The Room Above The Pub

‘There was a buzz… people said, “Oh my goodness, there are wonderful things happening at this very small place at the end of the District line”’

(Gillian Thorpe, Former Administrative Director)

Ann Curthoys and Willie Jonah in ‘Go Tell It on Table Mountain’, 1971.
Image credit: © Unknown. Image supplied by the OT.

Lunchtime on New Year’s Eve 1971 and over one hundred people were queuing on the stairs in the Orange Tree Pub in Richmond. Not for the bar – but to see a forty-minute show about politics and race relations in Rhodesia. The play was 'Go Tell it on Table Mountain' and the director was Sam Walters. Along with other theatre professionals and his wife, Auriol Smith, Walters had recently formed a theatre group called the 'Richmond Fringe.' This was its first show.

‘I’d been telling the actors they’d be playing to five people and a dog’

(Sam Walters, Founder and Former Artistic Director)

This was the first of many times that the theatre was unable to accommodate its audience in one sitting. Not missing a trick, Walters arranged for the play to be performed twice in quick succession, allowing the overspill to enjoy a pre-show drink in the pub. The first played to an audience of over sixty people, with at least sixty more attending the second that same evening.

'It [the pantomime] was called "Dick Whittington and his Wonderful Cat." I was the "wonderful cat" and Sam was… everything. He was the Dancing Bear. He was Neptune. And she [Auriol Smith] was the beautiful princess’
(Vivien Heilbron, Actor)

Walters and Smith had met, fittingly, whilst performing pantomime in Rotherham, and were recently returned from a year in Jamaica where they had run a drama school. In November 1971 they called a meeting of like-minded thespians in their house in East Twickenham and formed a theatre group: Richmond Fringe.

The Orange Tree Pub seen from afar, c.1975.
Image credit: © Richmond upon Thames Local Studies Library and Archive, LBRUT/P/2/1/58.

In 1968 the Theatres Act had put an end to over two hundred years of censorship, meaning that theatrical expression was no longer policed by the Lord Chamberlain. A wealth of ‘fringe’ theatres had subsequently sprung up in the back rooms of central London – but nowhere as far out as Richmond, a whole ten miles from the West End.

Naturally, Walters and his group went on a pub crawl to choose a venue, where they discovered an unused room above the Orange Tree Pub, with a landlord happy for the extra punters. Described by Walters as ‘a big room with windows on three sides… full of Masonic trappings, sideboards, a sort of spare bar and a lot of junk’ - it was perfect.

‘We called ourselves ‘The Daylight Theatre’… There was proximity and closeness and involvement’ 

(Sam Walters, Founder and Former Artistic Director)

‘The Room’, as the space came to be known, had no stage, backstage or proper seating. Significantly, the absence of artificial lighting meant that performances could only take place in the daytime when there was sufficient natural light. But Walters embraced the fact that the audience could see absolutely everything - there was to be no segregation between performer and viewer.

‘Certainly the approaches to the theatre doors did smell of beer to start with... the fact that the audience sat on very hard church pews meant...the audience was going through considerable pain to come and watch… so that meant we were very proud of our audiences’

(Gillian Thorpe, Former Administrative Director)

The Wandsworth-based brewery which owned the pub, Young’s, paid in 1975 for The Room to be refurbished into a licensed theatre complete with heating, ventilation and fire exits. Individual chairs were replaced by sturdy church pews, given by a church in Kingston which was undergoing renovations. A room next to the pub kitchen became an office and storage space, as well as a makeshift dressing area divided by a curtain.

Top: ‘The Googlies’, 1972. Note that the audience sit on individual chairs.Image credit: © Unknown. Image supplied by the OT.
Bottom: A later show where the church pews can be seen in the background.Image credit: © Unknown. Image held at Royal Holloway University Archive (uncatalogued material).

'Richmond Fringe at the Orange Tree', booklet published in 1974.
Image credit: © The OT.

'There were no wings... you had to be a bit careful because there was a lot of noise in the kitchens. And I think at one point the landlord had an enormous dog... so in order [for the actors] to make an exit and an entrance again, it was really rather tricky'
(Marcia Bennie, Former Theatre Manager and Publicist)

The staircase leading from the pub was later plastered with theatre posters, and a sign demanding 'silence' - to which few paid any attention - was placed on the door to The Room.

'The Room', c. 1980.
Image credits: © Unknown. Images held at Royal Holloway University Archive (uncatalogued material).

The difficult task of finding sufficient seating for the queuing crowd was in the early days shared between Walters and Marsha Hanlon, Stage Manager and later Theatre Manager:

'His [Walters's] energy was just enormous. His enthusiasm never flagged... To give you a picture of what he was like as a person, when he and I were sharing Front of House duties... one of the audience regulars came up to me and said, "I'm always disappointed when it's you, instead of Sam. When you do it, you just stand there and seat people. When he does it, he's running around, leaping up and down. He's such an entertainment"'
(Marsha Hanlon, Former Stage Manager and Theatre Manager)

Audience members recall the thrill of waiting in line to see if there would be space for them:

'The first priority on arrival was to get there in time to join the queue up the stairs... Waiting whilst clashing one's pint glass of Young's bitter... waiting for the count to see whether one was going to get in... the heartbeat increasing as one got closer and closer to the little door at the top of the stairs to see whether there was capacity to accommodate one within those pews. And the Administrator then, Marsha Hanlon, was very good - rather like some people in the Japanese trains - at squeezing more and more people in, to make sure everyone that could be possibly seated safely was seated'
(Paul Velluet, Former Trustee)

The theatre went from strength to strength and gained a reputation for quality and experimentation. A fruitful relationship with the writer James Saunders existed since the very beginning: Saunders and his wife attended the Richmond Fringe's first show, and the theatre performed a number of his plays. In 1973, it staged ‘The Borage Pigeon Affair’ by James Saunders; both the theatre's first full-length play, and its first to be performed in the evening. An original musical, ‘The Lady or the Tiger’ was the first show to transfer to the West End, and a number quickly followed. An outreach programme bringing Shakespeare into schools was set up in 1982; the first of many community-orientated activities.

'I think when we first did it ['The Lady or the Tiger'], it was before we were taking bookings and people were queuing around the block. They'd finally get there and say, "this is my sixth time trying to see it!"'
(Marsha Hanlon, Former Stage Manager and Theatre Manager)

‘There was a lovely sense of family’ 

(Imogen Bond, Director and Former Education Director)

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