Imagine this: It’s 2013. You have just watched real children weep over the (feigned) death of a real kitten on stage. Now, flames lick the manger of the barn in which the majority of the play you have been watching is set. It’s thrilling – remarkable. And the most impressive part? This whole play has been staged by Keighley Musical Theatre Company, an amateur dramatic group from West Yorkshire celebrating its centenary.

Whistle Down the Wind is perhaps not part of the classic line-up of musicals on your must-see list, but when performed properly, it astounds. Overshadowed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s more famous creations – Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat, just to name a handful – it is sadly only remembered as the play that gave Boyzone their number one hit ‘No Matter What’. It is not as spectacular as Joseph – there is no great ‘chandelier scene’ as in Phantom, but its appeal lies in its depictions of the innocence of childhood faith. It is a simple play (comparatively), but one that resonates.

Call me privileged to have seen something this good, but this production proved the power of amateur performance.

"I am yet to experience a performance that can challenge what I have seen in amateur productions across the country"

It feels futile to even attempt to list the number of actors who have passed through the ancient halls of Cambridge University. No-one could ever challenge the prestige of Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson or similar A-list stars. Coming to Cambridge, I expected to be seeing the next McKellens on the stage before me. But, so far, I am yet to experience a performance that can challenge what I have seen in amateur productions across the country.

Student and amateur performances have their different strengths, as well as those which should be consistent across both. Cambridge’s vibrant cultural atmosphere seems to allow for a flourishing of student-written drama and a demand for a wider variety of established plays, but casts often seem to pale in comparison to the energy of similar amateur dramatists elsewhere. 

"Cambridge’s vibrant cultural atmosphere seems to allow for a flourishing of student-written drama"

One thing for which I must applaud Cambridge theatre is that it never falls back on the gimmick of being ‘so bad it’s good’. There are pantomimes across the country which subsist only on the audiences who  turn up solely to see the gold hot-pants that have been worn at some point by every cast member for the last twenty years, or for the bear costumes that should have been surrendered to the moths years ago. From my experience, when student theatre goes for comedy, the audience is usually laughing in the right places.

Furthermore, student-written scripts can be infinitely superior to several of the director-written scripts that I have encountered in certain amateur dramatic productions. For example, Negotiating With the Dead showed keen potential in its playwright Amie Brian. Certainly, the play was original and engaged the audience through a deeply ingrained passion for the subject matter. This was not a play about just anything that might pull an audience: it has a message. I myself have had to work with several less than exemplary scripts written by directors who rely upon their casts to edit their (less-than-satisfactory) work for them. 

"Cambridge theatre is also significantly more ambitious than local productions tend to be"

Cambridge theatre is also significantly more ambitious than local productions tend to be. In the interest of ensuring an audience, the same plays tend to crop up again and again. Whistle Down the Wind has been performed in at least Keighley, Cleckheaton, Harrogate and Whitby, and is set to return to Todmorden later this year – five revivals in the last twelve years between North and West Yorkshire alone. Even professional theatres tend to stick to the same shows – Blood Brothers crops up like clockwork at the Alhambra in Bradford.

Cambridge students seem to seek a bit more variety. Perhaps it is the relative cheapness of the tickets that encourages us to try something new, but directors seem to be rather braver in selecting their material. Last term’s Intruder/Home, two masterpieces of Belgian symbolism, absolutely stunned with their unsettling, eerie atmosphere. But more than anything, their appeal was in their freshness.

However, all of this holds less importance when considering stand-out performances from actors. I'm not here to criticise the actors of Cambridge theatre: there are some assured talents who will always appear and please. But as an organism, the casts can be somewhat patchy. Two or three actors – and not necessarily the main ones – can steal a show and carry it along. In contrast, the 2023 Shipley Little Theatre’s production of Billy Liar was blessed by a cast of spare-time actors who took on the challenge of a play with such an iconic film version with commendable precision. 

We may blame the Cambridge workload for performances which aren’t as fully fleshed out as they had the potential to be, the short terms for the lack of time to construct deeper camaraderie between cast members, but that simultaneously denies the pressures on other amateur actors. Amateur productions are often the second concern of those involved, after work or education, but they offer an outlet to escape from the everyday that is vital to the wellbeing of actors, crews and audiences alike.

We can never demand perfection from live theatre – professional or amateur. But when small-town productions are convincing, can’t we expect something even more from an institution with such a renowned theatre scene?

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