Theatre club ambition for Mail's sporting Roger

Jul 18 2008 Amateur Theatre By John Slim

MY colleague Roger Clarke is quite disconcertingly busy these days when he finishes his stints on the Mail sports desk.

He has just finished writing a Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime, but among the projects that are simmering away beneath his customary laid-back exterior is a plan to start a revue company that will also encourage local writers, stage short plays and monologues and possibly look for radio plays for hospital radio stations.

But not only hospital radios – he is also thinking about digital stations.

He says: “I’m sure they must be grateful for anything that makes a noise in the middle of the night. I don’t mind audiences of insomniacs and nutters.

“Then there is the live leap into the unknown. There seems no reason why you can’t have a theatre club, for example, running like a comedy club, where local writers, or – let’s be honest – anyone willing to perform wherever they are from, can turn up to do monologues, a bit like Talking Heads, or even short two or three-handers, poems or whatever they have written, in front of an audience that improves as the evening goes on and the drink goes down.

“I just need a pub or club with a free room for that one.”

He has an ambition to start a pub theatre to do pro-am productions – and he would like a pub with a courtyard to use for a Shakespeare festival in summer. “I have a hankering to do Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story on alternate nights with a pro-am cast. I suspect that I might be a shade too mature for Romeo or Tony, so I might have to content myself with direction and perhaps appear as a priest or a bar owner so I don’t get bored during performances.”

At the moment, he is stuck for a name for such a venture. He says Sutton Arts Group seemed a good one until he got to the initials and moved on to Sutton Arts Workshop as a possibility.

s HIGHBURY Little Theatre is achieving something special with the six-and-a-half hour open day that it will hold tomorrow.

Top comedy playwrights David Tristram and Raymond Hopkins will conduct an open forum to discuss their work, which includes The Secret Lives of Henry and Alice (Tristram) and Love Begins at Fifty (Hopkins), both of which have been presented at the Sutton Coldfield venue in the comparatively recent past.

There will also be a Jake Thackray festival and two concerts and a live band – which I always think is likely to be better than a dead one – plus play-readings, poetry and dance.

Tours of the theatre will include the chance for visitors to dress up in a costume from the extensive wardrobe at the Sutton Coldfield venue and have their photograph taken. The fun runs from 10am.

* More information is available from Paul Knapman at paul.knapman@blueyonder.co.uk