Bristol Old Vic
directed by John David
Luck was on my side when John David, who had been a freelance director when he employed me at the Bristol Old Vic to be in Guys and Dolls, was appointed Artistic Director of the company the following year. When I encountered him at a conference about something or the other which was being held at the Young Vic, I asked him whether I could join his first season as an actor-composer. A few months later, I was back in Bristol, with a commission to write songs for the Christmas show, preceded by a couple of productions. The Tempest, directed by John himself, was the first.
It proved to be an inauspicious start to the new artistic regime. Prospero was played by an actor popular with Theatre Royal audiences but who was wrestling with personal demons. Inevitably, his struggles cast a pall over the production. Fortunately, there was much talent on display to compensate the audience. Joanne Pierce contributed a feisty Miranda; Rudolph Walker was terrific as Caliban; and Patrick Malahide was a haunting, haunted Ariel. I was completely miscast in the thankfully small role of the ship’s Bosun. but I wrote some nice song-settings for Patrick, and also for the trio of goddesses (one of whom was Julia Hills, also returning to the BOV) in the masque. However, John David decided that something grand was needed for the Dance of the Nymphs and the Reapers, so I was sent off to find a suitable recording of something. I came up with what in later years I realised was a hackneyed choice of a popular piece of Vaughan Williams, to which Peter Woodward, who played Ferdinand, choreographed a lot of leaping and jumping by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School students, who were brought in to swell the ranks. Among them was Samantha Bond, the memory of whose twinkly what-am-I-doing-here eyes as she leapt into the air still makes me smile.
The luckiest break of all was that a very distinguished actor, Peter Copley, was also in the cast. Anyone of my generation had seen Peter in umpteen films and television series, while the generation before mine knew him, among much else, as a member of both Guthrie’s and Olivier’s companies at London’s Old Vic. In The Tempest he was cast as Stephano, the drunken butler, who had to sing. During the first week of rehearsals I found myself in a room with Peter and a piano. He announced, in his gentlemanly manner, that he was tone deaf. Our sessions together were a riot, with me trying everything I could think of to get him to sing the same thing twice. I failed, but it didn’t matter. He was wonderful as a Stephano whose vocal improvisations were as unsteady as his inebriated gait. Before too long, Peter and his wife, Shosh (aka the author Margaret Tabor) took the decision to leave London and move to Bristol. We were soon steadfast friends.
