Where It All Began: Julie Andrews at the Walton Playhouse

This year marks the centenary of the Walton Playhouse, a small community arts centre in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Originally part of the Cecil Hepworth film studios, the building was converted into a theatre in 1925, with its foundation stone laid by Dame Ellen Terry and the venue officially opened later that year by Sir Philip and Lady Richardson (Ellis 2002, p. 83; Hughes 2003, p. 96).

Like many such venues across Britain, the Walton Playhouse has long functioned as a site of amateur performance, arts education, and cultural participation for the local community. Yet it also holds a more intimate historical significance. It was here that a local child and future star, Julie Andrews, made her very first theatrical appearances.

As Julie recounts in the first volume of her autobiography (2008), performance was embedded in the fabric of her family life. Her mother, Barbara, was a trained pianist and her aunt Joan an accomplished dancer and percussionist. Together, the sisters earned their living in the Walton area through local concerts, teaching, radio work, and community events (Andrews 2008). By the time Julie came along, Aunt Joan was already well established as a dance teacher, running her own school and troupe: the Joan Morris Juveniles.

The Walton Playhouse became a natural focal point for this extended family enterprise. Each year, Joan staged an annual revue and showcase for her pupils there. These were not merely community events but thoroughly familial affairs. Barbara supplied the music; Julie’s father, Ted Wells, built scenery by hand; costumes were designed, sets painted, props engineered, and backstage labour shared among relatives and friends (Andrews 2008, pp. 19–20).

It was within this environment that Julie made her 'unofficial' stage debut. Her first billed appearance came in one of Aunt Joan's Playhouse revues in May 1939. At the age of three-and-a-half, she performed in a routine based on the nursery rhyme “Wynken, Blynken and Nod.” A rare surviving programme from this performance — reproduced here — lists her under her birth name, Julia Wells.

In one oft-recalled moment from that performance, when a fellow performer’s hat slipped over her eyes mid-dance, Julie quietly guided the hapless child safely across the stage — an early, almost comic illustration of the communal ethic she had already absorbed. As she later reflected, she seemed instinctively to understand that “the show must go on” (Andrews 2008, p. 20).

Julie performed regularly at the Playhouse throughout her childhood and adolescence. As another programme featured here indicates, by 1943 — at the age of eight — she had graduated to a solo spot, singing the Judy Garland classic “I’m Just an In-Between.”

Even after attaining professional status as a juvenile star, Julie continued to lend her name and presence to Joan’s revues at the Playhouse. Her youngest brother, Christopher, also appeared in some of them, extending the collective family enterprise.

What Julie’s early experience at the Walton Playhouse reveals is something theatre historian Michael Mangan has argued more broadly: that amateur and community theatres are not marginal to British cultural life, but central to it. Such spaces sustain what Mangan describes as a deeply “dramatised” national culture, in which performance is embedded in everyday social relations rather than confined to professional or metropolitan stages. Their value lies not in polish or prestige, but in participation, sociability, and cultural continuity (Mangan 2010, pp. 157 ff.).

Seen in this light, the Walton Playhouse was not merely the backdrop to the beginnings of an extraordinary career; it exemplifies the cultural ecology that makes such careers possible. As amateur theatres across Britain and elsewhere face increasing pressure and closure, the Playhouse’s centenary offers a timely reminder that community performance spaces do not simply preserve local culture — they nurture the habits, values, and collective labour from which future creative artists emerge.

Sources 

Andrews, J. (2008). Home: A memoir of my early years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Ellis, B. (2002). Walton Past. Chichester: Phillimore & Co.

Hughes, W. (2003). Images of England: Walton-on-Thames. Stroud: Tempus Publishing.

Mangan, M. (2010). Theatre in modern British culture. In F. Smith, J. Higgins, & J. Storey (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to modern British culture (pp. 154–171). London: Cambridge University Press.

Stirling, R. (2007). Julie Andrews: An intimate biography. London: Portrait.

That being said

I am so glad that I am no longer in uni doing am dram because I just know in the depths of my soul that there would be 2 factions:

1. Those completely obsessed with EPIC, playing it at every party and trying to get songs into the shows

2. Those who hate on the sheer principle of the others are just so annoying about it