Golden age of the Aberdeen stage

December 2005

by Douglas Kynoch

Bill Gavin was a mild-mannered Aberdonian, whose stature on the North-East drama scene was out of all proportion to his smaller than average height. By day, he worked as a clerk with a city coal and agricultural merchant, to support his wife and three children; by night, he was the inspiration behind a team of amateur actors who brought what seemed like an unending supply of quality drama to Aberdeen theatre-goers.

Bill would have liked to have been on the professional stage but had been unable to pursue a career in that direction when he came out of the army in the 1940s; so until his dream could become reality, he poured his phenomenal energy and considerable artistry into creating, in his home town, a company of as near professional a standard as could be achieved. Once in full harness, they produced five or six plays a year (three in later years), each play taking six weeks to rehearse.

The William Gavin Players had their origin in a body known as the Aberdeen Repertory Theatre Association, ARTA, which, as well as providing an umbrella organisation for amateur drama groups in the city in the late 1940s, offered classes in drama in association with the Education Authority and mounted its own productions.

When, after a brief existence, there was word of ARTA closing down, Bill Gavin asked if he might draw together some of his fellow members, to form a group of his own. So it was that the William Gavin Players came into being, presenting their first play, the Ben Travers farce Rookery Nook, in the winter of 1949. They mounted this trial effort in the ballroom of the Music Hall, which served as a useful theatre till the Arts Centre opened in later years. A local critic declared the production to be “a creditable showing”; and from these beginnings the Gavin Players embarked on the challenging, if sometimes tempestuous, seas of amateur theatre.

Of those taking part in that first production, only three are known to be still with us: Jane Cowan (known to all as Dolly), who worked at SAI; Dorothy Eddie, a shorthand-typist with the North of Scotland College of Agriculture; and a research worker at the Macaulay Institute, Sheila Law. All three live in Aberdeen, Dorothy’s daughter and son-in-law, Fiona and Roddy Begg, carrying on the family’s drama tradition today.

Another member of that first cast, Alastair Selway, not only performed and produced with the Gavin Players but was an astute drama critic for Aberdeen Journals, reputedly pulling no punches when writing about his friends. Alastair died in 1990 (in His Majesty’s Theatre, as it happens) but, happily, left a bulging scrapbook, now in the keeping of his fellow player, retired headmaster Jim Couper. Sheila Law not only kept a scrapbook, but, on her retirement, recorded a potted history of the Players in the form of an embroidered sampler.

In the year after its formation, the group took part in its first festival mounted by the Scottish Community Drama Association, a one-act performance of Everyman, with John McRobb in the title role and Tom Alexander as Death. Later than year, they won the North-East Division of the SCDA’s full-length play contest with Emlyn William’s The Wind of Heaven. Given that they had only been on the scene for a year, this was an outstanding success.

At about this time, the company rented rehearsal accommodation in a former tearoom and salmon fishers’ bothy on the banks of the Dee. Later they moved to an attic in the harbour district, which had the considerable advantage of being able to store their scenery.

Of their early production, Love from a Stranger was one which Sheila Law, as leading lady, was unlikely to forget, as she had to leave the Music Hall during the second act on receiving a phone call from the Royal Infirmary to say that her mother was seriously ill. A member of another company saved the day by reading the part for the rest of the evening. In a similar situation, Sheila was later to deputise for an indisposed player at a drama festival, reading the part so well at five minutes’ notice, that she drew the enthusiastic plaudits of the adjudicator, who then went on to pan the production!

A new departure in 1950 was a show with music and dancing, with George Sellar in charge of the musical direction. Toad of Toad Hall, the first of numerous Christmas shows for children, featured Bill Gavin as the irrepressible Mr Toad and a young Judy Kelly making her first appearance with the group. Such productions as The Tinder Box and Hansel and Gretel were to follow in later years.

In 1951 a production of Jean Cocteau’s drama, The Eagle Has Two Heads, had Dorothy Eddie as the Queen “faultlessly” delivering a 20-minute speech, thought at the time to be the longest ever delivered on stage, though this may have been before the days of the one-actor play. The company took the second act of this production to the national finals of the SCDA festival. Serious drama of this kind would be financed, as company policy, from the proceeds of more popular work.

Introduced that year was a modest ‘provincial’ tour to Culter and Tarves. Tours were to become a regular feature of the club’s activities, bringing with them the unpredictabilities of strange venues. A production team visiting Foveran to set the stage for the following night, found they could not start till the cinema show finished at 10.15! A gramophone breakdown at Culter meant that George Sellar had to play the incidental music by spinning a record round with his finger, while at Tarves, when Dolly Cowan was playing a love scene within feet of the local audience, a local woman’s not so sotto voce comment resounded round the hall: “Aat’s nae the first time she’s deen aat!”

This had been a lighter moment for Dolly who, as Dorothy Eddie left Aberdeen and Sheila increasingly took on the role of producer (not to mention stage designer and costume-maker), found herself playing more of the demanding female leads such as Joan in Anouilh’s The Lark and the Queen of Scots in Schiller’s Mary Stuart. Comedy was never forgotten for long, however, and sometimes it was unplanned. In a performance of The Happiest Days of Your Life, Dolly as the gym teacher was playing a scene with Sheila as headmistress, when the groundsman failed to enter on cue, forcing them to improvise for a few minutes. Only when the two actresses had successfully covered all the important plot lines he had failed to utter, did the groundsman make his entrance, causing even more confusion.

Another hazard of stage work is the corpse: nothing to do with dead bodies and everything to do with out-of-character laughter. Sheila recalls still a performance of Treasure Island, with the popular Gordon’s College English master, John Foster, playing Blind Pugh. When the dramatic highlight was reached in which the latter revealed the death mark, the black spot, what he, in fact, showed to his fellow players was a small card bearing a saucy joke, causing not only young Jim Hawkins (Judy Kelly) to corpse, but also his sainted mother (played by Sheila). Judy’s marriage to Tom Alexander in later days was the fruit of a romance which began in The Seventh Veil and blossomed during Jane Eyre.

Another aspect of the Gavin Players’ work was their occasional collaboration with the Aberdeen branch of the British Empire Shakespeare Society (‘Bessie’), performing such works as Richard III (1955) and Othello (1957), with the city’s youth employment officer, Frank Harris-Jones, in both title roles, and Romeo and Juliet (1960) with the playwright, Charles Barron, in the lead. My own association with the group followed an appearance in a university revival of The Eagle Has Two Heads, which Bill Gavin produced for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe six years after his own group had performed it. This led shortly afterwards to my being asked to appear with the Gavin Players, a highly flattering invitation for a 20-year-old. They had by this time a distinguished record in amateur drama and were already acknowledged to be the leading company in the city.

Guest players and directors were to be an important feature of the company’s routine, helping them to keep up with the relentless schedule they maintained. Around 200 people contributed their talents over 27 productive years.

When the Arts Centre opened in 1963, it was the Gavin Players who mounted the first production, the cast including Stuart McGugan, who was later to feature in such TV comedies as It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. Playing an old man in the Arts Centre play, he stuffed a pillow down his jacket to increase his girth, all going well till the pillow started to slide down, an embarrassment more easily concealed on a TV recording than on stage!

The Gavin Players were the first group to take part both in the Aberdeen festivals and in the Braemar festivals organised by Mrs Farquharson of Invercauld, performing at the latter such Scots comedy classics as The Lass wi the Muckle Mou, for audiences widely composed of (no doubt rather bemused) American tourists in search of ethnic culture.

It was in this production in a local church hall that Sheila Law, as the Lass, was required to leap from the gallery into the arms of the leading man, Tom Alexander. She made it clear that, though she was prepared to suffer for her art, there were limits; they agreed she could slide down a rope instead.

There was often a strong Gavin Players’ representation, too, in Scots language plays presented on radio from the BBC Studios at Beechgrove. Several of the company joined such broadcasting professionals as Effie Morrison and Bryden Murdoch in an adaptation of Louis Grassick Gibbon’s Sunset Song (a classic they performed twice on stage), as well as in plays by Bill Gavin; one of them, The Silver Tide, about the lives of fisherfolk. Somehow, Bill found time to write prolifically both for stage and radio.

Eventually, in 1967, having earned a living with his pen for some years, he left Aberdeen to become an actor / writer with Perth Repertory Theatre; and when that job ended after about a year, he took his courage in both hands and made his way to London with his wife, Trudie. Fortuitously, he arrived there not long before an unknown actor was being sought to play the part of Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, in a prestigious television drama about his life.

Thereafter, he was to take character parts in such series as Taggart and Waiting for God, as well as appearing in a large number of commercials. A small fish in a large pool perhaps; but, at last, he was working in the world he had set his heart on as a young man.

All the while he kept in contact with Aberdeen and the group which bore his name. With a wealth of acting and production talent to call on, they were to keep going without him for some years thereafter. Having reached their hundredth production in 1976, however, they decided to call it a day. They had lost their old attic premises at the harbour and, even more importantly, there were no young members to carry on the rigorous tradition of mounting several plays per season.

The man who founded their company died, aged 80, on Christmas Eve 1995. They held a memorial service for him at the Arts Centre shortly afterwards. He had realised his dream of going professional; but surely his greatest achievement had been to give to Aberdeen and the North-East the nearest thing to the permanent repertory company theatre-lovers had always hoped for: an amateur group, yes, but of such a quality and dedication as to be fondly remembered long after its disbandment.

After 35 years in Glasgow, Douglas Kynoch has returned to live and write in his hometown of Aberdeen.

This is an article from the December 2005 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.