Dr. Gabby Sabo (University of Munich) in conversation with Bill
Bellamy (Action PIE, Cold Steel und Unity Too) 30.06.92 in Cardiff
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Bellamy:
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Now, tell me all about your life, please.
Please!
Starting from the 70's or whenever you started your theatrical
career.
Bellamy:
Well, I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in
1977 and did the Graduate Diploma in Drama, left in 1980 and I was
lucky enough to get my first job with the summer-project of Action
PIE called Cold Steel. It was under the auspices of Action PIE but we
were a separate company.
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Was that TIE as well?
Bellamy:
It was summer-shows. There were two shows, one for playschemes and a community-show we toured community centres
around Cardiff for about six months. Then it becomes all very
blurred. I did a cheapo pantomime around the valleys of Swansea,
doing twelve shows a week. It was about that time that Carlton
Bunce got in touch with me again and suggested doing "It's a
Bobby's Job" with Unity Too, which we took out. That was such a
success that when Cold Steel reformed in 1981 what was Unity Too
did the community show "Over the Hills and Fairly Near" and the
kid's show went to Hijinx. After that, Unity Too did "Chilli con
Carnage" and stuff like that. During that time I was advised to go
and work with a Birmingham based community theatre company,
which was called Second City, but unfortunately, when the Artistic
Director took over the reins, he found an enormous deficit and was
left with no choice but to close the company. He wouldn't have been
able to trade it and he offered the actors preferential treatment as
creditors, so we got money without working, and also first refusal
on jobs when and if he ever set up a new theatre company.
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And did he?
Bellamy:
That became Theatre Foundry. I worked with them from 1982
to 1983 and in he meantime I as coughing and spitting, sort of little
bits with Theatre Wales. The shows we did there, were "Blood
Brothers", the original version, a small piece Willy Russell wrote. And
again, "It's a Bobby's Job" as a community-tour. This takes us to ’83
and around that time, I did work with Action PIE and a thing called
"The Big Break" which was an awful piece of TIE. I think it was
because the company was going through a bit of a dilemma at the
time. I was only brought in as an actor; Libby Mason already did
most of the devising.
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What was so awful about it?
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It was set in 23rd century. How can you make sense if you set
things that far in the future? It really didn't work, it was written by a
guy called Carl Tighe who was quite high profile with the Welsh
Writer's Union. Then I went up in late' 84 to do a model season with
Mike Kay who had preciously worked with Theatre Foundry. He
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wanted to put together a model TIE season for the infant juniors,
like Pow Wow. I was in Raj, a piece from Leeds TIE about
colonialism with lots of old lags like Jim Bywater. And I was in No
Pasaran. As a consequence of all that, the Crucible TIE-company
was reformed and luckily I got on well enough with Mike Kay so that
once he had finished with that block of work, he had a show _ the
main house and I did the Chaplain in Catch 22, so all in all spent
about nine months in Sheffield. And then it was back to schlepping
around doing tours of things like The Snow Queen, and then went
back to the Crucible late 1985 to do Canterbury Tales, directed by a
very young Stephen Daldry, that was the Christmas Show, and then
did Arturo Ui. Then I think I did three shows in Swansea, and then
to Milford Haven to do pantomime there 86/87. Then I went to
Spectacle Theatre who were a community company and did a play
called Home and Away which has nothing to do with Australian soap
operas, but which was about evacuee children. Then I had a big
break and presented a comedy series for HTV called Vamp! which I
also researched and wrote sketches for. It was a satirical comedycum-chat show, so the comedy linked into the chats, themes. It was
an extension of what I was already doing, issues argued in a sort of
accessible way. This only ran for one series because the director lost
his programming because he fiddled his expenses. So early 1988, it
was the Sherman Theatre Company, then Traveling Opera, La
Boheme, small part in that, then got into Panto in Belfast. And the
rest is on my C.V. there's lots of little gaps in between, when I had
done my one-man-show called Pre-shaving Tension which was a
show about the New-Man because that was a sort of buzz-word in
the mid-1980's and that was going on wherever I could get it on at
the time. And I was doing warm-ups for television, a Saturday
morning kids show. Most recently, at the Sherman, I did something
about Danny Abse, a well known, Cardiff/Welsh poet, based on his
autobiography, how he grew up in Cardiff. And then those odd days,
working at the Welsh Opera or doing the Radios. It's quite
interesting talking about it, because you become aware again of that
threat to socialist valued work and new writing.
If you are doing a lot of Panto or light entertainment - do you
feel threatened by the idea of doing new stage-work, are you
looking for it at all?
I would think I do about 70 or 80%. Certainly, I have an attitude
that if there's any new Cardiff plays going on about Cardiff, I really
do try and get involved with those in preference to a costume
drama.
But is new writing still that much linked to local Issues?
Not always. There's new writers like Alan Osborne who writes
very much from his base, from where he comes from, as well as
things like The Tuscan, which is about Leonardo da Vinci. I would
think quite a lot of the new writing is about Wales.
Do you think this percentage has changed in your time?
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Well, when I first started, there was nothing apart from the TIEcompanies doing new writing because the Sherman wasn't even in
existence. There was the Welsh Drama Company which then became
which was only project-funded and doing the classics. We used to call
it "Theatre 125" because the actors used to come down from London.
The Sherman really took off, I suppose, about six years ago, which
meant the demise of Theatre Wales. But since that's happened, Made
in Wales has shrunk, so that now it's just a propagator for new writing.
It doesn't have enough money to put on fully-grown productions of
new writers. So, it spends its time going round doing touring
workshops and stuff like that. Whereas Made in Wales used to do two
or three productions a year, it might now only do one semi-staged
performance a year. The rest of the time they spend work shopping
with potential writers.
Are you saying that new writing these days is actually put on in
bigger theatres like the Sherman because only they can afford it?
No, obviously there are companies like Y Cwmni with Ed Thomas,
which is more dedicated to its own work. There has been the work of
Geoff Moore, which was new work as well. But the Sherman does
tend to do a lot of new work: not necessarily as issue based as the
stuff the smaller companies or the community companies do. And
quite a lot of the Sherman's new work could be seen to be
adaptations as well.
You've worked with quite a few companies. Is there a company in
Wales you would want to join, either for structural reasons or for their
new plays or for aesthetic reasons? ,
Unfortunately, I think the answer to that question is no, really. I
don’t think the standard of work is anything to write home about or is
competent. I don't feel like going and doing a second-rate Shakespeare
particularly. And for the smaller companies, I think I've got to that sort
of mid-30's where schlepping around single venues doesn't do body
and soul much good. I did enjoy working with Gwent Theatre because
that was in situ; the kids were actually brought in to do that. I must
have done about 25 or 30 productions in total, with other community
or TIE- companies where there has been a lack of energy. They
haven't been able to motivate themselves and compromises are made
on the performers when they are touring around. Certainly through the
80's with standstill-budgets, etc. touring with three or four-handers is a
luxury. It means that the shows are always going to be very small,
very insular. It's a mind-boggling achievement even to get out and get
an audience. I find that with quite a lot of the established theatre
companies that obviously, they have their audiences in schools, but
when it comes to their community-work, they still haven't built an
audience, and that's something that frustrates me. If you are expecting
the actors to go out and work under these conditions - then these
companies with a ten or fifteen years history should have somehow
built an audience from their community.
If it's supposed to be community theatre, for the community, how
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do these companies fail?
Several reasons really. One is the geographical reason, that they
might only hit those places once a year, so perhaps there is not the
continuity that there should be. But there is also the insular nature of
the companies themselves where perhaps sometimes the company
politic takes precedence over the actual selling of the shows and the
company politic usually determines the subject matter of the shows. So
sometimes instead of that the shows are made for the community, the
companies decide something that is based around the politics they
want to explore. And also, I think, with the Welsh Arts Council now
expecting companies to do three-year-plans that they have to sketch
something vague, like "the meaning of Welshness" as their showtheme and they are bound to stick to that, so they can't respond
immediately. If you go back to Chilli con Carnage or It's a Bobby's Job,
which was about police brutality, which was on the agenda then, they
were made for the time. It doesn't seem nowadays that there are a lot
of shows "of their time”.
That's blaming the money-giving bodies for making the bureaucratic
process too difficult?
Yes, it's been very, very tight.
I was just talking to Mike Baker (WAC,) about this and he was
saying that; (A) they want to have an idea where the company wants
to go - which seems reasonable - and that (B) most companies don't
stick to it in any case. And they are not expected to, either.
Well, as I say, they give nebulous sorts of reasons for the shows
they are going to do, but then the shows tend to become very
nebulous, too. I can honestly say I haven't seen anything vibrant/
competent, yes, even some of the stuff I was in doesn't seem to have
that immediacy. But that could be the actual depression amongst
socialist theatre practitioners as well. They've been a bit like tortoises;
they're battening down the hatches and are just surviving.
Do you think that an audience today is still interested in socialist
theatre, which usually involves stepping on their toes - as huge chunks
of the working class vote Tory? Although I've never met anyone that
actually votes Tory.
Well, there is a distinction, there is a theatre-going audience and
there is a non-theatre-going audience, and taking aside TIE, because
it's a captive audience, community-theatre audiences are non-theatre
going audiences, by definition, because they don't have theatres, and
one is not stepping on their toes. I've always thought that (A) that
"Flying Picket"-thing, you go in there and give support to people - also
you explain things they perhaps have difficulties with - that's what we
are doing. The best shows are the ones that have a reason, a live of
their own other than just wanting to put a play on. One of Spectacle's
last shows The Stone-Throwers, was a very beautiful, nice plan, but it
was set in a mystical time many years ago and it was also lovely with
"fingers in the ear" music, etc. I don't think it met its audience at all:
there was nothing wrong with it, it was very competent, but I don't
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know... It was a problem having to do three shows a year and not
being able to get out and research your audience, to meet your
audience, and in some cases, to live in the community where your
audience lives.
Are companies in general not depending at all on box-office?
Oh, definitely not.
Isn't that an obvious reason why they don't care about their
audience?
But then, what is the point of doing the work?
The point I'm trying to make is: is not the Arts Council or similar
body's money making the companies thinks of the ACW more than of
their audiences?
Well, I suppose there is that historical problem. Take for example
what happened with Action PIE. And this is my perspective; other
people may tell you that it happened differently. As far as I can see,
Action PIE was an ultra-left company. The majority of their company
were members of the Worker's Revolutionary Party, a Marxist-type
party. And they saw their job to be confrontational, in all degrees. And
that led to the Education Department, the Welsh Arts Council, getting
really pissed off with them for a couple of the shows and some of the
job-appointments they made were obviously political. They called it
confrontation and that confrontation led to the company losing it’s
funding. The problem for practitioners was that Equity withdrew
support from Action PIE because they knew that the funding would
remain in the kitty, and now there is Theatre lolo that has taken its
place, so no actors-weeks had been lost or anything like that. But I
think what it did, was send shock-waves along quite a lot of companies
who were scared to death being cut for political reasons. I think Mike
Kay always said that they can't catch you, if artistically your work is
good, because if it’s good and the audiences are there and the reports
are good you'll survive. Unfortunately - certainly in Action PIE’s case,
the work had got to a terrible level. It was laughable work towards the
end, because it was so soapbox-orientated. But there are loads of
theatre companies throughout Great Britain that work for political
reasons, the Foco Novo’s, the 7:84’s, etc. And in the first flush of
Thatcherism their grants went for virtually no reason at all; Perhaps
there was a lot of nervousness amongst the movement, but what has
happened is that the movement has not redefined itself at all. SCYPT
has shrunk, so it's not as active as it used to be, but every TIE
Company used to be a member of that. The Worker’s Revolutionary
Party infiltrated it and there were good socialist people that didn't want
to be part of an ultra-left analysis of the situation. As people got very
frightened, they tried to hang on to the working method developed in
the late 60's with, say, M6. But it had no sort of "belief". As new
generations came in, the same working methods have been eroded, so
the TIE and community-theatre companies - the Gwent’s, the
Spectacle’s, etc. - are doing good work, but it's all a pale shadow of
what it used to be. In Wales, it's only Theatre West Glamorgan that
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really packs out and can tour in Welsh and English.
I hear the term "serving the community" quite a lot now. Theatre is
Interpreted, as a kind of service to the community; naturally a safe
narrative line, a proper fourth wall presentation - isn't that giving up
lots of things?
I certainly wouldn't mean fourth wall presentation at all because the
venues that people are going into preclude that. They are not doing nice
drawing room, well-made plays or anything like that. They have to serve
their communities, certainly with TIE nowadays: they have to serve the
National Curriculum which they never used to have to do but in a weird
way, for a TIE company could be seen as a creative thing as well. With
the three'-year-plans at least you know you're targeting the right areas.
Since when have TIE companies been linked to the National
Curriculum?
I would say over the last 12 to 18 months. But when it comes to
community, it was very easy, for instance - with' a company like Unity
Too - to "serve the community" because it was a theatre company that
was of its people. I think a lot of companies find that difficult, especially
companies that work co-operatively. The first flush of creativity is great,
because this group of people wants to serve. If you replace that group
and expect it to function exactly the same - well, it never does. And it
loses some sort of immediacy. I think, so all you've got is the shell of the
company pretending to be working the same way it did when it was
founded with the original members - rather than the original members
coming in and _being allowed to turn around the company and bring out
their fresh initiatives. I think that is a great danger and a reason why
there are so few co-operative theatre companies around. Most TIE
companies used to work cooperatively, but now that has shifted to
benign dictatorships with an Artistic Director hiring and firing actors.
Was that due to tighter budgets as well - the companies just not
being able to pay full time staff and members?
There must have been a time for a company to decide to go that
way which for a lot of companies was a hell of a lot to give up: the
notion of working as a cooperative. Most of them nowadays have an
Artistic Director and one or two full time actors. Then you can have
actors from anywhere, because it's totally the Artistic Director who has
his or her finger on who to employ.
Do you think there is still an overall term for what seems to have
split into small-scale, middle-scale, TIE etc. like Fringe or Alternative
Theatre?
Well, groups like that that would have been termed 'alternative" like
Interaction which worked with a Grotowski based method don't exist any
longer. I'm sure the "British Alternative Theatre Directory" must be The
slimmest volume available in the bookshop, now, if indeed it's still
published, because it used to be quite a thick tome. But many companies
have gone to the wall. Also, 'project-funding" is virtually impossible for
companies to get now, unless they are "Preferred Companies" who exist
on project funding. Whereas you used to be a6le to go to the Arts
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Council and get project funding for a show pretty readily - you could get
it within three months. But now the budget is always used up.
You are basically saying that alternative theatre doesn't exist
anymore?
It doesn't exist as a funded outlet. I think there's lots of companies
doing profit sharing and working in their own way.
What does alternative theatre mean for you?
For me, I would think its non-word based theatre, in a classic
English sense. I certainly wouldn't count community or TIE as
alternative. I think the alternative companies would have been the
Brith Gofs and the Cardiff Labs
Would have been?
Brith Gof seems to be going more theatre-orientated now and much
more accessible. And companies like Paupers Carnival don't exist any
more.
Has alternative for you to do with inaccessibility?
Not inaccessibility but avant-garde. I think the avant-garde of today
is the mainstream of tomorrow. And lots of companies have proved
that: the way that Moving Being became a more mainstream-company
ending up doing classics. It was a multimedia company when it first
started. Brith Gof doing shows at the Sherman Theatre. It blurs the
edges, it doesn't make them alternative. For me, alternative is playing
with new forms, new a style of theatre, not the perceived idea of what
theatre is.
How about yourself? Writing new shows and putting them on is
practically impossible because the Arts Council doesn't give you any
money.
Well, it's the long-termness of it that is the bad side. You would have
to subjugate yourself for 12 months to get something on whereas
before it was three months. Now the actual process of applying,
waiting for the money and doing it means that you can't doing
anything else for 12 months while you are waiting for your luck to
come through. I'd say the 80's were the age of administration and
getting companies together to leave the Arts Council and go to private
advisers.
What do you think the future, the 90's holds for non-profit theatres?
Well, that's a problem. Principle-based theatre is never going to get
sponsorship really. And this happened in Sheffield when we did Arturo
Ui; NALGO, which is a union, wanted to sponsor the show when the
government had just brought in its theatre sponsorship scheme, where
the first-time sponsors would be matched pound for pound by the
government. And NALGO decided to sponsor us but the government
said they wouldn't give the money because it was a political decision at
NALGO to sponsor Arturo Ui.
So much for the principle of arms' length.
That's the problem for small companies. They're never going to get
the sponsorship money that's floating about. I've always thought since
we moved towards sponsorship that there should-be a percentage of
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sponsorship money creamed off to go into a pool that the Welsh Arts
Council administers to companies. If sponsors didn't want their money
to go to certain companies, they could always sort of blacklist them.
But with every £10.000 of sponsorship, 5 % would go into that pool
which could relieve smaller companies. We're talking about £30.000
sponsorship for the Welsh National Opera per production. To lose
£10.000 on a year's budget is nothing, but for a small company...
Talking of WNO and small companies, what do you think about the
criteria of quality that is ubiquitous nowadays?
It's a very arbitrary thing. Quality should mean that an artist does
have answers as to how we do what we do - because I think there was
a lot of time spent moaning during the late 80's mostly because we all
felt so impotent. But it's high time that socialist thinking actually
reclaimed that moral high ground and actually started giving answers
to "what is possible". And I don't see a lot of theatre that is "enabling
theatre".
Thank you for this interview.