Musicals

On Saturday evening I was transported back to a previous life. One that seems several lives ago already.

There was a short window of time among the brethren in which theatre suddenly blossomed. As usual with blossom, it was lovely while it lasted but didn’t last very long. It kind of grew out of the realisation that if the community was to educate its own children, then it had better take some teaching, at least, quite seriously, combined with a need for funds that was becoming quite daunting even for the wealthy brethren.

One of the first elements of education to be championed was literacy and being able to express oneself, and another was confidence and articulacy in speaking, because of the perceived need to be able to rely on all brethren members to say the right thing if called upon in the public arena. That led to plays within the classes, and it wasn’t long before those who were hands-on in the running of the Education Centres (as they were then before the centralised control) realised that a good many birds could be killed with one stone by performing plays as fund-raisers. It worked extremely well, too. The pupils loved it all, and got real experience of the pressures of an audience, while the rest of the brethren tore open the loophole in the ban on entertainment with great glee.

That glee was the reason it couldn’t last. Brethren tend to be quite single-minded in the few things they do pursue, and theatrical performances were no exception. It became fairly obvious that everybody was enjoying it far too much, beyond what could be excused as a useful necessity, and it was all shut down.

Not too long before that I had my own experience of why the stage is so seductive, when I was heavily involved in one of these productions. I foolishly volunteered to write the script and lyrics for a musical, and ended up deeply involved. It was fascinating fun, all the more so because everything was invented from scratch – few brethren had been to see a performance anywhere else, and so they had no idea how things should be done. The ingenuity that showed itself was quite amazing.

That’s all past for me, now, and already was before I left the brethren.

But going to see the Wizard of Oz on stage in London brought a lot of it back. The really odd thing was how much of it reminded me of our amateur efforts. OK, there was an orchestra where we had a few musicians in a side room, and computer controlled lighting where we had old-fashioned lights screwed and clamped where we could get them, and they had a large turntable as part of the stage ... but really it wasn’t so different. I could see why they were doing what they were doing at each point, and their solutions weren’t very far from ours except for the superior resources.

Admittedly we had a homegrown script and score instead of an all-time classic to perform. And part of the fun of our performance was that we had precisely the right number of students to be actors, and so had no chance of selecting for ability, whereas London has the cream to call on. Yet the Wizard of Oz is so stylised that the overall feeling was oddly similar, at least to me. There was no striving for realism. It was performed as a kind of moral fairy-tale, like life reproduced in poster colours. Real actors in a stylised drama reminded me strongly of amateurs attempting realism!

I haven’t seen the original film (I’m still in the early stages of catching up on classics I feel I’ve missed), but I got the impression the stage version is a pretty good effort at reproducing it, and it’s the kind of thing that reproduces well on a stage, where everything is an indication of real life rather than a copy. The critics haven’t been too kind to the show, and the audience must have been a bit thin because we were given a substantial upgrade to our seats, but it made for a great night out.