NEWSLETTER
MAY 2003
| The Compton Players'
NEWSLETTER MAY 2003 |
|
Wanted: more bums
Play readings
Autumn to winter production
Spring Triple Bill - review
Bill & Bob on the move
Dave's cartoon
Casablanca
Odds and ends
Remembrance of things past
How to write a crime novel
CP web site
AGM minutes
CP Calendar
Next newsletter
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Our Spring Triple Bill has come and gone (although Bill & Bob is not
done yet - its world tour has started). You can find all the details below,
including the Newbury Weekly News review and Dave's cartoon, but the big
disappointment was the small audiences. We're not sure why, but it was probably
because people prefer a single play to three one-act ones. Anyway, we're
confident that we will get a full set of bums on seats next time. Read on, and
you'll find out why.
Rob once again has looked beyond the boundaries of Compton and written the first
of two articles on the film Casablanca, and hot off the press are the
minutes of the AGM.
We traditionally hold weekly play readings in the scout hut during the summer
months, and for the past two years I have organised them. This year I'm
suffering from a bit of theatre overload, as well as some tight schedules at
work, so I'm not going to do it. However, if anyone else would like to organise
it (which means choosing some plays to read, reading through them to see how to
allocate parts at the readings, and running the readings), please let me know;
we'd all be very grateful. Even if there's just one play you'd like to read
(perhaps with a view to producing it???), that would be fine.
In either case, I can help. I work within walking distance of Reading library,
which has an excellent drama section, and I can get scripts out if you tell me
what you want.
At the AGM we decided not to do an autumn production because of lack of
support (boo) but instead we will do a pantomime at the beginning of February
(hoorah). It's called The Eighth Dwarf, it's written by Dave Hawkins and
directed by Tracey. See the list of important dates below.
Pantos are always popular with the audiences, so we're expecting some full
houses. As well as our (now) standard four performances, there is also a
Saturday matinee.
As if you didn't know, our Spring production was a triple bill of H's new play Bill & Bob, Green Favours which was our Wallingford production last year, and Pyramus and Thisbe from A Midsummer Night's Dream to round the evening off.
This is the review from the Newbury Weekly News.
| Three times the fun
Compton Players Entertainment Triple Bill: Bill and Bob, Green Favours and Pyramus and Thisbe, at the Coronation Hall, Compton, on Tuesday April 29, Wednesday, April 30, Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May3 Compton Players chose three very diverse one act plays for their Spring production. The first, Bill and Bob, written and directed by H. Connolly, a member of the Players, was a study of two couples' relationships. Well written, funny and dramatic, it explored complex themes within the couples lives. Art reflects life they say, and sometimes the dialogue was explicit, but the actors equipped themselves well and were well rehearsed. Bob (Mike Long), Bill (Dave Hawkins), Maureen (Mary Warrington), Jane (Tracey Pearce) and H. Connolly are to be congratulated on an engaging and effective piece of original theatre. The second act brought us Green Favours by Frank Vickery, a two-hander, with Mark Bailey and Brenda Prior as Tom and Valerie, brought together in the unlikely setting of an allotment garden shed. Tom has persuaded the gardening club to accept Valerie as its first female member. Tom has left his wife, however, and has more than gardening on his mind. In the charged atmosphere of a thunderstorm, complete with a rain lashed window, the characters work through their mutual attraction to a 'what-the-hell' final clinch. With a super set and effects, the actors portrayed their roles well under the direction of Tracey Pearce. In total contrast, the final play was Pyramus and Thisbe, an extract from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. It was a delightful costumed piece, directed by Eric Saxton, in which The Court were entertained by the players in a highly humorous version of Pyramus and Thisbe. The Court was Ian Hickling and Enid Farr as a commanding Theseus and Hippolyta and Paul Shave as a Philostrate. The players were Eric Saxton as the rustic Prologue, Nick Roberts as the hammy Pyramus, Jasmine Gartshore as Thisbe. Faye McGeehin as Wall, Peter Whitworth as Moonshine and Michael Sheperia as Lion. The evening lived up to the title of an Entertainment Triple Bill, and all three plays were well received by the Compton audience. TREVOR DOBSON |
The photo album for the production, taken by Tony, is here. There's also a CD available with all the pictures on.
'I can take any amount of criticism, so long as it is
unqualified praise.'
Noel Coward.
Bill & Bob is CP's entry for the Wallingford Festival this year, but
just after the Triple Bill performances there was a phone call from the
organiser of the Kenton Drama Festival at Henley saying that several groups had
dropped out at the last minute, and could we help. Resisting the urge to stage
all three plays, we took Bill & Bob to Henley on 17th May. Kenton is a
lovely theatre, seating over 200 people, but on our night (which was the final
night with the adjudication), there were only about 30 in the audience. We
didn't win any prizes, but the adjudicator, Russell Whiteley, is also the
adjudicator for Wallingford, so we shall be taking his comments into account.
At Wallingford (15th to 19th June), our turn is on Monday 16th June, so please
come and support us.
We have also been asked to take part in the Shinfield Festival, where we are
performing on Thursday 17th July.
'We were on tour for five weeks in Leeds,
so we were living, working and playing together. At the end of that, either
no-one is going to be speaking or we're going to end up adoring each other.
Fortunately it was the latter.'
Jacqueline Pearce on touring with Dangerous Corner. Official London Theatre
Guide 15.11.01.
Click
on it to see the big animated version.
'No one could have seen what was going to come.'
- Julius Epstein, scriptwriter
The 1940s film Casablanca is an example of a production which was
initially expected to be fairly ordinary - Hollywood studios in the 1930s and
40s, after all, were knocking out films at the rate of one a week - but which
through an extraordinary combination of circumstances and coincidences became a
worldwide success. It also turned Humphrey Bogart from a star into a major star,
brought the Swedish star Ingrid Bergman to the world's attention, won Oscars for
its scriptwriters and has been voted recently as one of the most popular films
of all time.
In the amateur theatre we've all known productions which didn't turn out as
expected. Sometimes something which seemed good and important to us never seemed
to quite set the audience alight. More often something about which we were
uncertain suddenly seemed to take wings at a dress rehearsal or during the first
performance and we knew they'd be queuing for tickets by Friday. Something
similar to this unexpected success seemed to happen with Casablanca. In the
early days of its production one of the studio's story-editors described it as
'pure hokum'. Another studio figure described it cruder terms but,
significantly, did think that something could be made of it. Even later on in
the proceedings some of the people working on it were still thinking of it in
detached and fairly cynical terms. As one of them said, 'It was just another
film'.
The script had begun life as a play written by written by Murray Burnett and
Joan Alison. He was a high school teacher and sometime playwright in New York
City and she, when she wasn't writing plays, was a wealthy divorcee and
socialite.
In 1938 Burnett and his wife had taken a holiday in Europe. They had arrived in
Vienna as the Nazis invaded Austria and, said Burnett later, 'the Viennese were
ecstatic about it'. The Burnetts were horrified by what they saw and heard: the
thud of marching jackboots, elderly Jews being assaulted in the streets,
never-ending choruses of Horst Wessel, the Nazi Party anthem. They left Austria
with relief and moved on to the south of France. In France they were almost
equally disturbed by the way in which, it seemed to them, people were trying to
ignore what was happening in Austria and Germany. Depressed and uneasy at the
atmosphere around them and by what they had seen in Vienna they went one evening
to a nightclub. This place, wherever it was, seemed to them both to be an oasis
of cheer and forgetfulness amidst the surrounding gloom and nervelessness. One
of the first things they had seen on entering the club was a lone man softly
playing a grand piano. Burnett later said that it struck him at the time what a
wonderful opening it would make for a play and it is, of course, a scene
repeated with Sam in Casablanca.
Burnett stored his impressions in his mind and when he and his wife returned to
New York he contacted his fellow playwright Joan Alison and over the next few
months they wrote and rewrote the play and then tried to find someone who would
stage it.
Although it had an exotic setting in North Africa, the plot was a fairly simple
one. Set in the early months of World War Two when France had fallen to the
Germans the scene is set in a nightclub owned by Rick, an expatriate American
with a slightly dubious past. Into the club one night comes a former lover who
he had known in Paris in the years before the war: 'Of all the gin-joints in all
the towns all over the world she walks into mine.' She is expecting her husband,
a Czech businessman and prominent anti-Nazi. They both need travel documents in
order to leave North Africa so that he can continue to help lead the fight
against Nazi Germany. But French North Africa at that time is a very dangerous
place, ruled by the Vichy French, the puppet government set up by the Germans in
defeated France, everybody's loyalties are uncertain, the Vichy authorities
cannot be trusted and their German masters are to be feared. Rick acquires
travel papers, which he needs to make his own escape but instead he gives them
to his former mistress and her husband, both out of his great love for her and
so that her husband can continue his struggle against the Nazis. They leave at
night from a mist-shrouded airfield and Rick's fate is left uncertain.
Although many details were to be changed before it came to the screen, not least
the title which was the less than snappy Everybody Comes to Rick's, the
plot was to provide the basic storyline for Casablanca.
Burnett felt very deeply about what he had seen in Europe and the play is quite
consciously anti-Nazi. It was not the best time, however, for such a plainly
anti-Nazi tract. Although the war in Europe by this time, 1940, had been in
progress for several months and many nations had fallen to the German forces the
American government was still officially neutral and many Americans were opposed
to being involved in yet another European war. Burnett and Alison were unable to
persuade anyone to take on their play - in fact it never was produced on stage -
and their agent decided instead to try and place it as a film-script.
One of the places it ended up at was Warner Brothers' New York office where it
languished amongst heaps of other unsolicited scripts. On a visit from
Hollywood, Irene Lee, the chief story-editor from Warners' West Coast office
found Everybody Comes to Rick's and liked it. A former actress, she had a
reputation for finding good stories having recommended at one time that Warner
Brothers take up Gone With The Wind; a suggestion which they ignored.
Lee took the script to Hal Wallis, a senior producer at Warner Brothers and also
Jack Warner's chief lieutenant. Her timing was perfect. It was four days after
December 7th, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the
United States had just declared war on Japan and her ally, Germany. The air of
studied neutrality had vanished and anti-Nazi films were suddenly very much in
fashion. Quite apart from that, Wallis liked the script; Burnett and Alison were
paid $20,000 for it and the studio swung into action with well-practised
professional ease to make the film.
Taken from Bogart by A M Sperber and Eric Lax, published
Weidenfield and Nicolson 1997. ISBN 0 297 81275 0
Ronald Reagan as Rick?
Hedy Lamarr or Tamara Toumanova (who she?) as Lisa?
It nearly happened. Read next time how Casablanca got made.
RB.
Following the anecdote about husband and wife team Alfred Lunt and Lynn
Fontanne chronicled in the previous edition (Don't be lousy, dear) I've since
discovered that such incidents were not unusual between them. So much so that
when they were in a production of The Taming of the Shrew in New York in
1936 playing Petruchio and Katharine one of the stagehands noted that the
relationship between the couple off-stage mirrored their relationship on-stage.
He remembered this and when he later became a producer it provided the
inspiration for the musical Kiss Me, Kate which portrays a similar
situation and is also based on The Taming of the Shrew.
Kiss Me, Kate also provided the composer and lyricist Cole Porter with
the opportunity, once he had been persuaded to do it, to write some of his best
songs and his wittiest lyrics including, amongst many others:
'I've come to wive it wealthily in Padua If wealthily then
healthily in Padua.'
with its chorus:
'With a hey, nonney, nonney and a hey, hey, hey, Not to
mention, money, money for a reh hey heyney day.'
Elsewhere he succeeds in rhyming Coriolanus with heinous, gay (gay ay ee) with
Pompeii, and in one verse of 'I hate men' - they should be kept like piggies in
a pen - he succeeds in rhyming democracy (democrassy) with brassy and Lassie all
in the same verse. And it all matches the music, which he wrote, as well. In
fact, he professed scorn for teams such as Rodgers and Hammerstein where two
people were required to write a song.
Most of the above was gleaned from the programme notes to Wantage Stage Musical
Company's recent production of Kiss Me, Kate. Very, very good and well
worth seeing. The best amateur pit orchestra I think I've ever heard, ranging in
age from about 11 to 60 and as good as some professionals.
'The thing about performance, even if it's
only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain
within ourselves infinite possibilities.
Daniel Day Lewis.
On 22nd May, Tracey and I (Paul) and a few others of us went to see The
Edge of Darkness at the Haymarket, Basingstoke. This is a Brian Clemens
thriller that we performed at Compton in 1988. It was Tracey's first performance
with CP; she played the maid, and I played Livago, the seedy Russian who gets
poisoned.
Before I saw it, I had a clear recollection of just one of my lines from the
play. As the play unfolded I found many of my lines coming back to me, but
strangely the line I had remembered was actually said by one of the other
characters. And I could remember absolutely nothing of the plot. Even towards
the end, I couldn't remember whodunit.
If you're interested in another stroll down memory lane, the Sinodun Players at
Wallingford are performing Alan Ayckbourn's It Could Be Any One of Us
from 14th to 19th July. We produced this in 2001. The play has three alternative
endings, with a different murderer for each ending. We stuck to one of the
endings, but Sinodun are going to learn all three, and decide each night which
one to do. If you're interested in going to see it, call me (01635 866800); that
week is difficult because we're doing Bill & Bob at Shinfield, but Monday 14th
currently looks like the best bet.
In the programme notes for The Edge of Darkness, it lists ten rules laid down in 1928 by Monsignor Ronald Knox, in his introduction to an anthology of detective stories, for the traditional crime novel:
Since we acquired the domain name c-p.org.uk, it has been used for the CP emailing list but the web site itself has been lying fallow waiting for a cyber-farmer to come along and sow his seed corn. (Sorry about that, got a bit carried away by the metaphor.) I've put the Triple Bill photos up on it, and now this newsletter, but Tony Gartshore has agreed to lick it into shape and turn it into a decent web site, with some help from Michael Sheperia. Send any suggestions for what you'd like to see on it to Tony.
This was a joint effort by Louise and Tracey. The minutes are here as a PDF document (see the top of this page if you need to get a PDF reader). At the time of writing, the Treasurer's Report was not available, but it will be added when it appears.
[Tracey told me to make it really bold, so that everyone reads it.]
|
15th to 20th June |
Wallingford Festival (CP on 16th) |
Corn Exchange |
7:30 |
| 16th to 19th July | Shinfield Festival (CP on 17th) | Shinfield Players Theatre | 7:30 |
| Thursday 28th August | fist read through of Panto - all interested to attend or ring Tracey if they can't make it | Scout Hut | 7:45 |
| 4th - 7th February 2004 | Pantomime Performances - two on Saturday | Village Hall | 7:30 |
All offerings to me, by email to