Seona was the Director of the Young People’s Theatre from 1980-1981.
I was an actor and director but I ended up doing lots of front of house jobs too. I remember Alie Street. If you wanted to go off stage left and on again stage right you had to climb up a ladder! When it rained the noise was incredible in the theatre. I was on the building committee for the new theatre and I had to go to lots of boring meetings. We couldn’t agree on anything including the audience capacity and what was going to be best financially.
Being involved in Half Moon was lovely – it was like a commune. The down side was that you worked 80 hour weeks with company meetings on Sundays. But we all got the same wage per week – £70. That included Sian Phillips and the cleaners! There was a crisis over Pal Joey though. The band had a minimum wage of £84 per week so we all had to be paid that too. It ruined the budget!
I always say of my time at Half Moon that it’s the place I made the most friends in my career. We were all so close. I wanted to replicate that theatre collective somewhere else. I never managed it of course.
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