The 1970 production was written by Clive Anderson and Geoffrey
Perkins.
Click here to see the
programme.
Memories of Happy Poison - by Katie Finch (Percival)
My last term at the Girls' School was the Autumn Term of 1970. My parents were moving down to Chichester the following Spring, I was going with them and would be starting at Art College. Loathe though I was to leave all my friends in Harrow, the knowledge that I would not be taking 'A' Levels did mean I could concentrate on my main interest - the stage - without a moment's guilt at the missed homework. This was a splendid finale to the previous three years of only slightly less blatant academic neglect. Quite how I was supposed to find time for school work in between the four productions a year with the Old Gayts Drama Club and the seven or so Convergence productions was a problem that my teachers somehow never quite understood.
November and December 1970 were busy months - rehearsing Hamlet and making costumes, working on Old Gayts productions and painting the forest for Midsummer Night's Dream ...but at the end of the term was a chance to be daft and relax, Happy Poison.
I have to confess remembering little about the rehearsals - I suspect there weren't many - but I do remember plenty of typing and re-writing in A2 and laughing a lot. The staging was very basic-just the tabs and front curtains and the occasional rostrum. I swapped roles with Jo Hutber one night as we couldn't resist trying to corpse Clive Anderson - always nice to see the genuine look of surprise on an actor's face when someone they don't expect walks onstage. Michael Portillo gamely struggling with a model boat in the model maker sketch, the Spot the Ball sketch (you had to see it), Clive Anderson's Galloping Gourmet and Bruce Boyd playing his cheeks. This last has entered the stage crew Hall of Fame as the sketch that covered the power cut - Bruce gamely holding the audience so spell-bound in front of the tabs with his version of The William Tell Overture that they never noticed the change over from real electricity and lighting to the generator in the quad and some car headlights.
I daresay there was a party after the show,but as with many parties I went to then I regret I remember nothing. At the reunion last year (December 2001 - ed.), Paul Lewis (stage manager of the show) lent me a copy of the script which jogged my memory and brought back some of the sketches I was in surprisingly vividly, and with hindsight and re-reading, the funniest gag in the show is surely in the finale when the Compere is introducing all the cast to take their bows and the following wondrous casting is revealed, "...Mrs Margaret Thatcher (Michael Portillo)...."
Katie Finch (Percival)