THE history and achievements of the Chungkai Theatre is one of the most creditable things in our Prisoner-of-Warship, some of the shows being put on with extraordinary skill in producing, acting and décor. Every week practically the whole camp turned out to see the performance and within a couple of months the standard we found in Chungkai when we arrived was enormously improved.
On our arrival in the camp the whole scene was dominated by ‘Fizzer’ Plumbton. ‘Fizzer’ was an amateur actor and comedian of great ability, and seemed equally at home acting a straight part in a play, a genial ass in a musical comedy, or on occasion he would get down to what he and his lyric writer called ‘the real, red-nose stuff’. Second to Fizzer was Eddie Evans, who had been running all the entertainment for the hospital. Eddie was an O.R. and his forte was the collection and compèring of Variety Shows. He was the prime spotter of variety talent in camp and had great gifts as a compère of the old Music Hall type. Lastly, the Dutch had a company of their own, which put on an entirely Dutch show once in six weeks.
Into the middle of this set up strode our producer and professional Leo Frick. I could never understand why Leo asked me to be his A.S.M. for we instinctively disliked one another and ended up by having a row and parting for good. But in spite of any personal likes or dislikes, everybody had to hand it to Leo because he put on the highest standard of steady entertainment seen in any camp in Thailand, and kept it up in Chungkai alone for a year; and he worked himself untiringly and unceasingly, expecting everyone else to do the same. His friends said that he was a genuine artist, a great asset to the camp, and his temperament, unavoidable; his enemies called him an egotistical fellow of little depth; and the Theatre attitude was to ignore his temperament and let him get on with producing.
The entertainment of the camp was in the hands of a Theatre Committee of about ten people. The figurehead chairman was a Lt Col; the Stage Manager was Alec Day, the justest and most balanced member of the body, who survived all rows and intrigues; and he was helped by Peter North, who made all the Stage Props out of bamboo and matting. Hand Props, Publicity and the Box Office were under Reggie Fitch, the lighting was in the capable hands of Stevie, of ‘Shokos’ Folly’ and the wardrobe was the charge of a jovial Humpty Dumpty of a man – very efficient – Gerald le Fevre. There was also, of course, Eddie Evans and then a Hospital Welfare Officer and a Dutch representative. All these people worked in their offices, wardrobe or on the stage itself, and formed a sort of permanent staff.
For rehearsal purposes we had a quiet place known as the ‘Bamboo Theatre’, a clearing in a bamboo thicket near the camp boundary. As a matter of interest, the dimensions of the stage were about 24 feet front, 18 feet back, 18 feet sides and the height of the Proscenium Arch about eight feet six inches. The stage could be either boxed or winged as the wings were made only of bamboo and matting and were reversible on adjustable bamboo hinges. The lighting came from two, three or more paraffin lamps, borrowed from the Nips or from Major King, the latter being again Chungkai Q.M. The whole exterior, roof and walls, were atap thatched, and from the front looked rather a pleasant, sloping-roofed building. The curtains were made from old green mosquito nets and had to be hidden whenever a high ranking Nip inspected the camp.
The first show I saw from behind the scenes (as ‘Prompt’ alone), was a production of three short plays, all acted and produced by various members of Fizzer’s little company of about ten men. They were The Boy Comes Home, The Playgoers and The Dear Departed. It was these three plays that showed that a remarkably high standard of acting had already been attained, and the leading lady, Bobby Dale, looked as bed-worthy as many of his opposite sex.
But Chungkai was to be woken up in a few weeks by the announcement of the first Leo Frick Production! This was a Musical Comedy entitled Shooting Stars, with a cast of thirty and a Band Presentation on the stage. Written and produced by the Maestro himself, posters all over the camp proclaimed that it would be the hit of the season. Chungkai was interested!
Most rehearsals are about the same, so we’ll just look in at one in the Bamboo Theatre called for 10 o’clock one morning. Seated on a stool marked ‘Leo Frick’ is the great producer, wearing a pair of clompers, sunglasses, a pink Jap-Happy and a knitted dark blue skullcap. Seated at his side, on a smaller and anonymous stool is the A.S.M. Hung up on a bamboo thorn is the Call Board, showing all the ‘calls’ the various actors are due to make that and the following day. This rehearsal is for 10 o’clock, followed by two others. At five minutes to ten, Leo starts fidgeting and walking up and down, saying nothing for a few minutes and then suddenly he calls me over. ‘John,’ he says, ‘do go and see if you can find Bobby, will you? And then there’s Bill and René not here, either. We can never start until the whole cast is here – will you look in the cookhouse and see if you can drag them out?’ ‘O.K., Leo!’ The first week I walked many miles ‘calling’ people who were so sorry they hadn’t seen the Call Board, but in the end we made it their responsibility to go and look at the board daily.
When all the cast are present who look like turning up that day, we start, and begin with the opening scene – a queue of theatregoers in London being entertained by buskers while it waits for the ‘stars’ at the stage door, hoping to collect autographs. When these long-awaited people at last appear, they are kidnapped, complete with the band, in a stolen bus and taken on board a gangster’s yacht. Leo has to be very patient, and lines and actions are repeated over and over again; the producer demonstrating what he wants and trying to interpret, for those who are reading their lines un-understandingly, what the words are meant to mean. After about an hour everyone has had enough; the A.S.M. has followed the script all the while and noted down various instructions – for it seems the A.S.M. holds the baby as well as the book!
The American gangster scene on the yacht is then rehearsed, Leo himself being the arch-gangster who in the end, after broadcasting the band kept for ransom from the deck of his yacht, reveals himself as a super G-man, arrests crooks left and right and marries the seductive crooneuse of the band!
For three weeks we have anything up to four rehearsals a day and everyone is driven hard by the quality producer, and it’s obvious that if the show is a success it’s purely due to Leo’s terrific personal efforts.
Then comes the first night. ‘The Curtain goes up at 8.30 – call the cast for seven p.m., please, Mr A.S.M.’ At seven p.m., more or less punctually, the cast begins to assemble back stage. I have malaria again, with a high temperature, but the heat should sweat the fever out as we go along. Leo is a little anxious about me – I fear only because no one else is quite sure how to set the different scenes and distribute the hand props. The actors are first of all made up by the ex-Hollywood make-up man, and they then cross over to Wardrobe for their clothes. The Wardrobe has two sorts of clothes – borrowed and home-made. Each week Gerald collects all the available clothing we need to borrow in the camp, has it washed in the river over the weekend and returned to the owners the following Monday. He has a ledger and knows just where he can lay his hands on the owner of a pair of flannels, a blue scarf, a white shirt or any of the other amazing bits of kit some of the cunning people still own who’ve not gone up country or lost their kit. And then, secondly, the Wardrobe buys, dyes and makes up cloth of all sorts that it can buy, and the dresses turned out from old, used, white mosquito nets that have been dyed, are marvellous.
Bobby, the leading lady, has a wardrobe of his own, including scanties which he has made himself. You see him now made up and patting his hair, walking up and down in a pair of light blue silk panties, looking at himself in the mirror. In another corner, the Camp R.S.M., Sandy McCulloch, with a very beery complexion, is striving to get into a commissionaire’s uniform – a converted Dutch tunic! At eight o’clock, Leo sings out, ‘Call the Half, Mr A.S.M!’ I consult the pundits and then bellow, ‘Half an hour to go, please, gentlemen!’ ‘No, no! It’s not necessary to say “please gentlemen”. In theatre etiquette you merely say “Half an hour”!’ ‘O.K., half an hour!!’ Then there’s the Quarter, then ‘Beginners, Please!’ and the orchestra of about twenty instruments, led by the vast Norman Broad, its conductor, goes down to the orchestra pit. There, the wooden music stands are lit by tiny oil lamps, and among the instruments are about four Red Cross 7/6 violins and two that are privately owned, two clarinets, two accordeons, one good and one home-made guitar, three of four trumpets or cornets and a magnificent string-bass made from three-ply sugar-chest wood and cable wire – it can’t be bowed, of course, but it plucks well.
Although Alec Day is called Stage Manager, he is, in effect, the Theatre General Manager – Leo referred to him as the ‘chief carpenter’ – and the S.M.’s job of setting the stage is done solely by me, and from the moment the curtain went up, theoretically, I was in charge. So now, the stage is set. Leo inspects it and touches it up, passes it, and the overture starts.
As it deserved to be, Shooting Stars, in spite of its childish story, was not only a fine success, but quite the most ambitious attempt so far made on the Chungkai stage. True, the greatest applause came at the end of one scene when one of the lamps petered out and the curtain fell down when they attempted to draw it; and to this day, Leo doesn’t know that in the Board Directors scene, where they are meeting to consider the ransom note, I had left two life-belts from the previous yacht scene still hung up on the walls. But Shooting Stars made Leo’s reputation, and was only a beginning.
In this early period, the theatre went through a managerial crisis. The Lieut.-Colonel who presided on the committee resigned because his advice on a certain matter was not taken and the theatre was left under Alec’s chairmanship, and not a senior officer was on the committee at all. It was intended by Alec to ask the Q.M., Major King, who was very interested in the theatre, to take the Colonel’s place, but before he could do that, other people approached Bill King and suggested that a public meeting should be called in order to form a smaller and more professional committee, because the present committee was too youthful and inexperienced, and a small core of ‘business men’ would obviously be better. As, when the Colonel resigned, Alec had become the General Manager, I had been elected to the committee as Stage Manager, and of course Leo was a member too. So we all prepared for a highly irregular meeting that was called for May 1st, 1944, Major King in the chair.
It will be remembered that I have said that Major King, or Bill as he always was called, was the most powerful man in 2 Group and, as Chairman, he’d have been the greatest asset to us. He hated Nips like poison, yet he had an almost uncanny knack of getting things out of them, and he got for the camp things that nobody else in Thailand could have got. I’ve actually seen a Nip come into Bill’s Q.M. Office, where we were having a drop of Thai hooch with him, and Bill, so far from being embarrassed, persuaded the Nip to go back and fetch him another two bottles, escorting him to the door, pushing him on the shoulder, and sending him on his way with a very audible ‘F . . . off!’ Now Bill didn’t know that the committee had anyhow been going to ask him to become Chairman the next week, and at the present moment he felt that he had been ignored and slighted.
To cut a most amusing meeting short, the Chairman, who seemed to gravitate rather heavily towards his chair, and to speak a little indistinctly, said that he proposed a vote (from the Chair) of ‘No confidence’ in the existing committee. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he – somewhat irrelevantly and also inaccurately as it turned out, for at least a third of those present were Dutch – ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remember you’re British!’ But no one seconded the motion. Bill’s putter-uppers didn’t feel like coming into the open and there was silence. The Chairman left the chair, Alec took it over, and a vote of confidence was passed almost unanimously in the existing body amid amusing cross-talk and laughter. But in spite of this, Bill became our Chairman the following Sunday. I think Leo was disappointed not to have got a smaller committee, but he contented himself by trying to control the ten of us.
The committee used to meet every Sunday morning at the back of the stage to discuss the events of the past and coming weeks. Bill, in the chair, always knew what was coming, and thoroughly enjoyed his guiding and refereeing. Alec was cold commonsense, and Eddie invariably had ‘just one more little point, Mr. Chairman’. Leo always had some objective or other, and we’d wait patiently for the clouds to disperse until he eventually came to his point, and then the argument would commence. ‘Lights’ Steve would be there, his massive under-jaw stuck out and his bespectacled face ready to pronounce a strong opinion on any and every subject. They were lively mornings, generally. The financial situation used to take up most of the time and, as secretary, I had to take down the minutes of each meeting.
The highest peak reached in what one might call the first and best period of Chungkai entertainment was Leo’s Wonder Bar adaptation, to my mind the best all-round show ever put on. The old story was completely changed and re-hashed, and new music by Norman Broad was added to the old hits like Wonder Bar and My Friend, Elizabeth. This latter number was sung in French, German and English by three young things who ended in a dance routine of high-kicking that delighted the audience and, seeing those three ‘girls’ capering about on stage, it was odd to think that in normal times one was an R.A.S.C. private from London, one a regular officer and the other a baldheaded corporal in a Highland regiment: Johnny Duncan, who had come through cholera, malaria, dysentery, beri-beri and jaundice altogether up country!
The second act of Wonder Bar was a low comedy scene between a waiter, Woolley, and a charwoman, Freddie Mills, the latter later becoming the camp’s leading actor. But the last act was the best. The set was a most attractive scene laid in the Alps, and you looked through Wonder Bar itself to snow-capped mountains, beautifully painted on the back-cloth, and cleverly lit. The whole stage was a blaze of colours and the music, after five weeks rehearsal, was first-rate. Leo was called to the front of the stage to make a speech, and it was not for many months that he had the opportunity to try and excel Wonder Bar with his production of Bonnie Scotland.
Quite different, was the first Dutch show, Circus Cavaljos, produced by two Dutch O.R.s, one a well-known clown in the navy and the other the best dancer in the camp. The Dutch shows were often too much standardised, but this ‘Circus’ was not. Acrobats, pumas, penguins and clowns were mixed together with serious acts such as a legendary ‘Lotus Dance’. For this latter they had on the stage a giant model of a lotus, which slowly opened out to the sound of music, revealing the beautiful nymph of the lotus, a ravishing girl who then danced a most intricate routine with the devil for her partner. In a later show they did a skit on this dance, when Joop Bruyn, the clown, appeared out of the flower and did a drunken comedy dance.
But it is to complete amateurs that we must give the credit for the funniest show ever put on, and that was Thai-Diddle-Diddle, a highly topical thing that the censor must have slept through when he read the script, and which the Nips banned after the first night, threatening to stop all entertainment. It was produced by Dudley Brown, our battalion doctor, and Charles Skipper, the hospital welfare officer.
From the very beginning Dudley was told that a topical show was stale and wouldn’t go down, but he insisted and we had Thai-Diddle- Diddle. The two things that riled the Nips were the appearance of three comedians in a Wild West scene, clad only in Jap-Happies and singing an old song from Wun Lun days to the tune of You Take the High Road, which ended up with the last line of the chorus of each verse: ‘On the muddy, bloody banks of Kamburi!’ But the opening scene was the real trouble. It dealt with the return home from Thailand of Private Robinson. When he arrived home he found that his wife had had an American billeted on her and he was introduced to his youngest child, about one year old. But the whole point of this skit was that Private Robinson, after being a P.O.W., was quite unacclimatised to anything civilised, and spoke in the well-known pidgin- Japanese. When he wanted to ‘wash his hands’ he plucked some leaves from the aspidistra, stuffed them in his pocket and left the room. When he asked for a banana he used the Malay word ‘pisang’, and when his wife reluctantly passed him the fruit bowl, minus the fruit, the misunderstanding had to be explained. The constant use of the pidgin language sent the audience into such prolonged laughter as was never equalled again, and Dudley, dressed up as a Chinaman for his Front Cloth Act, was walking round the wings prodding the Committee members in the ribs and saying between the bursts of applause: ‘You see, you silly buggers – you see? Who was right eh? Who was right?’ There was no doubt about the answer, but the use of the Japanese words infuriated the Nips as much as it pleased the British, and the ban was imposed. Quite why they should have disliked us using such words as ‘Kurrah! Buggairo!’ or ‘Benjo speedo’, which were part of our vocabulary and theirs was never explained, but they are the most suspicious race on earth, and they thought they were being laughed at – so, ‘Pinish-Ga!’
After Thai-Diddle-Diddle the theatre was closed because the camp had one of its yearly floods and there was three feet of water on the stage and ten feet in the auditorium, where people were going to bathe. During that period Eddie stepped in again, week after week, and we had small musical shows near the P.T. centre, based on the famous ‘Swingtet’ and Eddie’s spotted talent. The Swingtet consisted of the double-bass, a guitar, trumpet, drums and accordion. The Dutch accordionist was the best any of us had ever heard, and he and the bass player made the Swingtet into a combination that would have been of a genuinely high peacetime standard.
It was then Leo’s turn to show what he could do in the way of a straight play. All the while he had been forming a select little company of his own, training them and bringing them on, and in Night Must Fall he showed how much he had achieved. It was so good that when the rain stopped the performance a second time, half a large audience stayed sitting out in pouring rain in the dark till the show had to be stopped because the stage itself was flooded! It is not necessary to tell the story of Night Must Fall, but just consider the types that had to be found among the actors. Dan, Emlyn Williams’ part, was played by an amateur actor from Wye College and played convincingly and well; the fantastic split personality of that sinister young man was, however, one of the more easy things to master, for there remained three long, difficult female roles to fill and Leo filled them. The nasty old pathetic woman in her wheelchair was superbly done by Freddie Mills, who before the war had been rather a good rugger player. The rather hysterical, morbid, queer young girl who fell in love with Dan, was incredibly played by Ginger. I remember standing in the wings a yard from Ginger while he was leaning against the door of the room after discovering the murder of Mrs Bramson by Dan in the Last Act, and to realise that the palpitating, nerve-wrecked girl in a green dress and glasses would be calmly taking our medical parade next morning, was very odd indeed! And the comic relief, the cook, was very well done by our bald-headed corporal who’d been a successful gay young thing in Wonder Bar. All the minor parts were competent enough, and after this one straight play that had surprised them completely, the whole camp was greedy for more.
Some time before, all the 4 Group personnel who had been sick in Chungkai had been evacuated down to their own Group in Tamuang. With them had gone Fizzer and most of his cast, but before they went we squeezed in a ‘Promenade Concert’. This was due to the work and amazing memory of Eric Hill, a teacher of music and considerable musician, who trained up our light orchestra of 20 people in less than a fortnight to a surprisingly high pitch. Whenever Eric rehearsed I made excuses to leave Leo’s rehearsals to attend to Hand Props, Wardrobe or something, and went and heard Eric’s rehearsals in what was curiously known as the ‘Slaughter House Rehearsal Theatre’, because in this clearing the butchers had formerly performed the gruesome task of killing the camps’ meat with a sledgehammer. At the end of his two weeks, and in spite of several depletions in his orchestra, a programme was put on containing a movement from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik four of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and other small items that, with the help of Gibby’s choir that sang an arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and a doctor who sang Where’er you Walk made up a programme of an hour and a half, and resulted in a demand for further ‘Proms’.
As the camp shrank in size due to Japan parties going away again in June and Sick Parties going down to a base hospital at Nakom Paton and 4 Group leaving us as well, the Nips decided to close down half the camp, and in the closed area lay our theatre. We were given a new but inferior site on the other side of the camp and over we had to go. The last show in the old intimate theatre was one for which I was responsible, in that I conceived and arranged the show, and took the responsibility for it with several producers.
It was an all-dancing show and, though it had been originally intended to centre round a big Javanese Dance, in the end that was the only feature that didn’t appear. However, in one evening was seen the Lambeth Walk, a Scat Dance, a Hornpipe, Scottish Dances, Dutch Clog Dances, Tyrolean Dances, Balinese Dancing and a twenty-three-minute classical ballet! It was much too ambitious, but the theatre staff was keen on it, and it went down very well. It was during this show that Leo and I parted company for good.
The Balinese scene was of a shrine or temple, with a light burning before the figure of God who sat in it, the whole stage being in dim lighting and with lianas and creepers hanging down from the flaps above. Stevie had by now fixed up all sorts of coloured spotlights and they were quite invaluable. The story of the dance was of a young priestess who, dedicating herself to the pure service of her God, was tempted by the Monkey Devils, who were in turn driven out by the God of the Sun. Lighted torches, beats on a special drum and the quite new type of dancing made another triumph for the Dutch producer, Filippe van de Broek.
But the ballet, produced by our old friend Johnny Duncan, was the piece de resistance. Johnny selected and fitted the music, and called it The Sleeping Beauty, and the cast consisted of Prince Charming, a Witch, the Sleeping Beauty, eight fauns and four dwarfs! But every Prince Charming we selected either went sick or up country, and in the end Filippe van de Broek took the part over at 36 hours notice. The standard of dancing achieved by the chief three was simply astounding. The Witch pirouetted to flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder and the Prince and the Beauty performed the intricate Sleeping Beauty Waltz perfectly together in the finale. The only people on the stage who didn’t enjoy it were the fauns. They, dressed in bits of fur and fluff here and there, were decidedly self conscious. The backcloth was a Walt Disney style of forest with red toadstools and a little bent house. Altogether, it wasn’t a bad finale to the old theatre.
There remained now only four or five months before the officers were to leave Chungkai and, as Nip restrictions on entertainment were steadily making things more difficult, the only really consistent thing of interest was a series of straight plays, once again excellently produced by Leo. He had got his company fixed, drilled and efficient, and he could now put a play on in two or three weeks. They performed Youth at the Helm, Major Barbara,Accent on Youth and Dr Clitterhouse. In each case not only was the level of acting – especially among the female impersonators – very good indeed, but the props people back stage were producing out of bamboo, old matting and mud paint, dummy radiograms that lit up when turned on by the actor and behind which a musician could play concealed; and they made a grand piano that looked like a grand piano and there was also a team of décor artists that could turn out good backcloths with paints made from mud, leaves, and various coloured bullock manures!
My association with the theatre, which had only been held on to so long because the officers were being forced to work once again, ended with the Christmas Show. This was a pantomime, once again by Carl Bucks, Cinderella, and on Christmas night it was a drunken, raging success with a cast that included all the traditional characters and others added for luck. On the actual Christmas night, Carl directed the entire show himself, for I was in bed with malaria. When I recovered, the theatre personnel had been cut down by the Nips, and without complaint – for six months at any job in P.O.W.-ship was generally enough – I joined the Officers Working Party once again, this time as a hut constructions coolie.