulsive, but yet the opposite is true. The vampire has taken on an eerie glamour, coupled with a sense of tragedy. Hence the success of Anne Rice’s ‘Vampire Lestat’ books and the ‘Twilight’ series by Stephanie Meyer.

Of course, folkloric vampires predate Dracula by centuries, with demons showing what we would consider to be vampiric ways and practices noted by the Romans, Mesopotamians and the Ancient Greeks. But these creatures were ruddy, or purplish in colour, and bloated from the drinking of blood, a far cry from the slim, pale skinned figures we associate with the term now. And frankly a lot less sexy.

Liz Lochead is a Scottish playwright and poet who adapted ‘Dracula’ for the stage in 1985. She made a number of changes to the tale, but then reducing a novel of several hundred pages down to a workable two act play was always going to require that. Lucy Westernra and Mina Murray became sisters sharing the surname Westerman. Arthur Holmwood, also known as Lord Godalming, and American Quincey Morris, two of Lucy Westernra’s suitors, are excised from the script while Renfield’s part is expanded on. In come new characters, such as Nurses Grice and Nisbett, as well as Orderly Drinkwater, at Dr Seward’s asylum, and to add a working class voice to the narrative, Florrie Hathersage, the Westerman’s maid. Across the whole script, the language has been updated to provide a level of humour and innuendo, while focusing on female sexuality and madness.

Do the changes work? Certainly Renfield’s character, and the story, benefits from the extra time spent with him. He’s more articulate, even sympathetic. A victim who can see his own doom coming. Mina though is something less in this version. Pared back, she’s no longer the architect of Dracula’s downfall, nor is Lucy any the stronger for having been reshaped for the late 20th Century. Dracula remains however, untouched, his presence throughout underlined by over a century of cultural familiarity.

Dark Deeds at St. Mildred’s

Welcome to ‘Dark Deeds at St Trynian’s’ – a homage to the St Trinian’s books created by the cartoonist Ronald Searle (1920 – 2011) between 1941 and 1954. Searle’s cartoons were hugely popular – the antithesis on the Enid Blyton-type posh girl’s boarding school; its pupils are wicked and well-armed, and mayhem is rife. The Gothic cartoons often showed the dead bodies of girls who had been skewered with pitchforks, tortured by their classmates, or succumbed to violent team sports. Searle started to draw these cartoons whilst a prisoner of war of the Japanese. Perhaps it was his way of dealing with the unimaginable horror.

Four movies, based on Searle’s cartoons, were made between 1954 and 1966. There was a remake in 1980 and another in 2007. St Trinian’s is portrayed as an unorthodox girls school where sex, smoking, drinking and gambling aren’t on the curriculum – but they’re not exactly frowned upon either. The girls come in two categories: the Fourth Form, most closely resembling Searle’s original drawings of ink-stained, ungovernable pranksters, and the much older Sixth Form, sexually precocious to a degree that must have seemed alarming in 1954 (one of the girls is even married). The Fourth Form includes a number of much younger girls who are the most ferocious of all. The rule of thumb is that the smaller a St Trinian’s girl, the more dangerous she is – especially with a lacrosse or hockey stick in her hands.

Sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid and capable of any excess, the films implied that the girls were mainly the daughters of well-off gangsters, crooks, shady bookmakers and other low-lifes.

Our production is loosely based on some of the characters from the St Trinian’s books and movies, but with a wholly home-grown script and story. Firmly set in a comfy, non-specific era of post-war nostalgia sometime around the middle of the last century, it bears no resemblance to the recent ‘updated’ movies of St Trinian’s. (Sorry about that, if you were expecting Girls Aloud…)

Jack The Ripper (2006)

Is it lazy to return to a play that you’ve staged before?

Or maybe – like revisiting a favourite book or film – there’s more to be explored and enjoyed a second, or even third time around?

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon first staged Ron Pember and Denis De Marne’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ back in 1983. We went back to it just eight years later in 1991. Cumulatively, we’ve probably paid enough in licencing fees to send the two authors on a good long holiday. Many of the 1991 cast are performing again is this production. Three of the 1983 cast are here too, young theatre pups now turned grizzled stage veterans. Richard Lloyd has played the ruffian Daniel Mendoza in all three!

So why do we keep coming back? Frankly, because it’s an exhilarating show to be a part of. It’s got great songs, songs you remember and hum along to, or even sing out loud, long after the final curtain has dropped. Mainly though, it’s just a very TWC kind of show. It’s brash, irreverent and a little (little?) over the top. It feels as if it were written for us.
 
When we first put ‘Jack the Ripper’ on, it was considered an obscure and somewhat controversial choice. Since then, it’s become something of regular staple on the amateur theatre circuit, but we haven’t let that put us off. This show was meant to treated in the rough and ready manner of the seedy East End it portrays, not with the polite diffidence of a well-trained light-operatic group. It’s rumbustiuous, down and dirty, leaning into the coarser side of the music hall tradition. We’ve seen others take this on, and when they’ve treated it as a finely sung choral piece, it loses its heart, and almost inevitably falls flat.
 
Of course, the subject matter might not be to everyone’s taste. Making a musical out of history’s most notorious serial-killer must count as an act of potentially dubious taste, even after well over a century. The original West End run of the show was cruelly short, perhaps for that very reason. And yet the mystery and murders of Jack the Ripper remain very much part of the cultural psyche of Britain, and probably further afield. Fresh films, documentaries, TV series, radio dramas appear on a regular basis. The hunger for ‘Jack’ is insatiable, or so it seems. The criminal, who most claim was never caught, has moved from simple mystery to almost the stuff of legend.
 
So, tonight, step in to the Steam Packet Music Hall and be hideously entertained. But watch your step on the way home, alright?

Pride At Southanger Park

A delightfully off-the-wall one act play, drawing on and spoofing mercilessly the literary world of Jane Austen. This ‘previously undiscovered 18th Century classic’ has been rehearsed meticulously, and yet, in the vein of ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’, a continuing sequence of disasters befalls the hapless actors who try desperately to recover their composure, their wits and their lines. The show really must go on, despite everything, and we mean everything.

Performed on just the one night, ‘Pride at Southanger Park’ formed part of an entertainment entitled ‘A Evening of Cod and Ham’, featuring a two-part quiz devised and hosted by Julian Cooper, along with music and a fish and chip supper. 

 

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

 

The Taming of The Shrew

‘The Taming of the Shrew’ was one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, but has in recent years become considered by some to be controversial, mainly in its depiction of the cruel treatment handed out to the ostensible heroine, Katherina, by the her suitor and eventual husband, Petruchio. However, this was never intended to be a hard and fast primer on how men should behave with women, especially when you wish to marry them!

There are two main storylines at play here, both set around the wooing of a woman by a suitor, or in Bianca’s case, a number of suitors. Katherina is shown as being wilful, haughty, disobedient even, when in fact she is merely displaying an independence of thought and spirit. Her father, Baptista, being of an older generation, has no understanding of this, and though he truly loves her and wishes to protect her, he sees the biggest barrier to her ongoing happiness as herself and her attitude. Bianca, the younger daughter, plays a very different game. Her supplicatory attitude to her father’s ways earns his favour, and is indulged. Her gentler ways, and good looks, also earn her the attention of the pragmatic Hortensio and the aging and foolish Gremio, both vying for her hand, and undoubtedly her dowry. Baptista is a wealthy man. Into this come two new protagonists. Petruchio of Verona appears to see Katherina as a challenge, and becomes seemingly determined to ‘break her’ as you would a wild horse. Lucentio, from a wealthy family in Pisa, has come to Padua to study but falls for Bianca and so cooks up a scheme to woo her by disguising himself as a Latin tutor. The scene is therefore set for some absurd behaviour and comedic antics set around confused identities such as Shakespeare delighted in.

As the play comes to an end, each of the two women reach a decision over their futures and they are very different, but also very personal to them as individuals. In some ways, neither woman has been portraying themselves honestly, that is, true to their natures, before this point. And more obviously, neither Petruchio or Lucentio have been themselves either. Each couple will now face a future with the facades stripped away. Whether those relationships will thrive, we can only guess at.

This was Lucy-Ann Martin’s first production in the director’s chair. All the more impressive given that at the time she was just 16. And though she was supported by both her family and the group in the endeavour, as you’d expect, it remains a remarkable achievement.

Dr Ho

It’s Bond. James Bond. But you’ve never seen him like this.

Britain’s finest, and most well-known, spy has encountered threats over the years that have endangered his life, his country and even the world, but now someone is placing Christmas itself in peril! Plucked from the night skies, Santa Claus has been kidnapped and here’s only one man who can possibly find him in time before the world’s children open their eyes on Christmas morning, and find… nothing! But will a fondness for fast cars, faster women, a particular martini and a licence to kill be enough?

Mark Taylor draws on 007’s significant rogue gallery to populate this panto with vile villains galore and their perfectly hissable henchmen. Dr Ho. Ernst Stavro Blowave. Bob-a-Job. Rosa Widdecombe. Jaws. (‘What’s Jaws?’ ‘Thank you, mine’s a pint.’) However, this time around, Bond isn’t working solo. Enter Ada Bagwash, MI5’s cleaner. Is she really what she appears? Or is she a deep-cover intelligence operative with the tactical nous of a bagful of generals and the combat potential of a Gorilla with a machine gun? Sad to say, she’s just a cleaner, but what she lacks in intelligence… let’s just leave it there. Throw in a casino, an atomic reactor and a couple of women with unlikely and sexually provocative names, not to mention the all-singing Bondettes and their backing band, and you have a pantomime to live and let die for.

Mission briefing over, report to Q Branch to pick up your tickets now.

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.