The Compton Players' NEWSLETTER JULY 2000

Summer, so they tell us, and already the first stirrings are being heard in the land as the Compton Players begin to prepare for their Autumn production. Mike Long is the producer, as many of you know, and he would like to make a start in August. Further details are given below.

Otherwise, we seem to be in that summer lull when everyone breaks up for the hols and starts going off to foreign parts. Not too much happening, in other words. In this edition we have some information about past and recent events, together with an article about promenade productions - what they are and what they're like - and the usual sprinkling of anecdotes.

The next newsletter will be at the beginning of October so that we can use it to publicise the Autumn production. Since it can take up to three weeks to get everything together, typed, photocopied and distributed I'd be grateful if any contributions could reach me by 10th September. Many thanks.

The Worst Stage Effect

This unique moment of corporate nausea arose during the opening performance in 1945 of The French Touch, staring Arlene Francis and Brian Aherne. Seeking to add novelty to the occasion, the play's highly inventive press agent had all the programmes and usherettes liberally doused in French perfume. Had it stopped there the boudoir aromas might have proved an acceptable gimmick. However, the agent was so pleased with it that he arranged for perfume to be blown through the ventilating system as well.

The results were staggering. In no time at all half the audience had crawled out into the street and the other half were in deep sleep. The cast struggled queasily through to the end of the play.

Taken from The Book of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pile, pub. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979

The Autumn Production

Mike Long is producing. There will be a reading and, hopefully, a casting meeting on August 1st in the Scout Hut, Compton, beginning at 8 o'clock. Mike hopes to do Potter's Brimstone and Treacle but it depends upon who is available.

Rehearsals will start on 16th August. The nights of the performances will be November 9th, 10th and 11th.

An enjoyable barbecue on June 17th when, despite a slightly chilly evening and the football, there was a good turnout and some welcome new faces, all of which we hope we'll see again. Many thanks to Scott - why do I keep calling him Roger? - who played the major part in organising it and to all others who were involved.

Hamlet Without The Prince

This is said to have actually happened at a presentation of the play in 1787 with no-one playing the title role. It was to have been played at the Richmond Theatre by an inexperienced actor called Cubit who had previously only been given small, walk-on parts. His debut as the Prince of Denmark had not been much relished by the first night audience. This so undermined Cubit's confidence that he was taken unwell on the second night just before curtain-up. With Hamlet ailing in his dressing room the manager was obliged to request that the audience 'suffer a production' which omitted him entirely.

According to Sir Walter Scott the play was better received than on its first night, and many of the audience felt that it was an improvement on the complete play.

- from The Book of Heroic Failures

Promenade Productions

Whether a production is staged in a conventional manner on a stage at one end of the auditorium or whether it is theatre in the round, the audience usually stay in one place and, by and large, so do the actors.

In a promenade production, however, both the cast and the audience move around from one area to another. Some plays - a minority, I suspect - seem to be almost designed for this style of production.

During the past two years I've had the good fortune to be involved in two productions of this type, once as a spectator and once as an active participant. The first was Larkrise, based on the semi-autobiographical novels of Flora Thompson set in rural Oxfordshire around 1900. The production was presented in Lains Barn, north of Wantage, which was and is a barn, modified to some degree to provide 20th, if not 21st century, comfort. The company was the Domino Players from Wantage and this was a beautiful production.

The entire floor area of the barn was used. It was in turn a village street, the neighbouring gardens of cottages or the open fields around the village. The sight of a line of mowers across the width of the barn, swinging their scythes in unison as they moved down the length of an imaginary hayfield was a memorable one. Good lighting was used to enhance the various effects and the audience was discreetly shepherded with great skill from one area to another, either to get them out of the way of the actors or to give them a better view of the action.

The second production, one in which I took part, was recently in Mother Courage and her Children, presented by the same company and once again in Lains Barn. The play is by the German author Berthold Brecht, and traces the history of one woman and her children through the course of fifteen years in the Thirty Years War in the 17th century. On this occasion the floor of Lains Barn had to represent a much larger area than the fields around an Oxfordshire village - no less than central and northern Europe. At different times areas of the barn were used to represent battlefields, encampments, a general's tent, a sacked town and a garden. The gallery was used to represent the upper storey of one house and, later, the rooftop of another.

A feature of the play and which has to be a part of any production is the wagon which Mother Courage and her children pull around Europe in the wake of the troops to whom they sell food and clothing and anything else that's required.

The wagon takes up a lot of space. In a production which I saw many years ago in London, the theatre had a very wide and deep stage. The wagon, a four-wheeled one, still seemed to bulk uncomfortably large at times and so perhaps a promenade production is a sensible answer to the problem. In the Domino Players' production we cheated by using a light two-wheeled gig, made up to look larger than it was. Even so, the producer had to give quite a lot of thought to where and when it was to be moved since it still seemed to take up a surprising amount of space.

Inevitably, there is a certain sense of freedom for the actors in being able to roam around such a large space. At the same time it felt slightly strange to have the audience quite so close to you and even slightly intimidating if you were sitting down and they were standing up or moving about within feet of you. Personally, I missed the magic barrier of the proscenium arch and one seemed to need to work fairly hard both to stay in character and to project oneself.

Still, interesting experiences, both plays, and perhaps an experiment for us to try. It has to be the right play, of course, and in a production of this type some thought needs to be given as to how the audience should be managed and moved around, both for their benefit and that of the actors. Something for the future, perhaps.

R. B.

The Least Successful Audience Participation

The growing trend towards audience involvement has given us all the opportunity to add to theatrical confusion.

During 1974 a young woman attended a performance of the rock musical Godspell in London.

During the interval, the cast invited members of the audience up on the stage to meet them. She is said to have left her seat, walked down the arcade outside and passed through the stage door. After climbing a flight of dark stairs, she turned right and found herself on a brilliantly lit stage.

To the great surprise of herself and everyone else, she found herself in the middle of the cast acting Pygmalion at the theatre next door.

DIARY

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