It is most provoking, as Humpty Dumpty observed to Alice, when people can’t tell
the difference between a tie and a belt, or in my case between waving and
drowning.
Due to an overdeveloped social conscience and a desire to continue showing off, I
have conceived the idea of founding a Youth Theatre. Frankly I think it’s rather big of me. Not because it’s altruistic, although it is in the way outlined; but because it’s over-ambitious!
I last ran a Youth Theatre over 30 years ago. It was easy. A friend lent us an old barn up in the hills of Llanfair. 18 children aged from 5 to 18 came each Sunday afternoon to learn about performance, telling stories, writing scripts, making scenery, costumes and how to co-operate. We drove around the area piled somehow into my old Landrover, all 19 of us squeezed in amongst props, and costumes with really very little thought as to health and safety. I was the only adult and we
performed puppet shows, pantomimes and reviews in pubs, in fields at village
fetes, town festivals. All the material
was devised, designed and written by the children. Sometimes it was ad hoc and sometimes it was pretty professional; it all depended on how long we’d had to rehearse and make props, scenery and costumes.
It’s very different this time, we have to be a constituted Charity, we have to have CRB checks, we have to have Trustees and then we can get “Funding” I wasn’t expecting that and now I know why potential Prima Donnas are popping up. To date I am the official and only recognised PD. And it is here that we come to the provokin bit.
I have been promoting the thing so as to get the thing off the ground. The sooner the better in my view. Within what seemed like minutes but was probably a couple of days, to my delight, people were contacting me. But they just wanted to tell me how to set the thing up, how to teach, how to direct and how to run it. They even went so far as to complain that I hadn’t done it as they would have; but refrained from going into too much detail.
None
of these are particularly provoking in themselves. However, what is provoking is the inability to tell the difference between a grateful welcome to some practical help and an inability to know what I was doing.
In the end, of course, no practical helphas been forthcoming and I am at liberty to set the thing up to please myself. As I would be taking the lion’s share of the responsibility and am currently funding it this suits me to a degree.
In this way, when the inevitable rush of people wishing to be on yet another committee arrives; either to gain kudos for cute costumes for their offspring, or to put pressure for same to be in the limelight, I will be able to resist in favour of the talented and the dedicated.!
Now I’m off to Zumba which should take care of any last vestige of aggression that I have left after this rant!
Since I drafted this, two of my very competent and skilled old students have consented to serve on my committee; and the perfectly fabulous Helen Jones without whom things would have gone particularly pear shaped on the first workshop! I am an ungrateful cow! Bless you girls I love you xxxx
