06/03/2017
Why the Archive?
I decided to make this archive page because people often ask about those times. The page will be grown throughout 2017. I hope that as it flows along others will add their memories: the actors who played in the productions; the loyal audiences; all the amazing members of Shiva Youth Group who played at The Minack Theatre Schools Fortnights. All the weasels from the Wind in the Willows, the elves and goblins from The Hobbit, the townspeople from The Three Musketeers, playing cards from Alice, pupils from Tom Sawyer, children from Under Milk Wood, and others. They were big productions, big casts including 30 youth players, two teams of 15 over the 2 weeks. This page is for everyone who became involved in those years; and indeed the early Acorn cross-over years. Maybe some pieces of film or recordings might eventually join the archive - I know they’re out there. But all in good time.
Things were different then, in the nineteen-seventies
Administration:
There were no mobile phones (you couldn’t ring a venue from the road to say you were stuck in a traffic jam and might be a bit late, you would have to stop and find a telephone box). We didn’t have computers, so none of the digital convenience of computer data-bases, accounting software or email. Everything was typed, in this instance on a Splendid 66 Olympia portable typewriter (replaced in the late 1980s by an electronic desk Olympia typewriter, given to the company by Olympia as sponsorship). The world of typing is one of Tipp-ex, Sno-pake and carbon paper. The world of graphics was one of hand-drawn lettering, or Letraset, red film, colour separations. Even photocopiers were uncommon. There was no Social Media through which to drum up a following.
Infrastructure:
There was no Hall for Cornwall. There was Truro City Hall, Wadebridge Town Hall, St. Ives Guild Hall, West Cornwall Arts Centre, St. Austell Arts Centre, Falmouth Arts Centre, Redannick Theatre in Truro, Cosy Nook in Newquay, various Public Halls, and our beloved Village Halls but no Carn To Cove Village hall/rural touring scheme. (Another great entrepreneur, Ross Williams, can tell the story of the growth of the infrastructure which we take for granted in 2017.)
We played on St. Mawgan Air Base; and regularly went to St. Mary's Town Hall, Isles of Scilly.
There were electricity meters to feed stage lighting, most famously the ones that took five pence pieces at St. Agnes Puppet Theatre and Bude Parish Hall. And, Rowena Cade still sat in her upturned wheelbarrow at The Minack Theatre; where there was no exhibition centre or cafe, just a simple concrete pill-box ticket office.
The roads:
To get beyond Penwith you had to drive through Hayle. (The bypass was built in the mid-eighties). I’m convinced there were 7 sets of traffic lights in Hayle, and each turned to red as we approached, especially on the way home from a gig late at night.
The dual-carriageway A30 as we know it today didn’t really happen until the late nineteen-eighties. There were by-passes around towns but not as they are today; and passing Jamaica Inn on the way home meant ‘three hours to go’; more like four in some of our vans.
The M5 was completed to Exeter in 1977 and Devon A30 was dualled to the Cornish border in the late nineteen-eighties, bypasses at Okehampton in Devon and Blackwater in Cornwall were dualled around 1988.
‘Pioneering in the wasteland’ was how Guardian reporter Allen Saddler described the tour of ‘Dylan’. There was a rash of pioneers around the time: The 1980 July/Aug issue of Arts South West (the newspaper of South West Arts) listed the following in what they called ‘The Great Western Stage’: Avon Touring Theatre Company, Dance Tales, Dr. Foster’s Travelling Theatre, Ekome Arts, Emerging Dragon, Footsbarn, Inside Out, Medium Fair, Natural Theatre, Newgate Theatre Co, Orchard, Platypus, The Playwrights Company, Portable Dance, Shiva (Cornwall Theatre Co), South West Music Theatre, Stiletto theatre, White Horse Travelling Theatre.
