The Obituary in the Guardian on his death of Peter Cheeseman a few days after the last posting in which I featured his work at in Stoke-on-Trent with Stephen Joseph and Alan Ayckbourn stimulated me to add the following to the last Swansea U3A posting.

THEATRE
Last week I was pointing up the
similarity between the pioneering work done with theatre in the cultural
desert of Stoke on Trent to the current tasks facing National Theatre
Wales, and in particular to the work of Peter Cheeseman, Stephen Joseph
(who died of cancer at the age of 46 in 1967) and Alan Ayckbourn in the
early 1960s. I was amazed to open today's Guardian and find the featured
obituary was for Peter Cheeseman, who died two days ago. He directed
theatre in Stoke until retiring in1998, by which time the 600 seat
Victoria Theatre had been built specially designed for
theatre-in-the-round.

I was struck by the similarity of aims
with National Theatre Wales to set up theatre which built on the local
community, and was anxious to find the few programs I kept from that
initial era. They start, like the obituary, from the touring Studio
Theatre Ltd. of Stephen Joseph and a 1961/2 performance of 'A Doll's
House' with Alan Ayckbourn in the leading male role. The Victoria
Theatre (that name obviously pre-dates the New Vic as it was known later
before returning to the original name with the purpose built theatre)
had its first season in 1962/3. A season from which I have programs for
The Rehearsal by Jean Anouilh directed by Peter Cheeseman and The
Caretaker by Harold Pinter directed by Alan Ayckbourn.

A program from 1964 was for Look Back
in Anger by John Osborne, but the program missing from that year was The
Jolly Potter, a locally written musical staged during pantomime season
as I recall, which told the story of the Potteries town which was still
manufacturing a very high percentage of world's quality china -
manufacturing now sadly virtually entirely transferred to Asia. To my
chagrin we had decided to miss that iconic play, a fitting reward for
the snob I still was! That was evidently the first of a whole series of
productions featuring the concerns and history of the local community,
and that is the real link with the aspirations of National Theatre
Wales.


To convert the abandoned Victoria cinema
into a theatre-in-the-round venue apparently cost £5000 (the price of
two good houses in Stoke at the time), affordable and incredibly good
value for money, yet provided the platform which together with
outstanding artistic talent set theatre in Stoke off to the real success
it was to become.

The other performance we remember from
that era was a production of Hamlet, a play particularly powerful in
'theatre in the round' format as demonstrated superbly a couple of years
ago at The Tobacco Factory in Bristol, with a performance directed by
Jonathan Miller.

Theatre to Peter Cheeseman to quote from
the Guardian obituary 'meant a permanent company of professional actors
living in the town and making theatre that "springs from our contact
with this community".'

Stephen Joseph (son of Hermione Gingold)
left Stoke in 1966 and returned to Scarborough, the base of his touring
Studio Theatre Ltd, and soon opened the Stephen Joseph Theatre in
Scarborough with Alan Ayckbourn as Artistic Director, which is still
active to this day. Like me he had first become an enthusiast of
theatre-in-the-round in the USA in the 1950s - another program I found
was a memorable Off-Broadway production of The Crucible by Arthur Miller in an upstairs room of the Martinique hotel in New York City in
1958.

In April 1966 I left English
Electric-Leo-Marconi in Stoke to further my career with The Steel
Company of Wales at Port Talbot.
Apologies to Newcastle-under-Lyme which
might lay claim to the theatre, but like it or not it is physically part
of Stoke, which in any case consists of five towns according to Arnold
Bennett author of The Five Towns - though I remember it as six,
Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Fenton and Stoke.