Oral Histories

When you had Polka Children’s Theatre basically said “this is what we do and this is who we are performing the stuff, the shows, for” and that was quite amazing from that point of view.  It set itself up as a children’s theatre at a time when children’s theatre was still not considered. Some people used to say “I just get into children’s theatre so as to get experience of how to become a performer and then I’ll just get rid of that and just go and do the adult stuff”.  Because it pays bills via the back door and that kind of is where it is.  Yet the people, who did the Polka Theatre knew their audience and were passionate about it and were getting on with it.  Their goal, their model, their target was aimed at a specific part of society and that was children.  Most other theatres where you go to they do a children’s performance and they do it for however many weeks during half terms or Easter breaks or anything or during the summer.  Well the Polka did it as often as possible all year round and that was quite an incredible difference. Back in the very very early eighties a friend of mine at the time, Simon Greenhill, whose parents were both patrons of Polka Theatre themselves, said to me, “Do you fancy doing a bit of a summer job?  All you have to do, Dave, is to take these leaflets around and give them out to people, who basically might want to see a show, a children’s show.” Something like that. Most people knew that I liked to perform anyway and there I was in this establishment working as someone who was giving out flyers and stuff and then I began to do a lot more work backstage so I started working with the performers and such.  And that was one insane summer.  It was amazing how those six weeks changed my life and I got to do some really interesting things – not necessarily performing at the time, but it was my chance to see how a theatre worked.  So imagine my surprise as I now can go into this building where they have marionette puppets and glove puppets and they had a shop that sold amazing sweets and things and then upstairs there was the shows that were going on once or twice a day and it was unlike anything that I’d ever been to.  Even to the Wimbledon Theatre which was just a little higher up the road. I had never seen anything like it.  I remember it how it used to be as the old church hall and it was a pretty scary place to be in those days.  You can imagine all of this everything that was dark and dank was now bright and coloured and brightly lit.  They had this amazing railway train that the kids would go and sit in and eat and drink and stuff like that.  And they had a garden in which to play in between shows and stuff. Yeah it was like nothing that I had ever seen or experienced. So quite a magical thing, quite an unusual thing for me to see and it made a lasting impression.   I was about fifteen when that started so by the time I got back to the Polka Theatre with my own show I was 24.  I’d always promised myself that I would one day go back as a professional performer and I am very pleased to say that I’d gone back and done several things there including a recording of The Fun Song Factory, which was a great children’s show to be a part of and this thing was just a bunch of people singing nursery rhymes and it just took off.  It was huge.  So I went back as a performer and it was a fantastic show and I’m very pleased to say that The Fun Song Factory went on to make loads of videos itself, including the spawning of a few TV series and a revamp as well.  So it was a fantastic thing to be a part of and of course that started at the Polka Theatre. They were the first place to take it on.  And then of course some years later I took in the show that we wrote Mrs Phillip’s Night Together (??) called Get Up & Go, which was just an activity show, we sing songs, we do rhymes and actions so it was a bit like The Fun Song Factory, but with a lot less people.  And that became a DVD. That became a live show and it was quite a successful show.  People still want it even now. A lot of what I do was literally born out of on-the-job training, just being around enough people, watching and studying. If you showed me a list of all the people that worked at Polka I could literally just go down each one and say “yes, they were lovely”. It was a wondrous thing.  It really was.  It was like an extended family. These people didn’t mind talking to me, interacting with me and thus connecting as it were and that was incredible thing to be a part of.  It truly really was. It was an environment that I guess most people would have passed it by unless they had children.  There was a certain type of person that would attend a children’s theatre like Polka.  They were normally, as you could say, they were either middle class or very informed or very well educated, had aspirations as such and they clearly knew the importance of taking their children to see people perform, but those were those kind of people.  Like you say that was the kind of community that I wasn’t used to and a lot of my friends were not of that community either.  So when I used to talk about what I did at the weekends my friends were like “no, this all sounds a bit weird to me, you know”.  And it wasn’t  until I think for some of them when all of a sudden they had a cousin or a nephew or relative, who all of a sudden said “I’ve got to take them to this children’s show at the theatre” and they saw it and then they got it so that was nice. My time at the Polka Theatre has been with me for the rest of my working life, my personal life as well, just my life in general.  It might sound a bit like an overstatement, but like I said before, right at the beginning of all of this I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing wasn’t open to people like me.  So for me to go in – this lone lad, South London, black, working class – to see this theatre and the people in it, who became my mentors, my friends, my heroes and for me to do the job that I do is very hard to quantify.  I hope I have done a good enough job, but the Polka Theatre itself, in a word, changed my life. In fact that’s a sentence. Polka Theatre changed my life and gave me something to shoot for where I’m sure had I been left to it, had I not been at the Polka Theatre, I’d still be wishing that I was on a stage somewhere, but not knowing how. So really it helped me live.