Jill Gascoigne and Ken Loach: The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester

The other day we mourned the death of commercial theatre in Leicester with the closure of the Royal Opera House in 1960.

The invaluable Arthur Lloyd website takes up the story, as the city council's theatre committee

helped a group of actors set up The Living Theatre in the old St Nicholas School Rooms. These were situated between Holy Bones and Great Central Street in Leicester. This was to be a temporary arrangement as the School Rooms were already due for demolition in July of the following year, for a major road development scheme.

In fact, the Living Theatre was to last until January 1963, but its site was eventually lost somewhere beneath Vaughan Way.

If you click on the image above you will be taken to a film report about this theatre group. The two members interviewed are Jill Gascoigne, star of the ground-breaking The Gentle Touch in the 1980s, and Derrick Goodwin, who became an important director of television dramas.

Among his work you can find 18 episodes of On the Buses - "That's wonderful, darling, but I think we need to feel your hatred of Butler a little more."

Arthur Lloyd has some programmes from the Living Theatre, and they reveal that other significant figures were involved with it, notably Ken Loach.

And, going back to the interview with Jill Gascoigne and Derrick Goodwin, it's good to hear there was an audience for Osborne and Pinter in the Leicester of the early Sixties. I can get annoyed when people use "provincial" as a pejorative term.