Love and dedication can conquer all

Critics may disparage amateur theatre, but even the greatest actors had to start somewhere and the gap to the professional art isn’t as large as one might imagine

- Michael Billington

CRITICS are often snooty about amateur theatre. Kenneth Tynan described it as ‘an exhibitionist alternative to bridge’ and James Agate, in his heyday at The Sunday Times, used to say that the difference between amateur and professional actors was that the former lacked the technique to convey emotion when they felt it, whereas the latter had the skill to express it even when they didn’t.

Now, a critic, Michael Coveney, has come along with a richly entertaining and informative book, Questors, Jesters and Renegades (Methuen), that at last does justice to the massive contribution of amateur theatre to national life.

One of Mr Coveney’s sharpest points is that almost all the best actors started as amateurs. Dame Judi Dench made her debut in the 1951 staging of the York Mystery Cycle, starting with a small role and graduating, in later years, to the Virgin Mary; in 1952, Sir Ian McKellen played a page in a Bolton Little Theatre production of Emlyn Williams’s Spring 1600, a forerunner of the film Shakespeare in Love; Sir Michael Gambon was a Vickers apprentice engineer who first trod the boards at the Geoffrey Whitworth Theatre in Crayford and at the Unity Theatre in London, where he was Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Bloomsday; Sir Kenneth Branagh, patron of the Little Theatre Guild, was a 16 year old when he joined The Progress Theatre in Reading and, as he records in the book, went on to make a total hash of his job as a stage manager.