When I retreated from London to Southampton, I started with the thought that the proper alternative to the Proscenium would be the open stage - not sure when I read Richard Southern's book of that title, but its arguments impressed me greatly - so went about setting up a small company The Rostrum Theatre that gave no doubt what I was about. Swollen-mindedly, I jumped into a production (one performance only) of Othello, using a cast of friends and acquaintances, plus one apparently highly-regarded ex-professional who had come to teach in the town (now city). The venue was a downtown equivalent of The Albert Hall. It failed in most aspects, aided spectacularly by the ex-professional, playing Othello, who had quit the stage, I then learned, because he had to get drugged up in order to perform. After which, those in the company still willing to admit being part of it would stay members only if performance was confined to behind the proscenium arch. From 1953 to 1957, then, I did such plays as Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Easter and Priestley's An Inspector Calls, deconstructing the Proscenium set-up from within, discarding lighting, scenery, costume and stage furniture, one item after another, until the company performed Chekov's The Bear with two chairs only, both of whiich had to be broken by the end.
When the curtain rose on such a bleak vision, the audience (part of a Drama Festival) froze into dismay and found it hard to titter once at all the on-stage slapstick. Finally, before throwing in the Rostrum's towel, I wrote a one-acter for another Drama Festival, which started with an open curtain looking on to three chairs set out as a triangle on the stage's edges. The play was called Triangle; actors sat in the chairs when they were "off-stage". It was actually praised by the adjudicator.
Meanwhile, I had started teaching, and from 1955 to 1957 had written and directed three Christmas plays for large casts in the all-age Hampshire school I was appointed to. I hadn't the courage there to insist on working outside the proscenium - partly because there was already a tradition there for a stage to be built for some kind of seasonal show. My innovation was to write the plays.
Ron James turned up as Hampshire Drama Adviser during that period, was very much into the new ideas of school drama, and already an advocate of open-staging. So, at last I met someone moving along the same lines as myself (indeed rather further ahead) and I was boosted by a relationship that still continues today.
In 1958 the Senior Section of the all-age school I was at shifted temporarily into Eastleigh; I was offered the post of Head of English and found myself in an old Grammar School building with two large halls and no stage. In that year, I met Stephen Joseph, who was touring his Studio Theatre from Scarborough in Southampton, and booked Brian Way to bring his Children's Theatre Group to perform in what was now my drama hall. Both were the major advocates of theatre-in-the-round. That then was the year of my conversion from open-stage theatre to the Round, though in Ron James's Children's Theatre Groups set up by him in a number of Hampshire's districts performances stayed within the semi-arena. Since that year I have only once performed on the proscenium stage - and then to help out a neighbour working with her own amateur company in Southampton who found herself short of someone for the main part.
Much of my awareness of the value and significance of the Round started from conversations with Stephen Joseph, whom I last spoke to a week or two before his death in 1967 at the age of 46. He started, I think, as a theatre designer after his war service in the navy, and came to the Round through contacts in the United States but also with drama practitioners in the UK. Theatre shape to him had symbolic significances well beyond theatre itself; he looked at its development through Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance periods in the light of its relationship with the philosophical and political structures of those civilisations. This touched several nerve ends in my own inchoate searches into significant form, nudged into being by the writings of Clive Bell and others; and since those conversations I have followed the implications of the Round at every level of my creative and social endeavours.
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