Stoke On Stage And Screen – 50th Anniversary

Ray Johnson founded Stoke Original Theatre in the late 1970s to commission new theatre scripts and shows by local writers and take these shows on the road to theatres and Arts centres. We performed annually at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival Fringe in July/August for several years - with up to four different shows every day at the Celtic Lodge near Edinburgh Castle - plus frequent late-night spots at the Festival Fringe Club, and extracts on Radio 4 and local TV. “What a Tonic!” said The Scotsman.

It was a team of up to a couple of dozen Stoke creatives, with the largest company being 35 people. The culmination of the Edinburgh years was a collection of great theatre reviews, a top “Fringe First” award for Ray for his play Jellies, Jam & Jubilation and this wonderful quote in The Scotsman newspaper: “It will soon become a law at the Fringe that there is “NO STOKE WITHOUT FIRE!”.

We were ambassadors for Stoke, and recorded the album A Souvenir from Stoke of original songs from our musical revue Dr Music’s Special Mixture. We were signed up by BBC to present two half-hour entertainment shows -Pottery Patter-on BBC1. Here we see a collection of clips from the plays and shows of those times.

Entertaining short films made by ten-year-olds in a multi-generational schools project devised and run by Ray Johnson and incorporating lots of archive film, interviews filmed by the children themselves and lots of special effects:

With recorded clips from several sources, this is entertaining film show is a great celebration Stoke from half a century ago!