Philip Gunstone – Theatre Workshop Coulsdon

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.

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!’.

Mort

Welcome to Discworld, the light-hearted fantasy universe devised by the author Terry Pratchett and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in 1983, with the publication of the first Discworld novel, ‘The Colour of Magic’. Contained within its pages was a fleeting appearance of Death, not as a concept but as a personification, complete with hooded robe (over a seven foot tall skeletal body), scythe, sonorous voice and riding a pale horse called… Binky.

Death would go on to become one of Pratchett’s defining creations, and appeared in all bar two of the 41 Discworld novels that Pratchett wrote before his death in 2015. In ‘Mort’, the fourth Discworld novel, published in 1987, the story focuses on Death as he takes an apprentice, the aptly named Mort (‘Mort’ meaning ‘death’ or ‘dead’ in French). Mort, who prefers to be called by his full name, Mortimer, is a gangly, inattentive but well-meaning teenager whose father is only too glad to pass on to another’s responsibility.

Mort does his best of course, but allows his feelings to get in the way. One night, while undertaking ‘The Duty’, he’s called to the bedroom of Princess Keli of Sto Lat, who is about to be assassinated by an agent of the scheming Duke of Sto Helit. Rather than simply escort her soul away in the aftermath of her death however, he prevents the assassination, which sounds great, but sadly, it doesn’t end there. She may not have been killed, but as her death was already pre-determined, people are beginning to act as if she’s not really there…

Stephen Briggs adapted ‘Mort’ for the stage in 1993, and as a frequent collaborator with the author has actually adapted over twenty of Terry Pratchett’s novels for the amateur stage. TWC have performed three of them, ‘Mort’, ‘Wyrd Sisters’ and ‘Lords and Ladies’, all directed by Mike Brown.

The Three Musketeers

France 1625.

A young nobleman called D’Artagnan leaves his family in Gascony, south-west France, and makes his way to Paris to seek his fortune and join the King’s Musketeers. Unfortunately he encounters Rochefort, Captain of the Cardinal’s guard at a rural inn, and after an ill-advised confrontation, loses his letter of introduction to M.de Treville, (the captain of the King’s Musketeers), his money and his sword. So, when he finally arrives at the French capital, his welcome is far from warm. Things take a turn for the even worse when his first meetings with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the best of the Musketeers, result in him challenging each of them to duels. Finally, taken under the wing of the Three Musketeers rather than being killed by them, the young Gascon finds himself embroiled in the machinations of the cunning Cardinal Richelieu and his deadly agent, Milady de Winter, with plans to dishonour the Queen of France herself. A tale of high adventure, full of fun, swordplay and affairs of the heart…

Originally written by Alexandre Dumas (in collaboration with his regular ghost writer Auguste Maquet) and published in 1844, this swashbuckling historical tale became one of the most enduring adventures in literature, challenged only by, perhaps, ‘Treasure Island’. Numerous adaptations have been made, for stage and screen, including musicals, animation, and even an opera. The script that Chris Argles chose to direct was by Willis Hall, and had been published just the previous year, 1995. Although it keeps to the story, more or less, inevitably some liberties are taken and Hall leans into the humour, no doubt one reason for its selection.

It has passed into Workshop legend that Mike Brown, playing, or rather completely inhabiting the role of Porthos, at one point during the production ran across the stage completely naked, except for a strategically placed broad-brimmed musketeer hat (with a large feather). The part demanded it, obviously.

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.

Oliver!

‘Oliver!’ is a stage musical written by Lionel Bart, and adapted from Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel ‘Oliver Twist’. The tale of a young, innocent, orphaned workhouse boy, who falls in with thieves and pickpockets before finding his fortune, it premiered at the Wimbledon Theatre in 1960 before transferring to the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane (Now the Noel Coward Theatre), opening on the 30 June that year and running for what was then a record 2,618 performances. It was the first musical based on a Charles Dickens story that had actually been a success in any real sense.

The musical, very much simplified from the book, contains song after song that will stay with you, catchy beyond belief, from ‘Food, Glorious Food’, ‘Consider Yourself’ and ‘I’d Do Anything’ to ‘Oom-Pah-Pah!’, ‘You’ve Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two’ and ‘Reviewing the Situation’. ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ is as powerfully emotional as anything that has ever been sung on a West End stage.

Bart, real name Lionel Begleiter and descended from Galician Jews, was called a musical genius at the age of just six. He started his songwriting in amateur theatre, and was eventually talent-spotted by Joan Littlewood and joined her Theatre Workshop. His golden era was the late fifties and early sixties, when he wrote hit records for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley, picking up numerous Ivor Novello awards. He wrote the theme to the James Bond film ‘From Russia With Love’ in 1963. But despite earlier successes, it was ‘Oliver!’ that made him a truly household name. Funnily enough, Bart couldn’t read or write music. The music for ‘Oliver’ was transcribed by a man called Eric Rogers, famous for writing the music scores for twenty one of the ‘Carry On’ movies. Bart would would hum the tunes while Rogers wrote down the notes.

In 1969 the movie of ‘Oliver!’ was released, and one might have thought life was good for the composer. However, Bart’s follow-up musicals had failed to recapture the glory of his most famous show, with ‘Twang!!’ (opening in late 1965) closing after awful reviews, mostly empty houses, and only 43 performances. It was the most expensive flop the West End had ever seen up to that point and wiped out Bart’s personal fortune. Nor could ‘Oliver!’ help him out. He had sold the past and future rights to his show to entertainer Max Bygraves in 1959 for just £350.

Oh What a Lovely War!

As 1914 began, Europe was a tinderbox waiting for a spark. On the 28 June, That spark was provided by a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Pricip, who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the streets of Sarajevo. Not just Europe, but the world caught fire. By the time the armistice was declared on the 11 November 1918, millions had died.

It was a hideous conflict. Germany had hoped for a repeat of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, fast moving and decisive, over with complete and resounding success inside six months. It was not to be. The stalemate of the Western Front, with miles of trenches, mud and barbed wire, is the overarching image of this period.

On Armistice Day 1962, Gerry Raffles was listening to the BBC Home Service, and a programme called ‘The Long Long Trail’, written by Charles Chilton. It was a documentary about the First World War, interspersing facts and statistics with reminiscences and popular songs of the day. He thought it would provide a good basis for a new production, and broached the subject with his partner, Joan Littlewood, the prime mover in Theatre Workshop, a group she’d set up in 1945 with Ewan McColl. She hated the idea, but Raffles had brought Chilton along, and the two played and sung a number of the songs. Eventually she was persuaded that perhaps the idea had merit after all.

The show was developed through improvisation, and Littlewood had very definite ideas about what would and would not be admissible on the stage. No khaki or uniforms for instance. Instead the cast would wear pierrot costumes, taken from the Comedia dell’Arte, in order to provide some form of ironic contrast.

The production debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on the 19 March 1963 to rave reviews. However, a transfer to the West End seemed unlikely, as the official censor was unprepared to authorise it. The intervention of Princess Margaret, who having watched a performance, discreetly bent the ear of the Lord Chamberlain, changed that, and it opened at Wyndham’s Theatre on the 20 June.

A film version followed in 1969, directed by Richard Attenborough, and with a screenplay written by thriller writer Len Deighton. Filmed in and around Brighton, notably on the now derelict West Pier, it dispensed with the pierrot costumes and thoroughly embraced the military uniforms. Littlewood loathed it.

Dazzle

In a world of multi-million dollar science-fiction movies, it’s a brave amateur theatre group who takes on a supposed ‘out of this world’ musical play that was intended to parody the much-loved TV series (and subsequent movies) of ‘Star Trek’. John Gardiner also wrote ‘The Dracula Spectacula’ which Workshop performed back in 1977, and would again, no doubt (at least in part) why Chris Argles chose it to direct. However, like its predecessor, the story is only very loosely based on its source material.

At some point in a far-flung future, Sam Galactic of the Star Blade Squadron is welcomed as a hero by Sekurikor, the President of Homeworld, and entrusted with his first command, that of the starship Sunburster One. He and his crew are then given the relatively mundane task of taking the president’s daughter, Dazzle Star, to a finishing school on Procyon. En route, they are intercepted by a Red Star vessel commanded by Big Olga, and then have Dazzle Star kidnapped by spacefaring Irish pirates, before finding out the true purpose of the mission. To complete it, and guarantee the future of mankind, Sam and Dazzle Star must throw themselves back in time to the 1960’s and survive an unlikely encounter with a greasy, leather-clad motorcycle gang led by the daunting Sue Zuki.

Of course, that’s only how it started out. Though the story may have remained much the same, Workshop took exception to a lot of the treatment meted out to the various characters. In the script, the ship’s doctor inexplicably sounded like one-time world champion boxer Muhammad Ali. That went. The random Irish pirates were ditched in favour of the classic Trek villains, Klingons, with all the gags that you can imagine the name entails, and their song became a spoof of ‘Pink Elephants On Parade’ from Walt Disney’s ‘Dumbo’ (Why? Ask Mark Taylor. But it was great fun.).The captain developed a middle initial to become Sam T Galactic. The ship lost a number and gained a ‘USS’ prefix, and the set of the ship’s bridge was as close to an exact copy of the original Enterprise as our limited budget could manage. The wardrobe guidelines were thrown out too, and in came fairly faithful reproductions of the classic Starfleet uniforms.

We boldly went where Samuel French didn’t expect us to go.

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.