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Golden girls: Mum, daughter and
grandmother, Lucy, Joyce and Lorraine
The Tower Theatre’s productin
of Anne Frank
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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.
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