Oral Histories

I was trying to develop my own theatre company over the years, particularly in the seventies, and we suddenly realised, Richard Gill and I, that we both were trying to do similar things, and we were living literally within half a mile or a quarter of a mile of each other, which was quite useful and the year Polka actually opened, 1979, was a special year for me because my company, this sort of proper touring company that I’d always wanted started in exactly the same year and my second daughter was born that year as well so it was a very good year! Well Richard Gill was a name that I indeed had heard of, and he was one of the children’s theatre pioneers. I knew that he had a company which toured and which specialised in actors and puppets, and the puppets were a very important part of it which differentiated him from any other company. There were various organisations in those days which were promoting the idea of theatre for young people. There was a schism between if you like Children’s Theatre and Theatre in Education. They were polarised, partly because I think the T.I.E. people felt that the importance of what they were doing was in schools and that the work they should be doing would very much be issue based, so you might do a project about bullying, I suppose the usual sort of issues. And they rather looked down upon the children’s theatre brigade who they felt were just doing things about elves dancing on the village green which I don’t think we were, although there were some companies like that, obviously there are all sorts, it’s a broad spectrum, but we were trying to educate through entertainment, my own theory was always that you could never really educate unless you were entertaining and my dream was to have a company which was doing work, particularly for primary schools, I mean we had the same objectives as far as schools was concerned, I wasn’t really interested in going into schools, I had done that but I really wanted to get them into the theatre building which I though was an exciting building, certainly for me and my child it had been and I thought that could trigger something which would last them for life. Unfortunately a lot of the people in the Theatre in Education movement saw theatre buildings as middle class places that you shouldn’t take children to or whatever. They were institutions that they didn’t really approve of and that was a great shame, but Richard was one of these people who saw things more the way I did and at this particular conference I was speaking, and I saw this man sitting there and he came up to me afterwards and introduced himself. As a result of that we met and he told me that his dream was to have a theatre and he’d found a possible building in Wimbledon and would I be interested in talking to him more about it. He invited me to go onto what was called the committee of management, it wasn’t a board I don’t think, it was a committee of management who would help steer the whole project through. And I said, “Yeah absolutely, fine” and that was how it all started, it was very domestic in a sense. You felt that there was a group of friends, as we became, who were all helping Richard towards his dream, and Liz of course, Richard’s wife, who was a brilliant theatre designer. He ran around doing everything, and of course he was writing the plays, and he was directing the plays, and he was casting the plays. It was very much, not a one man band, I shouldn’t say that because I think Liz, his wife, was very instrumental in getting things going, she was his right arm in many ways and then people that he brought on board, Stephen Midlane (sp?) who came for a six month, nine month attachment and ended up staying there for his whole working life and he’s only just retired forty plus years later, so there was this willingness but nevertheless the vision was Richard’s, and certainly he was the one who managed to get a royal to come and open the place, the Queen Mother came, and that was a lovely day because it did go very very well, and she was very gracious and they did a couple of excerpts of plays and they had children there and everything was absolutely right. Richard was determined the quality was important, the sort of homemade aspect of everything was important, and when you went into the auditorium of course, it was like going into the Arabian Nights, I suppose was the inspiration, I don’t know what sort of curly-whirly things, beautifully crafted things and the colour scheme, I mean quite dark purples, and it was an exciting place to go into I think he actually called it the Enchanted Theatre, I think the original brochure that was brought out, which was again was a very nicely produced thing. All the way along that was what I sensed from Richard, that he wanted quality, he didn’t want ever to be accused of cutting corners. Remarkably, Richard’s baby has managed to continue and to grow and to be fully fledged. I remember particularly with James and the Giant Peach, Roman Stefanski (sp?), Roman directed James and the Giant Peach very very well, and the excitement when the peach was growing was tangible and was magic, people would say, “My child loved being there, it was so real, they thought it was real.” They didn’t think it was real, I don’t believe children think it was real any more than we do, but the fact is children are more willing and able to suspend their disbelief and enter into the spirit of something than adults, and will enjoy doing that given the opportunity to and when they do, when they’re swinging full with it, it is to me the most exciting thing. So I think that James and the Giant Peach is probably a highlight of my memories. The amazing inventiveness that designers and directors have displayed over the years I think is phenomenal. I think we owe them a huge debt because they manage to make all sorts of different settings seem almost easy, oh yes that’s the way it will have to be, that’s terribly terribly difficult. And not only that, because of the financial problems, not problems but the fact that there isn’t that much money has meant over the years that you can’t have stage management who are up there changing scenery and doing everything, so the actors in nearly every case do it as part of their job during the course of the show, and sometimes the scene changes are as exciting as the play, you know we watch the speed of it. Those limitations are a shame, but at the same time, because the limitations are there, very often they lead to creativeness which might not have been there if they hadn’t been there. Polka has paved the way very successfully in commissioning new work and quite a lot of contemporary subjects that maybe would have been difficult to do in theatres some years ago and I think the work of Polka, and indeed Unicorn to be fair, has changed the scene hugely and the horizons are wide open. In spite of the fact that children’s theatre is more respected than it was, I think we have helped a bit and that now there is much more work available. There are many more people who actually want to do it, there are more people want to act in children’s theatre, they see it as a career rather than a step on the ladder directors, musicians, writers, therefore there is now a sector which I believe would not have been there in quite such a strong way unless we had kept going and pushed and Polka is really at the forefront of that.