Person: Paul Ford

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, 18th 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…

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?

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.

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.

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 Merry Wives of Windsor

‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ is one of Shakespeare’s more unusual comedies. No strange land for this one for a start. No far-flung Illyria, exotic Messina or Syracuse, but instead the action centres round The Garter Inn in Windsor. A real place no less, and one that stands to this day. Similarly, the Princes, Dukes and sundry other nobles that inhabit so many of his tales are notable by their complete absence, replaced by the title-less and newly prosperous middle classes. The only knight of the realm that features is the rascally, roguish Sir John Falstaff, a knave who sets out with poor intentions to fool the good wives of Windsor out of money, but fails spectacularly at every turn.

It is said that the character of Falstaff was one that Queen Elizabeth herself was most fond of. He appeared first in Henry IV Part One, and again in Henry IV Part Two, a portly, aging disreputable sot, too fond of his drink and of cheap women, forever lacking in funds. Quick to borrow, never to repay, and cowardly to boot, Falstaff does retain a certain charm and zest for life, and it’s this, for a time, that endears him to Prince Hal. However, when the prince becomes the King, all his former life is left behind, including Falstaff. In Henry V, Mistress Quickly delivers a eulogy outlining the circumstances of his death, and there, one might suppose, was the end of him. If a queen commands though, a humble playwright must write, and so, two years after his death, Sir John Falstaff lived again.

So ‘The Merry Wives…’ is what we would call today a ‘prequel’. Reunited with his low-life comrades, Pistol, Nym and Bardolph (the latter two also dying in Henry V, executed for looting), Falstaff unknowingly engages in a battle of wits with Mistress Page and Mistress Ford and finds himself distinctly unarmed, or at least badly under-gunned. Unlike the bittersweet nature of his antics in the histories though, these adventures are purely comedy, descending almost into farce. It dispenses with the oft-used conventions of romantic comedy, such as the mistaken identity, the flirtatious wordplay, the lovesick entanglements, and replaces them with Falstaff, the aging would-be suitor and lothario (supremely lacking in self-awareness) falling for the tricks being being played on him. In parallel, middle-aged, middle-class Francis Ford, consumed with ill-founded jealousy, repeatedly makes a fool of himself while attempting to prove, vainly, his wife an adulterer.

It’s funny, but this, undoubtedly the most original of Shakespeare’s works, drawing on no ancient text or foreign translation, is looked down upon by numerous scholars of the Bard. They seem to forget that the texts weren’t designed to be pored over, dissected and examined by fusty literary experts. It was created to have life on the stage, uproarious, physical life as popular entertainment.

And that is what you have before you. Enjoy.

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.

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.

The Recruiting Officer (1992)

It’s been said that ‘The Recruiting Officer’ reflects the warm afterglow of Blenheim’, and certainly, for a play written in a time of war, it is a confident and optimistic work. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun in May 1702, the latest in a series of European wars triggered by the ambitions of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, ruler of France. Queen Anne had succeeded to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland just two months previously, and she immediately appointed the John Churchill, the Earl of Marlborough, as the Captain-General of her armies. As war began, Marlborough was made supreme commander of the combined Anglo-Dutch army, and the campaign began well for him. So well that in December 1702, Queen Anne made him a Duke. The apex of his success however, lay at Blenheim, in Bavaria, on 13 August 1704, where a masterclass of planning and logistics paired with tactical and operational brilliance saw his forces defeat the Franco-Bavarian army so heavily that Bavaria was no longer capable of continuing the war. Patriotic fervour reached a crescendo, with even his enemies at court acknowledging the scale of his triumph. The Queen gave him the royal manor of Woodstock, on which Blenheim Palace would be built. And it is into this atmosphere that the play invites its audience.

George Farquhar, in 1704, was a soldier, having taken a commission as a Lieutenant of Grenadiers in the Earl of Orrery’s Infantry Regiment as a means of earning money. His recent plays had been unsuccessful, and he’d married a woman the previous year who already had three children from a prior marriage. He was practically penniless. That summer, his duties took him to Shrewsbury for a recruitment drive, and it was his experiences there that led to his writing of ‘The Recruiting Officer’. Supposedly he even wrote it in Shrewsbury, while staying in his lodgings at The Raven Inn.

The play, when it opened on the 8 April 1706 was a huge and immediate success, but his share of the income from the play was barely enough to cover his outstanding debts. Worse, he had contracted tuberculosis, and had to resign his commission in the army. Weakened by illness, he wrote one last play, ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ in just six weeks during the autumn of that year, and it opened on Drury Lane in March 1707 to universal acclaim. Sadly, its success came too late, and in May 1707 he died, aged just 30 years old.

‘The Recruiting Officer’, played in the traverse along the length of the main hall at the Coulsdon Youth and Social Centre, turned out to be the last, to date, summer production to take place there. From the following summer of 1993, Theatre Workshop Coulsdon would take its shows out into the open air. ‘The Recruiting Officer’ too would see the open air, being revisited by the group only six years on, in 1998.