These memories are extracted from a series of articles in The Stoic, September 1999 issue, reviewing drama at Stowe over its first fifty years.  Joe’s own contribution appears under the ‘In Joe’s Word’s’ link. Those with access to the Old Stoic site will find the complete articles and other material on the subject in the Stoic’s fully searchable archive.  

George Clarke, (At Stowe, 1950 – 1985, including stints as Housemaster and Senior Tutor. Also leading authority on Stowe House and Gardens:)
…Joe Bain, who took over the Congreve Club from Peter Dams, promptly and irreverently christened the new [Roxburgh] hall the ‘Roxy’ – there was always something impish about the youthful Bain, who enjoyed tweaking the tail of Authority.  But he turned his independence of mind to good effect when selecting plays for the Congreve Club.  The plays which Dams had chosen were theatrically efficient, well-made plays by writers like Shaw, Galsworthy and Rattigan. They were often thoughful plays, controversial even – but never challenging. Bain set out to change all that.  He fired a warning shot with one of his earliest productions,The Bald Prima Donna  by Ionesco.  Then in rapid succession came a string of difficult Modernist dramas, first in the Gym then in the Roxy: plays by Pirandello, Anouilh, Ibsen, Max Frisch, Durrenmatt and others – a series of raids on the impossible.  He can never pull that one off, we said, when we heard what he was planning to do next.  But somehow he did, every time.  Among the most memorable were Hedda Gabler, which seemed to me to compare well with the professional production running in the West End at the same time, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed under the cedar on the South Front with Puck swinging down by rope to take part in the action with mortal men, and the mechanicals entering erratically across the South Lawn in a donkey cart.  No other open-air production which I saw at Stowe had the same magic.

Those who took part in rehearsals directed by Bain witnessed ‘the play within the play,’ as one of them described it, watching him demonstrating what he wanted, and then coaxing, bullying and cajoling his young cast into a performance that transcended their limited experience.  And he did, habitually, produce very difficult plays.  The reviewer of The Cherry Orchard in The Stoic commented that many in the audience were bewildered by the play and did not know what to make of it.  On another occasion Bain gently chided me for wasting a couple of paragraphs of my review discussing the play itself rather than the production.  The truth was that he made us think.

The Cherry Orchard, one of his last productions, broke new ground in another way.  The leading part was taken by Oriel Arnold, another Staff wife with professional theatrical training, and this was the first time in a Congreve Club production that the cast included masters and masters’ wives as well as boys; a few years before Bain had brought in two girls from a Buckingham school to play the leading female parts in Othello.  These innovations, which could not have taken place a generation earlier, effectively broke the long tradition of girls’ parts being played by boys.

… By then the tradition of challenging plays and polished, penetrating performances was firmly established, the legacy of Joe Bain more than any other single person.  By the time he left in 1973 Drama at Stowe had come of age. It had taken exactly fifty years.

Brook Williams: (Chatham, 1956, actor, alas deceased:)
 …About this time the Congreve Club was to be shaken to its foundation by the arrival at Stowe of a new master, Joe Bain.  Joe had taken an active part in the theatrical life at Cambridge, and in fact I heard later that it was a toss-up as to whether Joe or Peter Hall would become a schoolmaster.  We all know the answer and, in my opinion, having been directed by them both, Stowe was the winner. I think Peter Dams was happy to hand over most of the work to Joe. Joe’s first play in charge was an extraordinary choice.  It was the little-known Pirandello play, Henry IV.  It was an incredibly difficult play to produce, and even the leading theatrical companies fought shy of it, though its central character is a wonderful acting part.  It is the story of an eccentric character who prentended he was the Holy Roman Emperor, Enrico Quarto, and surrounded himself with courtiers and servants.  At a ball a cruel trick is played on him and as a result he has to pretend to be the Emperor till the end of his days.  That is an immensely simplified version of the plot. In fact it contained all kinds of questions about the nature of perception, and the blurred image of imagination and reality.  The boys immensely enjoyed it, and I’m sure they didn’t understand it at all.  But they took something valuable away from the experience and it gave them considerable food for thought. …

Since I left Stowe I have apppeared in numerous plays and films, often with some of the most famous actors in the world. … But nothing I have done since those days has been quite so much fun. And it never will be.

Piers Plowright: (Temple, 1956, distinguished Radio producer:)
… If Bill McElwee meant summer and starlight on classical temple steps, Joe Bain meant winter and high drama in the shabby gymnasium that passed for an indoor auditorium in the 50s – it stood near where the sports hall now stands.  Here in the Christmas term of 1955 this recently arrived Diaghilev swept us through the mysteries of Pirandello’s Henry IV and nothing was quite the same again.  Madness and the uncertain nature of reality were new concepts to me then.  After all, I’d only just recovered from Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes, floating out of a study window the summer before. Joe was young, witty, slightly dandified – ran to coloured waistcoats – and ‘experimental. ’ Brook Williams played the ’mad’ king and I played the Doctor with a pronounced stoop, spats and a lisp.  I remember feeling more than mere stage-fright as I stood backstage each evening in a pool of sweat and creosote and the opening bars of Holst’s The Perfect Fool brought the house lights down: it was as if a very dangerous magic was about to be unleashed, a magic that might, if we didn’t get it right, turn very black indeed.  Brook certainly got it right, giving an astonishing performance for a schoolboy actor, and holding in so much suppressed violence it was quite terrifying to be on stage with him.  To this day I dream about this production and the sparks that were lit in the whole group of us, for although only Brook and Joe Tillinger, who played one of the courtiers, went on to be professionals, nobody in the cast could have remained indifferent to the power of the theatre and the thrust of this very great play.

David Temple: (At Stowe, teaching classics, 1968 – 1973:)
  When I arrived at Stowe in 1968 there was no such thing as a drama department.  Drama in the classroom did not exist and altogether it was regarded as a poor relation to music, which had, under the redoubtable Angus Watson, built itself into a mighty empire.  But the Congreve Club did exist and was flourishing, and when as an eager young beak I asked colleagues whether I might be involved in producing plays they all with one accord pointed to Joe Bain, who had become by his own art and enormous ability the de facto boss of almost anything dramatic that occurred.  Thus began what was, for me at least, a very happy partnership, and no colt could have had a better breaking-in than I had under Joe.

The Roxburgh Hall over the next five years saw some spectacular plays, into most of which Joe, with his wicked sense of humour and gallant determination to strike a blow against Puritan fustian, managed to introduce clouds of fragrant incense. Casesar and Cleopatra was spectacular in the extreme, with a ghostly sphinx, a complicated machine for lowering Cleopatra into Caesar’s camp, and a wonderfully decadent banquet scene, set against the imaginative backdrop of the fabled towers of Alexandria, and complete with two braziers hired from Stratford debouching the incense.  Most spectacular of all though was The Royal Hunt of the Sun.  Peter Shaffer’s stage directions would be demanding enough even in the professional theatre: the opening of an enormous petalled sun onto Atahualpa was beautifully designed and executed by Johnny Dunn (Temple), who worked day and night to produce a contraption of strings and pulleys which he alone knew how to operate.  It worked wonderfully and Atahualpa’s first appearance was heightened by the use of a new, complex lighting system, which had been installed a couple of years before, with the latest technology – preset dimmers and master control systems all done by means of thyristors.  The new lighting also enabled us to convey the ascent of the Andes in the most threatening way, for the Spanish soldiers entered through the auditorium, under ghastly strobe lighting to the accompaniment of live, and thoroughly weird, music, played on improbable instruments such as saws.  Such a spectacle as this, in a play about the destruction of a beautiful civilization by the evil Spaniards, naturally called for plenty of incense during the blessing of the Spanish banners.

Royal Hunt of the Sun was unusual in its inclusion in the cast of Staff and Old Stoics.  We had done the same with the Cherry Orchard some years  before. It caused some raising of eyebrows but, as Joe rightly saw, it was hard to expect a Stoic to play Firs or Madame Ranevskaya.  The move allowed Peter Dams, doyen of the Congreve Club to die most beautifully as Firs only to be resurrected as the sinister inquisitorial priest Valverde in Royal Hunt of the Sun, so that he rounded off his career as one of the lynch-pins of Stowe drama in a way which would, I think, have been dear to his heart.

An expansion of activities unconnected with the CCF or games gave an invaluable opportunity for drama workshops to be established. These, it would be fair to say brought out the dramatic interests of many boys, some of whom later appeared in major productions.  One might think of this innovation, previously unheard of at Stowe, and probably in most schools at the time, as being the forerunner of the modern perception of drama as being central to education and the development of young people.  The workshops were not designed to produce plays but to show boys how the theatre worked and was organised, from designing and blocking out a set, with lighting, effects and all, to the the finished production,  and how they as actors might be trained to move and speak, and what the demands of being in a play in any capacity were, whether in a major part or a member of a crowd scene (ahd now difficult they can be to control!), or someone behind the scenes. …

Perhaps the most surprising and most valuable aspect of drama at Stowe was the loyalty which all those involved in the plays had to the play itself and to each other.  It would be hard to imagine a greater team spirit than we had at Stowe in those high and far-off times, and although it could be maddening to have to go down to the Roxy at four in the morning to make sure that the set was painted on time, it was all worthwhile, sub specie aeternitatis.

(Posted by kind permission of Stowe School.)