The day the Krays came to Nottingham
THE '60s – if you can remember them, you weren't there, so the saying goes.
Of course, if you really weren't there, you might simply raise a cynical eyebrow at the myth.
Free love and flower power aren't terribly evident in the black and white archive pictures of Nottingham, which show old dears wearing retrospecs and Ena Sharples hair-dos.
So how keenly did the provinces feel the winds of change in the 1960s? Playwright Stephen Lowe is perhaps well placed to judge.
He came from Sneinton – not too far away from the home of his favourite Notts author DH Lawrence – and yet, as the Lady Chatterley case gripped the nation, Lowe felt a million miles away from the hub of the action.
"The '60s was full of this mythical belief that you could get out of the world you lived in," recalls Lowe, "and I really want- ed to get out of the world I lived in.
"Those of us in the provinces were waiting for...not even a wave, a ripple would have been fine."
Now Lowe has written a play, entitled Glamour, that reflects on his experiences of the period – especially his time as an usher at the Moulin Rouge cinema on Milton Street.
"I used to man the box office, give out programmes, make the revolting sausages and I even used to book the films. We showed the most wonderful things – Fellini and Bergman – but I didn't know who these people were."
Glamour is a prequel to Old Big 'Ead in the Spirit of Man, Lowe's popular play about a middle-aged writer called Jimmy Potter who is inspired by Brian Clough.
In Glamour we meet Jimmy in action a few decades before.
In 1966, at the time Lowe worked in the cinema, he was trying to promote his own film – an adult flick named The Blue Movie.
"It was going to be my breakthrough," he says. "I had bought the cheapest film I could get and I developed it myself in the bedroom, edited it myself with Sellotape and dyed the sex scenes blue."
The cinema's owner Bill Cook arranged for the film to be shown to producers from London, including Michael Klinger.
"He thought I would be the new Jimmy Dean with acne!" jokes Stephen. "And he decided to set up an evening with film producers he knew from London."
Little did Stephen know that this would be the moment the '60s hit Nottingham with a vengeance. Instead of a party of metropolitan film buffs, the notorious Kray twins showed up.
"The showing turned out to be a major riot," says Stephen. "Unlike the film people we thought were going to arrive, the Kray brothers arrived. "The characters in the play are, of course, nothing like real people – for legal reasons!"
He is keeping tight-lipped about the details for now, but all will be revealed when the play, based on that memorable night, opens on February 6.
They also visited the Rio Cinema on Oakdale Road, also run by Cook, to see a "soon to be famous performer".
Stephen went on: "From there they moved off to Station Street purportedly to sort out a leading club and local protection gangs. I am saying no more. They didn't stay overnight. But they were trying to take over Nottingham and I got caught up in it."
Glamour takes place behind-the-scenes of the Moulin Rouge and charts the reactions of the staff as they realise they have gangsters as guests. The Krays don't appear as characters but maintain a menacing off-stage presence.
"The play is like a chaos-packed story of the fears, love-affairs, comedy and confusions that are unleashed by the Krays' presence," says Stephen.
It is set against a back-to-front cinema screen, beaming out famous film scenes while chaos reigns behind. The film recreations all took place in Nottingham.
"We remade famous French films with the music and everything," he says.
Stephen has a delightfully rakish air. Like many playwrights, he likes to take ordinary experiences and imbue them with significance. He refers to the Krays drama as a "a Blakean wandering from Innocence to Experience", and the sexy film as a "Lawrentian break-through".
He when he was born in 1947. His father Harry was a labourer in the Boots warehouses. "He came back from the war with meningitis and TB. He went into a coma when I was three and when he came out of it he was deaf," says Stephen.
"He managed to get me what was considered one of the top jobs at Boots... a job in the office. When the headmaster told him I needed to stay on at school until I was 18 and go on to university he couldn't understand it."
Stephen duly moved from Mundella Grammar in the Meadows to Birmingham University "because it was near enough to get back with my washing at weekends".
Not near enough for Stephen to return to the Moulin Rouge when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor dropped by for a surprise visit in 1968, though.
He says Bill Cook had told him the pair were old friends of his and would be dropping by the Moulin Rouge for a film screening. Stephen wasn't convinced and missed the visit of Hollywood most famous couple.
His own acting career made a good start after he set out with Alan Ayckbourn's company in Scarborough and soon moved to writing.
"Alan was fantastic. He directed my first two plays up there," he says.
One night, the company had a visit from one Richard Eyre who was, at the time, artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse. "God bless him, he came up to see the two plays and said, 'Are you ever going to do a play for Nottingham?' So I said, 'Yes, it's about three sisters in Nottingham in the war,' making it up, really. He said, 'Sounds great'. So I wrote it. And that launched me."
The play was, of course, Touched, his first big stage hit. Lowe proved prolific, moving effortlessly from writing for the RSC to a decade on Coronation Street, as well as writing 50 plays.
Corrie was "wonderful", he says. "I wrote the big tearjerker for the departure of Bet Lynch. But my favourite was writing for Raquel, who's the traditional tart with the golden heart."
I ask him why he sat on his story about the Krays for 40 years, besides the obvious. "There are things I don't want to dig up again," he says.
"But one of the things that triggered it was that in 1996 my wife got the movie transferred on to video and, when I went to the video place to collect it, I was arrested by the police for making porno films of young people. I told them: 'It's me from 30 years ago'. Once they realised it was me cavorting in my underpants, I was released without charge!"
Glamour is at Nottingham Playhouse from February 6 – 21. Call 0115 9419419.
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