In 2005 Sussex Playwright's celebrated 70 years of creativity. This event was marked with the hanging of a plaque in the Circle Bar at the Theatre Royal where the Sussex Playwright's Club was conceived and held it first meetings in 1935. The club was founded by CHARLES WALKER with an initial membership of five others. Charles belonged to Southwick players and they would occasionally perform plays by the Club's members.
Bruce Avis, who is the longest serving and perhaps oldest member, joined the SPC when he was sixteen in 1939. He has heard or read, during his membership an infinate variety of plays. The first was Lottie Dundas by Enid Bagnold (National Velvet). She lived in Rottingdean and her theatrical friend C. B. Cochran came down for the reading. Lottie Dundas eventually reached the
Membership of Sussex Playwrights has included:- CONSTANCE COX whose work includes numerous television adaptations, including Sunday serialisations for BBC TV and six scripts for the original BBC Forsythe Saga; radio plays and serials; original stage plays: The Romance of David Garrick, The Murder Game, etc as well as many stage adaptations of classics in particular Lord Arthur Saville's Crime, which is still published today by Samuel French.
PHILIP KING: See How They Run, currently enjoying a revival in the
JUDY UPTON: Three plays produced at the
In January 1967, at which time R C Mansell Woodhouse was President and our Vice Presidents were Madame Florence Moore (who ran a theatre studio in
Olive Chase and Stanley Clayton had a television production of one of their plays – and other successful writers included Vernon Beste and Muriel Slater (published by Evans, under the pseudonym Georgina Reid). The actor, Carl Bernard, (who appeared in four plays at Chichester Festival Theatre in 1967) was also a writing member.
For the first-ever Brighton Festival in 1967, SPC was responsible for arranging a National Theatre open forum at the Royal Pavilion with a panel including Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Tynan and Walter Esselinck (Gardner Centre), and with John Stride and Edward Petherbridge performing an excerpt from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
By 1974, the impresario Henry Sherwood was President (with a play competition named after him) and established writers included June Pierson and Peggy Eaton. Several plays by members (including Joan Brampton, Olive Chase, Fred Partridge, Philip King and Constance Cox) were either broadcast, on tour with rep companies, televised or were in production, both amateur and professional
Backward Glances
Margaret Gibbs was an SPC member for many years. For the 70th Anniversary, Trevor Harvey has passed on this information about her work as a playwright and children’s author from an article that appeared in the Evening Argus, dated June 11th, 1986.
When Margaret Gibbs wrote her first poem, Queen
She had her first article published in 1924, in the Daily Herald. Working as a shorthand typist in a bank at the time, she started writing regularly for children’s comics like Rainbow and Sunbeam and contributing to the famous Blackie annuals.
She became a regular contributor of stories to BBC Children’s Hour and a collection of these was published. A collection of her children’s plays, Simon the Tart-Eater, was published by Heinemann.
When a well-reviewed children’s book, One Man Wallopem, earned her enough royalties, she left her job at the bank in Croydon and moved to
As two of her plays had been broadcast during the war, she concentrated on playwriting, and one of her published plays – Storm in a Paintpot – was still performed by amateur groups in the 1980s.
Another play, The Hawthorn Tree, was at the Q Theatre in the 1950s, starring Rachel Kempson -wife of Michael Redgrave and mother of Vanessa, Lynn and Corin Redgrave