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Don Walker, life member of the Progressive Players and a firm favourite with audiences at the Little Theatre Gateshead, recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Here he looks back on over 60 years in amateur dramatics.
My very first appearance in front of an audience was in December 1943, when I played the lead in The Pied Piper of Hamelin in a classroom at South Street Boys School, to an audience of grinning schoolboys. They were probably just glad not to be doing their normal lessons, but I was convinced they were giggling at the pieces of coloured cloth that my teacher had insisted on pinning to my clothing, and I rattled through my lines as quickly as I could.
That put me off for a long time – eighteen years – until October 1961, when I waited nervously outside the French windows before making my entrance onstage at the Little Theatre in a play called Suspect being performed by the Pentland Robson Drama Club, that I had joined a few weeks earlier. What a relief when the audience only laughed when they were supposed to! I’m grateful to them for giving me my start, but they only did two full-length plays per year plus an occasional entry in a local one-act festival. I had got the bug, and needed more than that. So I joined the 43 Drama Club in Gosforth who did four full-length plays per year. I still fought shy of the Progressive Players, who I thought were above my ability, but I was occasionally meeting some of them in the bar at the Springfield Hotel (there was no bar at the Little Theatre in those days).
At last, in the summer of 1964, I joined the Progressive Players, and made my debut with them in March 1965, playing Drummond, one of the two main parts in Inherit the Wind, a play about the schoolmaster in Dayton Tennessee who was charged with blasphemy for teaching his pupils about Darwin’s Origin of Species. Drummond was the Defence Attorney.
By 1966 I had more or less severed my links with the other two clubs, but was asked by the Caprians if I would play Chief Brown Bear in a musical, Little Mary Sunshine, which they were doing at the Little Theatre. This led to me being asked by Felling Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society to play Sitting Bull in Annie Get Your Gun in November of that year. It also led to a ten year association with the Caprians, which only rarely clashed with my loyalty to the Progressive Players.
Drummond was to be my favourite part in my favourite play for a long time, until 1990 when I was cast as Cooper in A Month of Sundays. I turned up for the first rehearsal knowing nothing about the play, and felt growing astonishment as we read through it. It’s about a widower who opts to go into a care home rather than live alone, and it features his relationships with other people, as well as his soliloquies. His conversations with another resident, Aylott, are both humorous and moving, and when we did the play again about fifteen years later I was almost equally happy playing Aylott.
The first play I directed was Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime in 1973. I directed about a dozen plays in total, all for the Progressive Players. I can’t say that I had a particular approach to directing, other than to try avoid making mistakes. Some directors I have known slavishly followed the published edition of the script regarding set design. If that was based on a stage considerably larger than the Little Theatre, they have problems. Similarly with access points to the set. The Little Theatre has restricted wing space on stage left, and I had no hesitation about turning the whole thing round if necessary. One of the joys of directing is having cast members who want to discuss the play, its characters, their motivations and so on, but you don’t always get that.
I preferred playing in comedy, first because the audience response is more immediate, and also because there is sometimes a degree of licence (as long as you don’t overdo it). Acting appeals to me, rather than directing, for similar reasons.
I’m sometimes asked whether I have any theatrical superstitions; I don’t, but I don’t mind people who do.
What do I most like about the Progressive Players apart from acting and directing? I would say the sense of being “at home” when I’m in the Little Theatre. Regular and occasional patrons often comment on how friendly the place is.
I’ve spent two spells away from Tyneside since getting involved in amateur drama. I spent my whole working life in HM Customs and Excise, and in that department you normally had to be ready to move location if you wanted promotion. In 1970 promotion took me to Greenock Custom House and I soon joined the George Square Players there. I was only there for two years, and got parts, but nothing spectacular. The high spot was going to the Edinburgh Festival for a week in August 1971 doing an 18th century play called The Old Troop which had never been publicly performed since goodness knows when. I don’t know why it had been chosen, but it should have been left in obscurity. But we had a whale of a time when we weren’t doing the play.
Then, about seven years after coming back to Tyneside, I got another promotion which took me down to Harlow New Town for three years, when I joined no less than three drama groups. The best experience was a combined production of Under Milk Wood in the Harlow Playhouse. I played Captain Cat, sitting on the top of an eight foot tall tower. Nobody was able to upstage me!
I’m fairly certain that I kept up my membership subscriptions to the Progressive Players during those absences from Tyneside.
People often ask me if I’ve ever been involved in any onstage mishaps. In Inherit the Wind, Brady, the Prosecuting Attorney, collapses and has to be carried offstage, where he subsequently dies. In the 1965 production Brady was played by Roland Errington. He was a very big man, so carrying him off was a problem. It was solved by having him fall into the wooden armchair in which he had been sitting previously. Four men then came, one to each corner of the chair, lifted in unison, and carried him away. It worked perfectly until one occasion when one of the men gave a sharp exhalation as he lifted, his mouth opened, his false teeth popped out and rolled down Roland’s chest and stomach, and the rest of the cast collapsed with laughter. Fortunately this was the final dress rehearsal, and they made sure it never happened again.
My only theatrical ambition was to play one of the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. I had seen a professional production of the panto when I was a child, probably before the Pied Piper debacle, and was fascinated by the Sisters. When I started doing pantos with the Caprians I hoped I might get the chance, but was not optimistic. As it happened I was in Greenock when they did that panto, but a couple of years later, in 1974, the Progressive Players did it, and I was chosen to partner Tom Fergusson. We were a good pairing, I think. He made no pretence at femininity, and I offset that by doing as close an imitation of Hermione Gingold as I could manage. Can anyone still remember her?
I do have a claim to theatrical fame, albeit only tongue-in-cheek. When I was with the 43 Club in the mid-1960s they did a production of Ah! Wilderness in which I played Nat, the father of four boys. The eldest was played by a well-behaved, competent 17-year-old with a rather unusual name which stuck in my mind. A couple of decades later a lady season-ticket holder at the Little Theatre asked me if I remembered the boy that had played the boy in that play (she had been in Ah! Wilderness as well). “Do you mean Mark Knopfler?” I asked. “Yes. He’s now a world-famous musician,” came her reply. I had honestly never heard of him in the intervening years, and was only vaguely aware of the rock band Dire Straits.
Aside from treading the boards I have always enjoyed walking in the countryside, particularly fell walking – although not rock climbing, for which I had neither the head nor the agility. I tried all sorts of sports when I was young but without much success. When I turned to bowls after I retired at 60, I found I could play well enough to hold my place in a team, and the game has given me a lot of pleasure and almost as many friends as amateur drama.
Some Facts and Figures:
Since joining the Progressive Players in 1965 Don has appeared in almost 140 productions and directed 19.
He sits on the Little Theatre Gateshead Board of Directors, and is currently the Honorary President of the Progressive Players.