Players win best actor and best original play at home drama festival

THE Henley Players won best original play as well as the Henley Standard award for best actor at this year’s Henley Drama Festival.

They performed Mike Rowbottom’s play The Prize Fish with Mark Wilkin taking the acting award.

Headington Rye Oxford took five awards, including for “magic moment”, at the 53rd annual festival, which ran from May 6 to 10.

Mr Wilkin was “extremely chuffed” to win the best actor award.

He said: “I haven’t won a prize for my acting before so it was quite a surprise really, particularly when there were 12 other groups vying for the awards.

“We’d performed the play a couple of weeks before at the Maidenhead Drama Festival and I guess we were a little underprepared.

“A number of us had been involved in Absent Friends, which was only four weeks before our performance in Maidenhead so the amount of rehearsal we’d been able to do was quite limited.

“The adjudicator said some nice things about us but had suggested a few changes and there were also things which we felt we could improve on. We implemented all those and I’m pleased to say that it paid off. Not only did Mike and I get awards, but Pam Simmons was also nominated for best supporting actor, so as a collective we did pretty well.

“We’re now taking the play to the Corn Exchange Drama Festival in Wallingford on June 26, so anyone who missed us can come and see us do it again.”

The Prize Fish is about two old school friends, who are now competitors in business.

Mr Wilkin said: “My character, Tommy, is a really unpleasant, bullying, misogynistic person and the other guy, Johnny, is winding him up.

“It all revolves around this huge fish that Johnny has on his boardroom wall in the first scene and Tommy, who doesn’t like coming second best, decides that he needs a fish that’s bigger on his wall. It takes off from there.”

Mr Rowbottom, a musician from Stoke Row, had not written a part for himself in the play but inadvertently ended up taking a role as a minstrel. He explained: “When we were at Maidenhead, the adjudicator thought it would be a good idea to punctuate scene changes with live music.

“Out of nowhere, he said, ‘Have you got someone who can do that?’ and I thought, ‘Well, actually, yes we have’.

“He took the idea from One Man, Two Guvnors, the James Corden showpiece, which was done at the National Theatre and had a skiffle band in between scene changes.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll get up and I’ll use my ukulele for this because it’s such a cheerful instrument’. I had actually written a song to cover the gaps because I cannot face the bureaucracy of getting permission to use someone else’s song.”

Mr Rowbottom, who also won best original play at the 2006 festival with The Queen is Dead, credited everyone involved in The Prize Fish for its success.

“Theatre is an entirely collaborative affair and the writing is just the start,” he said. “Mark played his part extremely well. He got well and truly stuck into it.

“The part was actually inspired by Donald Trump. I can’t remember when I wrote it originally, it must have been in his first presidency and then I honed it.

“It’s an anti-bullying piece. I have worked with bullying, ignorant bosses who use bluster to cover their ignorance or to cover their complete lack of empathy. We’ve all worked with people like that.

“The idea was that this bullying boss with a very thin skin was incensed that one of his rivals had managed to catch a large saltwater fish while on holiday and he happened to be in his boardroom, saw it there and dismissed it as nothing.

“Then he came back to his office fuming and demanded that his staff catch something similar for that rival’s visit in a couple of weeks’ time. But he knows nothing about fishing and thinks they can just go down to the local quarry and catch one, so that’s what they have to do, without a hope in hell.

“It all resolves itself and the rival is using the obsession of the bully to undermine his confidence, at the same time sneakily buying his shares because he knows that he won’t have his eye on the ball.”