The Comedy of Errors: Kalaeidoscope - From the Other Side (1 May 1992)

Buy this at Discogs

Once Oliver! was done and dusted, my attention for the summer of 1992 shifted towards 2 things: my GCSE exams and playing for Falmouth Cricket Club.  I had substantial ground to make up for the former, given that I had failed all of my mock exams in November; while a developing interest in cricket, helped by Graham Gooch’s England side reaching the final of the 1992 World Cup had seen myself and a group of my school friends attend winter nets at the latter with an eye to playing for their Under 16 side.  I had an inside track on this as my mother worked at a solicitor’s office in which virtually every partner and solicitor that made up the practice played for either the 1st or 2nd XI.
Acting, on the other hand, was pretty dependent on my getting 4 GCSEs so that I could stay on at Falmouth School and take my A-Levels.  If I did that, I would include Drama as my one of my A-Level choices and would audition for the school’s main show for 1993, Carousel.  As far as I was concerned, it would be nearly 6 months at least before I went near a rehearsal room.
So, having settled on this plan of action, it came as a wonderful surprise to me when I went back to school after the Easter break to be approached about appearing in a production of William Shakespeare’s 1594 farce, The Comedy of Errors, which was being staged in late June by the school at Pendennis Castle.  Ostensibly, this allowed for both A-Level and GCSE Drama students to work at a smaller piece for public performance than having to appear solely in the main musical production.  My invitation had come through Michelle Rogers who was studying drama GCSE, but had not appeared in Oliver! though she had appeared in a production of The Innocents staged in the drama studio the previous year.  She was going to play one of the Dromios in this production.  I was offered two small roles, and once I had established that the amount of time required to rehearse it could be worked around study leave and cricket, I accepted the invitation with great excitement.

I’d been introduced to Shakespeare two years earlier when I had to study Macbeth for English.  My tutor in that module, Gary Matthews, did a wonderful job of bringing the text to life, but the language held no great fears.  Most of it was understandable, and for those moments where the text did veer off  into 16th Century pop culture - what celebrated Cornish am-dram director, John Frankland, used to refer to as “anything about Hecate” - I would tune out until the script got back on course, which never took too long.
More fundamentally, and relevant to this blog and an affinity with John Peel, the chance to do a Shakespeare play as my next experience of acting offered me something which I very quickly realised that I wanted in order to get the maximum out of amateur drama, and that was variety.
In my mind, amateur drama when I started doing it, meant 4 genres:
1) Musicals
2) Pantomimes
3) Comedies/Farces
4) Murder mysteries/thrillers

Even before I got involved with it, those were the kinds of things I saw advertised by various groups in Falmouth - revues were also popular.  But as far as I could see, variations of that kind of fare was what there was on offer.  I resolved to try everything I could, but to be discerning and to vary up what I did.  Wherever it was possible, I wanted no 2 productions I did to be stylistically similar.  If I did something light, I would look to follow it with something heavier or more gutsy; if I did something avant-garde or leftfield, then my next show would be something traditional and (awful word) safe.  By doing this, I hoped to retain interest in the hobby not only for myself, but also for my parents who would be coming to see me.  And while, I’m sure that they had their preferences in terms of what they came to see, at least it was never predictable - for them or for me.  This got even more important to me when they would bring friends along as the decade progressed.  It kept things fresh and interesting.  I was fortunate that at the point I started to get involved, Cornish groups started to gradually push their boundaries a little more in terms of what they did.  This allowed me to  experience all the different genres mentioned above and other ones besides and decide which ones I got more out of, but by being discerning, I also got to try ones which I felt were outstanding examples of their type.  It was impossible to say “Oh, I hate Shakespeare”, or “I hate pantomime” or “I hate farces” and so on, because I got to sample them all and hold up different examples as ones I had liked and believed in.  John Peel’s radio world  was a perfect match for me in the same way.  It offered that breadth and depth of choice.  There was stuff I liked and stuff I hated, but it meant it was impossible to dismiss any form of music he played, because there would always be something to catch your attention, draw you in, seduce you to its possibilities- and once you found it, you wanted to share it with other people.

To follow a West End musical like Oliver! with a Shakespeare comedy gave me that first opportunity to compare and contrast different forms, to try different challenges.  I think I actually started rehearsals later than 1 May 1992, but I know that the final performance was on 1 July 1992, so let’s be good to ourselves and indulge in two months of Peel content.  We pick up the action 3 weeks after the last Peel show that ran alongside Oliver!, but it’s a familiar name that greets us.  Bedford’s Kalaeidoscope provided one of the top tracks of the Oliver! shows but if I’m Gonna Get You sounded like an encapsulation of female fronted dance music, then From The Other Side returned the favour with a male centred approach.  I haven’t been able to trace where the “Oh-ee-oh - Eeah” vocal refrain comes from but it was pretty damn ubiquitous as I remember.  Garlanding it are some pretty full on drum’n’bass beats and the clincher, a gloriously ethereal synthisizer line which sounds like a rave held during a seance. From the other side, indeed...

Video courtesy of chuwingsoup.