Three Chairs, a Spot and…
Burton Rooms, Oxford, March 1978
CAST
Dibb - David Paget
Sally - Melanie Hawthorne
Keith - Dave Edwards
Maggie - Karoline Newman
Brian - Robin Seavill
Ralph - Robert Dawson Scott
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Mark King
BUSINESS MANAGER
Mandy Fagelson
STAGE MANAGER
Iain Craig Moss
LIGHTING
Mark Galloway
SOUND
Andrew Burnham
FRONT OF HOUSE
Hilary Beswick
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY
Robin Seavill
PS
Maybe we ought none of us to have done this.
We were all, or mostly all, in our final year at Oxford and bare months away from taking our finals, the allegedly life-changing exams we had all been ostensibly working towards for the last three or four years. But I wanted to write and direct at least one play before I left university, while all the necessary facilities and backup were still freely available, so I sat down and started writing. It had become clear to me that whatever path my life took, academe was certainly not likely to figure in it, so I decided I would play to my strengths instead. I would do my best with the revision and the exams out of respect to my tutors and family, but nobody by this point was expecting miracles on the research or insight front, least of all myself.
Robert D S
Where I found the time I do not know, because I was still having to read God knows how many pages of foreign every day and write endless essays which even now are the only pieces of my own writing, from any era, which I can never bring myself to look at again. But somehow the script came together in the wee small watches of the night at my desk in St John’s overlooking the High where the yellow lamps cast an Edwardian glow over the ageless silence.
Karoline N
I had fallen in with a rambunctious bunch of mostly Mod Langs students who all pitched in to take over the various bits of humdrum admin necessary, and I think it was OUDS in the end who bankrolled the production which was to consist of two performances only, one Sunday towards the end of term, in the famed Burton Taylor Studio theatre behind the Playhouse, a small performance space which had been endowed by, or funded by or, if neither of those, at least named after the glamorous acting couple. (Richard Burton had attended Exeter College on a scholarship.)
Melanie H and David P
The title is a tangential reference to that age-old adage about the minimum necessary for the creation of good theatre, ie, ‘bare boards and a passion’, and our play, set during rehearsals for a university revue, consisted of little more than that. (I can no longer remember whether we literally used three chairs on stage – I expect so, because I remember perching on a stool at one point, Jake Thackray-fashion, to sing a song.) I do remember it was the first time I employed the gimmick of recycling revue scripts to act as a kind of skeleton for the drama (see also eg Play On Words, Ha Bloody Ha etc). In his later TV plays, Dennis Potter famously made a habit of bulking out his scripts with vaguely pertinent songs from the 30s and 40s. It certainly meant he didn’t have to do all the writing himself. In my plays at least I could always claim any words I recycled were mine – and, come to think of it, all the songs too, so FWIW there.
Dave E
The main thing I remember about the whole process now was that everyone behind the scenes was very sweet and helpful given this was basically just a massive vanity project on my part. I probably did an appalling job as a director (at one point, while I was reciting someone’s lines to them to demonstrate the precise way I wanted the actor to say them, they asked me not to), and we even got decent little audiences. I know there was at least one good laugh, the line “Oh Maggie – I wish I’d never seen her face,” which works perfectly in context while at the same time incongruously quoting directly from the Rod Stewart hit ‘Maggie May’ – but to describe the setup would be too tedious to go into here. You’d have to have been there.
Mandy F, Karoline N, RAS. (I bloody loved that white sheepskin. I’d still be wearing it today if the armpits hadn’t rotted through and it hadn’t started smelling like an old dromedary.)
And I won’t even be able to reproduce it in the Plays section either. Sadly, the only copy of the script I have in my files is incomplete and while once, during rehearsals, I could have recited the whole thing word-perfect from beginning to end, alas, that feat is no longer possible, and since the confection was so slight anyway, there wouldn’t be much to be gained from simply posting a scene or two. But the rehearsal photographs tell their own tale. I think everyone enjoyed themselves, and most of them, at least, went on to get better degrees than I did. (They could hardly have done worse, let’s be honest.) I know one of us became a vicar, another went into documentary film making, a third became a teacher, much loved by their pupils. Sadly, not all of them are still around today, but I’d like to think the few weeks we all spent together beneath that spot, amidst those chairs, provided a final brief period of carefreeness before shit got real. And after all, what else is university for, if not that?
“For Christ’s sake, just do it more like this.”