Geoff Bamber
Author of numerous plays for schools
Geoff BamberAuthor of numerous plays for schools |
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| Geoff Bamber became a primary school teacher because, at the time, he could not think of anything else to do and
assumed that it would only be temporary employment until he found a proper job. After more years than he cares to remember he realised that the proper job was not about to materialise so he gave up teaching anyway to concentrate on writing, clearing out his garage and pottering about aimlessly. He started devising plays for his pupils for no better reason than it looked good fun and, over the last few years, has written the material now available from Lazy Bee Scripts. His view is that, for many people, the ‘school play’ is the nearest they ever get to live theatre, either as performers or audience members, and, if nothing else, such enterprises serve as an antidote to the education system’s never-ending desire to take itself too seriously. Most of Geoff’s plays for kids were successfully performed on stage in his own school before being made commercially available. The material (with the exception of Role Play) is designed for casts of 9 to 11 year-olds but can be adapted for older age groups. The plays were produced with very little in the way of sound and lighting equipment and hardly any of the actors had any pervious stage experience. His material has been used extensively in the UK and USA as well as in a dozen other countries. Geoff has also produced musical productions for children and contributed poems and even songs to a range of presentations. He lists his interest as football (he became a follower of Chelsea in the days when they had no money), rugby (his undistinguished playing career was cut short by a combination of old-age, injury, cowardice and lack of any real talent) and pub quizzes (at which he enjoys some success due to an obsession with useless information at the expense of knowing anything of any value.) His cultural icons are the singer Robert Palmer and the novelist Tom Sharpe. His main theatrical influences are the Whitehall farces of Brian Rix and the films of Will Hay. He believes that the greatest book ever written in the English language was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Geoff lives in the north of England. He has two grown-up sons and a wife who, fortunately, has a proper job. |
| Geoff delights in adding twists to familiar stories - thus in Cinders, the handsome prince runs off with an older woman, leaving Cinderella with a much better match, whilst in Hood, Marian is cheerfully abandoned to the ruthless Sheriff. Geoff also adds post-modern touches, such as the conversations between characters and the narrator in The Fourth Princess, and the appearance on stage of the director in Musketeer and members of the stage crew in Cinders. |
| Geoff's scripts run from historical drama (King Henry VIII - a brief and unreliable history) and traditional tales through to science fiction (the tongue-in-cheek Invasion from Planet Zorgon) to modern fables, such as The Farmer and the Cheruba Seeds. Butterfly Shoes, The Fourth Princess and The Chair are original additions to the fairy tale canon. A team from the Alison Coubrough Theatre School won the Under Fifteens' trophy in a one-act play competition in Guernsey with The Chair. (The directors deserve an award just for their organisational skills, as they marshalled a huge cast of 60 children.) The children clearly enjoyed themselves, and the play got an excellent reaction: "the adjudicator really loved the play and said it was like a modern Grimm Brothers fairy tale". |
| Those adults who appreciate the subversive humour of Geoff's plays for children will find his writing for adults hilarious. His first published novel for adults is "A Little Local Difficulty" (set in Czechoslovakia during the early 1940s, where the little local difficulty of the title is Second World War). Regrettably (because we don't publish books) this is not available from Lazy Bee Scripts, but it is available from the first on-line bookstore that comes to mind! |
| Geoff Bamber | |||
| Georgina Cawood | |||
| Julie Cordingley | |||
| Jon Dwyer | |||
| Gerald P. Murphy | |||
| Sue Gordon | |||