Allswell…!
November, 1975 at the Frankel Room, Corpus Christi, Oxford
ALLSWELLTHATENDSROCK!
‘All’swellthatendsrock!’
Soliloquy
A Good Book
Cinema Night
‘Temporary Postieboy’
Elsinore
The Place
Manners Maketh Man
OUDS Major, ETC
‘One Night Stand’
Elsinore Revisited
Gone With the Wind
The Samuel Pepyshow
The Prophet
Phillip the Bastard
Horseplay
Red Peter
‘Elsinore on the Rocks’
‘Allswellthatendsrock!’
CAST
Nigel Cox
Richard Curtis
Tammy Heatley
Joanna Hill
Robin Seavill
Richard Warren
WRITTEN BY
Nigel Cox, Richard Curtis, Tammy Heatley, Ioan Moss, Rob Orchard, Andrew Rissik, Robin Seavill, William Shakespeare, Peter Stephenson, Simon Watts
MUSIC
Nigel Cox, Robin Seavill, A N Other
SOUND
Steve Roberts
STAGE MANAGER
Roy Milne
DIRECTED BY
Rob Orchard
PS
I got my first big laugh with a sketch for this show. We used to hold afternoon-long script conferences around a big table in Corpus Christi, pitching ideas and reading out sketches, and I’d written a spoof film review, done in the brash manner of Eric Idle from Monty Python doing a bad impersonation of Clive James who used to present Cinema from the Granada studios in the 1960s. I called my sketch Cinema Night (a combination of Cinema and Barry Norman’s Film Night), and the male presenter, played in the show by Richard Curtis (yes, that Richard Curtis), is giving his opinionated opinion of Ken Russell’s recent big-screen version of the cute kids’ TV show Tales of the Riverbank. A kind of early rodent version of Last of the Summer Wine, this used to feature a hamster, a guinea pig and a rat getting up to all sorts of gentle nonsense in sunlit black and white to the voiceover of Johnny Morris. Russell was famous for gore and excess (the humour lay in the contrast, d’you see?), and the line that got the laugh was, “Russell’s motto seems to be, ‘If it moves, cut it off and film the stump’.” As usual, I had no idea where it came from, but suddenly there it was in my head, then on the page, and eventually out in the world making people happy, and I knew all over again that this was all I ever wanted to do with my life.
(Interestingly, when we came to reuse the sketch for our first Edinburgh show, Knockers, in 1977, I could never get quite the same reaction as Richard did with that line, which used to vex me more than somewhat. Then much later, while listening to a tape of the show, I realised one reason could have been that I was simply speaking too fast for the audience to respond. They didn’t want to interrupt me in case they missed something, whereas Richard had always taken it far more slowly and reaped the reward – another reason, I suppose, why he got where he is today.)
I also provided a couple of songs, including the Leonardo da Cohen number which would recur in After Eights at the Playhouse the following year. And I even got the chance towards the end of the show to break out a John Noakes impression I never knew I had in the Red Peter sketch, a spoof of Blue Peter ostensibly set in Russia (what would student stage revue do without TV programmes to leech off?). The ‘make’ in our version was a secret listening device that would enable children to spy on their parents. “What do you think of that, John?” demanded Val, the lovely Joanna Hill, putting the finishing touches to it. “Well, Val,” I falsettoed northernly, “I think we’re all going to have a lot of fun with that little bugger.” We sat there holding stuffed toys to simulate the pets, for Christ’s sake. I don’t think any of us were yet twenty. My heart still weeps at the innocence of it all.
And why Allswellthatendsrock!? Because there seemed to have been an awful lot of student rock musicals around that year and we simply jumped satirically on the bandwagon. A couple of the sketches – mostly by Richard Curtis, an English scholar – were derived from Shakespeare, and that perhaps gave director Rob Orchard the idea of dressing the cast in Shakespearean costume throughout. I based the poster image on a David Bowie pose, of course, but that is more or less what I wore for the show. My first time in doublet and hose. Thank God it was meant to be funny.
The other music, incidentally, was great fun, mainly rock parody written by the multi-talented Nigel Cox who played the piano in the opening and closing numbers while I plunked away on a borrowed electric guitar. (The other members of the cast had foam rubber versions and added to the ‘general hilarity’ by getting into ‘fights’ with these fake ‘instruments’ in the background.) I had never held a real electric guitar in my life, but despite the fact that half this one’s strings were rusty and it weighed a ton, I was simply too excited to care. There was even room in the opening number for a brief guitar solo which I laboured hard and long to get right. We were performing on the same level as the audience and, in the absence of wings, used to make entrances and exits down the aisles between the seats. On the first night, as I was making my way to the back of the room in the blackout following the opening number, during which I’d done my level best to get my twenty or so bars right, one member of the audience leaned out of his chair as I went by and whispered kindly, “That was bloody awful, mate.” He was probably right. On the other hand, he could fuck off.