The Frog Prince played at the end of January 2012. The show is now over but here is a shot of the cast in hysterics at the end of the matinee:
A Touch of Big-headedness!
In July 2011, I had the pleasure of directing Alan Ayckbourn's RolePlay with the Southfields Theatre Group. As a founding member of the group, I have been involved from its inception, having also written and directed its first production which was a pantomime, Cinderella. Here is a link to the RolePlay page from which you can also explore the rest of the site depicting other members' profiles, past and forthcoming productions: http://www.southfieldstheatregroup.org.uk/2011/past-productions/
Early Days
In my teens to early twenties, I belonged to the Brycbox Youth Theatre in New Malden, Surrey. I was involved with almost every production that the group put on between 1973 and 1981 when the local council decided to close the premises. I spent most of my time there doing back stage stuff, mostly stage management but also co-directed one production and occasionally acted. Some of the shows we put on were: Zigger Zagger, The Crucible, The Ruling Class, Black Comedy and White Liars, Billy Liar, Love on the Dole, Circles, There's a Lot of it About, No Passaran, Big Al. It was during this period that I honed my skills as a photographer. In fact for three shows, I took a number of pictures that were used as back projections. For White Liars (set on a seaside pier at dusk) I went down to Worthing having gained permission to go on the pier after hours and took a series of shots before, during and after dusk. For No Passaran, I took a number of rostrum shots of archive pictures of atrocities from WWII. I also put the main character in a mock up of a boxing ring and spent about half an hour teasing him into a sweat before taking some action shots of him sparring. For Big Al, I produced (this was before the convenience of Power Point) a series of news headlines using Lettraset which I then photographed. For the latter two shows, I shot all the pictures using Agfa Dia-Direct, a little known 35mm black and white slide film. The boxing pictures were initially shot on Kodak Tri-X (pushed to ISO 1600), printed then re-photographed as slides. This produced a good 'aged' effect. During the years at Brycbox, I also photographed most of the shows. Unfortunately, pretty well all the pictures I took during that period have been lost.
When the Brycbox closed down, the main youth group continued in the old dining room upstairs at the Fountain pub in New Malden, later moving to the Dysart Arms in Ham when Chris and Anne the managers moved on. We put on a number of shows in pubs, fields or anywhere we could, including getting through the first round of a national amateur theatre competition with a piece of alternative theatre. Unfortunately, our first attempt at the competition met with disaster (although it was arguably a better piece) due to its political undertones.
After a year or two, a few of us felt that we needed to move on to doing something different and with smaller numbers. Four of us thus broke away to form Fourway Theatre. We put on two shows at the studio at Epsom Playhouse. The first was an original piece called Us and Them. The second (for which we pulled in a woman) was Steven Berkoff's marvellous version of The Fall of the House of Usher. Unfortunately, due to work commitments, we had to call it a day after Usher.
I and a couple of others drifted into the Barn Theatre in Molesey where I appeared in a version of the Snow Queen and Death of a Salesman. After that (around 1984) I had a long break until becoming a founder member of the Southfields Theatre Group in SW London. More soon....
