The Apprenticeship Years:

1971-76 London and Half Moon Theatre 

Early 70’s, London is still ‘swinging’. Living on nothing; Left-wing politics; fighting bailiffs and the police as part of the squatting movement; two marriages; founding and running a theatre with serious critical success, a theatre that still (2023) is a one of the most celebrated community youth theatres in England.  The London years were straight out of an adventure novel and passed by like an express train. A precipitous learning curve in theatre craft, politics and life.

I had my shoulder to the door with a naïve determination. Was the Half Moon fate? Was I fortune’s fool? If the Half Moon had not happened, would the door have opened on some other, similar opportunities in any case? Or was it all just Luck?

Judit enrolled in her university classes no problem. Nigh-on broke, finding an affordable place to live in London in the Fall of 1971, we were told, would be impossible. Traipsing for hours through the residential streets of Shepard’s Bush, looking for a “Room For Rent” sign in a window, we bumped into a young woman lugging a suitcase, rushing out of a house with a slightly guilty look on her face. “Know any rooms to rent in the area” we asked her. She laughed, “Good luck.” Then, looking back at the front door she had just exited, “Well, you might try here in a few hours, there is going to be a bedsit available, I’m skipping out on the rent.” Luck? We went back later and persuaded the owner of the house, an older, shuffling, slow talking, Irishman who never looked us in the eye, we were not the type to skip out on the rent. Paid him in advance.  One pound a week for a single room with a dusty, moth-eaten carpet, a double bed, a tiny nook with a hot plate and a coin-operated gas heater that devoured our shillings so fast we preferred seeking warmth under the covers. We could manage the one pound a week as long as we did not spend too much on food or nights out. Bacon scraps (the fatty off-cuts left after preparing rashers of lean bacon) at 6p a pound from Sainsbury’s, the local supermarket, with boiled lentils and paprika was our Friday night special meal. We were living a war-time-like existence.

Finding work in theatre was tougher. My first paying gig was as a walk-on, literally a candelabra-carrier, at the Aldwych Theatre, for the Schiller Theater’s production of Ivona, Prinzessin von Burgund, by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Ernst Schröder, invited for a short run as part of London’s annual World Theatre Festival. My Schiller connections got me the gig as a local hire. Paid 10 Pounds in cash under the table. We also sold our VW van in the street to some Americans who were planning their own trip through Europe. £250, double the price I had originally paid for it. With its Berlin licence plate still affixed, it was an illegal transaction. Months later, my Omi had to suffer a visit from uniformed Berlin Police. The efficiency of German bureaucracy had tracked down the illegal sale. The police were looking for me. I can imagine my hyper-correct, socially conscious bourgeois Omi was severely traumatized by that visit. Eeee…! My bad. But that £250 carried us for months.

Breaking into the British theatre scene? Forget it.  Canada was considered an undeveloped theatrical wilderness inhabited by colonial Savages. “Canada? Do you even have any theatre in the colonies, old boy?” (Spoken with a posh Brit accent.) I remember an actor at the Half Moon, early rehearsals for Jungle of the Cities, our first production, during a blocking session, when I suggested he “orient” himself in a certain direction, looking at me with disdain. “The proper word is, ‘orientate’, darling, ‘orientate’, don’t you speak English in Canada?” I meekly mumbled Shaw’s quip that “American is now the language and English the dialect.” It did not register. Before founding the Half Moon, many doors were slammed in my face. Or rather, closed slowly, but firmly with distilled British disdain. I somehow finagled a personal interview with the highly respected Artistic Director of the Oxford Playhouse. He was clearly interested in my youthful male good looks, while I, naïvely oblivious, expounded my belief in the serious political potential of theatre and the need to learn my craft. He politely suggested that the Playhouse was not a great home for my energies.  Early in our stay, I managed to gain access to Christopher Plummer’s dressing room after one of his performances at the National Theatre. Thanks to Donald Sutherland, (LINK!) who somehow got a message to Plummer asking him to see me, I was ushered in by the stage door manager. Of course, pretty intimidated, a 23-year-old nobody in front of a theatre legend. Christopher had clearly no interest in helping this fellow Canadian find work in England. He sat post-show, in front of his make-up mirror, make-up smeared half off, in a loose gown, his legs splayed to make sure I could see he had no underwear on. (Basic Instinct?) His dresser, a young, good looking man, smiling at my discomfort. Plummer himself, clearly enjoying humiliating this unknown unknown. “And how is Donald?” I got the impression there was little love lost between the two actors. Donald had played Fortinbras to Plummer’s Hamlet in the fabled BBC production of the play, filmed with huge challenges on location in at Elsinore Castle in Denmark. I got no help getting a foot in the door at the National, where I surely would have withered and died, but retain my serious admiration for Christopher Plummer as a great stage and screen actor, despite the silly shenanigans he demonstrated at that meeting.

Time Out magazine was the key to all of London’s goings on. Not just theatre and movie listings but also to notices for a whole slew of community and political events. I ended up in a tiny Brixton community hall, part of a small discussion group on Brecht and theatre led by playwright Steve Gooch. Introducing myself at the end of the meeting, I told him of my interest in Brecht and my quest to work in British theatre.  He mentioned an actor who was living in a disused, vacant Synagogue in East London and was thinking of starting some kind of theatrical endeavour. Didn’t have the contact info on him, but took the phone number of my bedsit and promised to phone me when he got home. He never phoned. Two weeks later, I was changing trains on the Tube downtown, as I am exiting the car and he is entering, we bump into each other. Luck? “Maurice Colborne is the actor I was talking about.” As the doors are closing, he hands me a telephone number. “Give him a call.”

I do just that. At the other end of the line a lugubrious Yorkshire accent. “How big”, I ask. Size is important to this impetuous Colonial. “As I look over the space, it is a vast, potential crucible for productions”, replies the voice. When a I turned up at 27 Alie Street, near the Aldgate Roundabout, just East of the Tower, my Canuck understanding of “vast” had clearly distorted my expectations. The open area of the former synagogue was barely thirty feet square, although it had three stories of height topped by a skylight. I hid my disappointment, actually wondering if it would be worth my while to try and build a theatre in this, to me, risibly minuscule space. Maurice, a working-class giant of a man, trained to lay cobblestones, turned actor, recent graduate of Central School of Speech and Drama, nearly ten years older than me, is affable and open. He explains that he has been thinking of refurbishing the open space of the ground floor into a rehearsal hall, an incubator for the development of projects and plays. He and his girl-friend, for their bedroom, had enclosed one half of the former woman’s balcony, originally built, as in all orthodox synagogues, overlooking the male worshipers on the ground floor. Desperate to get some directing work, having no better option, with the innocence and ignorance of a Canuck Andy Hardy, I threw out the idea of converting the space into an actual theatre, proposing I direct Brecht’s early play, In The Jungle Of The Cities. Not knowing what we were getting ourselves into, over many cups of tea, he agreed. Claire Sorell, Maurice’s partner at the time, would design the sets and costumes.

The original Alie Street Synagogue had been built in 1934, a time of growing anti-Semitism in London. Only two years later, on Oct 4th, 1936, Sir Oswald Mosely, the leader of the British Fascist movement, and thousands of his Blackshirts, gathered just a stone’s throw (sic) from the synagogue, protected by 6,000 members of London police, determined, with a provocative march, to demonstrate dominance over the largely Jewish and left-wing enclave of Tower Hamlets. The diverse communities of East London rallied together, Communists, Jews, the Irish dockworkers and, chanting the slogan “They Shall Not Pass”, echoing the Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War, they turned the Fascists and Police back in what is remembered as the battle of Cable Street. A victory that, in 1971, lingered mythically in the collective memory of the community. This was the world that would become my home for the next four years.

The Half Moon, around 1974. The date at the top pf the building reads, 1934 when the former Alie Street Synagogue was built with a quiet unobtrusiveness that helped it blend in with the adjacent buildings, Jewish barber shop on one side, a tailor on the other. No doubt a deliberate attempt to avoid provoking the not-so latent Anti-semitism of the period. The double doors opened into a hallway, where we eventually established the Half Moon Gallery, and led to the actual synagogue, recessed into what would have been the backyard.

When we started our renovation work, elements of Jewish faith, fragments of the Bimah and the Ark, torn scrolls and the small black leather boxes with leather straps containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, called Tefillin, even the founding dedication plaque, were scattered between the old wooden pews. One of the first things we did, as ignorant but respectfully intimidated gentiles, was to gather up all the religious items we could and return them to the near-by office of the Federation of Jewish Synagogues, still the landlords of the building.

It was a good time to start a new theatre venture in London. There was a provision in the municipal building code for a legal entity called a “Theatre Club” and so, as long as audience members paid a membership fee to the “Club”, as well as the admission fee, the occupancy and fire regulations for the performance space were considerably eased. We started in. Scrounging building materials at night from local building sites and derelict factories. Chucking our building detritus into containers on the same sites. When Michael Irving, classmate of Maurice’s at Central School, who was living in the other half of the woman’s balcony, returned from a gig touring, to smooth over the acceptance of the transitioning of the space, at Maurice’s suggestion, I cast him as one of the leads in Jungle. Michael agreed to forego his dream of turning the empty space into a huge communal living room complete with palm tree, and pitched in. A good worker. The word got out. Actors and directors dropped by to give a hand or just see what was going on. Friends I had made thanks to Judit, like Tim Harvey, future Oscar-nominated film designer, came by for a few hours of hammering and sawing. A visitor described it as Dante’s Inferno with lumber, garbage, rubbish and clouds of dust and us covered in dirt working away. One actor with plumbing skills even helped us set up gas heating in the space, hooking into a gas meter in the basement of the street-front building. The meter had jammed, likely from disuse, and didn’t register that any gas was being used. Result was, for four years we heated the space with continuously running gas heaters and never paid a penny. How many thousands of £s of free warmth did the jammed meter afford us?*

*As I was leaving to return home to Montreal, four years later, workers from British Gas Corporation were digging up Alie Street in front of the theatre. When I asked one of them what they were doing, he confessed that they were looking for a leak somewhere in the gas line …

The open synagogue space had glorious height, two and one half stories up was a huge skylight that must have allowed for considerable, gentle daylight down onto the religious services. On the front of the balustrade of the former woman’s balcony, built horseshoe-shape into the space, were inscribed, in careful gold lettering, some in Hebrew, some in English, the names of all the members of the congregation who had contributed, small and smaller amounts, to the building of the Synagogue. My favourite was a dedication to a certain Fanny Blow, who had donated thrupence to her place of worship. After much deliberation, out of respect for the inscriptions, we covered them with sheets of newsprint gathered from end-rolls discarded by the printing presses in near-by Fleet Street. We were then able, in good conscience, to paint the paper over in black to complete the conversion of the space into a theatre while preserving the original inscriptions. With pews on risers in a horseshoe around the performance area, depending on how ample the audience derrières were on any given night, we would be able to seat between 80 and 100 spectators.

Across the road at Fredson’s Caf’, for two and one half pence you could get a nice cup of tea. Around the corner, a West Indian grocery store. If one of us had the ready cash, we splurged and shared a generous loaf of Jamaica ginger cake for 8 pence. If, doing all-nighters we were starving, and happened to be really flush, we would head to the stall in near-by Spittlefields Meat Market and indulge in the greatest of luxuries, a 2 AM ‘bacon all-on” a foot of toasted bagette with lettuce, tomatoes, onions and bacon, for the exorbitant price of 25p.

I started to assemble a cast. Initially classmates and friends of Maurice and Michael’s. We also put notices in The Stage, the official publication of British Actors’ Equity. Even though we could not promise more than a cut of the box as salary, actors were eager to be part of the production, so they could be “seen” in London, and showcase their talents for agents and casting directors. I was thrilled when Mary Sheen, a seeming twin of a young Helene Weigel, turned up. Cast her as the mother in the play. She became a faithful Half Moon actress over the years, even playing Richard the Second in our next production. No trouble assembling a dynamite cast. Will Knightly, father of Kiera Knightly, was one of the many talented actors in that first production. As an initial character development rehearsal process, I asked each actor to explore by improvising an animal as their character’s physical inspiration and animus. Sue Lefton, who would become one of British theatre’s more respected movement teachers/coaches, also joined the cast. With Sue we did a lot of improvising in rehearsal around animals. Yes, very Sixties.

Claire and I designed a set using material scrounged at night from the surrounding area. A white boxing ring floor surrounded and overhung with a jungle of scaffolding, nicked from local buildings sites. Back wall of the set, covering the “Ark” in which the Torah would have been kept in the former synagogue, was a cyc of corrugated iron (also nicked from local building sites), meticulously and laboriously painted in horizontal stripes of clashing chromatic colours in a Bridget Riley op-art style. This back wall cyc was designed to shimmer, when lit with different primary colours, to simulate hot air rising from the pavement of the scorching mean streets of Chicago, where the play was ostensibly set.

A £500 cheque from Donald Sutherland, helped us buy a few beat-up lights and a six-dimmer, two preset Strand lighting board.*

*Donald had turned up in London and dropped by to visit Judit and I (mainly Judit). We gave him a tour of our theatre building site and he immediately made a donation to our efforts.

Lucky the space was small and the play expressionistic, but we never had quite enough equipment to fully exploit our design concept.

The transportation vehicle for the scrounged lumber and our garbage was Claire’s black VW beetle that conveniently had a sun-roof opening. We were driving around the East End with16 ft pieces of lumber sticking upright out of the car. With the Leman Street Police Station (the “Nick”) just around the corner from the theatre, it is a miracle we were never pulled over.

Money, of course, remained the issue. In an alley parallel to Alie Street, behind our synagogue, a large Victorian warehouse was being demolished to make way for the expanding container industry and the gentrification of the East End. Maurice and Michael’s solution to our financing needs was to climb to the top of the vacant and dilapidated building in the dead of night, and rip the lead gutters off the roof, drop them in a heap over the side of the building to fall five stories with a huge thump. Then, in the darkness, we carried the lead chunks across the alley, into a row of derelict houses, up one floor, out the back window across a bridge we had fashioned and into the side window of the soon-to-be performance space. To be sold the next morning to a local scrap merchant, transported there precariously in the VW beetle. We must have fenced a couple of tons of scrap lead at 65 shillings a hundredweight, the going spot price for scrap lead at the time. East End scrap merchants were notoriously shady, the chaps running the place looked like gangsters from a Fifties Brit film. “So, and where did all this lead come from,” we were asked by the gangsters. “Just repairing the roof of our old synagogue”, we replied, with studied nonchalance. During one weigh-in session, with a pile of our liberated lead on the huge scale, I suspected the mechanism was rigged and asked them to weigh each piece separately and add up the total. There was a moment when I think they considered punching us out, or worse, but then they complied. My hunch was right, the scale had been tampered with to show false under-weight when the full load was on. They figured the hippies would be too dumb to notice. Re-calculated when each piece was weighed separately, they had to pay us for the correct weight. Our other main benefactor, and definitely under-acknowledged in all historical accounts of the founding of the Half Moon, was Judit. Working between classes as a waitress in a Wimpy’s restaurant on Piccadilly Square, her tips often helped us pay for the can of paint or the bag of screws needed in an emergency.

With rehearsals looming, we decided we needed some publicity. A phone call to the local weekly brought two young East End reporters to interview us. On the spot, and at the suggestion of the two reporters themselves, we named the theatre the Half Moon, after the Half Moon Alley just three doors away, the geographical designator of the proximate neighbourhood. The two reporters played us for the ignoramuses we were. Questions asked in all seeming innocence. We answering with full loquacious enthusiasm. Next week, on the back page of the East End Examiner was a full-page article: “Old Synagogue Is Getting In On The Act.” The photo shows three smiling raggedy workers, hammers in hand, over our heads you can make out some of the gold lettering inscriptions before we had covered them over with newsprint.