Some enchanted evenings: my part in Welwyn Garden City's am-dram dynasty
“H
ow do you measure a year in the life?” asks the closing number of Jonathan Larson’s Rent. It’s one of several musicals I know word for word – and one of several my mother is “not too sure of”. And I know the answer to its question: you can measure the years of my life in musicals. I held my first boyfriend’s hand through Little Shop of Horrors. I came out as queer halfway through rehearsals for My Fair Lady. My birth was announced on the opening night of The King and I.
I didn’t choose this life; I was born into it. My family has been part of the amateur theatre scene in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, since 1929. That’s four generations. My dad’s side of the family staged plays at the Barn theatre, my mum’s side put on musicals with the Welwyn Thalians Musical and Dramatic Society. Each year of their lives and mine has been mapped by the tensions and tribulations of mounting two or three productions, usually from the classic canon of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein and a regular churning out of Oliver! during “harder days / Empty larder days”. (Sorry. I can’t stop myself.)
My research suggests that on any enchanted evening you are no more than 100ft from an open audition for South Pacific
Though my experience of am-dram was unusually immersive, it’s a world known and loved by many across the UK. There are more than 2,500 member societies of the National Operatic and Drama Association, and many more guerrilla operations. My research suggests that on any enchanted evening you are no more than 100ft from an open audition for South Pacific. In the case of Welwyn’s Thalians, nine decades have seen a predictable diminishing from an almost unbelievable heyday. When my great-grandmother was at the directorial helm in the 1930s, shows would pack out with half the population of the embryonic new town. Casts were large, runs were long, the line between amateur and professional was much murkier (Oscar nominee – and later Dame – Flora Robson was an early and active Thalians supporter.) Additional late trains were scheduled to take audiences back from Welwyn to London.
Hannah Maxwell, right, with her grandfather, Peter Dunham, in The Hot Mikado (2008). Her mother Amanda Sayers directed the play and the cast included her stepfather Peter Sayers and brother William Maxwell.
I followed in Gran’s tap shoes from the ages of seven (as a member of The Wizard of Oz’s Lullaby League) to 18 (Harmonising Servant #4 in My Fair Lady). Partly for the love of it, partly because it was cheaper for my family to cast me and my brother than to find a babysitter on rehearsal nights. We swelled the ranks of plumbers from Luton, sales assistants from Stevenage and most of Hertfordshire constabulary as cowboys and can-can dancers, with wobbly eyeliner and suspect accents. Membership was predominantly white and middle class, like most of home counties suburbia, yet the feel was and is inclusive. Anyone who walks through the door is welcome to join – am-dram needs the bodies for the chorus numbers, you see, as long as they can hold a tune. And even that rule is regularly waived.
It is difficult to paint it three-dimensionally when explaining it to other people, but, for me and my family, the Thalians was so much more than a hobby. It was a secret language, it was a palace we played in, it was a vast library of librettos and anecdote and local names that we knew intimately. We were privy to the inner sanctums of this world – the gossip, the committee decisions (my grandfather being chairman). We could read the cast list on the kitchen table, its ink still wet, while my mother rang round with the good news and the difficult conversations. Our wardrobes were half-requisitioned for costume storage, our car journeys earmarked for harmonious pre-rehearsal rehearsal.
My Fair Lady (2010), directed by Hannah Maxwell’s grandmother, Angela Dunham, and Amanda Sayers.
Alas, the dynasty was sundered by my moving to London for uni and starting a career in queer performance and live art. My lifestyle and politics now tend to jar with the conservative values of am-dram. I wince at the same lines I once sang (other than A Woman’s Touch from Calamity Jane, which elicits a knowing snort of laughter).
I keep the two sides of myself in contact, however, which has made for some interesting crossover episodes. I bring my mother to a lot of live art made by friends and collaborators (she has asked several award-winning artists how on earth they learned all those lines). In turn, I brought the acclaimed lesbian performance-maker and Guggenheim fellow Lois Weaver to my mum’s Guys and Dolls.
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I spent most of my early 20s revelling in my liberal bubble. But recently I’ve developed more ambivalent feelings about my identity as a small-town exile. If you have left a place – a home town, a lifestyle, a community theatre group – it is tempting to dismiss everything of that time as an irrelevant preamble to the main event, when you step on stage as the person you want to be viewed as. Perhaps, though, it is worth a return visit: to reconcile those versions of yourself and find what might be worth holding on to, salvaging or celebrating.
Where am I left standing? A progressive, gender-queer performance-maker with a penchant for conservative musical theatre? Or a Thalian on sabbatical, waiting to make my grand return when the amateur rights are released for Fun Home? I’m still working that out – and I am, of course, doing a show about it. My mother, meanwhile, is doing Made in Dagenham.
I, AmDram by Hannah Maxwell is at Camden People’s theatre, London, from 1-3 May.