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extract from On September 5th, 1929, a new theatre group was formed in Ealing, having 17 members and a bank balance of 7s.11½d. The group comprised half a dozen or so enthusiastic young people, who had previously acted together in various local productions, and a number of their friends who had been persuaded to join them. The aim was merely to enable the friends to act together more regularly and more often. Alfred Emmet, a founder member, recalls:
The name was actually the brainwave of Alec Payne, the group’s first producer, and it came well before any policy was formulated, although the society very quickly began to live up to its name... So it was under this title that the group gave, on November 19th, 1929, the first of two performances of its first production, The Best People by David Grey and Avery Hopwood, at the Park Theatre in Hanwell. The names of those original 17 members of the group, most of whom were involved in this production in some capacity or other, are listed below as they appear in the first Minute Book:
Alec Payne was appointed the group’s Producer, Alfred Emmet its Honorary Secretary and John Ruck its Business Manager. Again from that first Minute Book comes this reference to the plans for the first production, which will help to set the scale of the enterprise in context:
It is worth noting that the Committee eventually ratified expenditure of the princely sum of £2/19/- ! |