Robin Hood

The Woodman has been Theatre Workshop Coulsdon’s ‘local’ for the last fifteen years now – the nearest decent pub to our home base, the Coulsdon Youth and Social Centre in Chipstead Valley Road. Every Monday and Wednesday evening, TWC members can be found quenching their thirst in The Woodman after a hard evening’s rehearsing!

So when we set ourselves a challenge – staging a play in the open air, the gardens of our favourite hostelry seeming like an obvious choice. Fortunately our obliging hosts, Chris and Linda Matthews, (although probably not quite realising what they were letting them selves in for) fully embraced the idea, and you could hardly choose a more appropriate play to be presented in the open air than ‘Robin Hood’.

A ‘Robin Hood’ staged in the open air among real trees and under real stars is quite a different, and very special, proposition to one staged in a theatre or hall.

Although the popular mythology of a medieval Robin had evolved over many centuries, his origins as a powerful manifestation of the Wildwood can be traced back in time, beyond any supposed historical roots, to pre-Christian folklore. Folk plays on the theme of Robin Hood have an ancient pedigree stretching back to at least the thirteenth century. Such plays would have been a familiar entertainment to the common people of the time – and were of course customarily presented in the open air.

Our current production is a free adaptation of a quite recent American script – which in turn was a fairly straight retelling of what we consider to be the most common elements in any recounting of the legend of Robin Hood.

And so began what became our traditional open-air summer production. We would perform in the beer garden at The Woodman every summer until 2010, our last production in 2009 being an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Lord and Ladies’. A number of unsympathetic landlords who simply failed to understand the numbers of additional people we were bringing to the pub to eat and drink each year, a remodelling of the beer garden that didn’t seem to help the pub and certainly worked against us, and then the building of a new cricket pavilion next door with floodlighting that overspilled into the area we were using – all contributed to us taking the decision to move elsewhere. But in 1993, it was a marvellous new experience and one we enjoyed, and would continue to enjoy, for many years.