In 1941, the Speech Room at Harrow School was bombed and lost its roof. There's a slight sense of the apocryphal to this story: how much of its roof was lost is forgotten, but among the rubble in the newly open-to-the-elements space, teacher Ronnie Watkins decided to take the opportunity to reconstruct some of Shakespeare's original performance conditions, with shared light, minimal scenery and an all-male cast; and writing a new prologue to that effect for a production of Twelfth Night, began a tradition which has continued to this day.
A long tradition
Harrow has a strong history of public speaking – due no doubt to a propensity to churn out statesmen – but an added bonus of this tradition has been a willingness to engage with drama as a worthwhile, fulfilling and personally advancing activity. When I met Adam Cross, Director of Drama at the school, it was clear that this ethos is in fine fettle. As well as Speech Room (its roof safely restored), the school now has the purpose-built 25 year-old Ryan Theatre which seats 330, and which was built with Speech Room in mind – the auditorium wide rather than deep, and curved such that performances are able to take place in Globe-like shared light there too. Cross is fortunate enough to have 3 teachers and 5 non-teaching staff in his drama department, as well as a Chemistry teacher who directs plays, and an English teacher who works on co-curricular productions. Whole-school productions are mounted each term as well as house productions nearly every two weeks between October and March, and among other projects the department tours a production devised by students at the School for primary-aged audiences each year, and the annual ‘Harrow Fringe Festival’ showcases student-made work, so drama is thriving.
Much of this enthusiasm for the subject can be traced back to Ronnie Watkins, and to his successor from 1964 Jeremy Lemmon. So much loved were the annual Shakespeare productions from 1941 that in 1951, a group of Old Harrovians – students who had been through Watkins’ direction and who wanted to continue after leaving school – set up the OH Players, putting on a second annual Shakespeare production in Speech Room, and continuing to do so for an unbroken 67 years, with non-OH participants including a young Joanna Lumley as Rosalind.
Pioneering work
Alongside Watkins back in the 1940s, Head of Art Maurice Percival developed an enthusiasm for design, and in particular for speculating about what the original Globe theatre might have looked like. His drawings and watercolours, many of them still in the school archive, are remarkable precursors to the ‘new’ Globe theatre many of us now know so well. And when Sam Wanamaker decided to embark on his ambitious project to rebuild the Globe on London's South Bank, Ronnie Watkins was asked to be a member of the advisory team for the undertaking, as Wanamaker felt (Lemmon recounts) that anyone interested in ‘original staging techniques cannot ignore the pioneering work’ at Harrow. Such it is that rehearsal rooms and education studios in the finished building are named after Watkins.
The connection between Harrow and the Globe theatre occasioned by this inspirational teacher's involvement meant that in 1994, when the new theatre was still a shell, Harrow were invited to bring their Speech Room production and perform it in the rising wooden ‘O’. Performed across Shakespeare's birthday weekend and starring a young Benedict Cumberbatch as Petruchio, the production was directed by Jeremy Lemmon who had ably picked up Watkins’ baton by that stage. Watkins, aged 90, was in the audience.
The 1994 chorus in the Globe minstrels’ gallery
A return to the Globe
2019 marks 25 years since that first full production in what would become Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and Harrow have been invited back to perform. The production will be a fundraiser, with the proceeds going to create a project in honour of Lemmon – in which Harrow boys and students from local partner schools will collaborate annually through workshops with actors from the Globe theatre and on its stage, culminating in a series of performed extracts.
Appropriately enough, the play Cross has chosen for its one-off performance is Twelfth Night, and in honour of that war-time production in the ‘Speech Room Globe’ it will be a loosely Edwardian affair, incorporating aspects of the school uniform, and an original score by the Head of Academic Music, William Church, based on some of Harrow's extensive school songs. It will have, Cross tells me, ‘some of the world of Harrow, but burst apart: youthful.’ He will cast it as a company of boys from all years, and then allow the roles to emerge, as he is, he says, very keen that ensemble is something that his department can teach the boys. In all, a cast of 27 actor-singers, a band of seven or eight, and a stage management team will have the opportunity to participate in this historic revisiting of a theatre intimately connected with the 20th-Century history of Harrow School.
All of this takes place in a world of undeniable privilege, in the scheme of academic institutions. Perhaps the biggest thing that can be learnt from Harrow's story, however, is that it is well worth delving into the drama history of your school. Digging in the annals may not bring forth such a well-connected picture as this, but might easily inspire a project which embeds drama firmly in the narrative of what your school has and should continue to offer its students and its community. To have drama so fundamentally a part of the life and identity of any school is an admirable, and crucially an achievable aspiration.
© Reproduced with the kind permission of Anne Hall Williams
Maurice Percival's drawing of the Globe theatre long before the building of the new one on the South Bank
© Reproduced with the kind permission of Anne Hall Williams
Maurice Percival's drawing and costume design for Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night