THE curtain rises on a darkened stage. A spotlight picks out a ringing telephone. Olive, a beautiful young lady in evening dress, steps into the spotlight, and answers the phone. “Who are you?” she demands.
A man’s voice is heard. He refuses to reveal his identity, but says he has information about Olive’s father who disappeared 12 months ago and now is in such great danger that Olive must come at once. He says a yellow car with a white owl mascot on the radiator is waiting for in the street.
Olive puts down the phone and rushes out stage left, as the spotlight fades out.
Spotlight on Mystery
Stage right, a second spotlight pierces the darkness and finds a hooded man placing a telephone receiver in its cradle. The stage directions say “he wears a long black robe, gauze veil and black gauntlets”.
The hooded man says: “The sign of the white owl.”
“Black out”, say the stage directions. “Curtain drops.”
And so begins a play called Climax. The original script says it was written by Miss Kathleen Pickard, the actress who played Olive, and Stephen Venner, a fairly well known theatre director in the 1920s and 1930s. Their names, though, have been crossed out and replaced with “by Lionel Dinsdale”.
The typewritten script, complete with pencil stage notes and revisions, is one of the items that is being offered at Darlington Book Fair along with two other documents that create a highly unusual piece of theatre history.
One is a large poster promoting the premiere of Climax, at Darlington’s Theatre Royal in Northgate, on November 25, 1935. It reveals in big letters that not only is Miss Pickard taking the starring role as Olive but, in much smaller letters, that the villain of the piece, the hooded man called Ignoto, is to be played by Charles Simon – an actor who will go on to become nationally famous.
And the other is a letter to the manager of the Theatre Royal from the Lord Chamberlain in London saying that he has viewed the script of Climax and has granted it a licence allowing it to be performed, so long as it is not altered in any way.
The Lord Chamberlain reminds the Theatre Royal that:
· No profanity or impropriety of language to be permitted on the stage;
· No indecency of dress, dance, or gesture to be permiited on the stage;
· No objectionable personalities to be permitted on the stage, nor anything calculated to produce riot or breach of the peace;
· No offensive representations of living persons to be permitted on the stage.
Censor's Strict Seal
The Lord Chamberlain was a member of the Royal Household who oversaw the production of plays to entertain the monarch. In 1737, Prime Minister Robert Walpole, afraid of satirical plays mocking his government, introduced the Licensing Act which said all new plays had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain.
This was censorship by the state – any play that was deemed immoral or disruptive was banned.
It ended on September 26, 1968. A day later, the shocking musical Hair opened in London’s West End, with outrageous nudity, drug-taking and profanity on stage as well as anti‑war sentiments and sexually liberated politics.
Despite its title, the script of Climax suggests there was little in it to worry the censor.
The poster claims that Lionel Dinsdale – surely a made-up name – has written “a unique story. Intrigue, mystery, romance, plot and counter plot”.
At the end of Act 3, when the hood is pulled back to reveal Ignoto’s true identity, and an extra paragraph has been pasted into the script so he dramatically shouts: “I have always hated you.
And yes, I had no compunction in using your name and degrading you – it was you who sent my brother to prison. When I discovered him murdered, I thought it might have been an act of vengeance by the Priests of Hendra, but it was you, it was you who killed him with a poisoned dart!”
These lines were declaimed by Charles Simon, who later found fame as Dr Dale in the radio soap opera, Mrs Dale’s Diary.
He was from Wolverhampton, and he claimed that two ladies from Darlington had seen him in repertory theatre in Liverpool and bet him £5 that he couldn’t make a go of it in their home town. He’d accepted the bet, and had taken on the lease at the ailing Theatre Royal in Northgate.
Actor's Darlington Bet
Climax must have been one of his first attempts at winning the bet.
He did revive the theatre, but in 1938, it was sold from beneath him for conversion into a cinema (as such, it now stands empty).
Look back through 150 years of Northern Echo pages in our newspaper archives
He married a Darlington girl, Nancy McDermid, in St Cuthbert’s Church in 1940, and continued running his theatre company, first in Gladstone Street and then in the Royal Astoria in Northgate, until 1951 – it was his company which gave Butterflies actress Wendy Craig her first break.
Then he became a national name, starring in Radio 4’s pioneering soap opera, Mrs Dale’s Diary, as Dr Jim Dale, which had seven million listeners a week. He appeared in blockbuster films like Shadowlands and 102 Dalmatians, and made guest appearances in TV programmes such as A Touch of Frost, Peak Practice and Holby City. He was working right up until his death, aged 93, in 2002.
His story, and that of censorship of the stage, can be traced in the Climax documents which will be among the countless thousands of antiquarian and secondhand books on offer at the Darlington Book Fair on May 9, from 10am to 4pm, at the Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Vane Terrace.
