I got involved with “proper drama” at Alleyn’s for a couple of productions. Andorra by Max Frisch was the first of them, when I was just 15. Here are my diary extracts.
The first block, from January, shows little emotion or detail at having got a decent part in a Bear Pit production:
Friday 13 January 1978, Got a talking part in the school play – I’m the innkeeper – V pleased,
16 January 1978, should have rehearsed – cancelled,
17 January 1978, first Andorra rehearsal,
20 January 1978, rehearsed for Andorra, 23 January 1978, rehearsed for Andorra,
24 January 1978 Andorra rehearsal,
26 January 1978, rehearsed for Andorra,
27 January 1978, rehearsed for Andorra,
30 January 1978, rehearsed for Andorra,
31 January 1978, Andorra rehearsal.
Two weeks in, by the start of February, I’m a critic as well as a performer. Didn’t I know about hubris? I was way overconfident anyway – “perfected” is not a term I would ever use now:
Thursday 02 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra – OK,
03 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra – OK,
05 February 1978, first Sunday rehearsal for Andorra – not bad,
06 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra,
07 February 1978, Andorra rehearsal – good,
09 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra – good – seems to be OK,
10 February 1978, rehearsed in evening for Andorra,
12 February 1978 rehearsal for Andorra in afternoon – a good one,
13 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra – not bad,
14 February 1978, scene 11 of Andorra perfected.
Matters were bound to take a turn for the worse after that and so they did:
Friday 15 February 1978, Dennis [Galvin] rushed to hospital last night with colitis – Mick Lemp [Michael Lempriere] has taken over,
16 February 1978, rehearsed for Andorra – not bad rehearsal but still looks poor,
17 February 1978, field day and rehearsal,
19 February 1978, rehearsal cancelled as Mick Lemp visits relatives in Exeter,
20 February 1978, Mick stuck in snowdrift, Dan [Shindler] in bed with flu, disaster for play,
21 February 1978, Rehearsed all day for Andorra – Mick & Dan & Den all absent,
22 February 1978, flop dress rehearsal this evening – does not look good.
But the show had to go on:
Thursday 23 February 1978, Yesterday’s flop dress rehearsal lead to an almost empty house [tonight] watching a great performance,
24 February 1978, 2nd night of Andorra – even better than last night – 3/4 house – enjoyed it,
25 February 1978, Last night of Andorra – 7/8 house – performance good – party afterwards – got drunk.
I’m pretty sure my parents came to see Andorra on the middle (Friday) night of the run. And I’m fairly sure the following dialogue (or something like it) took place on the drive home after the show.
MUM: I wasn’t very impressed by some of your school chums in the audience behind us.
ME: What happened, Mum?
MUM: Well, during the interval one of them said to his pals, “I’m looking forward to the bit where Harris has to run around the stage yelling ‘I’m not a Jew, I’m not a Jew.” Then they were giggling. I wasn’t going to let that pass without comment.
ME: Oh, God, Mum, what did you say to them?
MUM: I turned around and asked them why that was so funny. One of the boys explained, “because Harris is a Jew. But he has to run around the stage saying “I’m, not a Jew”. Then the boys giggled some more.
ME: …and then…
MUM: I said, “I’m well aware of all that. I’m his mother and I’ve helped him to learn his lines. I’m just trying to understand what makes it funny.” They went very quiet after that.
ME: Oh, Mum. I’m going to get mercilessly teased on Monday when I get back to school. Or worse. Why couldn’t you just let it go?
DAD: I knew it. I could have told you he’d be upset.
To be fair on the poor boys involved (and I do wonder who they might have been – any confessions?) it was an ironic, rather funny matter. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, my casting in the role of the Innkeeper might well have been based more on my physiognomy than my stagecraft. In any case, we cast had all had a bit of a laugh about the irony of me yelling “I’m not a Jew” during rehearsals and I saw little malice in the remarks as reported by my mum.
But to be fair on my mum, although I did get some serious ribbing on the Monday (as recorded in my diary), it was not at all to do with my mother’s intervention. Indeed the poor boys who got my mother’s tongue-lashing were probably more embarrassed than I was about that matter.
No-one would relish a tongue lashing from my mum. Cruel spectacles and cut glass voice to go with them.
No, the ribbing I received resulted from reports of my drunkenness at the after show party on the Saturday.
As to the exact details of my ribbing-inducing party antics, I recall very little. I do remember drinking far too much cheap party cider – a once-in-a-lifetime mistake (drinking cheap cider, not the occasional over-drinking). I think the party was at Tiggy’s house, mostly in a rather large garage/out-house. Or am I am confusing the Andorra party with the Twelfth Night party?…
Others who were a bit older (I was only 15-and-a-half) and a bit wiser (almost everyone else who was there) might recall the Andorra after show party better.
Still, my mother’s parental intervention was a pretty cringe-making one.
Michael Lempriere had arranged for our drama class to go and see Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton. It would have been the mid 1970s Royal Court revival production (probably the West End transfer thereof), with Beryl Reid as Kath, Malcolm McDowell as Sloane, James Ottaway as Kemp and Ronald Fraser as Eddie.
Anyway, when my mum got wind of it that we were going to see THAT play, she went into high horse mode, for reasons I cannot quite work out. I think she just felt that we were far too young for…whatever it was…not that she really knew anything about it, other than the fact that she probably mentioned it to a friend and that friend looked horrified at the thought. perhaps a sample of two priggish friends.
Mum was probably in a grumpy mood generally at that time – she was in and out of hospital for the first half of that year, culminating in a hip replacement in May. Anyway, she decided not merely to ground me from this one – I might have got away with just minor embarrassment for that. She got on to the school and got the outing cancelled. How un-hip was that?
Several of my drama pals were mightily unimpressed with this, as was I. We were all very disappointed as much as anything else. Michael Lempriere handled the matter with great dignity I’m sure, but that couldn’t prevent the ribbing. In particular, I recall Bob Kelly giving me a hard time; not least suggesting my mother’s physical as well as behavioural similarities with Mary Whitehouse. As my mother had chosen to go down the cruel spectacles line during the mid 1970s (illustrated with a 1977 picture below) this was a difficult charge to deny.
I’m not entirely sure when the theatre trip that never was should have happened. My diary is silent on the whole matter. I am guessing it was supposed to be an after exams jolly at the end of my second year, but it might just have been a start of the next academic year jolly for our drama group. If the latter, we didn’t miss out on Ottaway and McDowell, we missed out on Harry H. Corbett as Ed and Kenneth Cranham as Sloane.
Images scraped with loving care from Alleyn’s Scriblerus
I went with my parents on the Saturday evening to see the last night of that year’s Bear Pit production; a double-header no less – The Lesson & The Real Inspector Hound.
Let us gloss over the monumental water polo victory in the morning…11-7 that reads, just in case you are finding my handwriting a little hard to read.
Let us not linger over the fact that the 12-year-old me thought it important to say that I thought the Generation Game was good…
…whereas 12-year-old me failed completely to mention that Barry White – “The Walrus Of Love” – “The Pachyderm Of Passion” – was riding high at the top of the charts at that time with this classic sound:
No. Let us please focus on Bear Pit production for December 1974. My job back then as a juvenile critic was to be clear, incisive and decisive in my opinions. I think I achieved that:
Bear Pit. The Lesson – boring. Inspector Hound – good.
The late, great, Trevor Tindale spent at lest 100 times as many words saying…if I have understood the thrust of his argument correctly…more or less exactly the same thing in Scriblerus some months later.
I started to keep a diary in January 1974. The 23 January entry is my first record of visiting the theatre, although I went with my parents to see pantomimes and children’s shows before then.
This visit I’m sure was my first school trip to the theatre, an Alleyn’s School outing. I think just for my class; 1S, probably Ian Sandbrook’s initiative. It was a revival of the first production at the Young Vic Theatre, which I think therefore makes it the Young Vic’s first production as an independent theatre company. It seems the revival was a precursor to a glittering US transfer.
All the 11 year old “critic” wrote at the time was:
“Scapino v good indeed. Jim Dale good. Got to bed very late.”
Yet the evening stays quite clearly in my memory. I remember liking the patter song about Italian food and I also recall catching a plastic facsimile of a glass of wine and keeping it in a bottom drawer for years and years. It survived many clear outs, but I think it came a cropper in the end. Who knows, it might turn up in one of my junk boxes some day.
That’s probably because I enjoyed a fleeting moment of stardom in Cinderella (interviewed on stage), whereas I was overlooked in the throng of eager children during Aladdin.
In my mind, I had MET Dick Emery and would share that vignette with anyone who might listen, whereas I had merely “seen” Norman Vaughan and never warmed to the latter as a comedian…there might have been other reasons for that lack of warming of course.
As for Joe Brown and Peter Noone, my memory is mightily confused now that I have done a bit of research into these two pantos and acts. The It’s Behind You! – Pop Stars In Panto piece linked here explains a bit more. In truth, I remember Peter Noone’s performance (and Herman’s Hermits as an act) far more vividly than I remember Joe Brown’s performance or Joe Brown & The Bruvvers as an act.
I don’t remember seeing a collective of Hermits, only Peter “Herman” Noone, but the recorded history suggests a plurality of Hermits, as does a lisgting from The Observer at the time
…I do recall that one of my very early “party pieces” was to sing, I’m Henery The Eighth, I Am. No doubt encouraged by both of my parents, who were great lovers of Edwardian-style music hall.
My (possibly flawed) memory has Peter Noone singing it in Aladdin, but possibly I saw Joe Brown singing it in Cinderella instead…or as well…or neither – perhaps my parents simply taught me that song ahead of seeing one or other of those performers because my parents knew that they had famously sung that song.
While below is a vid of Peter Noone singing it with Herman’s Hermits:
Anyway, point is, possibly on the back of seeing that song performed in these pantos, it became one of my party pieces for much of my infanthood.
Then I more or less forgot about it for best part of 50 years…
…until I remembered it again and wrote an adaptation of the song, which I retitled The Thomas Gresham Nativity Song and performed for The Gresham Society…
…which might only be described as a mock Tudor performance piece. Well, I suppose I was a kid from a mock Tudor house in Streatham:
Mock Tudor Smarty Pants
For those especially interested in this sort of thing, below is a recording of the original music hall version of I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am, sung by Harry Champion:
By the summer of 1968, when I turned six, I think I was probably driving my parents a little bit nuts with my enthusiasm for pop music, which I would tape onto the faithful family Grundig reel-to-reel and play relentlessly:
I think it was fairly soon after that summer perhaps autumn/Christmas 1968 or early 1969, a stack of Beano Records arrived in our household. I still have them. They were children’s stories and classic novels, dramatised and set to famous classical music in the background.
My research for this Ogblog piece has uncovered the fact that they were formerly known as Tale Spinners and had been released initially (late 1950s and early 1960s) on Atlas Records and/or, in the USA, on United Artists Records. Here is the Wikipedia entry about them.
The Beano Label releases of the same material came later in the UK, 1965 from what I can gather, with 24 of the original batch (most of them) making the cut for Beano.
I ended up with 12 of them, although I think I started with a batch of 10. My guess is that dad bought them as remaindered items at the Slipped Disc in Clapham Junction. Possibly, knowing dad’s sometime trading methods back then, he swapped some of his dead stock of cine films for some of the Slipped Disc’s dead stock of records. Exchange is no robbery, as South London merchants were want to put it.
The cast was stellar – or better to say that many were proto-stars: Maggie Smith, Alec McCowen, Donald Pleasence, John Wood, Cyril Shaps, Paul Daneman, Derek Hart, Anthony Woodruff, Judith Whale, Tony Church, Geoffrey Bayldon, Ralph Hallett, Marjorie Westbury, Denise Bryer, Peggy Butt, John Baddley, Alan Rowe, Mary Law, Jocelyn Page & Robert Hardy, to name not all, many of whom went on to great fame and acclaim afterwards.
Here’s the list of my dozen Beanos, each with a link to the Discog entry, either for the Beano Record or for the original Atlas release. The latter tend to contain details on the fabulous cast of actors and actresses who performed each story. Sometimes the cast is listed, sometimes the images contain the cast list, occasionally neither is present:
An example cast list and script – these were not included in Beano versions
The stories and the dramatic telling captured me, I have no doubt. But it was also the music – I think my parents main purpose – that got me hooked and I remember asking my parents what the music was and wanted to hear more of it. Here’s the list again with a quick note on the music of each:
Puss in Boots – Vivaldi (mostly The Four Seasons plus some horn concerto stuff I think)
Hansel and Gretel – Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini and some Nutcracker Suite
The Brave Little Tailor – Mozart Eine Kline Macht Musik – don’t be deceived by the record sleeve that reads “Gluck”. Mozart and Gluck would have both had a hissy-fit about that mix-up.
Oh how I loved these records – some of them I’d listen to over and over again. At first I focussed on the children’s stories, possibly encouraged to leave the more “grown up ones” to one side for a while.
I especially remember being frightened by the Hansel & Gretel one, which is a really creepy, no-holds barred telling of that story. Francesca de Rimini is quite creepy music and the voices are American on that record. The mother…or evil step-mother…drones “something better be done, husband, something better be done”, to encourage the weak-willed spouse to go along with her plan to abandon the children. I had some nightmares about that aspect, yet I recall i wanted to hear the story over and over again, perhaps because, despite the nightmarish scenario, the children somehow get themselves out of trouble and into clover. One further memory about the Hansel & Gretel one. I remember my mother on one occasion, probably when I had been a bit naughty and aping the voice that she had heard countless times, saying, “something better be done, husband” to my dad and me having the collywobbles at hearing my mum say those words in that style.
I remember all of them pretty clearly and had a deep affection for those records.
Soon after, my parents sourced more records, several of which contained the music I had been listening to with these stories, which got me well and truly hooked on serious music, to supplant my interest in pop for several years.
I have pulled together a YouTube Music playlist of my twelve, mostly for my own convenience and/but you are welcome to use it. Do not be put off by the strikethrough on the link – anyone can access my playlists but if you don’t have a YouTube Premium account you’ll get adverts.
Alternatively, you can go to the source I used for that Playlist, where an enthusiast has pulled together all of the Beano ones into a YouTube channel named Beano Records Reboot. Finding that channel today (1 March 2025) has quite literally made my day, not least because I have lost much of the day wallowing with pleasure in that rabbit hole…not that Alice In Wonderland was one of the one’s I owned!
Which did I listen to the most? Hard to recall, but I remember with particular affection from the earliest times Puss In Boots, which I heard again today with great pleasure:
Latterly I recall wallowing in Treasure Island and dreaming of such adventure…
…which is a bit odd really, as my favourite true story about myself reveals me to be a landlubber who is a ludicrously timorous sailor whose timbers are all too easily shivered.
I wasn’t the only kid on our street with some of these Beano Records. I remember listening to some that I didn’t own, I think at the Cedar house or possibly the Benjamin house on our block. The Three Musketeers one, for example, I remember someone playing me at their house, just as I often played mine when friends were round. Those Beano Records were a wonderful part of my childhood, and that of many other youngsters of my generation.
On reflection, I am pretty sure that the purchase of these by my parents was about the music more than the drama. Someone must have recommended them for that purpose and I am grateful to that person, whoever they might have been.
Reflecting on my parents’ irritation at my pop music habits, I suspect that it was my mother who was angling hardest for a solution. Perhaps she even said:
…something better be done, husband, something better be done…
…to encourage my dad to get the records!
Thanks again to Ben at Beano Records Reboot @BeanoRecordsReboot – for his unwitting but hugely valuable help with this piece.
With gratitude to a posting on the Streatham,Balham & Tooting Memories Facebook Group, talking about the Streatham Odeon, I remembered going to see as a small child, Dick Emery (amongst others) in panto there. I did a bit of Googling to find out about it and found out quite a bit – not least through the blogpost linked above.
So, that year I saw Dick Emery, Joe Brown and no doubt some other names I would now recognise, in a production by Audrey Lupton & Arthur Lane.
In 1968 Joe was at the Odeon Streatham in Cinderella with Dick Emery. Joe played Buttons and as part of his routine to entertain Cinderella he performed a multi instrumental spot. In this he played guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele, banjo lutes and even a mandolin!
Is it possible that my later-day love of early music and stringed instruments for the playing thereof was formed all the way back then? Unlikely as I had no memory of Joe Brown’s multi-instrumentation.
The thing that made the event especially memorable for me, was being summoned onto the stage by Dick Emery himself and answering some fiendishly difficult questions in a manner that, for some reason, seemed to make the audience laugh.
This occasion might, technically, have been the first time I ever “trod the boards” personally and certainly my first interaction with a professional performer.
So why did Dick Emery pick on me for the honour of joining the cast on stage and being an unwitting, unpaid comic? The answer is lost in the mists of time.
Possibly I waved my hand and shouted “me! me!” more vigorously than anyone else. Or perhaps my mum did the vigorous waving and shouting for me. Or maybe I just looked like the sort of cocky little kid that central casting would have chosen for the role.
Cocky little Streatham kid c1968
We returned the following year to see Peter Noone and Norman Vaughan in Aladdin, but that, as they say, is another story.
My mum kept certain things and threw lots of things away. Two artefacts from an event at Nightingale survived the sands of time and mum’s occasional “mad-on” clear-outs across the decades.
The above clipping from the Jewish Chronicle is dated 27 May 1966.
Children of the Yavneh Jewish Kindergarten [based at Brixton Shule], presenting fruits for Shavuot at the Home For Aged Jews, Wandsworth [now named Nightingale House]
What a wonderful way to entrench the Jewish festival of Shavuot into the hearts and minds of the little children. Except, that, as history showed 50+ years later, it didn’t work on me and at least one other of the attendees:
The document below provides more detail about the event, which was presumably held a few days before the date of the newspaper notice:
A better quality picture, clearly from the same event. But Reuben Turner’s note hopes that people “will enjoy the play”. My guess is that he used a picture from the Shavuot event in his promotion letter for a play that was put on some days or weeks later.
I can only wonder at what the play might have been – perhaps a depiction of the traditional Shavuot story – The Book of Ruth.
Naomi entreating Ruth and Orpah to return to the land of Moab. William Blake, actually. Not Reubens…and not Turner
But in any case, what a cast!
The picture with Mr Turner’s letter has survived better, enabling me to identify several of the youngsters. I cannot name the adults in the picture – I’d hazard a guess that the man is Reuben Turner. The picture of the woman looks disconcertingly like my dad in drag, but I don’t think that was the case.
I am pretty sure I can name several of the kids, working from right to left…
…oy, so I must have learnt something at Yavneh…
Sara Monty [fairly sure] (standing);
Me (standing);
Sandra Corbman (sitting);
Maxine [Camlish?] (sitting);
Eve Cedar (standing);
Boy I cannot name (standing);
Girl I cannot name (sitting);
Jonathan Davies (standing);
Girl I cannot name (sitting);
Girl I cannot name (standing);
Jonathan Gold [fairly sure] (sitting);
Half a girl I can barely see, let alone name (standing).
Any help that a reader might offer to help fill in the gaps and/or pass this relic on to those who were in it would be much appreciated.
If anyone out there remembers anything at all about the show, I’d love to know. But it might well be that my love of theatre started there, 58 years ago as I write in 2024.
“My First Girlfriend”
I have very little recollection of my time at Yavneh Kindergarten, other than an impressionistic sense that I was happy there most of the time and that the experience did its job of preparing me to start school that autumn.
My only tangible memory is one that has been handed down to me by my mum, who used to take great pleasure in relating the following story in circumstances that might cause me maximum embarrassment.
One day, when my father asked me, as oft he would, to “report on the events of the day at Kindergarten”, I proudly announced:
I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s called Sandra.
When asked for more detail about my girlfriend, I stated that:
…we roll in the barrel together.
Whether my parents were able to keep a straight face at the time, and if so, how, I’ll never know.
As it happens, Sandra and I never did go out with one another, but we spent a fair chunk of our youth together through BBYO in Streatham and are still very much in touch to this day. Indeed Sandra was one of the Shavuot avoiders at our 2017 regathering and I expect to see her at the 2024 regathering about 10 days after this piece is published…
…if she is still speaking to me by then!
Update: Sandra Responds…
Brilliant stuff Ian. I also have some memories of being happy there but unfortunately I don’t remember the barrel.
