Pat Yesin Secondary Cause of Death 2012
2012
Jack and the Beans Talk
Spurred on by the exorbitant cost of licence and performance fees, we began work on writing our own pantomime. This was composed by committee which met regularly through the autumn and early spring. Eventually, we were able to hand it over to John and Richard for their musical input. Our big opening number was based on the Village People’s YMCA with lyrics revised by John Bessant about how lovely it is to live in Bishopsteignton! John and Richard also wrote a couple of songs specially for our panto which made it very special indeed. There were a number of hiccups on the way to production as people kept dropping in and out.
I was going to be the Golden Goose but I too had to drop out after the dress rehearsal because of a detached retina which made me very sad. Liz Mac took over as Stand-In Goose with a specially produced t-shirt. So, the performances went ahead in March 2012. And once again Peter and Marilyn excelled themselves with set and props – including an amazing beanstalk that actually grew and a grisly giant’s head. And of course, the musical talents of John and Richard made all the difference. Roger Hunt was our Dame Dolly and Brian Dunford was the kindly magician, Bill Basset, with a very rude staff!
Poster for ‘Jack and the Beans’ Panto 2012
Scenery for ‘Jack and the Beans’ Panto 2012
At the AGM in June, Keith Lambert stood down and Linda Wilmot took over as Chairman. I was able to hand over the baton of Secretary to Viv Nietrzebka at last, although I continued to help out with publicity, banners, posters and so on.
Secondary Cause of Death
We decided to do another open air play. John Patton was keen to do “Cold Comfort Farm” and we did have a read through but rejected it on grounds that we didn’t have enough young folk to cast it credibly! So, in the end we elected to do a sequel to “Murdered to Death”: “Secondary Cause of Death” by Peter Gordon. John Bessant repeated his triumphant performance as the bungling Inspector Pratt with Pippa as Miss Maple.
The weather was frightful that summer and we had a contingency plan to move the whole production to the Village Hall. But in the event, we were able to do it in the garden at Teign Lawn. I had a small part as the housekeeper Martha Armstrong who is murdered early in the play, stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors. This presented a problem for the costume department – Hilary Gilroy solved it brilliantly with a polystyrene block inserted under my cape to keep the scissors in place.
Programme for Bishopsteignton Players play ‘Secondary Cause of Death’
Play ‘Secondary Cause of Death’ 2012
We did two evening performances and an afternoon matinee on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st July. On the last night, we had a crisis at the end of Act 2 when Nigel Everett failed to come in on his cue. The rest of the cast madly ad-libbed. Nigel hastily came back in carrying the pair of smoking shoes but not through the secret door. John Bessant had to do some quick thinking to cover this up and pretend to discover the secret door himself.
Cast of the Play ‘Secondary Cause of Death’ 2012
Richard was keen for us to do another revue later that year. There was also the Jubilee in 2012 for which Heather and I wrote a special play about the Coronation and how it had been received in Bishopsteignton. We performed this in the Community Centre as a play for voices with hats at the Jubilee weekend in June. Becks Jones used her poshest voice to record the young Queen Elizabeth’s speech to the nation as part of this.
After this, we were going to do some one-act plays but this fell through because too many people were going to be away. But one of them was a short play written by Vivian Nietrzebka set in the Second World War and this later was incorporated into Mission Accomplished which we did much later in 2014.
2013
We decided to do another revue. Richard took charge of this, and it included some terrific sketches: Punch and Judy seek marriage guidance, witches come to grief quoting from the Scottish play. Richard was able to his use contacts in the media to get permission to perform some of these. Liz Mac and I did Fascinating Aida’s Cheap Flights with a lovely Irish girl, Niamh. (Liz and I repeated this for Red Nose Day, performing in the pubs of Bishopsteignton and raised £100 for Comic Relief!). We did a number from Sister Act, Hail Holy Queen, and also one from Les Miserables, Master of the House. We did three nights, in February 2013.
A comment overheard from someone in the audience, ‘Of course, it’s not as good as in the West End.’
At the AGM in March, we agreed to start work on another pantomime.
Liz Mac and I would write the script with input from Richard and John on the music. Our first idea was to base it on Alice in Wonderland. But later we changed this to Snow White. It was going to involve Snow White having a band, the Seven Back Beach Boys, instead of dwarves. Linda Wilmot later joined in the writing, and we had several wine-fuelled sessions on it through the spring and early summer. But we never completed it. I’m not sure what happened to the script!
Curse of the Werewolf
We started preparing a production of “The Curse of the Werewolf”, a Gothic romp, for the first Village Festival, set for June 2013.
The Players had done this some years before with a different cast. I was cast as Ingeborg, assistant to the fiendish Professor Steiner. I made myself some stern black-rimmed glasses and a plait out of wool to wind round my head. Hilary Gilroy sourced clinical white coats for myself and Derek. It is a musical but we did it without the songs at the Festival. It was quite a complex production and involved a great deal of smoke! We rehearsed through the early summer but never seemed to have a full cast for any of the rehearsals.
The Festival site was on a fierce downward slope which was quite tricky to negotiate. When we came to try and fit it into the marquee at the festival we found that the wonderful Gothic set created by Marilyn and Peter wouldn’t fit the space. They worked speedily to adapt it and we had to change all our entrances and exits at very short notice. John Bessant as a demented inmate of Dr Steiner’s institution had missed the dress rehearsal because of work commitments, so his first experience of the new layout was the actual performance! But we managed it and had a brilliant audience, all pretty well oiled with alcohol!
There was a suggestion that we might repeat it later in the year with the songs, but we all felt it was too risky! John Patton directed us. It was the most fun I can ever remember having with a production. I just remember the performance being like surfing on a wonderful wave, carried along by the cheering of our audience in the big marquee. Afterwards, John Patton confided to me that I was the only member of the cast he wasn’t worried about! I don’t think everybody remembers it quite like I do. It was a good decision not to try and repeat this later in the year – we might never have found that chemistry again!
Two
Things went a bit quiet after the festival. We began work on “Two”, a play by Jim Cartwright that the Players had done before, so called because it was originally meant to be performed by two actors doing all the parts but we did it with a full cast. We performed it in November 2013 in the Village Hall.
Bitter sweet, is how it was described. It was set in a northern pub and told a number of different stories of the various customers who came into the pub, intertwined with the tragic story line of the publican and his wife. Some of it was pretty heavy – Tony Cottle and Suzie Izzard played an abusive and controlling husband and his frightened wife, trying to break free. Liz Mac and Roger Hunt by contrast brought the house down as a pair of bikers, dressed in leathers, complete with tattoos! My part was a sad old lady having a drink on her own as a break from caring for her disabled husband.
I didn’t enjoy it much I have to confess. But we did the whole thing as an evening in the Players’ Arms and had singing, a raffle and a pub quiz as well which made it more fun. And we turned the whole Village Hall into a pub for the performances, so the audience was sitting in among the actors. Not sure that this was okay strictly speaking from the point of view of health and safety. But it went down pretty well. The Old Workshop lent us a proper bar and beer pumps so we had a really authentic set. We entered the production for the South Devon Drama Festival and got some very positive feedback from the adjudicator about the show. But we did not win any prizes that year.
Programme for Bishopsteignton Players play ‘The Players’ Arms’
This article highlights Pat’s reminiscences from 2012- 2013
and will be continued in Part Three – starting in 2014 with the play ‘Mission Accomplished’, so watch out for the next article.