LETTER TO AMERICA

My dear blogging friend, Frances, from New York, commented recently on a theatre production that I had just directed. What she wrote was: “I am curious to learn more about how your group arose, how long it's been going, whatever you'd like to tell, actually. It amazes me that folks are willing to give their time to such an activity...not just for one production, but for season after season.”

Well, let me try to respond to that. But before I do I have to say that I am astonished that a city like New York shouldn’t be teeming with amateur drama, opera, dance and circus groups of every kind, catering to every possible taste. While amateur theatre here in Britain may not be thriving quite so vibrantly as it did thirty or forty years ago, there is still a strong tradition of theatre over here.

As you know we Brits tend to be rather more formal, more constrained, less expressive of sentiment than many folk. We still try not to cry and to keep a stiff upper lip. Yet despite this stereotype - or maybe even because of it - we seize any opportunity to ‘let our hair down.’ Charades are played with vigour in elegant drawing rooms, regiments in the field hold concert parties, prisoners put on plays and pantomimes in jail, out of work actors ply for coins in the streets. (You can still see London people busking in Covent Garden, for example, by reciting Shakespeare).

Wanting to perform seems to me to be a basic human instinct. And acting when you can step for a moment out of your personality that everyone knows and metamorphose into a charmer or a villain is truly liberating. The shy person becomes the extrovert and the extrovert, fretful and shy. The young become old, the rich poor. In some bizarre sense which has to be experienced, the stage is a runway from which people can take off and remain airborne so long as the 650 watt spots play upon them. As a therapy for the wayward and for the deprived, the theatre is rightly acknowledged.

So that’s one reason why we do it. Another is the magnificent camaraderie. There are often fierce and spiteful battles too, but camaraderie wins each time. Not for nothing do theatre people call themselves ‘luvvies.’ You may think that calling people ‘darling’ all the time is repulsive - and it is a little - but a company in front of an audience does experience a feeling of togetherness, of experience shared, of genuine happiness that binds them together in such a way that they do feel like a family.

As the old song has it ‘there’s no business like show business’ - and that is true no matter on how humble a level the show may appear.

Our own theatre and our own little group started right after the Second World War ended. I am not familiar with the details but after the trauma of that experience folk rebuilt their communities after years of austerity and began to have fun again. At someone’s initiation a group came together here to put on plays.

You may think that is a difficult thing - but it isn’t. Just a few people can sit in a room or in the park with a theatre script and just read a play. That’s a start. From there you can go on - learning the lines, finding somewhere to rehearse and perform, somebody volunteering to build the set and make costumes - little by little you move forward. It is not actually difficult.

Our group managed to acquire a couple of ‘portacabins’ - imagine trailers without wheels perhaps - and leased from the council some land on which to install them. In these they used to store costumes and build sets and rehearse. Performances took place on the grand stage of the Town Hall.

But then luck came our way and we got a grant from the National Lottery to put permanent walls in place of the ‘portacabins’ and so our little 70 seat theatre was built. And it was built largely by volunteers, laying bricks and pouring concrete. Much equipment, seating and so on was obtained secondhand and bit by bit the theatre developed into what we have today. This, sadly, all took place way before my time.

Now we have to keep the theatre going, which is less easy than putting on plays. In the old days the company had 60 or 70 members. It was hard to win a part in a play so great was the competition. Now we have about a third of that number and far fewer patrons prepared to be generous with their funds.

Partly this is due to people working longer and harder; it is not just our society, voluntary societies everywhere have seen a fall in their numbers. As the older folk retire, there are insufficient new and young recruits these days coming along to replace them.

I do my best to encourage them! There really is no better place to get a buzz. I think of Sammy Davies Junior and his remark “ I’m a ham - I really am. When I open the refrigerator, the light goes on. I do twenty minutes!” And yes, when the lights go on it is as if a part of that electricity goes not into the light but into your very soul.

Let me leave you with the Little Prince - star of our last show - and who says “You can only truly see things clearly with the heart. What is essential remains invisible to the eyes.” he could have been speaking of the theatre.

And that’s why, there really is ‘no business like show business.’

DO CROCODILES EAT CHICKENS?

I find the past seven days have been rather dramatic. Indeed, exceedingly dramatic embracing as they have one play acted in, one play attended and another play written. All of which, I can’t help feeling, must be something of a record - even for an amateur of the theatre like myself.

Suitably clad in scarlet I was bidden to play a dying Cardinal Wolsey in ‘A Man For All Seasons’ - grunting my way peremptorily through an argument with Sir Thomas More. What the argument was about you only need to read Hilary Mantel’s excellent book ‘Wolf Hall’ to discover. Her treatment is rather more enlightening than Robert Bolt’s play even if she does play a game called ‘guess which character my pronouns are now referring to.’ If you pick up the book - and it is the bestseller of the moment - you will know what I mean.

That play ended its run on Saturday with our traditional relaxed cheese and paté supper for the actors and punters alike in the theatre bar. Another production put to bed signals that it is time to think about the next one. Which is where the play written comes in, or rather finished. Except, strictly speaking, it’s more of an adaptation than a play.

Our little rural town is twinned with a similar little rural town in France and our franco- and anglophile families have been shuttling back and forth annually for over twenty years now. I even had the honour to be at one time Vice-Chair of this group and charged with extracting generous subsidies from the European Commission for these cultural and sporting, boozy and gastronomic exchanges.

Recently I found that at one of these suppers in the past - buoyed no doubt by the shabby high of applause and performance - I had made the mistake of suggesting that our little theatre could stage a show for the French visitors. And then two months ago I found myself bounced into doing just that: producing a show of not more than an hour that would be equally comprehensible to someone speaking English only, or French only and that would be sufficiently entertaining to keep our travel-weary and sleep-deprived visitors awake after an alcoholic dinner.

“I’ll adapt the tale of ‘The Little Prince," I said. Which suggestion generally found favour.

Now 'The Little Prince,' or in French ‘Le Petit Prince,’ is a book that French children learn and love from an early age. It is one of those books in which an adult takes a look at the world through a child’s eyes and this makes it both appealing to children and adults. It is unique. A pilot crashes in the desert and he meets a little fellow from a distant star who asks him to make a drawing of sheep. The French government even put its author, his aeroplane and the Little Prince himself on the old 50 franc banknote.

The author - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - lived and died a pilot. When he wasn’t flying, he wrote. He helped to establish airmail services to Africa and later flew reconnaissance missions with the French Air Force. His book ‘Pilote de Guerre’ - (rendered for some reason ‘Flight to Arras’ in English) is one of the greatest novels to express the futility of war. Except it’s not really a novel. He is flying his plane, the mission is absurd, there's a two to one chance he won't get back safely, and yet he is detached, impersonal, dreaming of what is going on around him, the number of switches in his cockpit.

Maybe he was dreaming again on the 31 July 1944 when his aeroplane disappeared into the sea off the coast of Marseille. Who knows what book might then have been in his head? A few years ago both the wreck of his plane and his identity bracelet were found - but, despite various claims, how he met his end will never be known.

Luckily for us between the fall of France in 1940 and his return to active service with the Free French Forces, Saint-Exupéry sought sanctuary in New York and wrote both ‘Pilote de Guerre’ and ‘Le Petit Prince’ on the safer shores of Long Island.

So what is the story about? Le Petit Prince imagines other planets, or rather asteroids, populated not by people but rather each by a single person - so as we follow the Little Prince on a journey across the heavens we meet strange but eternal characters: the businessman, the drunkard, the follower of orders. We encounter love and emotion, pride and folly, longing and intelligence, a fox that wants to be tamed and a flower, cold and haughty.

It is no wonder that French people take this book - and its author - to their hearts. So it is with no little trepidation that I try to adapt it for our show. Adaptations have been made before, of course. There is even a DVD. You can do much on film. But these just tell the story of book and for me they miss the magic.

My adaptation may miss the magic too, but I hope that amid the necessary comedy something of a child's sense of wonder at the universe remains. I have had to change much, condense much. Owing to the limitations of our theatre wardrobe I have had to change the fox who eats chickens into a crocodile. Do crocodiles eat chickens? I have changed the ending too. But in a short piece that has simultaneously to stumble between two languages without boring its audience it has been impossible to include very much of the Little Prince’s philosophy.

Still I have enjoyed writing it and felt at times almost as though the Little Prince himself was sitting on my shoulder, so I hope that Saint-Exupéry will not be turning with irritation in his watery grave at my presumption. He is, I am sure, a reasonable mentor and will only expect what he knows I can fulfil.

Perhaps it was the Little Prince who directed me to seek tickets for Chekov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. This was the play watched. Just to remind me what a good play should be like, perhaps. And a good production too, for a play is just paper without talent to shake it from the page and bring it howling into life. This production was quite superb: a credit to all concerned. If we are a quarter as good with our production of 'The Little Prince' that will be a miracle.