OPERATION CERBERUS
by Michael Kittermaster
Directed by John Davey
Cast:
Tony Hill, John Kearns, John Martin, Ken Ratcliffe, Ted Scrivener, Wilfrid Sharp, Phillip Sheahan
THE AUTHOR
Michael Kittermaster combined a career in broadcasting and the Civil Service with an extensive body of dramatic writing. Before the war he worked for the BBC and subsequently held senior broadcasting posts in Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Cyprus. In 1966 he returned to independent Zambia as Director of Broadcasting Services, remaining there until 1968. He published two books about Central Africa, Katakala and the novel The District Officer, and wrote more than fifty radio and television plays, including adaptations of Thomas Hardy and Doris Lessing.
PRESS RESPONSE
Originally broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 1972, Operation Cerberus is a blackly comic satire set in a decaying military security post on the Yorkshire moors. Staff-Sergeant Hort has spent years guarding an operation so secret that its purpose—and perhaps even its existence—has become uncertain. The arrival of assorted officials and outsiders exposes a world sustained by regulations, military ritual and determined evasions of responsibility. The mysterious Cerberus, named after the many-headed guardian of the underworld, becomes an absurd emblem of bureaucratic secrecy: an elaborate defensive apparatus whose continued existence may be more important than whatever it was created to protect.
PHOTOS
PRESS RESPONSE
Reaction to Operation Cerberus proves unusually contradictory. Claudia Cooke in the Acton Gazette enjoyed its gently satirical conception, professional-looking setting and performances by Wilfrid Sharp as Staff Sergeant Hort and John Kearns as Khan, but felt that the humour weakened as the evening progressed and judged the play below Kittermaster’s best work. Tim Dehn in TOAD was much harsher, finding the jokes increasingly repetitive, the characters stereotyped, the pace wooden and the potentially sinister premise incapable of generating genuine dramatic tension. Kitharistes in Questopics, however, reached almost the opposite conclusion, calling the play “a delight”, praising its careful construction and gradual revelation and describing the acting as good as anything recently seen at The Questors. Wilfrid Sharp’s Hort was singled out as a “masterly performance”, with Ken Ratcliffe, Philip Sheahan and John Kearns also commended.
Acton Gazette
TOAD (Dehn)
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
OPERATIONS CERBERUS