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Once upon a time in far Illyria there lived a sad but pompous Duke who loved a fair cruel maid.
However the Lady Olivia will have none of him, prefering to shut herself away and mourn her poor brother, killed in a bizzare gardening accident.
Into both their lives come a sister and brother who, each believing the other to be dead, proceed to wreak unwitting emotional havoc on all and sundry.
Meanwhile, Sir Toby Belch and chums pursue a hilariously nasty vendetta against the puritanical Malvolio, whilst all about people break into song for no readily apparent reason...
Yes, it's another heady Shakespearian mix of love, cruelty and improbable plot devices.
Sit back, enjoy, and we'll see you at the Elephant afterwards!

If the question who put the 'nonny' in 'hey nonny no'? has been causing you sleepless nights, help is at hand. Crude Apache, the people who brought you last summer's highly successful 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' are about to say 'roll over Bill Shakespeare' as they prepare their latest interpretation of the Bard's work, and this time it's Twelfth Night that's getting the treatment. Set in the rockin' and rollin' '50's, the production features Teddy Boys, Rockers, beehives, jives, live band and 5 original songs, as well as musical arrangements of Shakey's text the like of which has never been heard before. As the Bard himself might have said, "If music be the food of love...rock on!"

Said the press release.

Performed at Norwich Puppet Theatre from Thursday, 23rd April - Saturday 25th 1998, the show didn't get a review, but despite having a klunky set, it was a good show with some great songs, and brought in a lot of new talent to the company.

Tim Lane had this to say:

Having directed A Midsummer Nights Dream the previous summer, Russell and I felt the need to present an indoor production, using the same formula that served us so well with the summer show; take a Shakespeare comedy, cut it down to a watchable length, stick some songs in it, put it in some unlikely setting and off you go. It was the first time either of us had directed a non-outdoor show for Crude apache, and while we were very happy with the end result, the learning curve was almost perpendicular.

The initial idea to "do" Twelfth Night came about because a friend of mine was studying it as a part of an access course and asked me what I thought of the play. I hadn't read since it was a set text in my GCE's so I took the opportunity to reread it.I was immediately struck by the extreme cruelty of the humour and decided that it was just the kind of thing Russell and I could really do something with.

Our "Big Idea" for the production was to give it a cartoon setting with a fifties rock'n'roll feel. We felt that this would allow us to explore the brutality of the tricks played by the characters on each other while masking it with an air of teenage innocence, such as might be found in programmes like "Happy Days". Our production would use these two ideas to set up the unrequited sexual tensions and heighten the comic nastiness. We wanted the audience to laugh first and then realize how spiteful and off-handedly brutal the scene was that they were laughing at. We also felt that the show needed to be very fast-paced, again to echo that Tom and Jerry feel.

Our first two big tasks in November '97 was to cut the play and write the songs. With A Midsummer Nights Dream the business of cutting the script had been comparatively easy; there were a lot of long poetic speeches that did little to drive the plot and had no place in our "fast loud and rude" policy. With Twelfth Night the process was much less straight-forward. It was very difficult to find large sections of the text to excise, there is very little in it that isn't pertinent to the plot. The cutting was necessarily a slow "one-line-here-another-line-there" affair, cutting out all those lines that might well have been absolutely hilarious to a Shakespearian audience but would be completely opaque to contemporary theatre goers. What this meant was that if you had to look a line or a word up in the notes to get the gag then it was cut. So it was that after a few sessions we had the projected running time down to under two hours and felt we able to get on with the songs.

In keeping with the spirit of the production the songs had a Rock 'n' Roll feel to them, although in the final event they also owed a debt to "The Rocky Horror Show" style of writing. In the end there were four original numbers and three settings of the Bards lyrics including Feste's closing number "The Rain It Raineth Ev'ry Day" set to a Bo Diddley beat. By Christmas all the songs were written and we were ready to start casting and rehearsing.

There were two main problems with casting the show; the first was that the play calls for quite a large number of actors if each part is cast individually, and the second was that there are more male than female roles, whilst there were more females than males looking to be cast. In the end we combined some parts, cut one entirely and added a chorus of ladies in waiting as well as cross-casting a number of characters. We saw no reason not to have the same actor playing the Captain, Priest and Servant, nor why they had to be male roles, so Nicki Turner got those three. Valentine we also cast as a woman, (Jo Pye), as well as combining the part with that of Curio cutting this character entirely. Fabian we left as a male role played by a woman, Sarah Montagu, and ultimately Sebastian was played by Jill Ashford at very short notice after our initial choice dropped out. This last piece of casting was some distance from being ideal, but it was an emergency situation and Jill saved our arses and turned in an excellent performance.

The rehearsal process was relatively straight forward but while it was going on we had another potential problem to deal with namely that of the venue where were we going to stage the show? The first choice would have been the Norwich Arts Centre but that was closed for refurbishment so we had to find somewhere else. Our natural inclination was to put it on in a venue not usually associated with theatre; a community centre or some such place. This would have had the benefit of being cheaper than a theatrical venue but more importantly it would be free of the stigma associated with theatres.

As it turned out this wasn't practical because there were no suitable venues in the city centre and there was the added complication of having to hire an entire lighting rig and the expense this would entail. The closest we came was an idea to put the show on in the old Noverre cinema which would have been great, but for some reason which I frankly can't remember this also turned out to be a non-starter. We considered the Norwich Playhouse but that was prohibitively expensive, and in the end we used the Norwich Puppet Theatre which was also a bit pricey but nowhere near as ridiculous as the Playhouse.

So that's how we ended up in the Puppet theatre, and leaves us with the question "What was the show actually like?" well...

The play opened with a kind of overture which led directly into the song "Let Love Wear Motley" sung by the ladies in waiting and Maria in their bobbysox costumes aided by the servant. This lead directly into Orsino's "if music be the food of love" speech. The intention was to make the show open with a bang and it certainly did that. Speaking entirely for myself, I thought the beginning was one of the strongest parts of the show. From this point on the whole worked tolerably well, with one major fly in the ointment. Russell and I had decided to place the action in two main locations, Orsino's Cafe and Olivia's place, with a third neutral area for those bits of the play that take place outside these two locations. This involved a number of scene changes in the first half of the play in particular, which would have been alright had the set not consisted of two vast sections of chipboard that took six people nearly a minute to move, and this was after extensive rehearsal! Unfortunately this mistake on our part meant that every time the scenes changed, the pace of the show was significantly de-railed. Having said this, it's a tribute to the cast that they attacked the play with such energy and vigour that they overcame this problem every time.

There were many highlights in the show; Bert's portrayal of Orsino as an almost idiotic self-obsessed man with the attention span of a butterfly was enormously effective and Russell's Feste-cum-Frank Sinatra-cum-Muddy Waters worked well in presenting the character as a partially alienated observer of the action, always ready with a nicely turned witticism or cutting remark. Trevor, Patrick, Sarah and Ruth made an excellent job of presenting Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Fabian and Maria as the not-so-loveable clowns of the show, achieving just the right mixture of tom-foolery and spitefulness in their dealings with the other characters. Particularly worthy of note was Patrick's bizarre attempt at break-dancing in the song "Show The Lady You Can Dance" made even more strange for being executed in a leopard skin Teddy-boy costume. Elliot used all his comic skill and frankly singular appearance to portray Malvolio as a pompous fool, his funniest moment being in the final scene when, having at last been released from his imprisonment in a vast refrigerator bursts onto the stage exploding with rage.

The two really outstanding performances came from Sharon and Lucy as Olivia and Viola respectively. Both women brought a level of commitment to their parts which made their performances in the show electrifying and exciting to watch, capturing as they did the very real sexual tension between the two characters.

The cast, the crew, the band and indeed everyone involved really gave their all with this production and the end result, in terms of performance and audience reception was a successful show. Were we to do it all again we would certainly rethink the set and perhaps put a couple more songs in the second half, but whatever minor reservations we might have, they are entirely concerned with decisions we made as directors and do not reflect on everyone else involved.

Orsino - Bert Eke
Sebastian - Jill Ashford
Antonio - Chris Phillips
Captain/Priest - Nicky Turner
Valentine - Jo Pye
Sir Toby Belch - Trevor Key
Sir Andrew Aguecheek - Patrick Cutter
Malvolio - Elliot Stewart
Fabian - Sarah Montagu
Feste - Russell J. Turner
Olivia - Sharon Fickling
Viola - Lucy Beaumont
Maria - Ruth Walters
Officer - Jonathan Falgate
Attendant to Orsino - Tom Key
Attendants to Olivia - Tamsin Young & Jane McCluskey

Producers - Nicky Turner & Nicky Falgate
Directors - Timothy Lane & Russell J. Turner
Lighting - Julie Curl & Panda
Sound - Chris Bond
Costume - Amanda Trendell
Publicity - Saff Edye & Tom Carver
Make up - Sallyann Spinks
Set Design - Bridget O¹Brien
Set Construction - Qarky, Bridget, Jo, Rupert, Jerry & Neil
Stage Manager - Jo Barnard
ASM - Nicky Turner
Front of House - Dave Guttridge
Photography - Bert Eke
Video - Mike Askew
Poster - Jo & Saff Edye
Music & Lyrics - Timothy Lane & Russell J. Turner with additional material by W. Shakespeare

Drums - Tim Dew
Saxophone - Jo Worley
Bass Guitar - Tom Crowe
Keyboard - Chris Hollingworth
Lead Guitar - Timothy Lane

Steve & Allyson at the Belle Vue Public House
Michael Rickhess, Arcadian Antiques, Reepham
Peter Beales Roses
Wildlife Art Agency, Muspole St. Norwich
Patso's Pizzas, Market St. Wymondham - 01953 604619
Cinema City
Jill Ashford
Simon Hannant at Crown Building Services, Old Costessey
Hussey Knights

Jo Clarke, Russell Biggs, David Biggs, Margaret & Ken Turner, John Barnard, Val & Denny Snelling, Boats & Bits, Viva, Ace Leathers, Roy Blower, Peter, Darren & Molly at the Puppet Theatre, Linda & Robert at Hussey Knights, Magpie Printers, Pierre Smirnoff & Brian Clough for his tactical awareness and, of course, W.S.

THE SONG LYRICS

WHAT A FOOL I AM: olivia's song

I never believed in love at first sight
but now that it's happened I know it must be right
it seems to me that finally I've come to understand
What a fool I am.

I have sworn that love is not for me
but oh how fragile foolish promises can be
it only took a single look and now I understand
What a fool I am.

I've always stood on the outside,
I've always been looking down
on all those crazy fools, playing by the rules
but it seems it's me who is the clown.

Fate show thy force, ourselves we do not owe
what is decreed must be, and be this so
right before my eyes love's sweet surprise
has made me understand
What a fool I am.

LET LOVE WEAR MOTLEY TONIGHT.

Do you think that love is the answer,
or do you think it can be vicious and cruel?
Are you a real hot rockin' romancer,
or are you being played for a fool?
Do you wish that your life could be a bedroom farce
but you can't pull it off with a heart made of glass?
When passion is the fashion
and the fashion ain't right
let love wear motley tonight.

Let love wear motley
let love wear motley
let love wear motley
let your blood pump hotly
let love wear motley tonight.

SHOW THE LADY YOU CAN DANCE

you tell me that you can really jive
and when you twist and shout the dance floor comes alive
and you're a hot-rockin' lover when you hear those rhythm & blues
well a man who knows how to shake his hips
is a man with the babes at his fingertips
if the thing you're after is some love and romance
show the lady you can dance.

It's a well known fact that I can cut a rug
and all the ladies swoon when I jitterbug
i'm a dancehall demon and I know how to strut my stuff
the men turn green and the girls all quake
when I get on down with my hippy-hippy shake
there's no doubt about it ican shake my pants
i'll show the lady I can dance

i've never seen nobody who can dance like that
it's a criminal offense to keep it under you're hat
do you think that I should do it more
you bet your bloody life
and before you can say boogaloo
you'll have yourself a wife

if you've got it you should flaunt it thats the bottom line
and if you follow this advice you'll be doing just fine
who could fail to fall in love with a man who can dance like you
I think you may be right tho' one doesn't like to boast
but when it comes to getting down hot daddy i'm the most
now you know how to get yourself some love and romance
show the lady you can dance

IT'S A FUNNY OLD WORLD

SEBASTIAN: It's a funny old world, there's always somethig new
won'tcha tell me what on earth can a poor boy do?
When a strange girl tels ya that she's in love with you.

OLIVIA: It's a funny old world, only yesterday
I told him that I love him but he turned me away
but now I know that this boy's here to stay.

SEBASTIAN: Is this love or is this madness
OLIVIA: I cannot contain my gladness
BOTH: now that fate's brought us together
darling I'll be yours forever.

It's a funny old world you must agree
how things can change so suddenly
now I love you and you're in love with me.

SEBASTIAN: Is this real life we're living?
OLIVIA: Is this real love you're giving?
BOTH: this is love and life and laughter
and we'll be happy ever after.

BOTH: It's afunny old world you must agree
and things can change so suddenly
now I love you and you're in love with me.

When we first started the group, one of our guiding concepts was that we should make our resources available to anyone with the desire to produce a show.
We had got to know Joanathan Thorpe during 'Boudicca', when he did a movement workshop for us (he is an ex dancer and choreographer).
Jonathan approached us at the begining of '98 with an idea for a summer show - Kleist's classic drama The Prince of Homburg. Although it did not look like a great outdoor show, he was keen, and we did not stand in his way.
Over the weeks of rehearsals, many problems cropped up - actors dropping out being the main one. But, eventually, the production made it to the parks and gardens of Norwich, where, despite some apalling weather, it was reasonably well received.
Jonathan wrote:

The Prince of Homburg was Kleist's last completed play, and is generally considered his masterpiece. Never performed in his lifetime (he died by his own hand in 1811) it nonetheless exists as a high point in contemporary repertoire of German classical romantic drama, alongside the works of Goethe and Schiller. It speaks to us today, as perhaps Kleist would have wished, with a clarity and precision which partly illuminates Germany's more recent tragic history. It also mirrors our contemporary concerns, our efforts to bring about peace in ourselves and in our surroundings.

The Electress: Dawn May
Princess Natalie: Lucy Beaumont
Field Marshall Doerfling: Jill Ashford
Prince Friedrich of Homburg: Russell L. Turner
Colonel Kottwitz: Bill Price
Colonel Truchs-Hennings: Nick Amies
Count Hohenzollern: Martin X
Baron Golz: Declan Pattison
Count George von Stranz-Sparren: Saff Edye
Cadet: Michael Falgate
Gaoler/Farmer: Oliver Howlett
Farmers wife: Brigitte Schneider
Court Ladies: Nicki Falgate & Brigitte Schneider

And the crew:

Stage Manager: Nicki Falgate
Sound: Joseph Sanger & Chris Bond
Costumes: Nicki Falgate
Director: Jonathan V. Thorpe
Producer: Pat Barr
Press & Publicity: Tom Carver
Poster & Programme: Dave Popkin

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

Crude Apache's Yuletide Log II - The Floater

Once again we celebrated the coming of the festive season with a star studded evening of music and comedy.

With:

The premier of our now legendary Xmas pub show
The Massed Guitars of Crude Apache
Norway's own 'nil point' Kammy with her new Xmas single
The infamous Doomweasel
Many other acts both musical and comedical.

A most excellent night's booze up, with a great casino, and a showing of the trailer for "Revenge of the Supermarket Trolleys".
A fine Xmas party.

1998's Xmas pub show was based on 'West Side Story' (well, nearly) and featured some genuinely apalling jokes.
With:

Saff Edye
Amanda Leeds
Tim Armishaw
Russell J. Turner
Jill Ashford
Trevor Key
Elliot Stewart
Nicky Turner
Lucy Beaumont
Chris Phillips
Tim Dew

The Common Lot - 1549 - the Story of Ketts Rebellion

Has it's own site