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The Review - FEATURE
 


Golden girls: Mum, daughter and grandmother, Lucy, Joyce and Lorraine


The Tower Theatre’s productin of Anne Frank

Generations join for a theatrical triumph

An amateur dramatic company has overcome all the odds to produce a winning peformance of The Diary of Anne Frank, writes Tom Foot

THE Tower Theatre Company, which was left in severe difficulties after losing its Islington home of more than 50 years, has triumphed again and is currently bringing together three generations of one family for its latest production.
The company’s troubles began after a legal wrangle over the lease forced it from its spiritual home, a 156-seat playhouse, in Canonbury Place in 2001.
It had been there since 1932, when the company was founded, taking it’s name from the nearby Canonbury Tower.
Now three generations of a family have united to help restore the 300-strong am-dram company – which kick-started the careers of household names such as Tom Courtenay, Sian Phillips, John Saunders and Michael Gambon – to former glories in The Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street.
Sprightly grandmother Joyce Terry, 74, who claims to have tried her hand at “everything in show business,” believes Tower Theatre productions outshine most West End shows and now promotes their events.
Her daughter, Lorraine Terry, 51, has collected theatre programmes dating back to her first theatrical experience – Noddy in Toyland – aged two.
After overcoming a host of fears and phobias, she offered life-coaching and goal-setting pep talks to passengers on Caribbean cruises.
Now transferred her new-found confidence to the stage as the Tower Theatre’s stage manager.
Her daughter, Lucy Danser, 18, born and raised in Belsize Park and now living in Kilburn, enjoyed her first taste of theatre as Mary in a nativity play at the Octagon Primary School in Belsize Park, aged five, and is playing the lead in the Tower’s latest production of Anne Frank.
Joyce Terry was the first woman to perform for troops in Berlin when Allied forces captured the German capital in 1944 as part of the Ivy Benson All Girls Band.
She has also played alongside Barbara Streisland and was a good friend of comedian Bob Monkhouse. Joyce, who has lived in Belsize Avenue for 26 years, said the Tower Theatre Company suffered after losing its home.
She says: “It’s such a shame because the productions are such a high standard. I think people associated the building with the company. Now they think the company has gone too.”
But the company, made up of “a large group of friends” is by no means gone. Last year, they staged 18 full-scale productions – using venues such as Highgate’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse and Theatro Technis in Somers Town.
Last year they performed at the windswept Minack Cliffside Theatre in Cornwall and this year they take Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Paris.
Lorraine was quickly brought on board after helping out with the last Tower production.
She says: “I helped out as stage manager for their production of Vincent in Brixton. I was absolutely hooked. They told me I was a natural. I don’t think I could have done anything like this before.”
Lorraine believes the theatre company helped her daughter become an actress.
She says: “It all started when three of us went to see a production of Mac and Mable at the Tower in 2000. It was absolutely brilliant. Afterwards we asked if Lucy could get involved through the youth theatre project. We got a call and Lucy was offered a part as an extra in the Wizard of Oz. Now she’s playing a lead role.”
Lucy, who is set to study Drama at Canterbury University in September, says she is looking forward to the challenge.
“I played the irritating sister in Vincent in Brixton and had parts in Jane Eyre and Queen Victoria,” she says. “I always seem to play the young girl who cries or dies or who was an orphan.”
But judging by her grandmother’s experience, it was the audience who were crying after the show opened last Thursday.
Joyce says: “The beginning is quite uplifting, but the end is very serious. The audience left in floods of tears.”
The story of Anne Frank will be familiar to many. Anne’s diary records her time in hiding from Nazi occupation from 1942 to 1945. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and those living with them were deported to Nazi concentration camps. In March of 1945, nine months after she was arrested and only a few days before liberation, Anne died of typhoid. She was just 15 years old. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hacker wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning script for the stage in 1956. All the characters are based on real people with much of the dialogue taken straight from the original diary.

The Tower Theatre’s Anne Frank runs until February 5, at the Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane (off Fleet Street) EC4. 020 7226 3633. See Theatre, page 10.
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