09 ACT ll - Doing It - Act ll - Scene l - The Rehearsal

LINDA HORNZEE-JONES 2001 139

ACT II

Doing It


ACT II SCENE I - THE REHEARSAL

The core motivation for amateur dramatic activity is rehearsal.

Amateurs exhibit an addictive desire to rehearse. Rehearsing amateur dramatic

activity in private satisfies the socially constructed need of the participants to rehearse

the life style of their patron. While this motivation is rarely articulated, most participants

will happily tell you they find rehearsal by far the most enjoyable part of the production

process. Rehearsal allows you to Play the Preferred Family Game on a regular weekly

basis with a group of like minded Game Players. Since this is unpaid and voluntary,

nothing can force you to turn up for rehearsal if you think the Director hasn‟t stroked you

enough, or if you have something more important to do. It would be logical to think that

staging a public performance would be welcomed as an invitation to the patron group to

witness the rehearsed behaviour is up to their required standards, but in Amdram we are

looking at the logic of a pleasure-seeking Child seeking approval within the family, not

an Adult worker seeking approval from the family‟s patron. An obligation to turn up

every night to present a set number of performances to a paying audience, enforced by

the expectations of commercial practice, oversteps the boundary between masochism and

sadomasochism, making performance dangerously close to a different Game to rehearsal.

OPENING NIGHT ADJUSTMENTS

In the dressing room, the Wardrobe Assistant adjusts June’s wayward train and bustle.

WARDROBE : Don‟t you dare sit down again. You can stand for five minutes.

JUNE : I hate this bit.

WARDROBE : Waiting to go on?

JUNE : Having to go on at all. It should all have ended last night.

WARDROBE : You enjoyed last night.

JUNE : I like dress rehearsals. It‟s a sort of peak. That was our best go at it.

Sometimes I wish it could all just end there. Tonight we will be over

confident and it will all go to pot. I hate having to go on and do it.

WARDROBE : But you‟ve auditioned for (the group‟s next play)!

JUNE : Oh yes! What would I do with Tuesdays if I didn‟t?

TANNOY : Act One beginners please.

WARDROBE : Oh well, break a leg.

JUNE : I wish I could!


Observation and experience confirms the anticlimactic feel of opening night and

the weariness that sets in as the run of the play progresses. The following MemoByte is

shorter than normal, but no less significant. It reproduces a state of mind I have heard

expressed repeatedly by so many.

THURSDAY NIGHT

JUNE : Three down, only three to go, thank God.

For convenience I have put this into the mouth of „June‟ and located it on a

Thursday, but I once heard a „June‟ say it every night of a fourteen-night run. Note that

June found the dress rehearsal was for her the peak experience of the project and that she

sought to prolong Tuesday night rehearsals as an important element in her life.

In The Paper Canoe (1995), Eugenio Barba charts his own progress from amateur

actor to drama professional as teacher and experimenter. He notes the phenomenon of the

growth in European U.S.S.R during the second half of the twentieth century of rehearsal

as an end in itself, rather than as a means. He attributes the rise of this new form of

theatrical rehearsal activity practised for its own sake as a pleasure and as a major source

of satisfaction to amateurs, to the success of Constantine Stanislavski‟s „method‟

exercises (Stanislavski 1980). He also sees a difference between this and what he calls

“the custom – common to the cultured classes in both Asia and Western countries – of

learning music, song and dance for non-professional purposes” (Barba 1995:109).

Although as I explored in Act I Scene II – Cast and Crew, practitioners in Asian

and Western countries may have different motives for doing drama and theatre activity

per se, I see no difference between learning theatre skills as an end in themselves and

using them to rehearse a prescribed text, but without intent to perform. I see no such

difference between these two activities for amateurs. Unlike professionals, amateur

drama practitioners do not train or rehearse only in order to be able to perform.

Professionals rehearse solely in order to perform in public. Amateurs have always trained

in music, song and dance for the pleasure of doing the activity of training, and not

necessarily with the intention of performing in public.


The observed evidence of my investigation and the honest analysis of my own

experience reveals that pleasure in rehearsal is a major desired product of the production

process, and that actual performance is often seen by amateurs as a necessary evil.

The professional director Norman Marshall records how he came to realise

amateurs would rather rehearse than perform. He writes of his early disappointment at

how amateurs appear to show a lack of commitment to actually learning stagecraft and

how they seem to be seldom seriously interested in the theatre other than in their own

activities. He owns to having been surprised at first that the courses and schools in

producing and acting and other facilities run in the 1930‟s by the British Drama League

had failed to raise standards in the amateur theatre. In spite of -

… the magnificent library, a monthly magazine, advice of every sort, lectures

and debates throughout the winter and a drama festival run on a gigantic scale

which gives the amateur the opportunity to have his work criticised by

professional producer,

- he thinks the amateur

has contributed little to the theatre as a whole. (Marshall 1947:87)

Gradually Marshall began to realise the training provided has been ineffective

simply because amateur drama is not viewed by its practitioners as „work‟. He realised

that because amateur drama is not a job, it is approached by amateurs with the same

spontaneity and lack of application that allows them to just as easily abandon it and

throw themselves into playing tennis when the light evenings come, with no intention of

ever being good enough to reach Wimbledon.

Perhaps I am being unfair to the amateur movement in taking it too seriously as

a branch of the theatre, and not seriously enough as a social force. It is significant

that the amateur theatre has lately acquired official status as a “cultural and

educational activity”. Public money is being spent on it by Local Education

Authorities … it is arguable that the main function of the amateur movement is

simply to give as many people as possible the opportunities for indulging in an

extremely pleasant form of recreation.

(ibid.:89)

He quite rightly perceives that submitting to sadomasochistic professional direction

and theatre management by using professional actors and crew in amateur productions

conflicts with the amateur pleasure mindset. Amateur drama he says, “should be allowed

to remain just a pleasant recreation for the winter evenings” (bid.:104).


My fieldnotes confirm Eugenio Barba‟s perception of recreational rehearsal as

being an increasing source of pleasure for amateurs - what he calls „the drift of the

exercises‟ towards being “for some performers the quintessence of doing theatre”

(op.cit.:109). „Workshops‟ and „club evenings‟ exercising theatre skills are regularly run

by amateur groups without reference to any proposed production. Satisfying the

requirement for pleasure in rehearsal workshops for adults and children in amateur

groups, using simple trust exercises and excerpts from classic texts as exercise material,

has become a new theatrical profession particularly open to, and increasingly taken up

by, ex-Game Players in need of extra income. Observation also leads me to believe that

Players find text exercises more satisfying than improvisation.

The focus of the new theatrical pedagogy is not the future execution of plays

(in their entirety or only scenes from them), but the very teaching of the

exercises as an active experience of the theatre. (Barba 1995:109)

Barba is acknowledging the phenomenon, noted in Act I Scene II - The Venue,

whereby an amateur drama form enters a final Educational phase. I see a clear indication

that when lower middle class Amdram eventually ceases in its current form of public

performance it could survive as a private fee-paying educational leisure activity for

children and retired adults. More on this later in the Coda – and particularly in Act III

Scene II - The Afterplay Party when I tackle the subject of drama in schools today.

Workshops and lectures are also a particular feature and attraction for delegates to

conferences held in the member theatres of the Little Theatre Guild. Both conferences

and workshops are observably most attended by older, executive-orientated, members of

groups who have „retired‟ from active stage work and who enjoy these rare opportunities

to exercise underused skills just for fun. Amateur members sometimes run these

workshops, but even when professionally run they should not normally pose a threat of

sadomasochism since they remain optional and can feel privately domestic. However,

qualitatively noting my own and other peoples‟ responses when taking part in some

workshops and seminars, I have observed a backlash reaction from participants who

were unable to handle the sadomasochistic element inherent in a professionally run class.

In addition to past incidents that I can recall from memory, my field notes record three

separate occasions when I observed delegates become confused and upset and walk out

of a workshop. All three incidents were in response to improvisation exercises.


Amateurs love to improvise in short bursts, in private, in a domestic small group

environment where it can be seen as a playful game (with a small g), but they can appear

uncomfortable improvising in public. A large workshop situation run by a professional

can leave you feeling very exposed. It feels more like a public performance, which you

will remember, is normally an appeal to your dominant patron to recognise your efforts

at rehearsing their borrowed culture. All three delegates who reacted badly and angrily

left the room appeared to feel as if they did not know what they were expected to do in

public and could not therefore tell if they were „doing it right‟. No Parental instructions

were available to tell them what to do or how to do it. Improvisation has a place in

private rehearsal but, because there is no „right‟ way to do it, its unpredictability runs

counter to the masochistic Parental Sets that tell you what is expected of you in public.

Amateurs need a script to rehearse from. Amdram is indisputably a text-based,

literary form of theatre. With its origins in elocution and the study of classic literary play

texts from the „world museum‟ of English language drama, it is welded to the descriptive

and prescriptive power of words. Above all amateur drama is about the control of text.

The Stage 1 Summary of the Report for the Arts Council of England on the Roles

and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres (Boyden et al 2000)

concludes that „text-based theatre‟, especially the performance of the classics, is in

decline. This report suggests that an increase and diversity in audience membership can

be encouraged by increasing spectacle, by „circus‟ type visual storytelling in the manner

of the Millennium Dome Show, and by the use of modern sound and light technology. In

arriving at this conclusion, consultations were held with some of the 50 professional

producing theatres and with „ key organisations representing wider theatre ecology‟.

Neither the Little Theatre Guild, nor its 90 affiliated independent producing theatres, nor

the many more unaffiliated other amateur producing theatres were consulted. These were

not counted as part of the „wider theatre ecology‟. Amateur drama is again invisible.

Will Amdram be the last bastion of the text-based play? The Central Council for

Amateur Theatre (CCAT) believes this may happen, decrying the failure of the Boyden

Report “to embrace, other than in one brief reference, the role of amateur theatre”, and

stating ”there is within the report a sinister and seriously wrong evaluation of the whole

value of theatre and in particular of text-based drama” (Amateur Stage 04/00:11).


The repetition by rehearsal of a rigidly followed prescriptive drama text is

Amdram‟s raison d‟être. It is because participants in amateur drama crave to create the

ritualised order found in Proppian play scripts that they favour wordy texts over

spectacle, literary classics over modern minimalism, and long painstaking rehearsals of

prescriptive texts rather than exciting innovative improvisation.

Past manifestations of amateur drama have been active for varying periods – from

little more than one generation (twenty-five years in Working Men‟s Clubs) to over a

century (in the country houses of the nouveaux riches). Amateur drama in its current

English suburban form, publicly labelled, in journals, conversation, and on the Internet

as Amdram, has been in existence for just over eighty years. The one factor that more

than anything else determines that this is a cohesive movement is that during that time

the occupations and social status of the Cast and Crew has remained constant

In Act I Scene II, I examined the dates of foundation of groups and in Scene III –

The Cast and Crew, I looked at the occupations of the current participants in Amdram.

The family continuities experienced in the case studies and in groups‟ literature record

family memberships which began in the 1920s and 1930s and establishes that the social

class of Amdram has always been mainly B and C1 – the lower middle classes. Amdram

arose between the wars within a newly aspirational group, who were the first to set up

their family homes at a semi-detached distance from major cities in greenfield suburban

developments. After the First World War these occupational groupings were deliberately

displaced from the working class inner suburbs and concentrated into a convenient new

Venue constructed by speculative investment building (Edwards 1981:134-139). This

Venue is outside the nineteenth century cities, but is not quite in the country. If the

participants in Amdram are motivated by a socially constructed need to rehearse the life

style of their benefactors who are these people and whose lifestyle do they rehearse?

This displacement was caused by a happy confluence between two socio-

economically-constructed needs of the upper middle class - the employer landowners of

occupational group A. The Great War depleted their supply of house and land servants.

Large agricultural estates became suddenly unmanageable. Developing farmland for

housing imported the lower middle classes closer to large houses on rural estates, the

more easily to run the small trades and businesses which substituted for the lost in-house

labour force that had formerly serviced their domestic needs (Brandon & Short 1990).


Meanwhile, re-investing the money obtained by selling off their land generated

new urban office jobs specifically to take care of the upper middle‟s investments. The

suburbs on the Surrey and Sussex Downs, and on the hills north of London, came to be

known as the „Stock-broker Belt‟ from their occupiers supposed chief occupation, and as

Metroland from the commuter railway line which took them to work in the city. Works

charting these reasons for the growth of individual outer London commuter suburbs

include studies on Bexley (Carr 1992), Chipstead (Scott-Willey 1966; Pringle 1984),

Ealing (Jahn 1982), Bromley (Rawcliffe 1982), and East Horsley (Connell 1974 &

1978B). All of these suburbs house Little Theatre Guild member theatres.

The betters that the participants of Amdram are aping live at „The Top‟ in more

ways that one, for in English suburbia higher in ground level also invariably means

higher in status. John Braine‟s rising young accountant hero, Joe Lampton, enjoys the

play he sees on his first night out at Warley amateur Little Theatre because

… it dealt with a very charming upper-middle-class family…. the characters

belonged to the income-group which I wanted to belong to, it was like being

an invisible spectator of life in one of the big houses on Eagle Road.

(Braine ibid.:1957:36)

Joe perceives he has joined the lower middles, and that the people who live at

„T‟Top‟ in detached houses whose material life-style, financial interests, and political

aspirations he serves as a Council accountant, are upper middles. He finds himself

“beginning to mix with people of a kind I‟d never mixed with before. … though there

was nothing to stop working-class people joining it, they somehow never did” (ibid.: 44).

Following the First World War, as their new occupations developed, the lower

middles became the current English-culture aspirational group. The outer suburban ring

was marketed to them as a way of satisfying a need to dwell in an autonomous rural idyll

preserving by imitation the late Victorian upper middle class values of the landed nuclear

families. These families were still visibly in possession of large houses situated in the

countryside, built in traditional vernacular materials and styles. The owner-occupation of

imitation rural vernacular architecture also became a socially constructed suburban need

(Barrett & Phillips 1993:125). Homes were built with upper middle detailing to inspire

snobbery and status seeking needs in their owners (Jackson 1973:137-139). Estates and

whole villages were named and advertised to emphasise the healthy lifestyle on hills.


ILLUSTRATION 2 – SUBURBAN NEEDS : THE MARKETING OF AN UPPER

MIDDLE LIFESTYLE TO THE LOWER MIDDLES (original in colour)


Upwardly mobile in all senses, the lower middles left the working classes behind in

the inner Victorian and Edwardian housing ring (Thorns 1972; 1975). The Second World

War interrupted this process of suburban segregation, but the post-war population boom

and designation of New Towns lead to a further migration to suburbia. This second wave

of immigrants however, did not become lower middle class but remained working class...

…young families whose „head of household‟ was either a skilled, semi-skilled

or to a lesser extent unskilled manual worker… The middle classes were and

have remained under-represented in council estates. Some 95% of Dagenham,

for example, was comprised of manual workers. The growth of owner-occupation

since 1945, and especially since 1970, has led to council estates being largely populated

by households whose heads were unskilled and semi-skilled.

(Clapson 1998:49-50)

So although suburban population continued to rise after the Second World War, the

social status of the new immigrants was different (Thorns 1975:42-46). Hence the

slowing in growth of the formation of new Amdram groups after 1950 and the

observable lack of Amdram groups in Local Authority housing estates. On the other

hand, the continuing impetus towards the owner-occupation of housing among the lower

middle service class in the between-the-wars suburbs promoted the increase in the

building of Owner-occupier theatres indicated in Table 3.

Amdram is not suburbia‟s only indigenous rehearsal activity. As Norman Marshall

intimated, Amdram is only one rehearsal option, seasonally pursued, and pursued with

varying degrees of commitment. Ideals of self-improvement aiming towards financial

stability, the acquisition of possessions proclaiming status and the patriarchal family life

style of the fully detached country-based upper middle classes, spawned a variety of

imitative suburban rehearsal activities in sport and leisure. Tennis, golf, and the activities

of most suburban leisure and sports groups and societies are also rehearsal activities

aping the life-style of their betters and all capable of degrees of Pastimer, Player or ex-

Game Player participation. Depending on their Preferred Family Game the lower middle

class B‟s and C 1‟s frequented dancehalls, joined the tennis club, and dined in restaurants

with silver service, all public consumption activities that imitated by rehearsal the

domestic activities their social superiors the A‟s were performing privately in their own

homes. Those with a Family Preferred Game favouring active benign masochism

consumed the lifestyle of A‟s by forming amateur drama societies to perform scripts set

in the drawing rooms of detached upper middle class villas (Jackson 1973).


The builders of semi-detached suburbia provided purpose built tennis and golf

clubs, large community assembly halls, and hotels with restaurants for elaborate dining.

Community assembly halls in suburban villages were intended to provide the lower

middle with a large social space equivalent to the ballrooms and great halls enjoyed in

the domestic spaces of the upper middles. They offered a first public indoor performance

venue to many Amdram groups in their early Itinerant phase during the 1920s and 1930s.

Although many „donut ring‟ communities have continued to support flourishing

Amdram groups in their Village, Church, and Community Halls since the 1920‟s,

curiously many have not. In some communities, including my home suburb, which is

well supplied with a variety of halls to act as venues, I have noted a serial history of

Amdram groups starting up and failing within a short period. Why should this happen?

Why, when an adequate public venue is provided, does no group take up its use? Why do

some groups grow out of and leave their village hall to develop into the Owner-occupier

phase when others do not? John Anderson may have offered the answer to these in a

perceptive remark to Iain Mackintosh (op.cit.). He suggested that to survive at all, (let

alone to proceed to self-built Owner-occupier status), an Amdram group requires the

long-term leadership of a single-minded, passionate entrepreneur, who he termed „the

person of energy‟. In other words a „Mrs Cuckoo‟ has to come, and has to stay.

The arrival of an Ex-Game Player with some form of professional experience is

needed to start the group and hold it together in its early phases. Even if all other

necessary elements of venue, script, cast and crew are in place and available within the

Venue, amateur drama as a rehearsal activity will not occur within a community until it

is kick-started by the arrival of a „person of energy‟ who is prepared to be what Norman

Marshall terms „a dictator‟ (ibid.:90-92), but in a Game-Playing masochistic way, not as

a sadomasochistic professional. A common day-job among „Mrs Cuckoos‟ is that of

elocution teacher. The alteration of diction and accent is of course a yet another cultural

rehearsal activity intended to fit the trainee for association with a different social class.

At the end of the twentieth century new estates of lower middle class houses still

continue to be built within the „donut rings‟. The establishment of new Amdram groups

within them is not dependent on the speculator providing an inexpensive community

venue if one is not already to hand, but on the chance arrival in the community of an Ex-

Game Player professional, nostalgic for the pleasures of their Game-Playing childhood.


Derek Wynne describes one such new speculator-built community he called „The

Heath‟, in his ethnographic case study Leisure; lifestyle and the new middle class (1998).

He speculates on the significance of the activities to be found happening in „The

Clubhouse‟ - a central facility built by the property development company as a

community focus - on discovering that some of the residents decline to use it.

Leisure practices are the principle ways in which residents of The Heath mark

themselves from one another. They are the primary practices in which the work

of „distinction‟ is accomplished between different social groups, and the practices

by which individuals come to identify with others. Lest this description suggests a

flurry of activity by all and sundry, it should be noted that non-engagement, as much

as engagement, can be seen as a social practice important to „distinction‟.

(Wynne 1998:122)

Wynne goes on to list some activities available at the „Clubhouse‟ and also

mentions others elsewhere in his text. As comprehensively as I can gather from

references in his text, besides unspecified „social events‟ organised by a committee, there

is a tennis club, squash league, youth club, activities associated with the swimming pool,

sauna and fitness room including aerobics, a „Ladies Circle‟, and a mother and toddler

pre-school playgroup. All these activities anticipate and demand a degree of regular

leisure time particularly in the daytime, and cash spare in your budget to pay for the

equipment and fees to do them. The „ladies‟ of the „Ladies Circle‟ and the mothers who

accompany their children to playgroup can only do so because they do not need to work.

They are playing at being „ladies‟.

These lower middle rehearsals of an upper middle class life-style are designed to

show that paid work is not the major activity of their day. Wynne terms the organisers

and participants of these activities the „sporters‟, who make their intentions towards

raising their social class visible in their choices in home furnishings and tastes in

entertainment. Spending their money on dramatising their house and garden, they „look

forward‟ towards pursuing activities that help them in “a search to acquire the cultural

hallmarks that they associate with a class they see themselves as entering” (ibid.:141).

In his introduction to On Collective Memory (1992), Lewis A. Coser contends that

Maurice Halbwachs „got it wrong‟ when maintaining that class position determines

consumption patterns, but I disagree with Coser‟s belief that the political emancipation

of workers will lead to them opting for the „participatory lifestyles of the middle class”

complete with „display activities‟ and „attendance at theatrical events‟ (ibid.:20).


Financial or political emancipation will not necessarily change taste or promote a

new participation in arts and other „display activities‟, for these are products of a desire

to change your class position, not of change itself. This is supported by Wynne‟s

observations of another sub-group at The Heath, the „drinkers‟ found in the licensed bar

of The Clubhouse. Although their origins lie in the same socio-economic group as the

„sporters‟, Wynne points out that unlike the social climbing „sporters‟ the „drinkers‟

could not be re-grouped at a new social rating. In spite of their financial ability to move

to their new Venue, the cultural capital of the „drinkers‟ remains resolutely working

class, „looking back‟ instead of forward (Wynne 1998:127-128). They never join

societies and clubs, remain spectators never participants, always Pastimers rather than

Players at golf-matches, snooker, and motor sports events. They are part of a new “petit

bourgeoisie created from the ranks of the traditional working class whose (economic)

advancement has occurred without the development of what Bourdieu calls cultural

capital” (ibid.:133). „Drinkers‟ and „sporters‟ may both come from „working class roots‟,

but I suggest that even before they moved the „sporters‟ saw themselves as part of the

readjusted rising lower sections of the lower middle class (revealed by the revised New

Social Classification system), while the „drinkers‟ lacked the desire to change. Although

thrown together in the same Venue, their Preferred Family Games will forever differ.

Firmly situated in the current Amdram Venue, The Heath has been occupied for

more than twenty years. The „sporter‟ inhabitants are of the right occupational social

grouping from which are recruited the Cast and Crew (ibid.:39-41). They show an

interest in drama and plays, for „theatre-going‟ as a social activity receives several

mentions in data quoted in the text. Why then is there no mention of any amateur drama

group using the venue provided (The Clubhouse)? There is no indication either of any

group still in an early Domestic phase and meeting in a private house.

The reason there is no amateur drama group at The Heath may be due to the lack of

a „person of energy‟ to initiate it. Perhaps, to date, no Ex-Game Player has moved to the

estate. Perhaps if the developers had built the promised small church and village school

(ibid.:38), a „Mrs Cuckoo‟ in the form of an Ex-Game Playing primary teacher or parish

priest, interested in elocution or public speaking, may have moved to The Heath, but this

is speculation. The lack of an Amdram group here is probably not due to the lack of a

venue, or the desire to rehearse alternative life-styles, but to the lack of a „Mrs Cuckoo‟.


I shall show in Act II Scene III how the audience has a relationship with an amateur

performance that is totally different to the relationship between an audience and a

commercial production. David Llewellyn is aware of this when he suggests that ”the idea

that the audience „takes part‟ in the act of theatre is central” to the appeal that performing

the plays of John Godber has to „ordinary people‟ (Llewellyn 1996:96). Plays by John

Godber feature frequently in lists of scripts favoured for amateur productions. Llewellyn

rightly suggests that ability to instigate dramatic activity is, at any period in history, a

function of class, and that this is currently based on the consumerist role of the middle

classes. However, I believe he is mistaken in supposing there to be a “culturally alienated

majority… on the wrong side of the divide gazing with passivity and indifference on the

commodity culture of the bourgeoisie” (ibid.:105) who could be involved in the practice

of drama if only a way can be found around the „alienating structure of the middle class

theatre‟. The concept that any other class currently desires but is prevented by „cultural

alienation‟ from participation in Amdram is a fallacy.

The ability to participate in any form of dramatic activity is not a property of class

in itself, but of whether or not a social group is rendered aspirational by becoming the

target subaltern group of an emerging dominant group. A social group instigating

amateur drama may aspire in downward directions if the dominant group has a lower

social status, for example in appeasement and for self-preservation. Twentieth century

Amdram is a product of the exploitation of the suburban lower middle class by the upper

middle class, but amateur dramatic activity has not always been the perquisite of the

middle classes or been found flourishing only in the suburbs.

In the past both the working classes and the aristocracy have on occasions been

socially manipulated into new Venues and amateur dramatic activity has occurred.

Amateur theatre activity has often risen which is essentially working class when large

manufacturing industries have shifted workers into purpose built housing estates and

company dormitories and even built theatres for them (Lowerson 1999). Live-in shop

workers in large department stores barely attained lower middle status, but many of these

stores, like Debenhams in London, ran thriving drama groups (Corina 1978). John

Lowerson recalls the working class amateur drama groups and amateur opera groups in

South Yorkshire in the 1930s. These grew for exactly these reasons. A new Venue was

created and a displaced population brought in.


…new deep pits had been opened up there with „model‟ villages laid out as miniature

garden cities. Made up of regional migrants, particularly from the depressed pits of

the South Welsh valleys and County Durham, their populations gradually acquired a

series of thriving recreational associations. Whilst these frequently owed their birth to

the initiatives of the small, resident middle class of clergy, doctors, teachers and

tradesmen, they acquired a considerable working-class membership.

(Lowerson 1999:201)

Rehearsals and performances were in the local welfare halls philanthropically

provided by the mining company, where recreation was presided over by indigenous

middle class „persons of energy‟ with an interest in training these displaced migrants in

the norms of their new location. In the post-mining era the Sheffield / Doncaster corridor

is a gentrifying, lower middle „hot-spot‟ of Amdram activity, with two Little Theatre

Guild member theatres and a healthy donut ring of entries into successive BT Biennials.

John Lowerson‟s parents met in one such Cuckoo Players‟ venue in Rossington

near Doncaster, where his father no doubt „yellowed up‟ to play the now politically

incorrect role of a „Gentleman of Japan‟. My parents met at about the same time as

Lowerson‟s - and for similar reasons - when one Durham miner‟s daughter was displaced

to a London suburb and married an Amdram-Game Player of Flemish Huguenot origin, a

lower middle migrant from working class Hoxton. Amdram runs in both our families.

Until a definable part of the „underclass‟, working classes, or „people on the wrong

side of the divide‟ (whatever they may be labelled) are made aspirational as a group, then

as a group they will continue to remain indifferent to any form of dramatic activity. As

long as they collectively continue to have no hope of changing their social status there

can be little incentive to rehearse an alternative. Isolated individuals from any class may

change their own perception of their status and expectations and deliberately use drama

participation, not for pleasure, but as a social climbing ploy. Such an individual becomes

a Joe Lampton, sneering both at their roots and at the class into which they have moved.

Unlike other amateur drama movements in the past, twentieth century Amdram has

not been a working class activity, for its appearance indicates the emergence of new

lower middles in a new lower middle Venue, but in the right circumstances another form

of amateur drama could become a working class artform. In The Coda I will propose that

an alternative form of amateur dramatic activity is occurring in one definable sector of

the working or lower classes at this moment, but because it is in a form not imitating the

structure of middle class theatre, it is not being recognised for what it is.


Though the ritualism of rehearsal cast and crew can apprehend their own life-style

while constructing as different the realities of another social grouping (Holzner 1968:13-

16), reaffirming the normalising structures of their own social grouping and reinforcing

the cohesion of the group (Furnham 1992;Ullman-Margalit1977). Rehearsing a script is a

comforting, orientating mechanism allowing the members of a group to define their own

world and reduce uncertainties in their relationships.

BREAKFAST RITUALS

There are swing doors between the kitchen and our breakfast room, and the only way

through them carrying a loaded tray is backside first, swinging round on the left foot.

An amusing frilly apron protects my elegant silk negligee. On the tray I have two coffee-

cups, milk-jug, sugar bowl. My eyes are glazed and my movements automatic. I hum a little

tune to the music from the radio as I unload the tray onto the table. Turn to the left, right

foot forward and walk back through the doors into the kitchen, pushing them open with my

left hand, remembering to avoid the point on the doorjamb where the paint is still wet.

Seconds later, face still blank, I swing backwards in through the doors again with the tray

laden with cereal bowls, Cornflakes, and the coffee-pot. Lean over, weight on the right foot,

and switch off the radio with the right hand. Left foot first, drift out through the swing

doors again, take off the apron. In again to the now silent breakfast room, backside first,

with my hands full this time of knives, forks, and spoons, swing round on the left foot….

Familiar early morning rituals? I have made these movements and carried these objects

at precisely the same time every day for a week and their similarity to the automation of

real-life breakfast rituals is accurately studied. But this breakfast-time is at eight in the

evening, and I only had to avoid the still-wet paint on the doorjamb on opening night…

This time I rotate around the swing doors and come face to face with my young wealthy

lover who has been standing unobserved (only by me, not by the 150 people out there in the

dark) in the middle of my breakfast room. Crash!! – down comes the cutlery as noisily as I

can throw it all over the stage. We scramble about, picking up the cutlery, arguing in

anxious whispers. I mince across to the open French windows on my high-heeled fluffy

mules to make sure my solicitor husband is well out of earshot in the garden.

Needless to say I don‟t have a young wealthy lover, my husband isn‟t a solicitor, and

our home is not so palatial as to have a separate breakfast room. Nor do I dress like that

for breakfast. According to the script, the set designer, and the wardrobe department

„Sheila‟ would and does. It is my job only to learn the lines, shift my weight onto the

correct foot at the right time, memorise and repeat the ritualised movements.


By working together to construct the alternative reality of her home and life-style

the cast and crew collectively give „Sheila‟ permission to do things neither they nor I

would countenance among our family and friends in real life. Not only is she cheating on

her husband, „Sheila‟ also lies, steals, and betrays her best friend. So why do we all find

it so funny? Why do we want to rehearse „Sheila‟s‟ immoral story at all?

Examination of the scripts favoured by amateurs will produce a list of similar texts,

many in active Play since the Thirties. Alan Jackson describes how the erotic „sex plays‟

of the late twenties and 1930‟s “pushed to the limits the censor‟s tolerance of these

matters” (Jackson, A. 1991: 261). In spite of the inroads into audience numbers by the

new talking pictures in cinemas, these plays filled seats in the commercial live theatre in

London where their matinees were particularly popular with women supposedly on

shopping trips to the West End stores. Although they tackled previously taboo material,

they were well-crafted in traditional formats with Proppian plot-plans and, because they

ultimately still upheld the middle class moral status quo, they entered the amateur canon

immediately. The text-rich „sex plays‟ by Noel Coward, George Bernard Shaw and J. B.

Priestley still figure in amateur listings today. Almost exclusively set in large upper

middle class homes these scripts provide the desired rehearsal material for lower middles

anxious to experience the delights of upper middle immorality without actually going

through the trauma of being immoral.

The rehearsed depiction of otherwise threatening behaviour has the effect of

transforming the threatening into the acceptable. Priestley‟s Dangerous Corner (1932),

dealing with drugs, fast cars and homosexuality, or When We Are Married (1938),

dealing with betrayal of trust and duty in marriage, are examples of scripts playing out

what was perceived as the breakdown in middle class morality and the patriarchally

threatening rise of female independence. By being referential to (but not totally imitative

of in real life) the details of upper middle culture, amateur drama filters a digest of the

memes of the upper middle class life-style downwards, distilling them into something

deceptively accessible.

Bourdieu calls this „culture moyenne‟ – a culture which is perceived as normative -

acceptable and desirable because it seems ordinary, or „middle-brow‟ (Bourdieu

1979:323-328). This second-hand cultural capital is then filed away in the memory banks

of the lower middle participants as if they were real memories.


Of course they are real memories, but of a fictitious past. I can still gain pleasure

from picturing in my mind the colours of the furnishings of my home when I was

„Sheila‟, except that I never owned them and Sheila‟s „reproduction‟ taste isn‟t my taste.

I remember my young lover and my solicitor husband with sentiment and affection, or

rather the actors who played them. The group with which I performed this play broke up

years ago, and although we still arrange occasional reunions at which we embrace, and

weep, and coo over „family‟ photographs, they aren‟t real family photographs. It‟s only

us in costume and make-up, and my young lover in this photo appears as my son in the

photos of another play. In reality he is happily married to someone else.

Like Francis Yates in Memory Theatres (1966) and Raphael Samuel in Theatres of

Memory (1994 & 1998) Bernard J. Baars uses a theatre metaphor to describe the thought

processes of memory retrieval. In the theatre of consciousness : the workspace of the

mind (1997) explores the metaphor to suggest that rehearsal helps the human brain

organise the „fringe‟ of peripheral impressions of unconsciously apprehended signifiers

into a form that can be foregrounded consciously (Baars 1997:41-47). Taking part in a

play as a cast or crewmember makes demands on memory, deliberately exercising both

short-term and long-term memory, and retrieving „lost‟ subconscious memories. This can

sometimes be extremely painful. However the process is more likely to be extremely

pleasurable. There is evidence that pleasure-inducing chemicals similar to endorphins are

released by the act of memory exercise (McGaugh 1992; Lindsey & Norman 1977).

The late Twentieth century growth of information industries has fuelled the need

for rehearsal practices to mentally fix methods of following instructions, and to order the

logic processes of those who deal on a daily basis with the logic of what is now an

almost exclusively computer based administration. Lower middle service workers have

been forced by the rise of modern office work practice to assimilate computer technology

and handle the sudden whoosh of computer generated data. Amdram allowed the new

home owning lower middle classes to rehearse the suburban ideals constructed and

marketed to them by the upper middles. At the turn of the millennium, the participants of

Amdram still satisfy the needs of this dominant group with service „day-jobs‟ but the

solicitors, accountants, owners of small businesses, and office administrators have all

become computer literate.


Furthermore, following their parents‟ lead, their children now also rehearse among

the memory theatres of the new high status data processing occupations, a discovery that

will be seen to be more relevant by the time we reach The Coda.

Since practice at the learning and rehearsal of complex wordy texts organises

memory and thought processes, drama is an ideal memory exercise for giving the brain

thinking practice. Not only is this essential for honing the mental processes of the rising

new professions of the lower middles, but it also releases yet more pleasure endorphins

to supplement the pleasure effect of masochism. Memory exercise from verbal rehearsal

is the secret of the appeal to the current Cast and Crew of the text-rich scripts they

favour, and it is this which has ensured the continued survival Post-war of text-based

Amdram and prevented its degeneration into the wordless visual performance forms

increasingly favoured by commercial theatre.

Memorising scripts, however, is only an option open to those who are cast to play

parts. What about those who never actually act and those who specialise in being crew?

Exactly how the make-up artists and lighting designers, scenery builders and

costume makers find their masochistic pleasures in the exercise of their skills through

exercising their memories is the subject of the next chapter.

09 ACT ll - Doing It - Act ll - Scene l - The Rehearsal

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