Chapter 13. Shakespeare's Greatest Hit
1982 – another year, another festival...
You can tell that Genesis was more or less finished by the fact that between 'You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown!' at the 1981 Summer Festival and the decision to do a new show for the 1982 Festival, having once again been so kindly invited, we did nothing. Clearly we were all of us busy living our lives, and although we still met frequently for social events and spoke on the phone, there was no talk of new productions. More people moved away, got married, got divorced, had babies, changed jobs, so that by the time we had to decide what we were going to present, there were very few of us left to make the decision.
By this time Chris and I were putting the finishing touches to our new musical, 'Marilyn', which was scheduled to be presented by Altrincham Garrick as part of their Golden Jubilee season in October 1982 (more of which later), and so we weren't therefore able to go with this for The Exchange with Genesis, so the question once again was what?
It was Andrew Pastor who provided the answer. He had written a new play 'Shakespeare's Greatest Hit', which I really liked and championed, and so we decided to go with that.
If you read Chris's account of this play – for that is what it was, not a musical, but a play with occasional songs – you would think it was an unmitigated disaster. Moreover, for several years afterwards I myself had nightmares about it. However, that only tells half the story. First and foremost, Andrew had written a brilliantly clever play. Written at the height of the Falklands War and presented just a few weeks after its conclusion, it was an incredibly brave, topical and high-risk production, right in the spirit of Genesis's original raison d'etre. Secondly, it was clever, original and very funny, while at the same time being extremely hard-hitting; and thirdly, once again, Chris had written some really fine music to go with it. In his entry he refers to the Eurovision Song Contest pastiche, which closed the first half, and which, as well as an Elgar-esque, jingoistic arrangement of Hamlet's soliloquy 'To Be Or Not To Be', also included a witty Bucks Fizz-style rendition of the famous sonnet 'Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day'; while the whole play closed with a much more serious and highly wrought and powerful version of Imogen's famous song from 'Cymbeline' – 'Fear No More The Heat Of The Sun' – as the cast left the stage, presumably to meet the certain deaths that awaited them.
So what went wrong?
To try and answer that perhaps I should say a little more about the play, which quite mercilessly satirises the way Britain and Argentina went to war over a seemingly insignificant little island in the middle of a cold sea, over whose sovereignty the two countries fought both a real and a propaganda war. Both at the time, and looking back, it seems hard to credit that lives were sacrificed over such a seemingly paltry basis, but tragically they were. What Andrew Pastor does with 'Shakespeare's Greatest Hit' (subtitled 'The Final Option') is to imagine a parallel scenario, in which Iceland lays claim to the Isle of Man, citing ancient Viking settlements as a rightful claim of ownership. Both countries embark upon a series of cultural propaganda – Iceland drawing on its tradition of sagas, Britain drawing upon Shakespeare. In a marvellous pastiche of the faceless Whitehall bureaucrats who throughout the Falklands War anonymously fronted up the daily press conferences with massaged reports, Andrew uses a similar device of an unseen theatre director, whose voice booms down from on high, giving anodyne, but fervently patriotic, Churchillian-style exhortations to protect our heritage, what it means to be British, in the face of a similarly never seen enemy threat. Actors are auditioned to form a “Cultural Task Force” in a kind of “phoney war” to beat off whatever the opposition might throw at them. A motley collection of aspiring wannabes and ageing has-beens are recruited and set sail for the Isle of Man, deliberately kept in the dark as to the truth of the situation and completely unprepared for what they will face when they get there. Following them secretly is a Kate Adie-style undercover TV reporter who, suspecting that dirty deeds are afoot, sets out to transmit the “truth” to the waiting audiences back home. But once on the island, this Dramatic Arts Task Force, as they are dubbed, is simply abandoned. Faced not just with the threat of Icelandic saga, but with very real weapons, they have only their combined makeshift talents – and each other – to fall back on. But rather than simply surrender they adopt the only motto they know: that the show must go on. In one extraordinary sequence one of the older actors – a faded comic – delivers a montage of various extracts from Shakespeare's various fools (Touchstone, Feste, Lear's Fool and diverse other Clowns) which is desperately unfunny, until one by one all the actors are killed, as, too, we presume, is the TV Reporter, on whom the plug is pulled even while she is describing the events that are unfolding. But rather that being a grim, downbeat defeat, such is the power of the writing that the failure is heroic, uplifting even, a story of courage in the face of overwhelmingly stacked odds, so that as the final song is sung, the actors 'rise up' and walk towards a rising sun...
So – again: what went wrong? For, as I write this, it feels that the show contains a kind of metaphor for the history of Genesis, always sustained by the spirit of loyalty, friendship and togetherness. Well, to start with, by this time, as I have tried to show, Genesis no longer really existed: people were simply too busy, or now preferred to do other things; and at first we couldn't cast it, even though it was a very small cast. In the end, only the ever-present Alison Davis, Bill & Jacqui Johnson, who had each appeared in every Genesis production, were available. To them were added Mike Monahan (who had played Maestro in the 2nd 'Stag'), Brian Seymour (someone I had once worked with at PADOS), a really fine actress I had come across when directing for Shaw Theatre earlier that year (whose name, I'm ashamed to say I can't bring to mind, which is terrible of me, for she was great) and Barbara Durkin* (a student I had taught from South Trafford College). In addition I took on a part, as did Chris (though quite naturally as a musician), while Andrew took on the role of the unseen theatre director (who gives out all the instructions and issues all the statements from on high).
(*Barbara was a fine student and later went on to be a successful TV actress. I once saw her playing a “gold digger” opposite Leslie Phillips as her “sugar daddy” in an episode of 'Midsomer Murders'!)
Then, having struggled to get a cast in the first place, we could never get everyone together to rehearse, due to people's other commitments, and the bald truth was that the show was woefully under-rehearsed. I was rehearsing 'Psycho' for The Garrick at the same time, while Chris & I were also about to begin rehearsals for 'Marilyn' and so were both busy with preparations for that too. Not only had we never managed a runthrough before the actual show, we had never once managed to get the whole cast together before the day of the performance. Even worse, we were rehearsing several sections of the play for the first time on the morning of the tech in the actual theatre. Then, to cap it all, for reasons that were never explained to us, the Exchange's technical crew failed to turn up until 4pm, and so we never actually completed the dress rehearsal either! The stage was set for a disaster, therefore, and so it proved.
Amazingly, the first half went surprisingly well: the audience laughed in all the right places, and we knew we had them with us; but in the second half it all began to fall apart – lines were forgotten, crucial moments and events went missing, one whole scene was left out, lights that had not been properly rigged blinded the audience for whole minutes at a stretch, so that when the performance finally and mercifully came to an end, we all of us slunk away unable to say a word. I for one simply couldn't face a soul afterwards and left by a side door, leaving others to oversee the get-out and, as I said above, I was haunted by nightmares about it for years to come...
And so, with that, Genesis was over – not with a bang, but a whimper – though it was not officially wound down till some time later (if indeed it ever was). As Chris has mentioned in his own entry, Amanda and I left for Dorset a year later (in August 1983), and we have lived in the south-west ever since. He cites this as the reason for Genesis coming to an end, but I don't think that's necessarily fair. I didn't have to be the only person directing productions; anyone else could have taken over the reins had they so desired. No, as I have tried to explain, Genesis was already over before 'Shakespeare's Greatest Hit'; it had run its course already, and had faded away because “life is what happens...”