Each had his own distinguishing stamp – Buddy Holly was wholesome, Chuck Berry was funky, Jerry Lee Lewis was wild, Elvis was sexy, and Little Richard was exotic. If the Muppet Show had been around in the late 1950s, you would have doubted he was for real.

With his slender build, manic eyes and enormous head, topped by the black, shiny bouffant, he looked odd even before he opened his mouth. The sounds that he produced – in hit songs such as Good Golly Miss Molly, Tutti Frutti and Lucille – were unlike anything you’d ever heard, erupting with energy, rhythm and joy.

Behind closed doors, Richard weathered much inner conflict over his sexuality, his family background and his very serious concern that rock’n’roll was “the devil’s music”. He left the scene for a while to become an evangelist, but returned when he finally accepted not only that the devil had all the best tunes but also that he was the best man to sing them.

Having just turned 80, hence the tribute programme, Richard impressed and influenced a whole generation of younger performers, from the Beatles – Paul McCartney copied his falsetto “hollering” on I Want to Hold Your Hand and other tracks – to David Bowie, who adored Richard’s theatricality and unabashed use of make-up.

John Wilson’s interesting series Mastertapes featured Dr Feelgood’s 1975 debut album Down By the Jetty, as recalled by Wilko Johnson. It was Wilson’s second encounter with the band’s frontman in recent weeks, the first being mainly concerned with Johnson’s extraordinarily positive attitude to the news that he is dying of pancreatic cancer.

It seems horribly ironic that Johnson is emerging as a funny and distinctive broadcaster at this late stage in his career. “While I still feel fit I want to do as much as I can,” he told Wilson. “We’re all subject to mortality, but mine is sorted out. It makes me feel a bit special.”

Wilson’s Front Row colleague, the estimable Mark Lawson, interviewed Miranda Hart, recently voted writer of the year by Glamour magazine for her autobiography, Is It Just Me?. Lawson got her to admit that the book is a sort of literary version of the Miranda we know from the TV sitcom, rather than a truly honest reflection of who she is.

She said she would “like to put the record straight at some point, but not quite yet”, perhaps implying that it’s too early in her professional evolution for a warts-and-all memoir. When she does, I look forward to reading about her grandmother, the erstwhile playwright Margaret Luce, who had one of her works produced in the West End in 1946 before quitting the stage to bring up a family.

The Jewel in the Crown, celebrating the centenary of the Indian film industry – the most prolific producer of films in the world – reached its conclusion by reflecting how the industry has influenced mainstream cinema, with directors such as Baz Luhrmann and Damien O’Donnell acknowledging their debt to Bollywood in their films Moulin Rouge! and East is East.

The marriage of childlike innocence, teasing sensuality and random musical interludes isn’t to everyone’s taste, but there is no denying the universal popularity of the Bollywood formula. Most of us still like to believe good triumphs over evil and love conquers all.

Little Richard – A Whop Bop a Lua, a Whop Bam Boom, 6 Music, Thursday, June 6
Mastertapes – Wilko Johnson, R4, Monday, May 27
Front Row, R4, Thursday, June 6
The Jewel in the Crown, R2, Monday, June 10

Richard Smith, 52, trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic in the mid-1990s but found it virtually impossible to get acting work, partly, he believes, because he is 6ft tall. Now a successful performance poet appearing regularly on BBC Radio 4, Smith, whose acting name was Richard Fleming, has penned a poem about the large number of short actors in the industry.

Entitled The Lilliput Conspiracy, the tongue-in-cheek piece includes the cheeky lines: “Dustin Hoffman – short arse; Tim Roth – garden gnome; Tom Cruise – bouncing weather dwarf; Sylvester Stallone – surreptitious user of fruit boxes; James Dean – fond of Cuban heels.” Later, he jokes: “Knock knock – who’s there? Al Pacino. Al Pacino who? Al Pacino who cannae reach the doorbell.”

Richard Smith as his character Elvis McGonagall

Smith, a former world champion performance poet, who performs under the name of Elvis McGonagall, says: “My wife Helen [Braunholtz] is 5ft 11in, and she has also found it hard to get leading roles. Casting directors do not want the female lead to be taller than the man. Generally, actors on TV and in films have small bodies and big heads. It may be it works better for the camera. Certainly, if one cast member was a lot taller than the others it could look strange, unless the plot was about that.”

It is not strictly true that Hollywood uses no tall actors. James Cromwell, who starred in The Green Mile, is 6ft 7in, The Shawshank Redemption star Tim Robbins is 6ft 5in, while Jurassic Park’s Jeff Goldblum is 6ft 4in, as is Full Metal Jacket star Matthew Modine. However, much of the work for very tall male actors is in action movies, where a large man looks natural.

It is even harder for tall women. Drama graduate Sadie Hemmings, who is 6ft 2in, achieved a 2:1 BA (hons) degree in drama and theatre arts at Royal Holloway university in Surrey, but realised, while doing the course, that she was unlikely to get much acting work.

“At university and school, I always played men,” she says. “I was never given female parts. I was advised that it would be very difficult for me to get professional roles, though no one discouraged me from trying.”

Hemmings ended up specialising in theatre make-up, and now acts for enjoyment in the Brighton drop-in drama group Working Toward Performance. She believes casting directors do not like female leads to be looking down on men. “It is the social norm that the man should be taller than the woman,” she says.

And as Smith points out in his satiric poem, there are an extraordinary number of successful short actors. Danny DeVito is only 5ft, Dudley Moore was just 5ft 2in, Michael J Fox and Richard Dreyfuss are both 5ft 4in, Jack Black is 5ft 6in, and Tom Cruise, Robin Williams and Al Pacino are all 5ft 7in.

David Jason, one of British television’s biggest stars with lead roles in Only Fools and Horses, A Touch of Frost and The Darling Buds of May under his belt, is only 5ft 6in. The Office and Extras star Ricky Gervais is just 5ft 7.5in – although his co-writer and performer Stephen Merchant is exceptionally tall at 6ft 7in – and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe (see feature, page 24) is around 5ft 5in tall.

With so many short male leads, it is not surprising taller actresses struggle to get parts. However, a few have slipped through the net. Comedy performer Miranda Hart is 6ft 1in and works well onscreen with co-star Sarah Hadland, who is almost a foot shorter than her. The difference in height between the pair is effectively employed for comic effect.

Hollywood star Brigitte Nielsen is also 6ft 1in – and has even starred in a film entitled She’s Too Tall – as is Janet McTeer. Kill Bill star Uma Thurman is 6ft, as are Brooke Shields, Geena Davis and Saffron Burrows. Nicole Kidman and Sigourney Weaver are both 5ft 11in, while Tilda Swinton is just half an inch shorter.

However, Hemmings says being medium height – around 5ft 4in for a woman – provides the best chance of gaining professional roles. “The people from my school and university who have made it onto TV are around that height,” she says.

Author Tom Quinn, who has written about theatre in his bestseller London’s Strangest Tales, says: “Very tall actors tend to play character parts. For instance, the baddie Jaws in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker was played by Richard Kiel, who is 7ft 1.5in – a height he grew to thanks to a hormonal condition called acromegaly.”

Sometimes height is useful in films to establish the difference between characters. In The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey, very tall doubles were used to stand in for Ian McKellen as Gandalf to produce the desired contrast between the wizard character and the diminutive hobbits.

In the comedy TV show The Inbetweeners, Greg Davies, who is 6ft 8in, plays an authority figure, the teacher Mr Gilbert, to produce a stark contrast with his shorter, puerile students. Davies, who has also starred with Helen Baxendale in the BBC sitcom Cuckoo, shows that comedy can be the answer for the very tall actor. His height shows no sign of hampering his career, which goes from strength to strength.

Perhaps the reality is that celebrity status conquers all. If a very tall actor has one big success, others will follow. For instance, Stephen Fry, who is almost 6ft 5in, has had a glittering career in film and TV with starring drama and comedy roles.

“It is important to get a fast break when you start acting,” says Smith, who is now getting TV work as a performer on programmes including BBC1’s The One Show. “You need momentum on your side to keep the parts coming. I find it hard to talk about this subject without being ‘height-ist’. Perhaps a lot of short actors succeed because they are exceptionally determined. But any successful showbusiness career involves quite a lot of luck, which can help anyone, regardless of their height.”

“When I was approached about playing in the pit band for Les Miserables, someone told me: ‘Don’t worry about being stuck there – doubt it’ll take off, it’s just some little thing moving over from the Barbican. And the critics have slagged it off.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, it’s decent money, and after a couple of months I’ll be back doing ‘serious’ gigs again’. I was 23 when I started on Les Mis. I was 42 when I finished.”

David Laurence is a french horn player, who now divides his time professionally between teaching music and playing for orchestras and jazz groups. In the early 1980s, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and began to gain recognition after winning a prestigious french-horn prize.

After graduating, Laurence wasn’t keen on the idea of playing in a West End show. The same music night after night, and a lack of opportunity for individual expression, means working on a theatrical production isn’t always obviously attractive to professional musicians, particularly one who wants to play ‘serious’ music.

“I was into jazz and high-level classical stuff,” says Laurence. “I had been playing with Johnny Dankworth and the guys from the Loose Tubes big band. But, looking back, the West End was perfect – half-way between jazz and classical.”

He took the Les Mis gig and loved it: “I found myself in a world full of top session players all of a sudden.” Following the Musicians’ Union strike in 1986, West End producers increased their rates, and suddenly the pits were filling with men and women more used to the inside of recording studios.

But doing a show is no easy gig for musicians. “[Les Miserables’ composer Claude-Michel] Schonberg’s music, arranged by John Cameron, is tough,” says Laurence. “I had the instrument on my face for three hours straight every night. Suddenly, doing a Mozart gig felt like light relief.”

The repetition could also seem gruelling. “It was six nights a week and two matinees,” he says. “You just had to focus because the music was so tough. But, yes – and this might seem strange to Les Mis fans – there were times when you’d be bored. People who weren’t playing used to sit there and read Private Eye or Viz or something during their bars’ rest.”

There is a danger of losing touch with reality when in the bubble created by a long-running West End show, says Laurence: “You find yourself getting tetchy about silly things – if someone had moved your chair a bit, for example.”

For musicians on shows, the fear of losing one’s edge is ever-present. For this reason, it’s important for players to ‘dep out’ on certain nights to allow for relaxation or the possibility of doing other engagements, even short tours. Laurence’s mammoth stint on Les Mis was made easier by the band leader’s relaxed attitude towards the use of deputising players.

The calibre of dep musicians used in top West End shows means they don’t need to rehearse the music beforehand, unless the musical director insists on it. Instead, the dep comes in to the previous night’s performance and sits next to the musician in question, listening and observing.

Many deps are star performers with other orchestras or ensembles. The rest of the band listens intently to see how they will manage some of the more difficult passages in the music, Laurence explains.

“The trumpet solo in the battle scene is very difficult, with some really high notes,” he says. “Sometimes the deps found that tough – also the long oboe solo after the battle is a big ask. But it was amazing. One night you’d be sitting next to a star player from the London Symphony Orchestra, the next the principal oboist from the Berlin Philharmonic would be there. They all wanted to do Les Mis. When you came back though, everyone would wind you up by telling you how great your dep was.”

Do pit musicians mix well with the acting fraternity? Laurence recalls both cordial and frosty relations. “A lot of the time the two just don’t mix,” he says. “There can be some resentment if, for example, ensemble actors are having to turn up for day rehearsals and sound checks while the band members just slip into pit the moment the conductor raises the baton – especially if the musicians are on more money. But other times we’d mix really well. Michael Ball, Alun Armstrong and Caroline Quentin were friends to all the musos, and we used to write songs with Dave Willetts up in the dressing room.”

For trumpeter Andrew Crowley, who played in the band for Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Adelphi, London, the lack of contact with the cast was a “bit of a shame”. He says: “Opening and closing nights were the only times the musicians and cast really got to mix. Sometimes, though, during the show, one or two actors would catch your eye, smile or wink, which was fun.”

Crowley has been a session trumpet player for more than 20 years. Like Laurence, he graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in the early 1980s, having already excelled in youth orchestras. He has played with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Quincy Jones, most of the major orchestras in the UK and Europe, and performs with his own classical brass group, London Brass, all over the world. Crowley is also ubiquitous in film music recording, having played on the soundtracks to Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Skyfall, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Hobbit.

There can be some resentment if, for example, ensemble actors are having to turn up for day rehearsals and sound checks while the band members just slip into pit the moment the conductor raises the baton – especially if the musicians are on more money

In 2007, he felt the time was right to ply his trade in the West End on a more regular basis, having played in the band for Michael Grandage’s production of Evita. So, when that show closed at the Adelphi, he was already on-board for Joseph, the next production at the venue. “I knew the contractor and was also recommended by other musicians,” he says.

Unlike the french horn part in Les Mis, the trumpet score for Joseph is, he says, refreshingly straight-forward – important for trumpet players because keeping the ‘chops’ in good condition is as crucial to top session players as maintaining supreme levels of fitness is for an athlete. Crowley says: “It was not that challenging, which is good because you don’t want to be stretching yourself to the limit eight times a week.”

Like Laurence, finding top players willing to tackle Joseph on a dep basis was not difficult. “I got [legendary principal trumpeter] Maurice Murphy, who had just left the LSO, as my first dep. He loved it. In the end, I only did about half the nights.”

Sid Gauld, another trumpet player, was a regular dep on Privates on Parade, which recently finished its run at London’s Noel Coward Theatre. He has also been a regular on Miss Saigon, Hello, Dolly!, Kiss Me Kate, Wicked and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and has seen a lot of change in the West End pit scene.

“It’s now famous session guys – the standard has gone up and up,” says Gauld. “The producers want the shows to sound like recordings to the audience. You don’t get asked back if you miss a few notes here and there anymore.” Privates on Parade involves playing the Last Post solo at the end of the show – something to induce a few nerves in even the most experienced player. Gauld says: “You do get the horrors a bit.”

Like many pit-band instrument-alists, Crowley, Gauld and Laurence followed a well-trodden path to becoming professional musicians. But keyboard player and arranger Andrew Corcoran, who earlier this year finished a stint on Aladdin –   A Wish Come True at London’s O2, has more of a theatrical background. He performed with amdram groups in Manchester, and completed a music with theatre studies degree course at Huddersfield University.

Tom Carradine

But, as with acting, talent does not always take a logical path, and can delightfully surface without years of formal training. Corcoran’s assistant MD and keyboard player on Aladdin, Tom Carradine, for example, graduated from Imperial College London with a degree in biochemistry and management.

Incredible advances in recording, sampling and computing technology – plus, perhaps, the need to reduce costs – might lead producers and musical directors to use more backing tracks and cut down on the number of live musicians. When Les Mis transferred to the Queen’s Theatre, the orchestra was much reduced from the original 22-piece combo. But Corcoran says he has not seen evidence of pressure to reduce the live element in musical theatre.

The standard has gone up and up – producers want the shows to sound like recordings to the audience. You don’t get asked back if you miss a few notes here and there anymore

“In a weird way there’s more of a push back to bigger bands and live sounds at the moment,” he says. “Keyboard samples are largely used these days to augment the live instruments, without particularly being heard themselves, so two live violins plus keyboard violins sound like a full string section, the live players delivering the required phrasing and nuance that the keyboard can’t quite achieve.”

He says the quality of any backing tracks used is crucial: “The Phantom of the Opera number itself is a famous example of where half of what you’re hearing – drum kit, guitars, synth effects – is on a backing track with the pit orchestra chugging along underneath. And that show doesn’t seem to have done too badly, does it?”

There were moments when this year’s live final resembled a big budget Junior Showtime – younger readers might need to check this reference out on Google or ask a middle-aged/elderly adult – with the first three acts all having to take time off from homework to appear. And each was met with the same response from the judging panel – namely, that their tender years were an irrelevance, and it’s the talent that counts. Presumably in the same way that it didn’t matter that last year’s winner was a dog.

In fact it was the judging panel that proved irrelevant, given that they had absolutely no judging to do. Instead, they gushed platitudes and made outlandish predictions of pending superstar status for everybody who took to the stage. Apart from serving as a target for an egg-throwing self-publicist who invaded the stage during Richard and Adam’s act, the quartet was pretty much surplus to requirements.

Hungarian shadow mime troupe Attraction eventually won a convincing victory and will no doubt be snapped up by the British Council to promote UK culture abroad, possibly in Hungary. The ensemble’s performance was a shameless exercise in international butt-kissing, celebrating their host nation through sundry tableaux of Union Jack-themed jingoism.

The viewers lapped it up, as reflected in Attraction’s impressive 27% share of the popular vote. But it was far from their finest work, lacking the imagination and definition that had helped propel them through earlier rounds. Indeed, their attempt at recreating a map of the British Isles must have pained geographers the length and breadth of the land.

Scotland had shrivelled, Wales was emaciated and East Anglia had disappeared altogether. Unless, of course, it was a map of the British Isles circa 2050, after the effects of climate change on sea levels, in which case it was probably very accurate.

Attraction pushed stand-up comic and hot favourite Jack Carroll into second place, and he clearly wasn’t happy. The controversy surrounding BGT’s dependence on child performers drags on, but surely it can’t be right that a 14-year-old boy should have to cope with such an enormous disappointment under the full glare of TV cameras and 13 million viewers?

Carroll could have been forgiven for bursting into tears, but he held it together admirably. As had Richard and Adam when their turn was rudely interrupted, heroically embodying that great British ability to keep calm and carry on. Perhaps Attraction will recreate the moment in their Royal Variety performance.

Poirot, he likes to drop in the occasional French word or phrase, n’est pas? So when the first episode of the new series, Elephants Can Remember, sent him to Paris to interview a French witness, you’d think he would leap at the opportunity to converse in his mother tongue.

But non! In Agatha Christie’s world, French speakers in France speak English among themselves. And they maintain the cod accent.

Britain’s Got Talent, ITV, Saturday, June 8, 7.30pm
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, ITV, Sunday, June 9, 8pm

I was one of the many performers who contributed to the critically acclaimed Charm Offensive production of Pentecost (News, May 30, front page). From the start, I was proud to contribute to an extended life for this powerful David Edgar play – all the more when the show received positive reviews and Off-West End award nominations for best director and best ensemble.

From the very beginning, it was very clear that the production was to proceed on a ‘profit-share’ basis. I received and signed a contract to this effect. Essentially, we felt we were all shareholders in this venture. As far as I was aware, all the cast was engaged on this basis.

From conversations with other cast members, it was clear that the consensus of opinion was that, while even a small profit would have been desirable, because the production was ambitious in scale profit was by no means expected. Nor was it the prime motivation for taking part. This was not just the case for younger, inexperienced members of the cast, but also for more seasoned members – like myself – of whom some had been working in the industry for a decade, and in some cases multiple decades.

Given the scale, ambition and complexity of this production, it would be no surprise to experience tension on occasion. Also, given the size of the cast it would be unsurprising to see disagreements from time to time. What I have found surprising, and disappointing, is that they should have escalated to this extent.

The entire cast was aware of the issues involved and the action taken against Gavin McAlinden – we were all at the original Equity meeting. The majority chose not to be involved in the action.

That is not to say that the case has not raised some important issues. I am of the opinion that actors, Equity and the rest of the industry should always remain vigilant against the possibility of exploitation not just of actors, but of all workers in the sector.

Nonetheless, I feel there has to be a place for profit-share production in fringe theatre and independent film. It provides a platform for riskier themes, less popular plays, experimental devices and unknown talent to be promoted, examined and showcased independently.

I fear the loss of this important part of the industry feeding into the mainstream would result in a kind of commercial censorship, where we would all be culturally poorer. Any attempt made to take up the slack using public funding, whereupon a selection process is involved, essentially manifests government censorship, whether consciously or otherwise.

One should consider that productions of this nature actually represent an intrinsic expression of the free speech that we cherish in our culture. They afford audiences an opportunity to see shows other than those that have been selected as a safe investment by corporations or as a vote winner by the government. The audiences themselves decide whether they wish to invest in these productions by buying tickets or not.

This in mind, perhaps it is time for Equity to engage in talks with the industry to try to deliver a profit-share agreement template as standard practice. This could also apply to independent film. This would help clarify responsibilities for genuine fringe producers and mitigate any potential exploitation, thus ensuring this important part of a world-renowned industry and culture is preserved for the benefit of all.

Leo Fellann
email address supplied

‘Exploitation’ charges unfair

I accepted work on Pentecost knowing we probably wouldn’t be getting paid, especially with a cast of more than 20.

I do not agree with accusations that have been levelled at Gavin [McAlinden] of exploitation. I can only speak for myself and say I never felt that in any way, nor did I feel disrespected. And if I felt threatened or put off by anything, it was the member of Equity coming to threaten to close the show, and trying to get us to support the stand that our colleagues decided to take.

We had been told how we would be paid for our work, and we all knew what we were getting into. I applied and accepted the job because I wanted to be in that atmosphere, to have the experience and exposure and to connect.

Unfortunately, this all escalated into something huge when it shouldn’t have. No, it was not handled in the best way, but I wouldn’t even think to go so far as to use the word ‘exploitation’. I would have left if I had – that would have been my choice.

Name and address supplied

No way to treat paying customers

Is it really so ridiculous to expect a preview actually to take place? And, in turn, if a preview is cancelled three days before the event by the producers themselves, are we, the theatre-going public, really supposed to accept this, no matter how much money we will lose on things such as non-refundable hotels and train tickets? This is what appears to be the case from my experience regarding Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I bought three, top-price stalls tickets as a one-off, expensive family treat to celebrate our daughter’s seventh birthday. Our whole weekend was planned around the show and we saved hard for it, spending more than £500 on the theatre, hotel stay and train tickets alone. I’ve never booked a preview before, and never will again, but chose to do so on this occasion as it’s a special date and our daughter is a huge fan of the book and films.

Almost seven months after making the booking and three days before the first preview, I received an email from See Tickets advising that the first two previews had been cancelled “due to unforeseen problems in the delivery of a piece of stage engineering by a contractor”. I was offered an exchange for a future date or a refund, with the producers also offering a new preview, on a school night. Do they not remember this is a family show, and families are a core market?

Following this sudden cancellation, and very mindful of our financial losses in these austere times, I contacted the Corner Shop, which does PR for the show and which was quoted on the press release regarding the cancellation, which in turn passed me on to Playful Productions.

The outcome of three emails and numerous phone calls over two days has been a ‘take it or leave it’ offer from Playful Productions to move my £180 tickets to another London show at the weekend – so we still have a theatre treat for our daughter – and to pay the difference if the tickets were more expensive. We cannot afford a second trip to London for the foreseeable future so, if we were to accept this offer, there’s no prospect of seeing the show we’d set our hearts on.

My experience would seem to suggest the theatre industry views this situation from its perspective only. Apologising, in an email no less, for inconveniencing people who booked these first previews is inadequate as responses go. Being made to feel stupid for investing so much in attending a preview – as if I should have known that it might not take place – is a further insult. Don’t they remember that without paying customers there is no show in the first place, and without previews you would not have an opening night?

Sadly, this whole experience has put me off coming to London again to see a show – a view now shared by many of my friends. I see touring shows in Bristol and Cardiff regularly. Maybe I’m best off sticking with them.

Rochelle Gale
Email address supplied

The naked truth

I do not know which of your headlines (News, May 23, page 2) concerns me more – “Equity: Actors will be worse off under HMRC proposals” or “Nudity requests on the increase”.

Robert Breckman
Email address supplied

So says Sam Mendes, and he should know – last year he was responsible for directing Skyfall, the most successful Bond movie of all time that grossed more than £100m at the domestic UK box office alone, and over $1 billion globally. Yet now he’s at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in the middle of intensive daily rehearsals for a lavish new musical version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

As I enter the third floor dressing room backstage that doubles as his office at 9.30am on a Friday morning, the American composing team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and the British book writer David Greig are leaving, having just had another meeting with him.

“We’re constantly in meetings, working on details like needing to take 20 seconds out of a number here, or working out a proper curtain call,” says Mendes. “I’m literally here from 8.30am to midnight every day – it occupies every inch of my attention.”

Yet for the next 45 minutes, he gives me every inch of his attention, effortlessly exuding the concentration, confidence and honesty that has put him at the very top of his profession both as a stage and film director.  Now 47, he won the Oscar for best director for his first feature film, American Beauty, in 1999. He was running the Donmar Warehouse at the time, and had also directed regularly at the RSC and National Theatre, plus West End and Broadway revivals of Oliver! and Cabaret respectively.

Although his status as an international film director is now secure, he confides, too, that “theatre will always be my home”.

“That’s partly because I don’t think it is possible for anyone to feel that comfortable on a film set – by definition, they’re constantly in motion, moving and shifting, so you never put down roots,” he explains.

“Whereas in the theatre you have a base. And however long and difficult this process has been – and the hours are tough – it’s nothing like doing a Bond movie.

“For this show, I’ve either been at Jerwood Space or Drury Lane. That thing of being in motion all the time and never being able to get a rhythm in film is very difficult when you’re used to the dedicated rhythms of a theatre rehearsal room, so for me that’s my natural home. I’m happiest when I’m in one of two places – the rehearsal room for play or a musical, or the cutting room for a movie.”

So why are musicals so hard to do, not only with regards to technical matters? “There are so many primary creative voices who all have equal status,” says Mendes. “You’re not just dealing with one writer, you’re dealing with three in this case. Your designer [Mark Thompson for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] is in large part in control of the way the show moves. Whoever said musicals are about transitions is 90% correct – the way the thing moves and flows is entirely in the hands of the designer, and then of course the choreographer is the other primary creative voice.

“Peter Darling is more than a choreographer – he provides a language of movement. So there’s these five people and then you – that’s why musicals on the whole benefit from having a strong producorial voice as well. That’s why a Cameron [Mackintosh, who produced Oliver! that Mendes directed 20 years ago at the London Palladium] is often necessary for a show – it’s so vast. There’s no question that without the experiences of Oliver! and Gypsy, my two big other mainstream, large-scale productions, neither of which were especially happy for me, I would not have been able to do this show in the way that I’ve done it.”

During his Donmar tenure, he also collaborated with Mackintosh on another new musical The Fix, written by US writers Dana P Rowe and John Dempsey – that wasn’t a happy experience either. “But I learnt an enormous amount – you always learn from your failures, you don’t learn much from your successes,” he says. “I’ve definitely thought about all three of those shows and the mistakes I made on them in the process of doing this. And I know that in terms of process I’ve not made some of the mistakes I made on those shows here, and it’s been a much more enjoyable experience as a consequence.”

Of course, one of the biggest differences between Oliver! and Gypsy on the one hand and The Fix and now Charlie on the other, is that both of the former were already written and proven successes.

“It’s a wildly different process and yet in some ways it is even more difficult to do them, because people have two legendary productions of those shows in their minds already and to eradicate it or reformat it when they’ve already been done to perfection the first time around is a very difficult burden to bear the whole time. Whereas with this, no one really knows. There’s an excitement to creating something new. It’s stressful, of course, because big things can change and you are sometimes rewriting a number or restaging and rejigging things, but you don’t have that thing of someone out there knowing how it should go.”

Lionel Bart, composer of Oliver!, and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of Gypsy and had himself directed a number of productions, were both still alive and very much present when Mendes did those shows. “They had a very clear memory of a rhythm of a show when it is firing on all cylinders and open and fully successful,” says Mendes. “So to watch something take baby steps on its first preview and falter and fall and die is unbelievably frustrating for them, because they know how it can work.”

Mendes prefers, however, to “pull something apart completely, as I did with Cabaret, Company and Assassins”.

Douglas Hodge as Willy Wonka with Jack Costello as Charlie in a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Photo: Helen Maybanks

“And in the case of the first two, I got the book writers to rewrite certain scenes, once they understood that conceptually the framework for the whole thing was different,” he adds. “Someone dubbed them revisals, not revivals. Sondheim is astonishing at embracing new productions of his work of all sorts – he’s seen every Sweeney Todd under the sun, from John Doyle’s with actor-musicians to the Royal Opera House, but he has faith that the piece will survive, and it can have any number of different productions because the play will always be great. You enter a strange grey area when you do a new production of something like Gypsy, but you have to use the Jerome Robbins choreography. That’s where I should have said no, because then it’s not a new production – it’s a half-new production. And you will only be frustrated, because it is not in the framework of a Robbins production. So you have to risk losing everything in order to win big with something like Cabaret. If you don’t, and I learnt my lesson on Gypsy, what you get is a half-way house that pleases nobody.”

When Mendes’ production of Oliver! was restaged at Drury Lane in 2009, Mendes was otherwise engaged: “I was doing the Bridge Project at the time and Revolutionary Road, so I was completely in New York and only saw it once it opened.”

So Rupert Goold was asked to follow in his footsteps and restage it instead, which must have been an even harder task.

“I said to Cameron to use a proper director please, not an assistant or resident director, but I felt for Rupert – he was doing it with [choreographer] Matthew Bourne and [designer] Anthony Ward in the room with him. At least I didn’t have Jerry Robbins in the room. And all of them and Cameron had a sense of it firing on all cylinders at the Palladium, but here was a new cast, a new director, a new theatre, so it would have to take baby steps first and it takes a while to get up there.”

That’s echoed in the journey that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has undergone. And right now he says the show is finally coming together. “The show landed for the first time last night, and you could feel it. The audience leapt to their feet at the end. I said that at the end of the third week of previews we’d have a show, and we’re just approaching that now. We turned a corner last night.”

The previous day the spectacular glass elevator was finally put into the show, as well as another moment that he won’t divulge for fear of spoiling it, “but it was the loudest gasp I’ve ever heard an audience make”, he adds.

It’s a show that he has built from the ground up. In its current incarnation, it has been in gestation since 2009. “It goes back even further than that,” says Mendes. “When I was at university I tried to get the rights to do a version on the Edinburgh Fringe. And then I tried again at Chichester when I running the Minerva to do the first proper stage production, though there’d been a touring version of a play before with songs where the Oompa-Loompa’s were. Then I tried again when Trevor Nunn was running the National and I said, ‘I’d like to do it in the Olivier Theatre in the realm of The Wind in the Willows Christmas show’, but again we couldn’t get the rights. They were being held by Warner Brothers, who wanted to make another film version.”

That was duly done in 2005, when Tim Burton directed Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. “Then Warners surfaced with it. Just after we’d produced Shrek on Broadway with Dreamworks, we got a call from them to see if we were interested in partnering in producing it for the stage. Obviously Disney were trailblazers for studios going into the theatre, and Wicked has been a monster smash for Universal – now there’s a wholesale raid on the back catalogue. Some things happening right now are absolutely made to be musicals, like Bullets over Broadway and Groundhog Day and I can’t wait to see them. They’re great ideas for musicals – others aren’t such good ones.”

Why is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the former camp? “This has just always seemed to have the shape of a stage piece for me,” he says. “There’s the straight line of the narrative, the competition aspect of it with the really clear goal that he has to win a ticket, and then the introduction of this great iconic character Willy Wonka who takes it to another level, and the sense that this domestic story that suddenly becomes epic.”

Translating it to the stage, of course, involved finding and putting together a team to do so, and that began with the writers. “Warners let me put the whole thing together with Caro Newling, my producing partner of nearly 25 years. My brief was always to some degree to find a team capable of writing a classical musical – one that is more Rodgers and Hammerstein than Kander and Ebb. It’s not metatheatrical – Willy is not the emcee of the evening and there isn’t direct address to the audience. It’s a journey into a world – the curtain comes up on a boy in the freezing cold on a rubbish dump and you believe in that boy and that world. And it is up to us, the storytellers, to make you believe in it in all its 360 degrees. There are no direct contemporary references or ones to other shows that has become a kind of disease recently.”

That includes Shrek, that Mendes’ company Neal Street Productions co-produced (but he didn’t direct). “But that lived in a different universe – Shrek the Movie lived in a world of pop culture, so it was appropriate that the show did, too. Dahl is different – he exists in a kind of parallel universe, somewhere between 1930 and the current day.”

As Mendes scouted for writers, he met a number of teams before choosing Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who of course had a big Broadway smash with Hairspray but have also both worked in film: “I already knew them which helped, and they were just up for it. They have an amazing way of working – they work at incredible speed, and understand that if something isn’t right to adjust the brief and write a different song.”

What I loved about the Donmar is what I love about Neal Street – there are talented people constantly working through the building. That’s part of the joy of producing other people’s work – to see how they do it

Then, as book writer, he brought on David Greig, the Scottish playwright; “He’s the polar opposite of Scott and Marc as a personality. They’re marinated in musical theatre, whereas for David it is relatively new. I wanted somebody who could preserve the pure heart of the book and of Charlie himself and not deliver it as sentimental, and could fight for the simple values at the centre of the story without overstating them. It’s a very delicate job and a complex one. The book-writer has such a peculiar job – usually they have a huge structural requirement, but with a book like this, the structural layout is there already. You can’t move scenes because everything happens sequentially. If I were a playwright, I’d have climaxes in my head, but for a book-writer, all those big scenes are the songwriters’ stuff, and they have to write the other stuff – everything leading up to that moment and leading away from it. David has the perfect personality for a book-writer. He’s incredibly watchful and he listens, he has very strong opinions but doesn’t speak unless he has something to say, and he’s very calming and focused and gentle so he’s a great personality to have around. And he writes brilliantly for the kids.”

Another part of the creative team turns out to be the leading man, Douglas Hodge as Willy Wonka. “He’s been amazing. He directs, he writes music and has made albums, and now he’s flourishing in this new arena of musicals. He’s got the enthusiasm of a 22-year-old newcomer, but he’s got the experience of someone who’s done 25 years of solid theatre, as well as great television and film. For him, this is a flowering, and I wanted that collaboration with my leading actor in a way that he could create the role.”

It’s also the first time they’ve worked together. By contrast, Mendes moves on, after Charlie, to return to the National Theatre to direct his old friend Simon Russell Beale in the title role of King Lear.

“It’s my tenth collaboration with him, and we’ve talked about it for a while. I asked him to do it after I saw him in Galileo – Lear needs the energy of a younger man, vocally and physically, particularly as we’re doing it in the Olivier, which is also the only major subsidised theatre space I’ve not worked in before.”

With the news that Nick Hytner is stepping down from running the National Theatre in 2015, he admits that he’s tempted by the job but has not applied. “How can you not be interested? It’s the most amazing job. But it’s a simple thing for me, and if I run the National Theatre I can’t direct movies. It’s no more complicated than that. I love directing movies as well as plays. Anyone who seriously does the job has to do it for ten years, or the very minimum five, and you can’t just go away and direct movies. I did it at the Donmar, but that’s a 250 seat theatre that does just five shows a year. The National Theatre is the National Theatre. I had a very brief conversation with them, but put it this way, the first line of the person who discussed me doing it was, ‘You don’t want to do this, do you?’ It was basically phrased that at the moment it would seem unlikely that I’d want to do this. That’s assuming they would even offer it to me, but it needs the kind of dedication that the two Nicks have shown, and it shows you what two remarkable people can do when they are fully dedicated to a single institution. The reality is that they’ve taken it to such a level and set it up so brilliantly for the next generation with all the development and capital work. They have to have somebody who is fully dedicated to it, because otherwise it will drop off.”

So instead he is consolidating his energies around Neal Street Productions, the independent theatre, film and television production company he co-founded in 2003 with Newling (for theatre) and Pippa Harris (for film and television). “It has really taken off in the last two years. On the theatre side we’ve mainly done Shrek and Charlie, but we also have our fingers in Merrily We Roll Along and co-produced Sunday in the Park with George [both transferred from the Menier Chocolate Factory] and The Browning Version and David Hare’s South Downs [transferred from Chichester], so we have a thriving theatre arm.

“At the same time we’ve also got an extraordinary explosion in television production – we’ve produced Call the Midwife and The Hollow Crown, that won BAFTAs for Ben Whishaw and Simon Russell Beale, and we’re co-producing the John Logan series Penny Dreadful with Showtime. So there’s an enormous amount suddenly happening, and it’s great.

“What I loved about the Donmar is what I love about Neal Street – there are talented people constantly working through the building. That’s part of the joy of producing other people’s work – to see how they do it.”

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now previewing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, where it opens on June 25, www.charlieandthechocolatefactory.com

At the age of 16, he joined Sadler’s Wells Opera for a production of Smetana’s comic opera The Bartered Bride, with the tenor Peter Pears. After eight years, he became part of the London Festival Ballet, now the English National Ballet.

As a principal, Hogan danced, among other roles, the Hussar to the music of Strauss in Le Beau Danube, staged by Massine. During these years, he was the company’s Equity representative, working hard to improve dancers’ conditions.

For more than 22 years, he toured throughout north, central and south America, the Middle East and mainland Europe. In 1961, he joined the cast of the first hit musical about the rock’n’roll craze, Bye Bye Birdie. Staged at Her Majesty’s Theatre by the eminent choreographer Gower Champion, it ran for 268 performances.

In 1956, Hogan appeared in Homage to a Princess, part of the celebrations of the marriage between the US actress Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. Nearly 20 years later, he was seen at the Arts Theatre, London, in a mimed play, Marilyn, based on events leading to the death of Marilyn Monroe.

He also appeared in a number of movies, most notably Never Let Me Go (1953), a romantic adventure starring Clark Gable; a horror picture, The Masque of the Red Death (1964) with Vincent Price; and Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1970), which focused on the life and career of Tchaikovsky.

In the late 1960s, Hogan majored in movement and dance at Leicester University and taught at the University of Colorado, as well as at state schools in Britain.

Michael Hogan was born on June 19, 1928, and died on April 16, at the age of 84. He is survived by his wife Anita Lauda, a founder member and later a principal of the Festival Ballet, and by three of his children.

Pertwee was cast as a humble greengrocer in the show’s fictional seaside resort of Walmington-on-Sea, where the local division of the Home Guard was based. In this position, he was required to show respect to pompous bank manager George Mainwaring, exquisitely played by Arthur Lowe.

But in the Walmington unit of the Local Defence Volunteers, he could order Mainwaring as the commanding officer to “put that light out” – as he frequently did – and mock him as “Napoleon”.

This careful, highly comical balance was one of the linchpins of the success of Dad’s Army, regularly attracting audiences of 20 million viewers and still repeated today.

Pertwee came from a showbusiness family. Two of his cousins were Jon Pertwee, who played Worzel Gummidge and the Doctor, in the long-running series Doctor Who, on television, and the playwright Michael Pertwee.

His own career began in 1954 when he supplied the comedian Beryl Reid with scripts. As a comic, he tried to deflect the interests of the audience in the array of naked young women on show at London’s Windmill Theatre.

Pertwee’s break came when in 1958, when he joined the cast of the second series of the Kenneth Horne radio show, Beyond Our Ken. This ran until 1964, when scriptwriters Barry Took and Eric Merriman fell out with each other. The show returned as the little-changed Round the Horne the following year, with Marty Feldman replacing Merriman.

This series, which ran until 1968, proved even more popular than its predecessor – largely as the result of a camp double act, portrayed by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, who were far better versed than their audience in the gay lingo known as Polari.

Perry and Croft enjoyed constructing around them a virtual repertory company of actors and, long after Dad’s Army had disappeared, Pertwee played a policeman in You Rang, M’Lord? (1990-93), a spoof of Upstairs, Downstairs.

Having been unable to read or write until he was 13, Pertwee nonetheless wrote an entertaining series of books, including two on seaside entertainment, another on Dad’s Army, a fourth on entertainment during the Second World War, as well as his autobiography.

William Desmond Pertwee was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, on July 21, 1926. He died in Cornwall on May 27, aged 86.

I am meeting Hemmings to discuss this year’s Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (GDIF). The outdoor festival, which is in its 17th year, was founded by Hemmings who is also its artistic director. As in previous years, the festival seeks to transform public spaces into what Hemming calls “extraordinarily emotional and transformational experiences”.

This year, the spirit of the recent Olympic and Paralympic games is a direct source of inspiration for GDIF. Hemmings who was co-artistic director of the Paralympic opening ceremony, alongside Jenny Sealey, states that there was a “feeling on the street” which transformed London into a different place.

Hemming asserts that the ceremonies, in particular, questioned “who we’ve got to be; who we aspire to be, and engaged emotionally with people up and down the country and globally”. He explains that “outdoor festivals are uniquely placed to capture some of that energy”.

Yet this brings challenges when trying to guage the audience, “there’s absolutely no point of me doing something absolutely groundbreaking that fails to communicate with the public. There’s a very profound responsibility to an audience that may be incredibly diverse and made up of people from all ages”.

Says Hemmings: “There’s a temptation for people to think that outdoor theatre is all about stilts and slightly more vaudevillian stuff, but through the work we’re doing at GDIF, we’ve been trying to include artists, designers, writers and companies who would normally be in the building-based world to create a body of work that is much more dramaturgically focused”.

Hemmings identifies this year’s large-scale event, As the World Tipped by Wired Aerial Theatre, written and directed by Nigel Jamieson, as an “extraordinary piece of storytelling”. The piece combines bungee-assisted aerial dance and projections to illustrate the detrimental future effects of climate change.

“There is not very much point of putting a lot of spectacular effects,” he says, “whether they’re fireworks or projections, unless you’re actually telling a story that’s purposeful, engages, or emotionally moves the audience in some way”.

“There’s absolutely no point of me doing something absolutely groundbreaking that fails to communicate with the public. There’s a very profound responsibility to an audience that may be incredibly diverse and made up of people from all ages”

The festival’s other large-scale production, One Million, is presented by Tangled Feet. The production uses music, pyrotechnics and aerial spectacle to create an ambitious production about youth unemployment. Hemmings is clearly excited about the scale of the production. One hundred young people will be involved as performers, trainees and associates.

“Young people are often seen as entirely negative by large sections of the community. I think this is a way of creating a different and much more hopefully optimistic world,” says Hemmings. He wants to particularly focus the ‘conversation and discussion’ found within the production to the young people of Woolwich who are the target audience.

Hemmings admits that he is “particularly proud” of Word on the Street which returns for its second year. “We’re drawing attention to the fact that we want to work with younger, building-based theatre companies and performers,” he explains. The High Street Odyssey by Inspector Sands is celebrated by Hemmings as “one of the best pieces of promenade work I’ve ever seen”.

He also praises GDIF’s collaboration with the Lyric Hammersmith, Watford Palace and Latitude through the co-commissioning of Push, Scoop, Frenzy and Splash.

While he praises GDIF’s collaborations with other outdoor festivals in Without Walls – a consortium of outdoor festivals which offer a shared programme of events, Hemmings suggests that GDIF maintains its position as London’s leading festival because it specialises in large-scale work.

(That’s) extremely difficult to do in other parts of the capital particularly in central London, because of the lack of space”.

Last year’s GDIF attracted an audience of 85,000 people with a turnover of 1.4 million. Hemmings believes that the festival will continue to develop and praises the collaboration between international and British companies.

“We really need to build our own outdoor theatre ecology here”, he says. “I would like there to be a National Theatre of the Outdoors. I would be very keen to play a role in that through which we can experience a sense of togetherness in our public places.”

The Greenwich and Docklands International Festival runs from June 21-29

This was first seen at London’s Tricycle Theatre as part of The Bomb, a cycle of short plays of which Greig’s was generally judged to be the star piece.

The title refers to the letters that new prime ministers must write to the commanding officers of each of Britain’s four Trident submarines, giving instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Protocols are in place by which the officer can ascertain that Britain has been obliterated and no one is left in charge. One is the absence of Radio 4.

Belinda Lang’s new PM – steel inside a velvet glove – is reaching the end of her first day at No 10, when head of arrangements, John, urges her to write the letter. On learning that a lack of Radio 4 is a criterion that the UK has been nuked, the PM gasps: “Without The Archers there’d be no civilisation.”

There’s a surprising amount of comedy – she calls her predecessor ‘Fishface’, and, when theorising that a nuclear strike might come from China, insists on calling Beijing ‘Peking’, on the basis that the Chinese are in no position to object.

The play becomes a debate on nuclear weapons. If she tells the sub to retaliate, that is inhumane – leaders of the aggressor state will be safe while millions of civilians will be wiped out. If she orders no retaliation, assumptions behind the whole nuclear programme become a not-very-funny joke.

The discussion is polemical, the language pared down and all the more deadly. The PM is no mere figurehead – her distant past is touched on, auguring the woman she has become. John is part butler, part philosopher, part agent provocateur, his “yes, madam” and “no, madam” responses providing the lead-ups to new rounds of lethal argument.

Confirming that we are alive and its commissioning instincts are spot on, Radio 4 invited Fay Weldon to write her new radio play The Weather Girl. This incorporates a riveting two-hander – a clinical psychologist (Rachel Pickup) opposite a wily, hardened young remand prisoner (Amy Nuttall) – inside a dramatisation of what led Abigail into crime.

Weldon plays with our expectations and sympathies, layering competing cruelties and vanities. The girl’s strict and fundamentalist Christian upbringing is reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Life coarsens her, and she is induced to fake a rape claim in order to claim compensation.

Another life and another narrative is hinted at with frequent weather bulletins – Abigail wanted to be a meteorologist but her ambitions were crushed. Nuttall demonstrates her range with a fantastic performance that alternately repulses and tugs at the heart.

The burdens placed on children by the generations before them is the subtext of Joseph Roth’s novel of the Austro-Hungarian empire, The Radetzky March, dramatised by Gregory Evans. Historical revisionism is just one of the themes that make for a rewarding serialisation.

Living up to his Horrible Histories reputation, Gerard Foster creates the most obnoxious baby ever, with horns, fangs and tail, in a pilot called Little Monster. This comedy is an allegory of the hardships of child rearing, predisposing mum (Sarah Hadland in well-primed comic mode) into decisions that would scare the NSPCC. But then baby Benjy is quite foul, his demonic demeanour given audible form in expulsions from every orifice.

The Letter of Last Resort, R4, Saturday, June 1
The Weather Girl, R4, Saturday, June 8
The Radetzky March, R4, Sunday, June 2
Little Monster, R4, Tuesday, June 11