It’s not all fluffed lines: the serious business of amateur dramatics

The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m your financial columnist with a constant eye on the villains and heroes of the global business scene. In the other half, I’m the panto dame of my Yorkshire home town and the veteran of dozens of other stage roles — from Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest to Mole in The Wind in the Willows — in the friendly little arts centre that we created for our community 30 years ago. My theatrical side-career over all that time has been creative, liberating, challenging and the fulcrum of my social life. But since I last trod the boards in February (in an Alan Bennett vicar sketch) it has, like so much else, been reduced to no more than an occasional Zoom. And I’m bereft.

So it has been some consolation to read two books which, in very different ways, record and celebrate the rich story of Britain’s amateur theatre. Michael Coveney spent 45 years as a critic of the professional theatre, successively for the Financial Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail, and his approach is serious and respectful. He has travelled to unearth histories of many of Britain’s long-established amateur groups and venues, from the lovely 18th-century Theatre Royal, Dumfries, saved from demolition by local thespians in 1959, to the extraordinary Minack Theatre, carved into a Cornish cliff. Included are two to which his title alludes: the Questors Theatre in Ealing, a founder member of the Little Theatre Guild which was at the heart of a post-second-world-war flourishing of am-dram, and the Renegades Company in Ilford, where the young Coveney first found himself drawn to greasepaint in the late 1950s.

And when I say ‘respectful’, I mean that Coveney is not of the school that looks to am-dram for what he encapsulates as ‘the hilarity of mishap’, meaning the sort of coarse acting and backstage incompetence that Michael Green once wrote a very funny book about.