In 1983 Lumiere & Son Theatre Company was commissioned to make a short film for the flagship Channel 4 arts magazine programme Alter Image run by the television production company After Image. The film was written by David Gale, directed by Hilary Westlake (for Lumiere & Son) and Jane Thorburn (for After Image). The producer was Mark Lucas.
The cast was as follows:
Alison Conway ……. Tamsin Heatley
Paul Darke ………….. Trevor Stewart
Ben Jameson ………. David Gale
Brian Roper ………… Neale Goodrum
The video of this work was uploaded to YouTube, a visitor to which would find this image at the front end:
The canine logo ties the image to the website of performance company imitating the dog, whose artistic directors Pete Brooks, Simon Wainwright and Andrew Quick have been producing exceptional and consistently innovative work for twenty years. Recently the company has added a magazine section to the site, titled ‘New Adventures in Performance‘. It kicked off with an archival Lumiere & Son short film, prefaced by this generous endorsement:
Lumiere and Son were one of the most significant companies to emerge from the British Independent Theatre scene in the early 70s. Led by Hilary Westlake and David Gale, the work was surreal, ironic, intellectual and very funny. They were unusual at that time in placing as much emphasis on the quality of the writing as on the visual, and we will be looking at this company in depth in a later issue. This made for TV short, more or less typifies the sense of ironic, elegant and articulate threat that characterised their stage work.
Attempts to open the ‘The Appeal’ will be thwarted however. YouTube has deemed it unsuitable for mass consumption, as this screenshot advises:
Should you wish to ‘Watch on YouTube’ you will be taken to this:
Then this:
Irresistible, yeah? No. I can’t be bothered and I actually wrote it. I could describe it to you but it wouldn’t be the same, would it?
13.08.2021 (A Strength Weekly post featuring a fully functioning YouTube video was originally published in June 2019. I only discovered that it had subsequently been blocked this morning.)
