Tales from the Green Room 1979

The Best Beloved spotted a factual error in my last dispatch from the Green Room, this very personalised history of the Bench Theatre. As I have said before, these reminiscences are based upon personal memory without access to the Bench archives, so errors or misperceptions or views from an individual perspective are bound to occur. It is one of the reasons that these Tales from the green room will change format after this dispatch. This is the last one that will deal with ancient history and, from now on, the tales will be concerned with particular productions and will use the archive material carefully stored and maintained by the Bench archivist.

Anyway I was telling you about the factual error spotted in the last Tale when I was describing the 1977 production of “As You Like It” and the advent of the Penroses on the Bench scene. Spokey Wheeler did make an appearance in 1977 but didn’t play Silvius to Jenny Jones’ shepherdess.

Spokey did go on to be Bench Chairman and Chairman of the Arts Centre but he didn’t play Silvius.

That honour went to Langley Gifford, a Havant College student at the time. In fact Langley may have been the very first Havant College student to have joined us but he definitely was one of the first of a long line of highly successful Havant College additions to the company, which have been a direct result of David Penrose becoming a Bench member. Such Bench stalwarts as Mark Wakeman and Damon Wakelin joined initially as Havant College students, before going off to University, and eventually returning to Havant and the Bench Theatre. Mark, I remember, arrived for “Martin Chuzzlewit” (May 1990) and one of the productions lined up for a backwards look in the forthcoming series of “Tales from the Green Room”.

I did say that I would review our first version of “Habeas Corpus” in this particular Tale. We did the very first production of any kind in the Arts Centre in November 1977 with me directing the Alan Bennett farce (It was reprised in July 1994 with Jacquie Penrose as director).

Alan Bennett wrote a farce in Habeas Corpus – admittedly in his own linguistic style but he deliberately wrote it in the form of a farce. The driving force behind a farce and what motivates the characters is desperation. A superficial reading of Habeas Corpus can mislead you into thinking it’s about English eccentricity and observation of quaint people and their foibles. But if you remember that each one is driven by desperation then the throwaway lines are not occasioned by wry humour but are wrested from tortured souls. The audience reaction should begin as quiet chuckles of recognition but as the farce proceeds, the pace quickens and the events come tumbling in on one another in ever hectic fashion, the laughter begins to roll in waves until the ultimate sign of success is audience humour exhaustion – “enough is enough already – my sides ache – please stop!”

One of the comments heard occasionally at play selection evenings is the plea that the Bench do something light, a frivolous bit of fun for all concerned. When such a suggestion surface, I groan because invariably comedy is hard work to do really well and the payback only comes in performance – there are invariably tears and tensions during the rehearsal period unless everyone involved is on the same wavelength. Such comments go double for farce!

Added to the difficulty of mounting a farce as described above was the fact that we were about to mount a theatrical performance in 1977 in a building, which had just ceased being the Civic Offices and Council Chambers of the Borough of Havant. The sunken area in Red Mango on the way to the toilets used to be the Mayoral Changing Room and what is now the theatre was the Council Chamber itself. From this we had the public gallery, which is now the balcony and lighting box. However, in 1977, there was no tiered seating. In fact there was no seating at all. The entrance at the back of the auditorium entered on the same level as what is now the stage. It was a purely arbitrary decision on my part that the stage area became the stage area. We had to clean and clear the area to make it practicable as an auditorium. We could have built a temporary stage area on rostra and this would probably have existed to this day. However, I went for performing on the flat and raising the audience on temporary seating stands. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was setting down the way the theatre has been used ever since in what is the David Spackman Auditorium or Hall, named after one of the Bench members, whose exploits I have extolled in previous Tales from the Green Room. One of my reasons for performing on the flat was that I wanted to hang one of the cast. I wasn’t being unnecessarily cruel to my cast but rather the first act ends with an actor having hung himself and the second act starts from exactly the same moment. It is a dangerous activity, hanging, so I had hired a proper flying kit. The lighting grid you see now didn’t exist and the roof was too far for us to use. I designed and built a triangular setpiece similar to the one that Tim Taylor designed for “Art” (July 2006). The difference was that one of the triangles faces was left out but with the cross beams still visible. It was from these that the actor (Brian Sweatman) hung himself. The counter weighting of the whole structure took a bit of thought I can tell you – and quite a few trials and errors before we got it right – without damage to Brian, who fulfilled all performances and rejoined the Bench for “Man of La Mancha” in February 1995.

The audience must have been very uncomfortable during the show but I am pleased to say the production itself was something of a triumph and helped to successfully herald in a new era of the Bench Theatre at the Havant Arts Centre.

I hope to continue these “Tales from the Green Room” by taking a look at some of the landmark productions the Bench has mounted at the Arts Centre since then, relying less on personal memory and more on our wonderful archive material.