Break a Leg: A Memoir, Manifesto and Celebration of Amateur Theatre, by Jenny Landreth Benedict Nightingale
BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE
Break a Leg: A Memoir, Manifesto and Celebration of Amateur Theatre By Jenny Landreth Chatto & Windus £16.99
Like almost everyone I know, I’ve done some amateur acting.
I started at school as the Third Witch in a scene from Macbeth which the headmaster thought so good he made us repeat it, to the consternation of
the assembled parents, among them Kenneth More, who later told me he’d never forget the slump of the spirits he felt. Much later I was a Prince Hal whose sword broke during the fight with Hotspur, forcing me to kill him with the hilt.
At Cambridge I was Kinesias in an outdoor production of Lysistrata, during which I waddled about in sexual frustration pointing at a tall tree supposedly symbolic of my penis. The director thought the audience would find that hilarious. Instead, they looked depressed and puzzled, seeing a physically impaired undergraduate inexplicably yelling at a beech. It was then I finally realised I couldn’t act.
But zillions of my fellow citizens continue to find acting important – even essential. In her enjoyably exuberant book about amateur theatricals, Jenny Landreth cites studies showing that 5,380 groups were, before coronavirus, giving an annual 92,000 performances to millions. And she argues that their common image – that they are ‘church-hally or twee’ – is unfair. Yes, non-professional actors – the preferred term – have fun, but they work hard to stage often serious, sometimes challenging drama.
Landreth herself followed her theatre-mad mother and dentist father into the Highbury Players, a group near Birmingham whose repertoire has included Chekhov, Anouilh, Sartre, Shaw and Miller. In her book, she follows the progress of an elaborately mounted revival of Variations on a Theme, Terence Rattigan’s updating of La Dame aux Camélias, interspersing this with reminiscence, history, visits elsewhere and much else.
The line between amateur and professional theatre has often been blurred. After all, the first masterpiece in our drama, the painfully realistic York Crucifixion Play, was staged by pegmakers and painters. Much later, no great house was without its drawingroom theatricals, the racy Lovers’ Vows
causing consternation in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. And in 1813, London flocked to the Haymarket to see the ‘Celebrated Philanthropic Amateur’, alias Robert Coates, as a diamond-encrusted Romeo who ended a high-camp performance by dying three times.
So one might go on, citing (as Landreth does) the theatrically obsessed Dickens or (as she doesn’t) the Zürich revival of The Importance of Being Earnest that Tom Stoppard featured in Travesties and which led to a minor consular official’s suing James Joyce for the cost of his trousers.
Many employers encouraged in-house acting, one branch of the Midland Bank allowing rehearsals to take place in an enormous safe. English-language theatrical groups appeared all over the old Empire and, indeed, modern Europe.
Landreth goes to Antwerp for a festival of amateur work, actually enjoying a play ‘in which Beethoven and Quasimodo invite you to a panel discussion on the search for the impossible sound’.
She’s rather less entranced by work (‘Are there any Spanish people here? Yes, but not enough to spoil it’) at a golf club in Marbella. Then it’s off to Kilmuckridge in Ireland for a festival of one-act plays, one involving a man who, suspecting his girlfriend of infidelity, feeds her dog to her in a stew.
As she demonstrates in her genial, breezy way, there are plenty of strong, bold groups around: Maddermarket in Norwich, People’s Theatre in Newcastle, Questors in Ealing and the leftist Unity Theatre, once of London, still active in Liverpool. That gave stage time to
Paul Robeson, who explained his refusal of a West End role by saying that, ‘as an artist, I must have a working-class audience’. It also inspired Joan Littlewood and introduced Michael Gambon, Bob Hoskins and Warren Mitchell to the stage.
But then many famous names first honed their skills as amateurs. Landreth mentions Charles Laughton and Brenda Blethyn, among others, but surprisingly omits those who went straight from university into professional theatre, such as Ian Mckellen, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn and John Cleese, who coincided at Cambridge.
I remember hearing Eric Idle, president of the Footlights in 1965, asked if he planned to become an actor after graduation. ‘I am an actor,’ he replied stiffly – and, yes, he was.
But why so many groups? Why the appeal? Well, it’s live, it’s human and, a word that often appears here, it brings ‘joy’. Not always to audiences, of course.
Landreth admits that there was a man ‘loudly groaning in front of me’ at the undercooked opening of Variations on a Theme. But the production grew, as did the audience’s appreciation.
Enough, clearly, to justify Landreth’s basic claim that amateur acting gives identity, voice, belief, strength and ‘bubbling kinship’ to a community. ‘Theatre makes family; family makes theatre.’