Tag: Roundhouse

Rabalais – An exciting production at the Roundhouse.

Jean Louis Barrault

Once when I was Production Manager of the Roundhouse, we had a production from France, Rabalais, which was an amazingly exciting production, which the English actors had real difficulty with, as they were much more at home with words then action, unlike French actors, who are the other way round.

I well remember the time he had to demonstrate a War Horse to an English actor, he was superb!

The staging was really odd, being a large stage, and the audience was standing, and thus free to move about freely as they often did at the Roundhouse.

Seating plan for Rabalais

So the audience could have seats on wooden blocks or be standing, so the weekly rock concerts were a real problem for us!  We had to build a stage, and demolish the set for Rabalais, which we did- but it wasn’t easy!  

The girls had a clause in their contracts which specified that they had to be prepared to have their breasts exposed, so they had a lot of naked tits around, which added to the joy of the events.

We got off on these!

There were a number of “famous” actors in this production…. Several of them. Bernard Bresslaw who played Friar John, and Bill Wallis who played Gargantua.

Bill Wallis

Birds……

Pope Bird

All in all, it was an amazing experience, and we had a great time of it!

China…. My experiences there.

While I was working and living in China, I had a number of experiences that were – for me – tricky to deal with.  I had all manner of work related experiences and life experiences.

One such work experience was the way we worked in the school I was employed in (Western Academy Beijing – better known as WAB) .  As I have said we worked a hell of a lot of hours, much like the Roundhouse Theatre.  We worked from about 7 o’clock to about 11 o’clock every day, starting from the Early Learners Centre and working until about 11 o’clock in the evening with a rock show, and in between we had films, and other entertainments. So basically it was non-stop all day long.  Sometimes we had a relaxed day, which we celebrated!!!

But generally we worked all the hours that we were sent.

Normally we worked from about 10 until about 6 in the evening. With exceptions!

When we had Pop Concerts, we worked until they were finished (obviously), quite often they were added to by other International Schools in Beijing which was fun. I drew upon my professional experience a lot for these concerts – shades of my Roundhouse days – in was much the same. It was a mix of groups, a Heavy Metal group or a folk group, following on from each other, a real mix of groups!  In my Roundhouse days we never mixed them up in that way, we tended to have a “type” of group, so Heavy Metal with Heavy Metal and such like….. Ah Doctor John!

We worked on these which was one thing we did, but otherwise we worked on kids talking or another thing…. We were really impressed by the kids presenting themselves…. They were so professional.  Striding around the stage as if they possessed it.

We used to have demonstrations of the lights, in which we had the kids standing around the stage and shone different coloured lights on them. Which was intriguing. We discovered that blue gels in spotlights had a really weird effect.  If we shone blue, simply blue lights on the kids, they were hard to focus and the weird thing was that they sort of were hard to see clearly. Odd effect.

So we worked all the hours that God sent, and generally functioned as serious professional roadies, which was entertaining, so the long hours really didn’t matter.

A very unlikely Hells Angels Chapter

As I said ages ago, this blog consists of random memories as they occur to me, so here is another such relatively pointless memory from my Roundhouse days – All about the most unlikely chapter of Hells Angels you could possibly imagine.

As I said ages ago, this blog consists of random memories as they occur to me, so here is another such relatively pointless memory from my Roundhouse Production Manager days – All about the most unlikely chapter of Hell’s Angels you could possibly imagine.

There was a small group of rather weedy young men who hung around the Roundhouse in those days, trying to get work from us as security for our Rock concerts (which we never gave them by the way) who felt that they were the epitome of what the Hell’s Angels stood for.
They wished to set up a proper London Chapter of the Angels for themselves.   But as they possessed only a small moped and a Mini Moke ( a sort of jeep version of the famous Mini car) we all felt that this was an unlikely dream.
They used to film themselves on that moped pobling along the road with a small video camera on the back of the Moke and obviously were living in a total fantasy world.
However, one day they astounded us all by coming into the Roundhouse full of excitement, as apparently the head Chapter of the Angels were sending someone over from California to make them into members of the club.
This bloke duly turned up one day, with an enormous heavily chopped bike (it only had half a petrol tank, so he could see the engine as he rode along on it).  And he was enormous as well.  A most impressive and rather intimidating creature to say the least.
He on his huge bike, and they on their moped and the Moke rode all over the place together for a couple of weeks, filming themselves of course and then he returned to the States, but had to our amazement actually enrolled them into the Hells Angels….
After which they wore their Angels jackets with great pride.  I wonder what became of them when the more normal Angels London Chapter was started.