Whisky Galore E-Book

Compton Mackenzie

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

It's 1955 and the Pallas Players, an all-female theatre company, are putting on a play: Whisky Galore. They transport us back to 1943 on the Scottish islands of Great and Little Todday, where the whisky supply has dried up because of the war, leaving tensions running high. Relief seems to be at hand when a ship carrying 50,000 bottles of whisky is wrecked just offshore. Then it's every thirsty man for himself as the islanders try to rescue as many bottles as possible before stuffy Captain Waggett of the Home Guard can put a stop to their fun. Philip Goulding's stage adaptation of Compton Mackenzie's comedy classic is a tribute to the feisty all-female touring theatre companies of the post-war years. First performed in a touring production by Oldham Coliseum Theatre, Hull Truck Theatre and New Vic Theatre, Whisky Galore combines rollicking physical theatre, panto and farce, with an array of hilarious characters for any female-led theatre company. This edition includes an introduction by Philip Goulding, notes on the characters, and the original music by Alan Edward Williams that accompanied the premiere production.

Leseprobe

WHISKY GALORE

adapted for the stage by

Philip Goulding

from the novel by

Compton Mackenzie

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

Whisky Galore

Music

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Philip Goulding

Compton Mackenzie, or ‘Monty’ as he was known to his friends, was born into a theatrical family. His grandfather was Henry Compton, an actor best known for his Shakespearean comedy roles, including the Gravedigger, which he played at the Lyceum to Henry Irving’s Hamlet in 1875. A critic wrote, ‘In every scene but one [Irving] was the centre of attention, but in that one scene in which he came to dialogue with the gravedigger, Mr Compton, he fell immediately and naturally into second place.’

Monty’s parents were the touring players Edward Compton and Virginia Bateman, who ran the Compton Comedy Company. One of Monty’s sisters was Fay Compton, a highly respected classical actress in the UK, while his brother was Francis Compton, who built a successful film and theatre acting career in the United States.

And Monty also trod the boards himself. In fact, after the actor-manager Arthur Bourchier saw him in a production of The Merchant of Venice at Oxford University, Monty was offered a contract as the young lead at the Garrick, on a salary rising to the tidy sum of £2,000 per year. He turned it down – having deduced that acting was a shallow skill. He’d decided instead to become a writer.

In the foreword to his novel A Passionate Elopement – finally published after eleven rejections – Compton Mackenzie wrote:

I never intended to be a novelist; I always meant to be a playwright. In 1906, being at the time just twenty-three, I wrote an eighteenth-century comedy to encourage my father to continue the allowance of £150 a year he was then making me. He agreed to put The Gentleman in Grey (as the play was called) into his repertory, beginning at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in March 1907. The play was generously received – yet I was dissatisfied. The actors and the actresses all gave good performances, but they were none of them my characters as I had imagined them, and although The Gentleman in Grey remained in my father’s repertory for three or four years I never saw a performance that did satisfy me.

Fortunately, his career as a novelist took off, and he went on to write over a hundred books – a few of them featuring theatrical characters, settings and themes.

Girls Will Be Boys

Shortly before being commissioned to adapt Whisky Galore, I’d been reading about the various touring theatre companies of the mid-twentieth century, including the Compass Players, the Adelphi Players, and the Osiris Players – Nancy Hewins’ all-female company that toured the country between 1927 and 1963. I remembered having come across the Osiris Players before, and after a few hours in the attic ploughing through box-files of old newspaper cuttings, I dug out Paul Barker’s 1995 Independent on Sunday article: A Woman of Some Importance. Re-reading the piece, I wondered if it would be possible to pay tribute to the spirit of Nancy Hewins in my version of Whisky Galore. Serendipitously, our show was scheduled to go on the road in 2018, the year Britain marked one hundred years since (some) women first gained the right to vote.

Though Shakespeare productions formed the core of the Osiris Players’ repertoire, they performed many other plays with entirely female casts, including Aimée and Philip Stuart’s Nine till Six, A. A. Milne’s Belinda, Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, J. M. Barrie’s Quality Street, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, William Douglas-Home’s The Chiltern Hundreds, Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett’s It Pays to Advertise, Charles Hawtrey’s The Private Secretary, Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement, the melodramas Sweeney Todd and Maria Marten, and adaptations of Treasure Island, Little Women, The Old Ladies, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist.

This programming – and the fact that the other companies of the period were continually adapting and reinventing classic plays, poems and other source materials – made it easy to imagine the fictional Flora Bellerby and her Pallas Players deciding, in 1955, to adapt Compton Mackenzie’s 1947 novel Whisky Galore for their all-female company, while being careful to retain the spirit and flavour of the original novel.

In his book I Crossed the Minch, the poet Louis MacNeice, after interviewing Compton Mackenzie in his house at Barra, wrote that he ‘looked like Lionel Barrymore on the point of turning into a bird’. And, according to Ian Jack in the Guardian: ‘Compton Mackenzie had a theatrical nature – he would march around in a kilt and sporran, though his paternal ancestors left Scotland in the eighteenth century.’

Given that he was such a charismatic and theatrical figure, it seemed logical that Monty should be the narrator or storyteller in the Pallas Players’ adaptation of his most famous novel. And once Flora had hit upon this idea, there could be no argument as to who should assume that coveted role…

Destry Rides Again

For this stage adaptation, I returned to Compton Mackenzie’s novel, rather than the 1949 Ealing film version, which excised a considerable amount of the story. Although Mackenzie was credited as co-screenwriter of the film, he was vexed by the decision to remove the religious rivalry between the inhabitants of the two islands – Little Todday (Roman Catholic) and Great Todday (Protestant). Abandoning this strand meant the elimination of one of the most engaging characters in the novel – Father Macalister, the Roman Catholic priest – with his passion for Wild West novels and his utter contempt for Paul Waggett, the bumptious commander of the Home Guard. Another result of the removal of religious division from the tale is the loss of the subplot whereby Fred Odd, the English incomer, attempts to convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism for the sake of Peggy Macroon, the local lass he loves – and hopes to marry.

Whisky Galore, the novel, was, of course, inspired by a true-life event: the wrecking of the SS Politician off Ericksay in 1941. While researching this adaptation I was pleased to read that, when the male islanders were salvaging whisky from the ship’s filthy hold, in order to prevent their clothes being stained by oil they reportedly took to wearing garments abandoned by their wives. Another example of British readiness, or perhaps eagerness, to embrace the art of cross-dressing.

If This Be Magic

Built into this adaptation is the potential for the Pallas Players to fail. They have been dealt a cruel blow with the loss of one of their most popular performers, and her replacement, Juliet, may not yet be quite up to speed. But this is not supposed to be a play that goes wrong, but one which – against all the odds – succeeds.

Quick costume changes, fake facial furniture, bicycles, bird-callers, face-packs, complicated props like piles of plates: all of these conspire to set up spills, create chaos and manufacture mayhem. But really they should be seen as challenges, rather than obstacles – devices to help tighten the teamwork and strengthen the ensemble. (Just don’t use the word ‘ensemble’ within Flora’s earshot.) The intention was to make things appear very difficult in order that, through close collaboration, great skill and endless ingenuity, it can all be made to look absolutely effortless. Therefore Juliet’s achievement will seem all the greater – and the total virtuosity of the Pallas Players be almost overwhelming. That’s the idea…

We seek not to mock these women and their work – this is, after all, a celebration. The Pallas Players take pride in what they do, in their craft and in the design and construction of the tools of their trade. Beards and moustaches need to attach securely yet be easily removed, and should not prevent the wearer from speaking clearly and being heard. A costume must be composed of simple, easily identifiable elements, or layers that can be donned and discarded speedily and without injury.

The set design for the shows the Osiris Players toured had to fit into two large cars. Imagination was required to recreate the settings economically and practically. Often the Osiris Players would be touring more than one show at a time. During the war, Hewins presented 1,534 performances of thirty-three plays (sixteen penned by Shakespeare, the rest by lesser authors). And the set-ups and get-outs – as with small-scale touring shows on the road today – would have been managed by the performers. As Paul Barker wrote:

They celebrated their twenty-first anniversary at a Women’s Institute in Kent, with Twelfth Night in the morning, Everyman at lunchtime, Macbeth in the afternoon, Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion after tea, topped off by Badger’s Green, R. C. Sherriff’s comedy about village cricket, in the evening. Not surprisingly, few of the players, outside the steady core of three or four, survived more than a couple of years with Osiris. ‘We were permanently exhausted,’ Susan Date remembered.

Of course, as Flora Bellerby pointed out in her unpublished autobiography If This Be Magic: ‘A great deal of things turn out to be a lot less faff without men mucking in.’ And she may have been right. But to return to Paul Barker’s article:

…all that mattered was how it was on stage. The novelist Jane Gardam saw the Osiris Players on Teesside, where she was a child in wartime. She had never been to a play before. A van drew up outside the school, she recalls, and ‘seven threadbare women got out’. They reminded her of Mr Crummles’s troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. They looked odd, even ridiculous. She went and sat in the front row. It was She Stoops to Conquer. She saw ‘the seven colourless women transformed into painted eighteenth-century beauties, into bumpkins and beaux, into thigh-slapping squires, into silken flirts’. They rollicked, frolicked, wept and danced their way through the play. Twelve-year-old Jane and the rest of the young audience clapped, stamped and cheered. They begged for more. Gardam never forgot these women.

It hardly needs stating that the more ‘truthful’ the Pallas Players’ portrayals of the men in Whisky Galore are, the more entertaining they will be. As Flora Bellerby, again in If This Be Magic, advised: ‘While buffoonish clowning may well amuse loved ones and immediate family, still it sells short those characters, so carefully and lovingly created that we might hold a mirror up to nature.’ Or, as Alan Ayckbourn put it, rather more succinctly: ‘What turns an audience off, I think, is when actors are in effect saying “Aren’t I funny?”’

There’s no reason, of course, why male actors shouldn’t have a bash at portraying Pallas Players should they so desire. As you like it, chaps; there is, after all, some precedent in theatre history for men playing women playing men.

It’s perhaps worth stressing here that this play isn’t intended to be a piece ‘about’ all-female touring theatre companies of the twentieth century, nor is it a ‘play-within-a-play’. It’s an adaptation of Whisky Galore, as Flora Bellerby and her Pallas Players might have made, conceived as a tribute to those pioneering theatrical women, and to Compton Mackenzie – for his wit, his craft, and his imagination.

Acknowledgements

Richard Annis, Sarah Baxter, Sarah Burton, Lesley Chenery, Emma Cook, Sercha Cronin, Janet Glass, Richard Hurford, Paula Jackson, Anne-Louise Jones, Sissi Liechtenstein, Chris Monks, Brian Morton, Mary Elliott Nelson, Jill Rogers, Rose Sergent, Carl Shavitz, Kevin Shaw, Robert Teed, Kate Wilson, Liz Wilson.

P.G.

This stage adaptation of Whisky Galore was first presented in a co-production between Oldham Coliseum Theatre, Hull Truck Theatre and New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, on 16 March 2018, with the following cast:

FLORA BELLERBY

Sally Armstrong

AILEEN McCORMACK

Lila Clements

BEA CORNFORD

Isabel Ford

JULIET MAINWARING

Alicia McKenzie

WIN HEWITT

Christine Mackie

DORIS SANDERSON

Joey Parsad

CONNIE CALVERT

Shuna Snow

Director

Kevin Shaw

Designer

Patrick Connellan

Lighting Designer

Jason Taylor

Sound Designer

Lorna Munden

Composer

Alan Edward Williams

Characters

This adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore is being performed in a Co-op Hall in 1955 by the seven members of an all-female touring theatre company, the Pallas Players: Flora Bellerby, Connie Calvert, Win Hewitt, Doris Sanderson, Aileen McCormack, Bea Cornford and Juliet Mainwaring. Two of Mackenzie’s characters – Annag and Paddy – will be played by more than one actress.

Those not ‘on’ at any point are to be kept busy doing whatever else is required to keep the action flowing smoothly. ‘Off’ is perhaps also ‘on’ – in that the design might allow the audience to witness the character changes, etc., as they happen.

The members of Pallas Players can hail from anywhere. The characters from Whisky Galore are Scottish, unless otherwise stated in the script. The suggested division of roles is as below:

FLORA BELLERBY

Monty, the author

The Biffer

Father Macalister

Constable Macrae

CONNIE CALVERT

Fred Odd

Major Quiblick

Annag No. 3

Captain Headley-Faversham

WIN HEWITT

Donald MacKechnie

Doctor Maclaren

Mrs Campbell

Annag No. 2

Tom Ferguson

Paddy No. 3

DORIS SANDERSON

Joseph Macroon

Catriona Macleod

Roderick MacRurie

Paddy No. 2

AILEEN MCCORMACK

Drooby

Peggy Macroon

George Campbell

Paddy No. 1

Lieutenant Boggust/Mr Brown

BEA CORNFORD

Paul Waggett

Annag No. 1

Robbie Baird

JULIET MAINWARING

Dolly Waggett

Norman Macleod

Duncan Macroon

Annag No. 4

More detailed character descriptions are provided after the text of the play.

Prologue

A Co-op Hall. 1955.

Six of the Pallas Players enter while the house lights are up. The lights dim and the women finish setting up for Act One. They can pretend that there is a thick curtain between the actors and the audience.

DORIS might discreetly look around the side of this imaginary curtain to observe the ‘house’. The atmosphere is generally relaxed and efficient for all except JULIET, who double-checks everything while studying her script. CONNIE calmly reads a mechanics magazine. AILEEN keeps an eye on the door, acting as lookout. DORIS, BEA and WIN make the final touches to their preparation. Binoculars are very deliberately set. WIN finds Monty’s hat in the bottom of a box, whistles to BEA, then throws it over to her. BEA places the hat. Someone whispers, ‘Who’s first Perce?’1It’s JULIET, so she tests the wooden bird-whistle. She’s a novice, so it’s a bit loud. Oops. The bird-whistle is attached by a cord to the set somewhere, to avoid it ever getting mislaid. It probably makes only one sort of call, which has to suffice for all the types of bird we’ll encounter on our tour of the islands. At some point AILEEN moves away swiftly from the door.

AILEEN. Incoming.

Everybody looks lively. FLORA breezes in.

FLORA. We’ve a good house anyway. I’ve been watching them arrive.

DORIS. What are they like?

FLORA. Anyone remember Halifax?2