Notes from the Stage Managers Box

by John Barber

This book is the story of my time with the National Westminster Theatre Club. It is a progress from unwilling volunteer in a One Act Play to novice stage hand and Stage Manager ending with a successful stint as producer for Grease.


This is not intended nor conceived as a manual for would-be Stage Managers or for those interested in stage craft. I hope though that this will help anyone who is looking for a career or involvement in the theatre and can learn something from my experience. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes and that is a truism which will become self-evident.


There are tales of production disasters, memorable performances and the funny side of staging a show from the auditions to first night mishaps. The book concentrates mainly on the eccentrics and the things that can and usually do go wrong on stage seen from the viewpoint of a Stage Manager.


It is also a personal account looking at ten years of the Theatre Club’s history from 1978 to 1987. Now renamed the RBS Theatre Company it is the oldest active Club of its kind since being formed in 1876.


I have drawn on my own career in the Bank to explain my involvement. You will not find stories of corporate take-overs of covert city deals. My professional life in the City of London is there to illustrate the background against which amateur dramatic companies and performers operate whilst being members of a large organisation. You will meet a lot of warm, talented people who worked for the Bank and became a close group of actors, singers and stage crew.


There are accounts of the staging of shows such as Oklahoma, South Pacific, Calamity Jane, Fiddler on the Roof, Grease and other less well known shows such as No, No Nanette. There are also a few black and white illustrations.

93 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 4, 2012

About the author

I began writing in 1996. My early articles were concerned with the impact of the introduction of the euro as a single currency unit within the European Community. Later I concentrated on articles for local UK county magazines and those dealing with social history and entertainment nostalgia. Most of these are now available in one anthology entitled An Echo from the Green Fields available in eBook format.

My first published book was a non-fiction title The Camden Town Murder, and the updated paperback still available. This was an unsolved murder in 1907 London, UK. The original suspect was tried and acquitted at the Old Bailey. This book looks at the evidence, the trial transcript, notes taken by the police investigation team, my own knowledge of the area and the work of a forensic scientist. The book offers a solution as to the identity of the murderer which is as accurate as I feel it can be after the passing of over 100 years.

I followed this with a traditional English detective mystery – A Little Local Affair. Although I grew up in North London I have lived for the past thirty five years in small towns and this book was based on that experience. It is more about the decline of the small High Street than who killed the most hated man in town. It also spawned the Fordhamton Trilogy and the two books that complete this are Return to Fordhamton and The Last Resort.

They are all eBooks and written in a humorous style which may or may not make everybody who reads it smile; but continue the theme of traditional English towns in decline. There are murders, political intrigues, secret affairs and conspiracies but written in a compassionate way and not rooted in the dark side of human life.

This cannot be said about my latest novel The Man in Black. As much as I enjoy the films starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith I have an interest in these men in black (MIB) going back to the late 1970’s. I have never seen a UFO but read a lot of research papers and first hand reports. One of the more interesting things to emerge was that the people who investigated reports of alien contact were visited by a man in black, rarely the actual contact

No one is too sure if they are working on behalf of a Government agency or are alien in origin. They are just not very nice people.

I wrote the novel with this in mind. There is an alien abduction and a man in black does his best to discourage any further investigation. There is of course political corruption and some sexual intrigue but the book is about the possibility of an alien presence on earth. There are plenty of questions raised on this subject but not many simple and complete answers.

All my novels owe a lot to my collection of news clippings from the 1980’s so there are plenty of odd stories to illuminate the darkness. These have also given birth to a number of non-fiction titles which are useful as reference, humour and for anyone who likes to read about the odd facts of life.

Insults – Old, new, borrowed, blue is a collection of over 750 insults many never published before in an anthology collected from newspapers, books of quotes, long forgotten and folded magazines and sometimes just overheard on the radio.

Quote Sport Unquote is a collection of quotes about mainstream sports such as football, cricket and tennis as well as the lesser known ones. Quotes come from the competitors, officials, the press and occasionally the public as well. They are also taken from poetry, popular songs and novels.

The 1980 Quiz Book has over 340 questions in 20 different categories such as Arts, Business, Employment, Food and Drink, Politics, Sports and many more; all in multi-answer format. None of the news stories made the national headlines so a knowledge of the decade is no hindrance although sometimes a sense of humour is. You can try a sample ten question quiz from my quiz page.

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