trumpeted the news on its front page: ‘World Premiere In History Of Television: Intimate Theatre Fame’. So successful was this venture that over the next few years fourteen plays were screened from the Intimate with the BBC taking over the car park for these transmissions and setting up three cameras in the circle to relay the plays to television viewers. Many well-known actors made early career appearances at Palmers Green over the years. Whilst still a student at RADA, Richard Attenborough made his professional debut at the Intimate in September 1941 in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness and Roger Moore, later to find fame as James Bond, was fresh from army service when he appeared as juvenile lead in several productions in the late 1940s. Other wellknown names to tread the Intimate’s stage include Robert Eddison, June Whitfield, Nicholas Parsons, Arthur Lowe, Patrick MacNee (Steed in TV’s The Avengers), Michael Hordern, Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, Peter Barkworth, Patricia Hayes, Irene Handl, Bryan Forbes, James Hayter, Eric Portman, Mervyn Johns and Kenneth Williams. The rock icon David Bowie even appeared there for a week in early 1968 with Lindsay Kemp’s dance company. When one looks at the British theatre scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s two playwrights stand out from the crowd – John Osborne and Harold Pinter - so it is intriguing to find Pinter, under his stage name David Baron, appearing at the Intimate as the second male lead in his contemporary’s most famous play Look Back
John Clements and the cast of S.I. Hsiung's Lady Precious Stream, September 1937.
Amateur companies were invited to use the facilities and these societies together with occasional professional productions (A youthful Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson appeared in 1982 in a Cambridge Footlights revue) ensured the Intimate was open most weeks of the year. ‘One-nighter’ professional concerts were also booked featuring such artistes as Matt Monro, Frankie Howerd, Kenny Ball, June Bronhill, Cleo Laine, Frankie Vaughan, Hinge and Bracket, George Melly and Jack Warner and each Christmas a professional pantomime, with stars such as Tony Blackburn, Ruth Madoc, Bill Owen and Shirley Anne Field, filled the venue. The Intimate flourished until St. Monica’s Church decided to reclaim the venue as a community hall in 1988. John Clements and Sheila Raynor in a scene from Alberto Casella's Death Takes A Holiday in February 1938.
In Anger in March 1958. Aubrey Woods, who played Jimmy Porter in that production recalls that Pinter was finishing off his script for The Birthday Party at that time. The Intimate also had a flourishing Playgoers Club, which held monthly meetings on Sunday afternoons featuring distinguished guests, including Sybil Thorndike, theatre historian W. MacQueen Pope, Marie Burke, Judy Campbell and Fenella Fielding. In October 1950, the Playgoers had a special treat when celebrated British actor Jack Hawkins chaired a meeting where the guest of honour was Hollywood film star Tyrone Power. Changing tastes and the popularity of television saw a sharp decline in audiences in the 1960s. With Fred Marlow’s death in 1964, his sons gamely tried to keep the theatre going but by July 1968 they conceded defeat and a new company led by Howard Kent took control of the theatre. Kent promised local theatregoers fortnightly productions with star names, such as Richard Todd, Penelope Keith, Dickie Henderson and Gwen Watford, but sadly these failed to fill the theatre and by the end of 1969 the Intimate was no longer a fulltime professional playhouse. The theatre’s closure, however, was mercifully brief.
Many thought that this was the end of the road for the dear old Intimate but it was not to be. After a year or two of theatrical nonactivity some amateur productions returned to the venue and, although it is not used anything like its golden years, today, over 78 years after it first became a playhouse, audiences are still being entertained at the Intimate.
Sheila Raynor and John Clements in a scene from J. M. Barrie's Mary Rose, January 1939.
Geoff Bowden is the author of the book INTIMATE MEMORIES: THE HISTORY OF THE INTIMATE THEATRE, PALMERS GREEN which was published by The Badger Press in 2006. ISBN: 978 0 9526076 3 2. Now out-of-print, copies can be found in Enfield’s libraries. Geoff gives various talks (including one on the Intimate Theatre) to groups and societies in North London, Essex and Hertfordshire, and is the editor of the British Music Hall Society’s quarterly magazine, The Call Boy. He has lived in Palmers Green since 1975.
8882 7888
|9