The Unsung Mentors: Part 2

 

 

An extraordinary little memory-bearing time-capsule from a black and white past. This from my friend Gaynor Miles Clark, a snapshot of a group of tutors and alumni of Monmouthshire Young People’s Theatre, dating, from the 1960s.

Mollie Wanklyn sits sideways on the bench, her body turned to the camera. It’s so like her to have intuitively balanced herself in the composition to the three tutors to her immediate left. She was a woman of graceful angles held in opposition, legs always immaculately crossed and sloped, insteps arched. (Her body language was similar to that of the actor Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s film of ‘The Birds’, all gleaming hose and pencil-line skirts in artfully arranged repose.) Mollie was the chief tutor and director with the company. Her influence on me was, though lightly scattered, nevertheless deeply sown. Her voice was rich and nuanced. She smoked cigarettes with elan and was always dressed beautifully, though subtly.

Centre is Marcia Griffin, who taught dance and who we all called affectionately, ‘Bunny’. While Mollie was somewhat daunting because she was such a presence, Bunny was a bottle of pop, and her enthusiasms and skills were myriad, coupled to enormous warmth and empathy.

Patricia Flowers, at the right, was I think the youngest tutor during my time, and she became a friend who I saw socially. Much later in life I tried to contact her. But though I was able to send a letter to an address I was given, I never heard back. There were half-lost memories of my time at MYPT that I thought she might help me recollect. Perhaps she didn’t receive my letter, or it was from a past she’d set aside and didn’t want to return to. Either way I was sorry. I was as fickle as any fourteen year old at the time we’d known each other, and I probably dropped out of her life as my own became more exciting. No reason at all why, therefore, she should have picked up the threads when I returned as an adult, full of questions.

Julia Hibbard’s head can be seen between Marcia’s and Pat’s. She was the niece of my ballet teacher, Myra Silcox. I think that her teaching came after my time at MYPT, as I don’t recall being in her classes.

Of the men I recognise only Robert Page on the right. He was among the generation of older students who went on to teach with MYPT. I knew him from the beginning, when we’d both been in a production of Henry V with the company. He was a magnificent, hearty youth, forever laughing and with a ripened actor’s delivery way beyond his years, all wrapped in the marvellously musical inflections of the south Wales coal fields. He was kind to me, joshing and ribald and tender, when I was as frozen and frightened as a kitten on a motorway!

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The Unsung Mentors

Encouraged by writer, Giovanna Congdon, who asked me respond to a fairly detailed Q & A about my life at her blog, I’ve been casting my mind back. The full version will be hers to post, but here’s a taster. This about experiences not previously shared, so all credit to Giovanna for prompting me.

Giovanna:

‘Is there a mentor in your past? I am thinking of historical characters that inspire, as well as feet on the ground…’

Clive:

‘Mentors. There have been many and various throughout my life. I’ll confine myself here to those who, on reflection, had the most impact in the early days, though at the time I was too young to understand or value the extent of their kindnesses.

Mel Thomas and Mollie Wanklyn at Monmouthshire Young People’s Theatre. Mel was the Drama Officer for the county, and he took me to MYPT when my parents confided to him that they were worried about me. Mollie was the main tutor and director, and she enthralled me with her ‘actress’s’ voice and her inspiring classes in choral verse speaking, which hit me like revelatory lightning. Myra Silcox, my fearsomely waspish but encouraging ballet teacher, and ‘Bunny’ (Marcia) Griffiths, who cast and choreographed me in the MYPT production of Peter and the Wolf, and showed me how shyness could vanish when I inhabited another character.

Mollie Wanklyn with me and Linda Henderson, backstage during a performance of Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird

Later, in London at vocational school, my headmistress, Miss Brierly, once paid out of her own pocket for a small group of pupils to attend a performance with Gemma Jones as Shaw’s Saint Joan. We sat in a box and it was another revelatory moment. I’ve watched Gemma Jones on stage and in films all my life, most recently in the film God’s Own Country. Boy and man I’ve loved her work, all unknown to her. She is everything I most admire in an actor. Her eyes can tell you all you need to know about her character, her life, her dreams, her joy, her despair. Joan Brierly opened the door to all that for me, with the gift of a ticket to a play in which a gifted actor gave a luminous performance that became a gold standard for me as I felt my way toward a career as a director. In my teens, after I’d left the school, a letter came in which she enquired what the results of my O levels had been. She wrote, joshingly, “You children can be so ungrateful You never think we’d like to know!” And I lived up to that summation, because I didn’t reply. Awkward and unformed as I was, her words then didn’t strike me with the force they do today. Now, I wish, I wish….. but of course it’s too late.’

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