Luke Argles – Page 3 – Theatre Workshop Coulsdon

The Changeling

Licensed on 7 May 1622, The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, is widely seen as one of the best plays of the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I). It’s a violent, baroque tale that manages to be both funny and horrific in its parallel plots.

Beatrice-Joanna – spoilt, rich, beautiful – is blinded by desire for Alsemero, but betrothed to Piracquo. To rid herself of her unwanted fiancé, she enlists Deflores – a disfigured servant who both repels and fascinates her. But Deflores has desires of his own, and Beatrice-Joanna has no idea of the terrible price he will exact.

Meanwhile, in the asylum, a pair of noblemen masquerade as lunatics to have their wicked way with the madhouse-keeper’s young wife. This comic plot holds up a mirror to the main plot, offering an alternative take on the same themes of madness and infatuation.

Who is the changeling of the title? Well superficially, it’s Antonio, one of the madhouse imposters. But the true changeling is Beatrice-Joanna – the young noblewoman who inexplicably turns into an amoral monster. In Middleton and Rowley’s England, people would have had no hesitation in blaming witchcraft for such a sudden, total collapse of character. Including the substitution of an apparently dutiful and virtuous daughter by some evil surrogate or changeling.

The playwrights know better of course. They deftly show how a few fateful steps take an impressionable young mind from the delirium of love to dangerous obsession. But is Beatrice-Joanna deluded, deranged or simply hapless? Does she really make the fatal mistake of engaging a contract killer without understanding the nature of the contract? Is she a spoilt little rich girl, whose game of dare spirals out of control, or a calculating sociopath? This central riddle is one reason why The Changeling remains such a compelling thriller, four centuries after it was first performed.

Middleton and Rowley

Like Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a successful jobbing playwright in the flourishing heyday of the early English theatre. He turned out dozens of plays, masques and pageants between 1602 and 1624. He collaborated with, amongst many others, Shakespeare himself, and is known to be responsible for parts of several of Shakespeare’s plays including Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale.

Middleton is generally credited with the tragic main plot of The Changeling, whilst Rowley is thought to be responsible for much of the comic sub-plot. But the hand of each man is also present in sections of the play attributed to the other. Middleton in particular had forged a style very much of his own, turning the conventional ‘aside’ into a parallel reality where characters converse with each other whilst sharing their thoughts with the audience – an intriguing subversion of the theatrical convention of his day.

Middleton was ahead of his time in his writing style too. He was capable of superb verse. But in The Changeling his dialogue is spare, gritty and workaday – more natural and immediate than Shakespeare’s. In fact, the play owes much to changes which coincided with the end of Shakespeare’s career. By the 1620’s, the outdoor Elizabethan playhouses had closed. The Changeling, first staged at The Cockpit in Drury Lane, forms part of a later genre known as ‘Revenge Tragedy’. These plays were tailored for cramped indoor theatres – hot, claustrophobic, and lit only by guttering candles. Small wonder The Changeling seems so gothic, shadowy and stifling.

That said, Middleton and Rowley’s setting of ‘Alicante’ owes very little to Spain, and a great deal to the London the authors knew so well. With the asylum in particular, we are clearly in London’s Bedlam, and being royally entertained – as Londoners were – by madness.

Cinderella’s Puss In Boots

Take the classic story of Cinderella, add the bluff and swagger of Puss in Boots, and you get two much-loved seasonal tales woven into one sparkling festive show.

Yes, we’ve put panto favourites Cinderella and Puss on stage together for the first time, in an irreverent mash-up of two much-loved seasonal tales. That means you get two principal boys for the thigh-slapping price of one, the most deliciously appalling Ugly Sisters ever to grace the stage, and the ultimate in hissable baddies – King Rat, evil lord of the underworld. Plus, of course, Puss-in-Boots at his irresistible, swashbuckling best. Beautiful Cinderella undergoes the usual series of traumas, trials and torments – until her Ab-Fab style fairy godmothers and fashion gurus breeze in to save the day with a haute couture transformation guaranteed to catch a prince’s heart. This is a top-notch Cinderella, with just that little bit extra panto goodness thrown into the mix.

Set in, and under, the fairy-tale land of Cornucopia, ruled by good(ish) King Egbert, the action starts with something evil stirring in the darkness below, and it’s got a tail, whiskers and cheap crown…

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…)

Lords and Ladies

It’s a hot midsummer’s night in the tiny kingdom of Lancre, up in the far northern hill country of Discworld. Crop circles are turning up everywhere, bursting like raindrops, a portent of wayward magic leaking into the land from between the standing stones known as ‘The Dancers’.

Magrat Garlick, witch, is getting married in the morning – to King Verence of Lancre no less. The wizards of the Unseen University are journeying north from the great city of Ankh-Morpork to bless the union, and the Lancre All-Comers Morris Team have been lined up to stage a rustic entertainment for the happy couple. In short, everything should be going like a dream.

But all is not well in Lancre. Elves, long banished from the human realm are pushing at the iron boundaries of their barren winter land, bringing with them all those things traditionally associated with the magical, glittering realm of faerie: cruelty, kidnapping, malice and murder.

‘The Dancers’ form the gateway between the two worlds, and for many years, Granny Weatherwax and her tiny argumentative coven have worked to keep that portal tightly closed. But now a new coven, led by the young, ambitious and wilful Diamanda (real name Lucy Tockley, but Diamanda sounds so much better) are determined to overturn the old order…

And when the Lancre morris team gets seriously drunk on a fairy mound, all Hell is ready to break loose. In short, it’s a festival of dwarves, wizards, trolls, morris dancers – plus an orang-utan, with a fair helping of hey-nonny-nonny and blood all over the place… We hope you enjoy tonight’s performance!

A big thank you to Debbie Bradshaw and Katy Tupholme at Bluetree Design and Print of Rotherham for designing our posters for the production, and to Mark Lewis and Nick Hewson at Mastercolour of Tunbridge Wells for printing them.

‘Lords and Ladies’ (1992) is adapted from the comic fantasy novel by prolific author Terry Pratchett, his fourteenth set on Discworld, and the fourth to feature the Lancre coven of witches led by the redoubtable Esmerelda ‘Esme’ Weatherwax, a character who Pratchett clearly enjoyed revisiting. Astonishingly successful, he sold over 100 million copies of his books, forty-one of which were Discworld novels, and he was awarded first the OBE in 1998 and then a knighthood in 2009. He died at the age 66, from complications relating to Alzheimer’s Disease, which he had been diagnosed with in 2007.

Following on from ‘Wyrd Sisters’ in 1995 and ‘Mort’ in 1997, ‘Lords and Ladies’ is the third stage adaptation of a Discworld novel that Theatre Workshop Coulsdon have undertaken, and any similarities to Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ are purely intentional. Nor is it a coincidence that all three have been directed by Mike Brown.

Sinbadaladdin

Sinbad sails into panto peril with Aladdin on board for laughs!

Sinbad the sailor, or Sinbad of the sea, was the hero of a series of stories outlining his seven voyages across and around the Indian Ocean. He came from Baghdad, now capital of Iraq, then the capital of the sprawling Abbasid Empire that stretched from Tunisia in the west to Pakistan in the East. The original tale of Aladdin is also set in the Middle East. And yet, in panto, this tale of a poor boy made good is landed in a Chinese laundry, surrounded by absurd cod-Chinese names and a mother, Widow Twankey, closer to the East End of London than the Far East. This has long been the case, since 1788 in fact, when John O’Keefe staged the first Aladdin pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Richard Lloyd has leant into the exotic influence, with his new pantomime mash-up featuring a significant flavour of the Orient (not the Leyton version). Wizards, pirates, genies, beautiful heroines and brave heroes abound, even if these last do look a lot like girls. Widow Twankee gets up to her usual mischief as manageress of the laundry – not so ably assisted by slopper-out Wishee-Washee, while the feisty Princess Jasmine steals Aladdin’s heart and risks the wrath of her father, the Sultan Ming the Mirthless and her ghastly mother, the Sultana No-Lo-Fat. The terrifying magician Abanazar, meanwhile, proves a formidable rival for Jasmine’s hand in marriage.

Songs, sorcery and silliness, with a touch or two of derring-do. Now that’s a pantomime, wherever it comes from.

The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare’s ‘The Comedy of Errors‘ tells the unlikely story of two pairs of identical twins, separated while they are still babes in arms when shipwrecked. The father of one pair, Egeon, continues his search over the years for his missing son, and his search eventually takes him to Ephesus. Sadly, Egeon hails from Syracuse and at this time, his home city and Ephesus are at war. As a result, Egeon is sentenced to death, and has just 24 hours to raise a one thousand mark ransom to avoid the executioner’s axe. As a comedy, this is an unlikely start.

Egeon’s son, Antipholus, (the one that didn’t go missing) has also joined in the search for his brother. And coincidentally he also arrives in Ephesus, unaware of his father’s fate. He’s also unaware that his long-lost twin lives in Ephesus, like him a successful merchant. And so a sequence of events involving mistaken identities is set off, compounded by the even more unlikely situation that his manservant, Dromio, is also an identical twin. And that this twin, who strangely is also called Dromio, just happens to be the manservant of Egeon’s missing son, who by sheer coincidence is called Antipholus too. Because, well, they’re such common names. Honest.

There’s a lot of running around, slapstick violence, misconceived sexual encounters, accusations of theft and even demonic possession, certainly enough to consider this a pure farce, but the shadow of Egeon’s fate lingers across it all, and makes this something a bit deeper. In the end, all is well. Brothers cheerfully embrace and a husband discovers not only a lost son but a lost wife (who he seemingly spent little time looking for).

This was one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and also his shortest. The concept is clearly absurd, but it still retains a level of poignancy, and the broad strokes of humour are from time to time put aside to make way for lyrical verse the equal of which you might find in his most highly regarded dramas.

The music for the production was composed and performed by Pete Bird, the fifth such project he’s undertaken for the group. Inspired in part by the period dance tune ‘My Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe’ by the English lutenist John Dowland (1563-1626), whose works have been brought to wider public notice recently by Sting, Pete has attempted to create a sound reminiscent of a small chamber orchestra or string quartet. To that end he has played all the music you will hear, with the exception of the mandolin theme, which is played by Simeon Dawes.

The She-Wolves Of Doctor Schlock

“But if we fail, we will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.” Sir Winston Churchill, 18^th June 1940

Wilkommen zu der Schloss Schlockhöfen… an eerie, isolated fortress, perched on a precipitous crag rising from the trackless Bavarian forest. The retreat and laboratory of the mysterious, reclusive Doktor Hieronymus Schlock, sometime scientific genius of the long fallen Reich…

That’s the setting for this B-movie musical schlock horrorfest – a hearty soup of pulp-horror goodness. A tongue-in-cheek melange of mad scientists, zombies, nymphomanic werewolves and gung-ho lost patrols. All spiced up with a risqué dash of sub-S&M gender-bending!

Barney Bridgework and Diane Dentine of CDBDBN Broadcast News are filming an investigation into mysterious disappearances around Schlockhöfen. But having lost the keys to their jeep, they are forced to knock at the castle door…

Can they survive the night within its forbidding walls with only Herr Doktor and his weird household for company? The denizens of Der Schloss include Beauty, a handmade nymphomaniac S&M junkie; Beast, who makes Frankenstein’s Monster look a complete pussy; Otto Plügbutt, Herr Doktor’s devoted batman, and his terrifying yet drop-dead gorgeous She-Wolves – an all singing, all dancing troupe of PVC-clad lycanthropes – the ultimate security detail to die for…

And dropping (quite literally) into this freakshow, a gung-ho squad of U.S. Airborne rangers, attempting to snatch Herr Doktor for a top-secret CIA programme…

The scene is set for a rip-roaring, rock n’ rolling evening of gothic devilment and pure pulp horror wickedness. So sit back, relax, and place yourselves in the horribly capable hands of Herr Doktor and his lethal, latex-clad lady friends…

Dick Barton – Special Agent

The star of the BBC’s first daily radio serial, private investigator and sometime Special Agent, Dick Barton appeared in in 711 episodes between 1946 and 1951 – the brainchild of BBC producer Norman Collins, who had of a visions of a ‘cloak and dagger soap opera’ broadcast every evening.

With his two sidekicks Jock and Snowy, Dick managed to get into some pretty tight scrapes – much to the delight of the listening audience but to the murmurings of stern disapproval from various clergymen of the day. Which seems strange, especially in hindsight, given that Dick’s adventures and last-moment escapes from deadly danger were all written and performed in accordance with a very strict code of conduct. No drinking, no swearing, no violence other than a good clean ‘sock to the jaw’ and even then only if evenly matched or outnumbered. Definitely no girlfriends or romantic associations, and no lying. If Dick needs to give chase to a fleeing villain in a conveniently available car, he must first ask the owner’s permission. No themes of horror should be used either, so no ghosts, vampires, other supernatural creatures or gorillas. (Yes, specifically no gorillas). It’s a wonder Dick managed anything more exciting than a trip to the shops.

Despite all this the show was a huge success, with, at its peak, 15 million listeners tuning in at 6.45pm each evening for 15 minutes of derring-do. The fast-paced, free wheeling adventures were just what post-war Britain was waiting for, and one-time commando Capt. Richard Barton MC was the hero of the hour. Or quarter of an hour, to be precise. However, the BBC were uncomfortable with their sensationalist success story, and when a new programme successfully debuted in a late morning slot in 1951, an everyday tale of life in a rural community, they quickly moved to replace the Special Agent with it. So for all the arch-foes and villains that Barton confronted, he was eventually killed off by ‘The Archers’.

An ill-fated attempt to bring back Barton to television in 1979 seemed to draw a far from discreet veil over any new adventures, but in 1998, Phil Wilmott wrote the musical ‘Dick Barton, Episode One – Special Agent’, part homage, part spoof, and with music from Stefan Bednarczyk, it was a roaring success when it debuted at the Croydon’s Warehouse Theatre, going on to tour Britain over the next couple of years. Since then there have been five sequels, the first two penned by Wilmott and then Duncan Wisbey took the reins

And now, it’s our turn to take on the mac and trilby of upright and uptight British manliness. Warning. The code of conduct will be disobeyed frequently.

During one of the Sunday set-building sessions for ‘Dick Barton’, Julian Cooper, who had been a well-liked part of the group in a backstage capacity for a number of years, suffered a sudden massive heart attack. Despite the efforts of both TWC members and ambulance crew to resuscitate him, Julian was pronounced dead on arrival at Mayday Hospital in Croydon. He was just 43. The play was dedicated to his memory.