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My fabulous cast 👌

This is about a company of amateur dramaticals: the Renegade Theatre Company of Ilford. And since a quick Google search, not available in the fifties and sixties, reveals that there are now several troupes calling themselves “Renegades”, I need first to make plain that I refer in this piece to no other company that bears, or has borne that name.

I don’t know if amateur dramatic societies are a peculiarly English, or British, thing but I do believe that during their time the Renegades were exceptional even among the English cadre: exceptional for their dedication, for their range and for their quality. For most of their existence, they presented a different play each month and a unique pantomime every Christmas. For a time, that schedule gave way to an exhausting two plays a month and a pantomime and latterly they regularly offered us a Victorian music hall. To achieve this meant rehearsing three times a week, which, for people with day jobs for whom this should perhaps have been just a bit of extra-curricular fun on the side, was an astonishing level of commitment.

But for the core players it was never so slight as “a bit of fun on the side”. They were dedicated. And in all the time that I was associated with them, whether as audience or as a stage hand or, more briefly, as an actor, I never felt the need to make allowances for their productions. From the moment the curtain rose until it fell at the end, you were captivated, all belief suspended, drawn into the world they were presenting. For the significance of that recollection, let me explain that, for a while during the sixties, I became infatuated (a fairer word would be obsessed) with a girl at my school, Caroline, and that meant trying to go along with her insistence that theatre was phoney and that only film could transport you. For her, the daughter of the then Secretary of the British Film Institute, it was perhaps an understandable conceit. But try as I did, I only had to sit in the auditorium of the Little Theatre as the lights went down and the curtain lifted to be utterly taken over by the play being acted out before me, something a film, with its bloated close-ups and enforced viewpoints, could rarely achieve. In that red plush seat, I may have been taking shelter from a real world that I could not join but, for two hours or so, sanctuary was freely given through the proscenium; and I left it feeling renewed and briefly convinced of my specialness.

The heart of the Renegades was James (“Jimmie”) Cooper, an actor/producer/director of uncertain age whose chiselled good looks could have give Peter o’Toole a run for his money. If there was a lead to play, whether in Arthur Miller’s “A View From The Bridge” or Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice or Hamlet or as Widow Twankey in Aladdin, Jimmie would play it. That was a given. And he could. Always at his right-hand was a woman, Yvonne, dark haired and deceptively fragile who would almost invariably take the female lead, deservedly so. In the sixties I had been bowled over by performances by Judi Dench and Helen Mirren but I swear even a glimpse of Yvonne could steal this poor innocent teen’s heart. Betty did props with assiduous care. Later on, came Jane, who eschewed performance, unless she could be disguised head to foot as a dog or a panda. Jane was serious, always dressed for hard work and dedicated to back-stage perfection. I credit her with quietly challenging all my received assumptions about the role of women as adornments for the pleasure of men. She was practical, could do anything a man could do but was indisputably a woman, gentle, caring and warm-hearted. It was a lesson that has lasted all my life so far.

Jimmie lived in a tiny converted three storey, three roomed building behind Ilford Station. It had formerly been the resting place for a Hansom cab and was still known as “The Stables”. I never saw what occupied the ground floor but a flight of rickety stairs to one side led up to a trapdoor that gave the sole access to the first floor room and this was where rehearsals took place. By first reading, Jimmie would already have selected his cast and copies of the play, hired from a London theatre supplier, would be handed out. I remember the buzz of excitement but also the seriousness with which it was all undertaken. We were not here to play at being “actors”. This was Theatre.

Nothing seemed to daunt them: from Shakespeare to Miller to Priestley to Coward. At the Little Theatre I lapped up Our Town, Arsenic and Old Lace, Blithe Spirit, Desperate Hours, The Anne Frank Story, The Ghost Train, An Inspector Calls as well as Macbeth, Hamlet and A midsummer Night’s Dream and so many others. I was enthralled.

I had become involved with the Renegades in the early sixties when my father, encouraged by my mother, took the, for him, unlikely step of joining in (late in my life I begin to see where my own diffidence came from). He was not one for performing, blaming his severe short sight which left him near blind without his glasses (though this was only truly an excuse for profound shyness: I did see him on stage once, very much against his better judgment, in a walk-on part as a detective inspector), but he was happy to function as stage manager and to operate the reel-to-reel tape recorder in the wings while the others went out under the lights. Being, myself, an unnaturally quiet and reserved teenager, terrified of his generation’s new apparent worldly freedoms, I was happy to be accepted by the group as Frank’s son, and to spend evenings in that loft and weekends at the massive workshop behind Ilford’s then “Little Theatre”, where the sets were prepared and stored. At the risk of cliché (when have I ever balked at cliché?) I felt a thrill run through me whenever I was there or backstage, and even now, nearly six decades on, to walk into a theatre is to feel as if I have been embraced by a very magical other world.

My father would work alongside little Jeff Wenn, a man small in stature but big in heart, with a perpetual fag hanging from one corner of his mouth the curling smoke from which caused him to scrunch up one eye. Jeff’s daytime job was in radio and TV repair. He had a little shop down a side street, packed with valves and smelling of hot wire, solder and tobacco. From him I learned the value of “knowing where to hit it” when the TV picture broke up, which, in those days, it often did. But for the Renegades he worked the lights, effortlessly controlling a bank of fearsome levers and switches and swapping gels on spots hot enough to cook dinner on.

I learned over time the names of some of the now famous people who had passed through the Renegades: Bryan Forbes, John Woodvine, John Alderton and Ken Campbell to name but four. Ken kept up his contact with Jimmie and at least once graced us with his irrepressible presence.

But the bedrock of the group was its amateur players. People from all walks of life who turned out for a chance to perform. Len, who worked in a Barking stationery store before joining the Civil Service, Myra, a seamstress, Brian, a tax inspector, Tod, a chicken-sexer, John, a salesman, Betty, a PDSA nurse, Ray, a tiler, Milton, a curtain maker, and Yvonne, PA for a while to a notorious politician. Some of them adopted stage names: Len became Leonard Charles, Myra became Lila Myra, Yvonne became Yvonne Haesen.

Jimmie’s talents did not end with acting or direction. He designed the sets and the costumes; he chose the music; he chose the cast. It was his life and, somehow, his livelihood. On Saturday mornings, I would watch as he sized and then painted huge scenery flats. Working on these massive canvas and wood flimsies, laid flat on the floor, he displayed an astonishing impressionistic flair. A few sweeps of the brush, which looked random and crude close up, might, under the lights and seen from the auditorium, become a cityscape or a library, a clock tower or a forest. Magic indeed. Only Rolf Harris, of whom, of course, no good may now be spoken, ever did it better.

I only managed to appear on stage in three productions: two pantomimes and the play “Inherit the Wind. That play, based on the “Monkey Trials” in early 20th Century America and written as a parable against Macarthyism in the 1950s, opened my eyes. I was eleven at the time. It must have been 1963. I had just started secondary education at Wanstead Grammar School, as it still was, and my appearance gained me a short-lived fame in my class. I played Howard, a boy around my age who had been introduced to Darwin’s theory of evolution by his teacher who now faced jail for doing so in a bible-bewitched town in the Mid-West. Up until that moment I had been entirely taken in by the comforting fairy tales of the new and old testaments but I came away dissatisfied with them and, in their place, with thoughts I had never had before, thoughts which prepared me some 20 years later to receive gratefully the patient, and finally and powerfully rational, explanations of Richard Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker. Such is the power of art to foster enlightenment.

Small as it was, I loved that part. I am surprised now that anyone in the audience could hear my lines but I suppose they could – Jimmie would not have allowed it to be otherwise. And, for a brief time, I was no longer my shrivelled self, afraid of what might confront me next, but a part of something certain and compelling. For just four performances, each two hours long, I felt I belonged somewhere.

I try not to fall into the trap of wishing my life had been different. It is not just that I know that for us humans time is a one-way street, a ratchet that prevents us from going back. I am also aware that if I were to change the smallest thing in my past the ripples of change would spread out to affect others, such as my son and daughter, who now have their own lives but who might even cease to exist in the present as a consequence of one tiny alteration. I have no right to do that. But I do have regrets and one of them is that I wish I had engaged more with the Renegades. I see now how much was there to learn from and to rouse this shy, scared boy.

I suppose I should be pleased with how my life has turned out over all but I look at people like Michael Coveney, who, for a time, graced the Company with his already powerful intellect and who has gone on to contribute so much to the world of theatre with his writings and I think how small my life has been by comparison. I was utterly in awe of both Coveney brothers back then. But it did not occur to me to follow their example. I was locked into to my small life, into gaining the approval of my seniors and, above all, into not making a fuss. I had taken to heart my Mother’s stricture that “good manners mean never offending anyone” (which I am afraid I now see as a convenient falsehood).

Jimmie never made it big but he lived life his way and in the process brought joy and the challenge of intelligence to his community. When he died, the Renegades died with him and something was lost that had been of a significance that I think few people recognised. His death opened up a hole that was never filled.

And that I suppose is what all this verbiage wants to acknowledge and maybe celebrate, belatedly. For a while, during a dim and grey time, the Renegades were a bright star for so many to gaze at in wonder and perhaps even follow. And the Little Theatre, their home until it was demolished by a careless, money-grubbing council, lobbied by envious rivals, was its powerhouse.

Stage Kiss, by Sarah Ruhl, at Sheffield University Drama Studio, from Wed 20th to Sat 23rd September 2023.

Search Midland Players for tickets.